In the Española Valley, 30 miles north of Santa Fe, adjuncts at Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) have ratified a contract that gives them their first wage increase in over a decade. At 10%, the increase marks a historic victory in a state where recent efforts to pass legislation that would have set legal salary minimums for adjuncts have failed. As of this year, New Mexico ranks thirty-eighth among the states in average pay for higher education faculty, according to the National Education Association (even without accounting for the disparity between full-time and contingent faculty pay scales).
This rural college, which offers a mix of four-year and associate degree programs, serves roughly 1,200 students, most of whom are Native American and Latinx. As the result of a growing organized labor force, it has become one of the latest battlegrounds in the decades-long fight for fair working conditions for adjuncts, or contingent faculty.
Unlike tenured faculty, whose jobs are secured indefinitely, adjuncts work on limited contracts, and are often guaranteed only one semester of work at a time. Their part-time status ensures they have no access to benefits, and no say in institution or departmental decision-making processes. When, in 1971, NNMC became the state’s first community college, about three-quarters of post-secondary jobs nationwide were on track to tenured positions. Since then, as a consequence of the “adjunctification” of higher ed, these numbers have reversed. Adjuncts, it should be said, possess the same credentials as their tenured colleagues and perform the same tasks–only more.
At NNMC—as at most colleges—adjunct labor has come to account for the majority of credit hours taught college-wide. As the largest subset of faculty, the students they serve make up the bulk of those enrolled, all of whom will have at some point passed through classrooms taught by adjuncts. Yet while the college relies on contingent faculty to fulfill its mission, union members argue their ability to do so has been greatly hindered by the precarity of their employment and their lack of voice in decision-making processes
Anthony Ballas is an adjunct and member-organizer of the Northern Federation of Educational Employees (Local #4935), which represents faculty and classified staff at NNMC. Ballas teaches philosophy and social sciences at NNMC; he served as lead negotiator in the spring-summer 2024 collective bargaining win. Ty Holter, a high school teacher and poet who lives in Western Massachusetts, interviewed Ballas for Convergence.
Ty Holter: You’ve written elsewhere about the national adjunct crisis, saying that as contingent faculty you are “rarely if ever invited to participate in important departmental decisions regarding textbooks, curriculum development, scheduling, policies, hiring procedures, let alone annual budgets.” In addition to these issues, what were you hearing from fellow adjuncts about the unique conditions at NNMC?
Anthony Ballas: Well, at Northern, as in adjunct labor pools nationally, the system of casualization and adjunctification more broadly puts a major strain on contingent workers, including graduate workers. At Northern in particular, we have experienced a lack of career advancement, and a decade and half—if not more of lost wages having to do with minimal pay increases over the years. Mix in inflation, lack of benefits, as well as the system of so-called “proportionate scaling” by which adjuncts are essentially penalized monetarily when their courses don’t meet arbitrary enrollment thresholds, and you’ve got a serious crisis on your hands.
Then there’s also the cultural aspect, which is to say normalization of these labor conditions through repetitive institutional practices. For instance, it’s simply assumed, and this sentiment was actually made explicit by our college president, that adjuncts operate like “independent contractors” for Northern, despite the fact that we labor as W-2 employees, and are defined by the college handbook as faculty. We, of course, perform the same instructional tasks as full-time faculty, and even sometimes teach alongside full-time faculty in the same classroom, splitting credit hours which essentially splits our pay in half in these instances because we get paid by the number of credit hours we teach. The culture keeps intact certain assumptions of difference between full-time faculty and adjuncts, and then the college justifies these assumptions in terms of their economic and classification policies.
Another assumption is that adjuncts don’t conduct research or make contributions to pedagogical theory. Therefore we are often left out of departmental discussions around decision-making, for instance, in terms of curriculum development, textbooks, departmental and course learning outcomes and alike. All of the above, again, stemming from a culture where adjuncts are perceived as contractors just because we sign contingent contracts from semester to semester.
So in a way, I guess, our conditions at Northern really aren’t unique. They are a small-scale expression of a much larger trend in academia over the last 50 years. However, I think the low institutional funding from the state and the fact that we serve primarily lower-income, Native American and Latinx students compounds and protracts these issues. The institution itself is constantly undermined, viewed as less important by the legislature, and so there’s a racial and class dimension looming over Northern, which affects all of the above and more.
TH: What avenues, if any, have adjuncts had to address these issues?
AB: Our local, NFEE 4935, got organized in 2005-2006 by our current president, Tim Crone, as the first union of adjuncts in New Mexico. We are affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT).
We renegotiated our wages in Summer 2024 and will renegotiate our contract in full in 2025. The agreement provides certain protections, including intellectual freedom—a rare stipulation for adjunct contracts. However, much of the language is outdated and in desperate need of being updated to express the current crisis, including wages, the online dimension of much of academia today, the abolition of proportionate scaling, and other pay-related language for adjuncts involved in committee work or other out-of-classroom labor, which so often goes unpaid for adjuncts.
Members of the adjunct union have been deeply engaged over the past couple of years by organizing, filing grievances, and agitating for better pay and better working conditions. We have also pushed a collective effort regionally through a task force of AFT-affiliated colleges (NNMC; the University of New Mexico; Navajo Technical University; and New Mexico Highlands University) composed of adjunct and full-time faculty. We have organized alongside full-time faculty at Northern and across the region to address legislative limitations and essentially funding at the more political-legal level.
Although our efforts did not culminate in a legislative victory this last session, speaking of 2023–2024, I am confident that the taskforce will see a victory very soon and secure a funding package from the legislature which will no longer allow management to declare, very often in bad faith, that they are hamstrung by the meager offerings of the legislature. So there are multiple avenues. As a union we have utilized the grievance process outlined in our CBA (which has enabled us organize across disciplinary lines, and since New Mexico is not a Right to Work state, members and non-members follow the same process), while also focusing on broader political efforts in the legislature with the regional taskforce and with AFT regionally. It’s also worth noting that AFT and AAUP just merged in 2022, which has provided more support for organizing in higher education specifically.
I should also mention that at Northern we have been very successful by coordinating and organizing adjunct efforts collectively with full-time faculty. Since we have split bargaining agreements (adjuncts, staff, and full-time) we’ve been coordinating our efforts and finding points of intersection and overlap in our separate contracts that put pressure on administration. One of the goals of our local is to push for single bargaining agreements between all faculty as well as staff in the coming years.
TH: Give us a brief timeline of events. How did adjuncts come together at NNMC, how were your concerns initially met by admin, and how did you get to the point you’re at now, on the brink of a historic win?
AB: Well, speaking as someone who only joined Northern and the local a couple of years ago, I can say that I began seeing adjuncts coming together very quickly. There was difficultly at first, however, due to some negative sentiment surrounding the union held by some adjuncts, some of whom expressed the very real fear of reprisal from administration should they get involved. This unfortunately made sense, given the reputation of NNMC’s (now retired) Vice President of Finance, Denise Montoya, who was known for her attempted union busting at a previous institution. Although Montoya’s efforts failed, they nonetheless frightened enough adjuncts to put a hitch in our efforts. This is understandable, since adjuncts are already at risk of losing their livelihood every semester for any number of reasons (low enrollment, changes in curriculum, retribution, etc.).
I began having conversations with my colleagues, adjuncts, sympathetic full-time faculty, and even trusted departmental chairs, as well as organizers with AFT, our venerable president Tim Crone, and others. We started organizing adjunct meetings over Zoom where we would discuss labor issues and our concerns more generally, and then out of these discussions we would organize ways to address these issues to management and with the union in a strategic and coordinated manner.
One initial obstacle was getting our hands on the adjunct email list, which was actually not very easy. We had to send a member to HR to demand it at one point because we noticed that adjuncts weren’t actually able to respond to one another as a mass via the adjunct email list. Once we secured the list, our efforts became much easier.
We also scheduled regular meetings, strategized and delegated roles with one another. If an adjunct was, say, a numbers wiz, we would have them collect data on, for instance, the adjunct to credit hour ratio, or adjunct to student ratio, etc., which would provide for us a data set so that we could compare how much labor we actually performed as a unit compared with full-time faculty, as well as get a better understanding of the online dimension of our collective labor. They would crunch the numbers and reveal abstract details about our labor at Northern that we couldn’t have known without this sort of process.
We nominated and voted in a couple of adjuncts on the faculty senate, myself included, which was less about political representation, and more about organizing with full-time faculty. We were able to interface with full-timers and department chairs, communicate adjunct issues and concerns together, which really provided a necessary spur to bolster our organizing efforts, especially in terms of applying pressure on management from multiple angles at once.
Finally, we agitated management regularly. We were constantly filing grievances, specifically for delayed payments, non-payments, addressing safety concerns on a couple occasions—on one occasion, actually, we filed a grievance when adjuncts were the only members of the workforce left out of communications when the college went on lockdown for an active shooter in the area. Imagine hearing second, third hand, through social media, or in fact not at all, that your place of work was on lockdown and had issued an order to shelter in place because of an incident where someone was shot by a right-wing extremist nearby? Well, that’s precisely what happened at Northern in Fall 2023. So we pressed HR, the president, provost, and safety office for answers. Someone from the safety office actually blamed adjuncts for the incident, claiming that the lapse was because we hadn’t updated our contact information, which was a bald face lie. The college uses institution email to send out all official correspondence.
This incident really ramped up efforts, as it not only put pressure on management to address this egregious malfeasance, while it also highlighted the extent to which adjuncts are overlooked or treated as an afterthought by the institution.
Likewise the issue of delayed payment was a major pressure point on management that us adjuncts collectively organized around. Adjuncts would quite literally receive contracts two to three weeks after the semester was already underway; they’d often be riddled with errors, which would affect their overall pay for the semester, or they would sometimes not even receive contracts for courses they were teaching. This culminated in Fall 2023 in the delayed or non-payment for some adjuncts, which was a serious breach of the bargaining agreement, and even potentially State labor law. So out of this issue in particular, which occurred in Spring 2024 as well, I think management really started to witness and take heed that us adjuncts were organized, prepared to struggle and make concrete demands. By the time the negotiation period started in May 2024, we were well-positioned to make demands concerning pay, the delivery of our contracts, and more.
TH: What would this win mean for adjuncts at NNMC? What is the significance of the precedent it would set nationally?
AB: The victory of a 10% increase in adjunct wage is no small achievement. This is a historic victory for adjuncts at Northern, but I also hope it sets a precedent for contingent academic labor in the state more generally. I am very optimistic that the task force can use this victory as a springboard toward more victories to come. We should not not treat this win as a monolithic. We should instead consider it as the epicenter through which the continuation of our collective efforts can cause ripples for adjuncts at NNMC and across the state. This win also ought to remind us of the viability of collective organizing on a national scale for adjuncts and other contingent workers, including graduate workers.
TH: As grad students and contingent faculty continue to mobilize across the country, including contract wins in recent years, including at NYU in 2022, what role has the national movement played in your local organizing efforts?
In terms of inspiration, the national movement has certainly been front and center in our efforts. Consider all of the momentum of the labor movement in 2023 and into 2024, with the SAG-AFTRA and WGA victories, the historic gains of the UAW, teachers’ strikes in Los Angeles, and more. Adjuncts, full-time faculty, students, and staff ought to remember that we are not isolated to our local efforts, but part of a broad, multi-industry labor movement nationally and internationally. As a small bargaining unit, we drew inspiration from the formation of the national movement on all these fronts, ramping up our efforts with all of these victories and this collective momentum in mind, while keeping the ideal of cross-industrial, cross-disciplinary, and cross-campus networks of workers in our sights.
As a bargaining unit, we often met to discuss not only the plight of adjuncts regionally and nationally, but as well we often discussed what was unfolding on campuses around the US and the violent right-wing attacks on students standing up for Palestine, which often spilled over into multi-industry, union-backed efforts such as what we witnessed in California with UAW Local 4811, which authorized a strike for 48,000 academic workers across the UC system in support of students who were brutalized by militarized police and right-wing agitators. As a bargaining unit, we often met and discussed these very issues, including what our role should be as a union in fighting back the tide of right-wing extremism (including extremist financial policy) at our own institution.
Although more must be done to tap into national networks, the higher education taskforce will hopefully serve as a good starting point on this front. We have made many connections regionally with adjunct and full-time faculty unions, pooled our resources and discussed strategy, collected data, and more, and we fully expect to broaden these connections outside of the region in the coming years.
TH: Have there been others you looked to for inspiration or strategic guidance?
AB: I have to say, strategically, we were quite unconventional in terms of where we sought strategy and guidance. Personally, in terms of both inspiration and strategy, I turned to examples of organizing from history, gleaned largely through the close study of the work of Gerald Horne, Charisse Burden-Stelly and Jodi Dean, Tony Pecinovksy, and others. Horne’s biography of Ben Davis, Red Scare/Black Liberation, has been hugely influential. Horne’s work on the labor movement in Hollywood, which we had the pleasure of writing about together in 2023 during the most recent Hollywood labor strikes, provided lessons both positive and negative, and detailed a history of labor and the Red Scare during the 1940s and into the 50s. Burden-Stelly’s book Red Scare/Black Scare is perhaps one of the most important books I’ve read in the last decade, if not altogether, detailing the various ideological, legal and political affronts during the longue durée of the confluence of Black Scare and Red Scare politics in the United States. Burden-Stelly’s collected volume with Jodi Dean, Organize, Fight, Win, has as well been an invaluable organizing tool—or set of tools, rather. Pecinovksy’s work on Hunton, has also been invaluable.
My many conversations with Horne over the past couple of years have as well provided strategic guidance both theoretically and practically. A number of organizers from UCW Local 7799, as well as Tim and Marcos from AFT NM, Emilio Alvelar, PM, and all of my fellow, hard-working NFEE members, Aspen, Kelvin, Charles, and numerous others, provided equal parts strategic guidance and inspiration in our collective efforts.
TH: What advice do you have for contingent faculty at other institutions facing similar problems?
AB: If you are an educator, address labor issues in the classroom, no matter what discipline you teach, and encourage colleagues to do the same. All disciplinary histories are steeped in class struggle, and so talking openly about this history as well as the present state of your labor in the classroom is always relevant. When I was a composition teacher at University of Colorado Denver, for instance, I read Sharon Crowley’s The History of College English, which went into great detail about adjunct issues in college composition historically. Likewise, Bruce Robbins’s more recent book, Criticism and Politics provided some interesting insights on a similar front. Matt Seybold’s podcast series on American Vandal called Criticism Inc. was also a wonderful and rich source for understanding the state of higher education, in particular the humanities, under neoliberalism. Sources such as these are certainly available for in-depth accounts of the histories of other disciplines as well.
Editor’s note: Readers interested in organizing within higher education may also want to connect with Higher Education Labor United (HELU). Formed in 2021, HELU is building a coast-to-coast wall-to-wall network—wall-to-wall because it takes in everyone who works for the university, including student workers, staff, adjuncts and tenured faculty.