front cover of Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education
Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education
A Labor History
Edited by Eric Fure-Slocum and Claire Goldstene
University of Illinois Press, 2024
An educational crisis from its origins to present-day experiences

In the United States today, almost three-quarters of the people teaching in two- and four-year colleges and universities work as contingent faculty. They share the hardships endemic in the gig economy: lack of job security and health care, professional disrespect, and poverty wages that require them to juggle multiple jobs.

This collection draws on a wide range of perspectives to examine the realities of the contingent faculty system through the lens of labor history. Essayists investigate structural changes that have caused the use of contingent faculty to skyrocket and illuminate how precarity shapes day-to-day experiences in the academic workplace. Other essays delve into the ways contingent faculty engage in collective action and other means to resist austerity measures, improve their working conditions, and instigate reforms in higher education. By challenging contingency, this volume issues a clear call to reclaim higher education’s public purpose.

Interdisciplinary in approach and multifaceted in perspective, Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education surveys the adjunct system and its costs.

Contributors: Gwendolyn Alker, Diane Angell, Joe Berry, Sue Doe, Eric Fure-Slocum, Claire Goldstene, Trevor Griffey, Erin Hatton, William A. Herbert, Elizabeth Hohl, Miguel Juárez, Aimee Loiselle, Maria C. Maisto, Anne McLeer, Steven Parfitt, Jiyoon Park, Claire Raymond, Gary Rhoades, Jeff Schuhrke, Elizabeth Tandy Shermer, Steven Shulman, Joseph van der Naald, Anne Wiegard, Naomi R Williams, and Helena Worthen

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front cover of The Temp Economy
The Temp Economy
From Kelly Girls to Permatemps in Postwar America
Authored by Erin Hatton
Temple University Press, 2010

Everyone knows that work in America is not what it used to be. Layoffs, outsourcing, contingent work, disappearing career ladders—these are the new workplace realities for an increasing number of people. But why? In The Temp Economy, Erin Hatton takes one of the best-known icons of the new economy—the temp industry—and finds that it is more than just a symbol of this degradation of work. The temp industry itself played an active role in this decline—and not just for temps. Industry leaders started by inventing the "Kelly Girl," exploiting 1950s gender stereotypes to justify low wages, minimal benefits, and chronic job insecurity. But they did not stop with Kelly Girls. From selling human"business machines" in the 1970s to "permatemps" in the 1990s, the temp industry relentlessly portrayed workers as profit-busting liabilities that hurt companies' bottom lines even in boom times. These campaigns not only legitimized the widespread use of temps, they also laid the cultural groundwork for a new corporate ethos of ruthless cost cutting and mass layoffs.

Succinct, highly readable, and drawn from a vast historical record of industry documents, The Temp Economy is a one-stop resource for anyone interested in the temp industry or the degradation of work in postwar America.

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