by P.D. Lesko

In the September/October 1995 issue, we published a feature called, “Who’s Going to Organize the New Proletariat?” In that piece, I looked at the American Federation of Teachers’, American Association of University Professors’ and the National Education Association’s efforts to organize part-time faculty. Only the AFT officials whom I interviewed back then indicated they had “no plans to significantly increase its efforts to unionize part-time faculty in the next five years.” True to form, both the NEA and AFT have continued to focus on the organization of graduate students and full-time faculty.

The AAUP’s membership has risen from 40,000 members in 1995 (I incorrectly reported it as 400,000 members, in the 1995 piece) to a current membership of about 45,000, still about 10 percent of whom are part-time or full-time temporary faculty. In the meantime, the NEA has gone from 2.2 million members in 1995, to a current membership of 2.7 million. Almost 400 faculty members at the College of the Canyons in California recently won a court battle to get out of the NEA. The AFT now has over 1.1 million members, up from 880,000 in 1995. Of those 1.1 million members, about 50,000 are part-time faculty. This means that, in the past eight years, the AFT has increased the number of its part-time faculty members about one percent.

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