Letter to the Editor: USC must equitably treat its workers

We write as USC community members who are united in a commitment to fair labor practices on our campus. In recent decades, higher education observers have witnessed the casualization of instruction staff, shrinking tenure-stream employment, ballooning student debt, outsourcing of campus labor including facilities and cafeteria workers, and “administrative bloat” that grows managerial ranks and salaries out of proportion. These problems are all well-known in their general contours, but they take specific forms here at USC, and the Trojan Family should know about it.

Did you know that the USC instructor workforce is about 40% full-time research, teaching, practitioner & clinical and only about 20% tenured and tenure-track? That means that nearly 40% of the people who teach full-time on campus have less job security than tenure-stream faculty, and they are also paid significantly less while teaching more students. 

At 20% tenure-stream USC is below the national average, which is in the 25 to 30% range, despite the size of our university endowment. An additional 40% of professors at USC are adjuncts, but this is a complex category which is hard to generalize across units: Some are working professionals who choose to teach on the side to contribute to the University, while others may be eking out a living teaching full-time at a substandard wage. 

No matter their titles, most USC instructors provide true excellence in their teaching and possess stellar research and clinical expertise. Although students expect quality education in many subject domains, what kind of a moral and civic education does USC provide? 

If college campuses are meant to lead by example, they have gone badly astray in how they treat their own workers. According to leaders of the USC chapter of the American Association of University Professors, an anonymous faculty survey conducted by them revealed that some instructors have delayed or deferred medical care and even sought public assistance while working for USC. The cost of living in Los Angeles is notoriously high, but surely the second-largest private employer in L.A. County can do better for its staff and faculty.

USC’s disreputable labor practices extend beyond our classrooms, reaching into the residential halls, care facilities and the logistical underbelly of the school, where many workers struggle to gain fair and equitable treatment. Nurses at Keck Hospital of USC, who have experienced exceptionally difficult labor conditions, went on strike over the summer. While their efforts were ultimately successful, the fact that a strike was necessary to obtain basic safety measures and adequate compensation illustrates administrators’ reluctance to acknowledge the campus workforce’s value.

USC’s ambivalence toward its workforce spans not only departments and facilities but also time. Labor disputes at USC are almost as traditional as tailgates. In the 1990s, a campaign with an 11-day hunger strike and mass arrests resulted in victory for protesters when the administration threatened to replace cleaning and catering employees with sub-contracted workers. Students and faculty are impoverished insofar as historical memory is concerned: The former have little knowledge as to what occurred prior to their arrival, and the latter are encouraged to keep their labor siloed from other campus workforces.

Measures that would shore up protections for campus workers are currently under consideration in Congress, which would in turn offer students a learning environment where campuses live the values they preach. These include the requirement that 75% of campus instructors hold tenure-stream positions at all federally funded institutions, which will include contingent instructors and allow them tenure protections for the work they are already doing, and a guaranteed living wage for all campus workers.

This is our case that we bring toward the USC community: 

We ask only that you look inward, toward our great University’s intellectual, social and moral duties and obligations. The Trojan Way should be to treat the entire community — all students and workers — fairly and equitably. If we are to be the world-class university we claim to be, shouldn’t basic fairness toward our own community, and a proudly displayed moral compass, be among our prime directives?

Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation (SCALE) and USC-AAUP https://www.instagram.com/uscscale/; https://www.uscaaup.org/