Marc Bousquet (Santa Clara, English), founding editor of Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor has a short piece in the Spring 2007 "Faculty Matters" newsletter of the AAUP entitled "Undergraduate Labor: The Final Frontier." It begins:
In its ruthless quest for super-cheap labor, the university has fastened on new ways of exploiting an old favorite: the student worker. We are all familiar with the figure of a student working a minimum wage job as “financial aid.” On many campuses, student workers outnumber faculty, staff, and other workers combined. Undergraduates work for their degree-granting institution as painters, maids, janitors, cooks, groundskeepers, truck loaders, daycare staff, teaching assistants, computer technicians, coaches, security guards, and administrative assistants, typically for wages at or near the national or local minimums.
Of course, at LSU, we laugh at such meager attempts at exploitation! Our administration has arranged for regular visits from Juvie inmates who pick up trash on campus, complete with orange jumpsuits and a bunch of armed guards. According to rumor, their "pay" for the day is lunch at the Union McDonalds. Not a bad deal for LSU, which gets to dump a certain number of Facilities Services workers who would otherwise pick up the trash. Does this use of inmate labor occur on other campuses, or have we finally found something at which we lead the nation?
Wait... Undergraduates? Doing *other* work? My students (as they have informed me so many times) are astoundingly overworked, pushing an average of 1/2 hour - 1 hour per week on major research papers. My insensitivity to their labor is a weakness, I'll admit... And yet, they don't have time to have a "real" job.
There are birds circling my head right now, without doubt; I just don't see them.
Inmates? (Crime is illegal at our university... perhaps I'm misunderstanding the term?)
Posted by: The Little Womedievalist | May 13, 2007 at 11:17 PM