Levelling the playing field

Re: Ontario should address contract faculty issue — Aug. 23

There are a few points regarding the op-ed piece on contract faculty that need to be made to put the topic into perspective.

First, many part-time faculty are not “precariously employed.” Several are people with full-time employment at the university or elsewhere who teach “on the side” because they like it and can make extra money. Also, many part-time professors are retired full-time faculty.

Furthermore, many part-time faculty would not be able to take full-time positions even if they were available as they do not possess terminal degrees that would be required to be eligible. For most fields, this would be a PhD.

Regarding the rate of pay for individual courses, it needs to be pointed out that a full-time faculty member’s job involves much more than teaching. Parttime faculty are not expected to do research or service to the institution or the wider community, so their pay for the same number of courses as a fulltime member would be much less.

Having said all of that, there are part-time faculty who rely on individual courses as their primary source of income and have no benefits or pensions. As part-time work is becoming more common, it’s time to consider requiring employers to provide pro-rated benefits and pensions for part-time workers.

This would remove the artificial incentive which now exists for employers to break up full-time positions into several part-time ones to avoid the extra costs of pensions and benefits.

There are good reasons for part-time positions and there are many people who prefer part-time positions to full-time positions.

By pro-rating benefits and pensions there would be a level playing field so that part-time positions would exist where they make sense, and workers having several “part-time” jobs would not be substantially worse off than others working “full-time” for the same number of hours. Terry Sturtevant Physics lab co-ordinator Wilfrid Laurier University Waterloo