The biggest controversy in higher education could very well be the use of contract faculty workers.
The issue has already been made clear in universities, but college teachers say it’s a problem there too.
“They’re doing exactly the same work as the faculty sitting to their left and to their right, and they know they’re being paid very different — much less — than the faculty to their left and to their right,” says Darryl Bedford, President of OPSEU Local 110 (which represents Fanshawe College faculty). “This is one of the biggest problems we face.”
Over half of all teachers at Fanshawe are contract faculty workers, meaning they they lack the job security and bargaining representation of their full-time colleagues.
“It’s a trend that we’ve seen over the last couple decades, and it’s a concern not only for the faculty who don’t know whether they’ll be getting work from semester to semester, but it’s also an issue for a local economy,” Bedford says.
