CampusOpinion

Confessions of a Contract Instructor: Peripheral Profs from the Precariat 1

This series is written anonymously by contract instructors at the University of Alberta. Unlike fully-tenured professors who have a higher salary and job security, contract or sessional instructors often have a heavier course load, must renew their contracts each year, and earn significantly less than what most tenured professors make. But even though working conditions as a contract instructor aren’t great, obtaining a tenure position isn’t easy.

Read The Gateway‘s feature on contract academic staff: https://thegatewayonline.ca/2016/11/contract-instructors-feature/


A healthy university community is made up of several different groups: undergraduates, grad students, post-docs, support staff, academic staff, and administration. Each of these groups is essential for a university to function the way it was meant to. Of these, academic staff members play a crucial role in making universities what they are: places to learn, explore, think, research, and apply what is learnt to the many arenas of human endeavour.

However, those who are not in the know about the realities of working as an academic (and this would include not only most of the general public, but also many students) are likely to think “a Prof is a Prof is a Prof” without realizing that there are varieties of academics. The purpose of this series of articles is to correct that misconception by highlighting the role played by academics who work at the university in a non-permanent capacity.

Which leads us to the title at the top: Peripheral Profs from the Precariat — sounds like a great name for a B-movie horror film or perhaps some sort of anarcho-punk band, doesn’t it? Let’s start with precariat, a term given prominence by Guy Standing, a British labour economist. The result of blending the words precarious and proletariat together, precariat describes a socio-economic class whose members are involved in “unstable labor, in ‘flexible’ contracts, working as temps, casuals, ‘freelance,’ part-time, or intermittently for employment agencies” (all quotes from Standing are taken from his essay The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class).

So, members of the precariat inhabit a whole segment of the economy that is based on work that is precarious (dictionary definition: “dependent on circumstances beyond one’s control; uncertain; unstable; insecure; dependent on the will or pleasure of another”). More and more, temporary work is viewed as the norm; in Standing’s words, “the precariat is being habituated to unstable labor.”

Standing highlights several ways of viewing and defining the precariat, including the basic existential fact that “the precariat has no secure occupational identity, no narrative to give to their lives.” When asked, “What do you do?” others in the labour force are more likely to reply along the lines of “I’m a _________”; for those in the precariat, a more likely response is “I’m currently working as a _________, but it’s only temporary. After that, who knows?” Moreover, as Standing notes, the precariat “relies on money wages, without pensions, paid holidays, retrenchment benefits or medical coverage.” In stark contrast to what most employees have come to expect, most in the precariat do not qualify for things like benefits or pensions.

Significantly, the net effect on members of the precariat, as Standing notes, is “a consciousness of relative deprivation, a combination of anxiety, anomie (despair of escape), alienation… and anger.” Now what, you may ask, does this have to do with universities? A lot, as it turns out. One of the three factions that Standing identifies in the precariat consists of “the educated, mostly young (who) suffer relative deprivation by being denied a future, a life of dignity and fulfilment (but who) look to recover a future, aspiring to create a good society.” Many of these end up working in higher education. More on that next time.

Related Articles

Back to top button