Temporary insanity, continued

by Kristen Lombardi

GARY ZABEL an adjunct philosophy instructor at UMass Boston, lobbied to get part-timers' pay at the school increased from $2200 to $4000 per course. He also helped launch a coalition that's working to get better benefits for part-timers at 58 other schools.

Until recently, NAFFE-affilated groups' attempts to organize contingent workers had gone slowly. After all, it's tough to organize a labor force that's not only in constant flux, but is also scattered across multiple work sites and occupational fields. Therefore, explains Christine Owens, the AFL-CIO public-policy director who works closely with NAFFE, "We promote a mosaic of strategies because we need to come at this problem from all angles."

This mosaic of strategies has borne fruit. In Boston, for example, newly hired part-time faculty at the University of Massachusetts used to scrape by without benefits while making a meager $2200 per course, as opposed to the $7400 per course that full-time professors enjoy. Every semester, adjunct faculty scrambled to survive. Some moonlighted for public secondary schools; others actually collected welfare payments -- until UMass Boston's part-timers organized. After 12 months of pickets and petitions, they won health and pension benefits, as well as a pay rate of $4000 per course. "It was a small victory," recalls Gary Zabel, who has taught philosophy part-time at UMass for 11 years.

It was inspirational as well. Success prompted Zabel and UMass colleagues to launch the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL), which works to mobilize the 10,000 adjunct professors at 58 area colleges and universities. Right now, members are waging union drives at Emerson College and Suffolk University.

Just over the border, in Rhode Island, temps lobbied for a "right to know" bill that requires agencies to reveal job descriptions, pay rates, and assignment schedules to temps. The measure, which passed earlier this year, was long overdue.

Rhode Island firms that place blue-collar workers -- and staff entire assembly lines at plastics plants and textile mills -- have become as prevalent as convenience stores. "Temp agencies are in your face, on every street corner," says Mario Bueno, who coordinates the Progreso Latino United Workers Committee in Central Falls, Rhode Island.

These agencies, however, pay only about $6 per hour, don't provide sick leave, and in some cases even prohibit workers from using company microwaves. So the advocacy organization Progreso Latino teamed up with community groups to organize the temporary workers, many of whom are immigrants, through factory visits and advertisements on Spanish radio programs. Last year, the coalition pushed unsuccessfully for a law requiring temporary and permanent employees to be paid equally for the same work. They settled for the right-to-know legislation.

In Seattle, hundreds of software engineers, Web designers, and technical writers have organized their union, the Washington Alliance of Technology Workers (WashTec), in a field that eschews labor organizing. For years, thousands of high-tech whizzes have toiled as temps at companies like Microsoft and Adobe Systems. Denied pension and health plans, as well as lucrative stock-option benefits, these techies have missed out on the wealth created by the information-technology boom.

"It was the industry's dirty little secret," says NAFFE spokesman Marcus Courtney, who worked as a "permatemp" at Microsoft for close to two years without the perks bestowed on his full-time counterparts. In a complicated lawsuit, the federal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decided last year that Microsoft was, indeed, the employer of such permatemps, and that workers like Courtney are entitled to full-time benefits. Because Microsoft has appealed, the court has yet to rule on workers' claims for vacation and sick pay, as well as health and retirement benefits. Nor has it decided on the damages that Microsoft owes to an estimated 10,000 workers.

That a billion-dollar enterprise like Microsoft had gotten away with denying benefits to 3000 "misclassified" temps angered Courtney enough to form WashTec. With 260 members from 70 Seattle-based companies, WashTec has wasted no time. It's worked to improve agency-sponsored benefits and win wage increases for temps. And it's now pushing a measure in Washington state that would force agencies to reveal fees they collect from worker contracts.

Meanwhile, in central Massachusetts, the Merrimack Valley Project (MVP), which consists of 46 workers'-rights groups from Lawrence to Lowell, has drafted a temp workers' "bill of rights" in response to complaints from day laborers at area shoe, yogurt, and clothing factories.

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Kristen Lombardi can be reached at klombardi[a]phx.com.