Moderator: We have all been precarious at one time or another… perhaps not all but many of us. We have picked a few people who represent the different categories [of precarious work] we presented a moment ago, with all their complications. Our precarious colleagues aren’t here to cry over their lot… Do you want to introduce yourself?

“Aurélie Legrand, I’m 33 years old, I’m at the master’s level in my studies [bac+5], with a decade of professional experience in the private sector. It’s been a little more than a year that I’ve been a contract worker at the university, and so I’m part of what they call the precarious workers of higher education. So I work on a short-term contract (CDD) as a research engineer (ingénieur d’études) in a social science lab at the university. The post became available on May 1st, 2008. I came to apply for it in December 2008, and… I can tell you that it was a little bit hard for me to accept this post, even though it did represent a good opportunity for me at the time. It was hard to accept because they offered me a very short-term contract. So, I had an interview in December, and they offered me a short-term contract (CDD) from the beginning of January 2009 to May 1st 2009, so a 4-month contract, because the permanent occupant of the job who went to the private sector on May 1st of the year before could return to their job on May 1st the year after. So… I had to leave the region where I was coming from because [unclear], anyway for this 4-month contract.

“Finally I accepted this offer, and the permanent person [titulaire] didn’t take the job back on May 1st in 2009, so they had me sign a second short-term contract from May 1st to June 30th. A two-month contract. It had a gap of two months built in for the summer. So honestly the situation wasn’t really good at all. But finally, when they brought me in to sign this second short-term contract, they realized it was a category A job, so there wouldn’t be a break in the contract. So they extended the contract to August 31st 2009. And… what else was I going to tell you… so during that summer, sometime around mid-July, I got a letter from human resources indicating that I was summoned on September 1st, in the early morning, to sign a new contract, this time from September 1st until August 31st — so a year-long contract. So I was brought in to sign this new contract and things more or less worked out because that was the end of this deal with the two-month summer interruptions.

“That said, I was pretty much astonished by the way the human resources people had us sign the contracts. We were brought in collectively, all the contract workers summoned on September 1st. They had us in a room that might be about the same as this auditorium. There was no real group welcome, everyone waited in their own corner, and finally two people came in with the contracts. The group was divided in two, maybe from the letter A to the letter L on one side and the rest on the other, and everyone lined up to sign their contract. So you didn’t have the time to really read all the conditions in the contract; you signed, and if you had questions it was pretty hard to ask them, to have any personal discussion of your work contract. Voilà.

[Inaudible question.]
“Yes, I found out that I was pretty privileged after all, I realized that among the contract workers of my university, well, this contract starting September 1st was what I was expecting, a contract for the same job for the whole year. On the other hand, I heard other people around me who were summoned by mail, who were brought in on September 1st to sign a contract that was only ten months long. Eventually, when they got to the table, and they got to read their contracts, they found out that they were only getting hired for three months at one site and then for four months at some other university site, which they weren’t expecting at all. Others found out that they had an initial contract one month long and after that they weren’t getting any guarantees of further work. So I saw some people refuse to sign these contracts and leave. Voilà.”

I’ve tried not to clean up the very “oral” quality of this discussion. It’s full of redundancies and not always perfectly clear. That’s as it should be, it seems to me. I should admit that the translation is a bit loose; I don’t have much practice translating oral discourses.

What we have here is a personal story that reveals a structural situation whose dry bureaucratic parameters themselves become grounds for all kinds of emotional reactions. A robot programmed like a sociologist might make the mistake of believing that the length of someone’s work contract is a purely quantitative variable, a simple matter of longer or shorter; but we can see here that, in reality, quantitative differences get magnified into local dramas. Ask yourself: what’s the difference between a 10-month and a 12-month contract? Two months, the math types will say. But they’ll be wrong, wrong; the difference between 10 and 12 months of employment, for Aurélie Legrand, is the difference between having relatively steady year-round employment and facing a huge seasonal layoff.

And we can see too that, in the algebra of precarity, the variable of “contract length” is multiplied (metaphorically speaking) by another anxiety factor: the uncertainty of contract renewal. The problem with having a succession of four or two or one-month contracts isn’t just short duration as such; it’s also the accompanying anxiety of constant contractual renegotiation and uncertainty. After a few months of such circumstances, we can see here, even a meagre year contract — itself hardly a recipe for long-term stability — comes to seem a blessing.

And farther along towards the end of this discourse, we see a new theme emerge: the theme of precarity’s place in a differentiated field of suffering, of precarity’s place in a world where some people have it worse than others. Needless to say, a peculiar feature of the panel presentation “where the precarious themselves will speak” was that the participants were publicly interpellated as precarious workers, with all the implicit stigma that that entails. Early on we can see Legrand accepting her classification among the “precarious workers of higher education”; but what’s interesting is that, by the end of this discourse, she is claiming in effect that she doesn’t have it so bad, that she ended up pretty much with what she wanted, and that it’s the others who really have it bad, the others who are really getting shafted with their 1-month contract offers, the others who need to negotiate but can’t. The most critical, outraged part of this discourse is also the part that does the most to minimize the subjectivity of the speaker, as we see her turn from describing her own circumstances to critiquing the collective misery of human resources’ assembly-line method of contract signing. As if there were after all a certain desire to ascend to a somewhat detached critical standpoint, one that would critique precarity while attempting to avoid entirely identifying oneself as its victim. The discourse on precarity is not without its internal contradictions.

I don’t know how I’ve gone this long without discovering Inside Higher Ed, but I’m very glad I finally have. This is clearly a hugely valuable resource and I appreciate it very much. I’ve been adjuncting @ 2 institutions for just 1.5 years now, after teaching as a grad assistant for 2, and am actively trying to figure out where the hell to take my career. The article here, as the others, and especially the dialogue in the comments are hugely valuable to me, not least because they just make me feel less alone in my outrage over the “white-collar Walmart” set-up, as another commenter coined.

I looooooooooooove teaching, like crazy, and I don’t even want a PhD. It took me 9 years to complete my BS and MA altogether, I’m 36, and I’m tired. I just want to work & learn with students about textual meaning-making, and do my best to arm ’em with those literacies that will best empower them to get what they need/want.

Before this gig, I’ve been a waitress for going on 20 years, a job I loved, but needed to get out of, due to a chronic injury and a certain amount of going stir crazy within its intellectual limits. Teaching gives me everything I love about waiting, without the arthritis, crazy hours, and bathroom-cleaning. The only seriously huge glaring problem, of course, is that waiting tables, I can and have pulled in a pretty comfortable, lower middle-class income, and get health insurance and a frickin’ 401k.

Something’s gotta give, certainly. I have every confidence that somehow, I’ll make a career that works enough to avoid true abject poverty when I retire, and I’m even more positive that I will find a way to have fun while I do it. I knew what I was getting into, job-wise, when I went for the MA. But I’ll tell you what, if I hear one more tenured/tenure-track faculty at my 4-year institution cluck sympathetically at me about how awful it is that the life of an adjunct is so hard, but take absolutely no advantage of their position to advocate for any change in our treatment, I will lure them to the bar I still work at on the weekends, so I can throw a beer at them on my own turf.

(Unfortunately, there seems to be no way to link directly to a comment on Inside Higher Ed, but if you scroll around you can find the original.)

What I like about this short text is that it calls attention to the moment of surprise that sometimes occurs when someone discovers that they aren’t isolated or unique in their anxieties. What I like about this text is how clearly it illustrates the paradox of people who come to love a job that they know hurts them. That they know is unjustly underpaid. What I like about this text is that it reminds us of the relative ridiculousness of many people’s academic working conditions, worse than those in restaurants. (While I have nothing against restaurants, they’re not really known as the epitome of good working conditions.) Though paradoxically, what I also like about this text is that, in an academic world where too many people seem to subscribe to the (quasi-Thatcherite) principle that they have no viable alternative to their “intellectual” work, here the author seems happy to eschew  snotty categorical distinctions between “manual” and “mental” labor, noting that restaurants and universities can be similar in their psychic rewards. I like the Bourdieuian reminder that cultural and educational capital can at times be inversely correlated with economic capital. And I certainly empathize with the critique of those tenured faculty who only theoretically sympathize with people getting the short end of the stick.

But what worries me in this text is the blithe certainty that something’s gotta give, that somehow, I’ll make a career that works enough, that the future will turn out providential against all odds, that the future can become this imaginary space where the irresolvable contradictions of the present receive a purely fantasy resolution. The endearingly practical logic of this passage, who needs a phd when you can already do what you love, at least in teaching you don’t have to clean bathrooms, all that practicality goes up in smoke at the end of this text. The whole last paragraph is written in the register of everything will turn out be fine, but if I hear one more word of false consolation from people better off, I just might lose it, as if two futures are really being envisioned here, one where everything magically works out well and another where the psychic costs of academic labor exploitation just can’t be repressed any longer and finally they explode in the form of a beer hurled across the room.

As we’ll see soon in talking about precarity in French universities, a characteristic social and psychological paradox of precarious academic workers involves this kind of split view of the future, where people fully intend to stick by their jobs and even feel passionate attachments to their work, but are also permanently haunted by the danger of everything falling apart at any moment.

This is the eastbound bus stop at Garfield. Dozens and dozens of university students come through here mornings, getting off the red line, waiting to go to campus. It’s one of those places where there is interracial coexistence without much real human contact. Pretty much all the white people here are university students. The university is set in a white enclave in an overwhelmingly black part of the city. There’s still a real degree of anxiety about race, or maybe it’s about class difference, or about both at once, inseparably. I’ve met white students who say they’re afraid to come here at night, not for any articulated reason, just out of an ingrained sense of “danger.”

This too is a border zone of the university, though not one where you can see a physical boundary. But I like this photo because some of the social barriers are written on the faces of the two people who ended up in front of my lens. The lady just looks out into the street, indifferent, sort of peaceful. The guy glares at me, his eyebrows creased, his mouth jagged, his head off axis. He hated me, I felt at the moment when I clicked the shutter, but just then the bus showed up and we went off in opposite directions.

It’s a place where strangers have different ways of remaining strangers to each other, of remaining separate from each other, of defending themselves against their fantasies of other people. Sometimes there are people who want cigarettes or directions. In warmer weather, people read academic texts while leaning on the edge of the bridge. There’s a perpetual howl from the highway and subway that run below. The edge of the university stretches off into the abyss of the road.