This is a guest post by Genie Giaimo, Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric, Middlebury College (Ggiaimo@Middlebury.edu). While the post focuses on aging and academia, it has implications for grant seekers and grant writers: most federal grants for the delivery of services to the elderly come are derived from the 1965 Older Americans Act administrated by the DHHS Administration for Community Living (“ACL”). The ACL funds over 600 Area Agencies on Agencies (AAA) across America, which is turn fund local nonprofit and public service providers. So, your agency can get OAA grants directly from the feds and/or your local AAA. The National Institute on Aging (“NIA”) is the primary federal source for research grants relating to aging.
Higher education deserves more attention as a workplace site, and, as part of this effort, I plan to survey and interview academic workers across rank, years of experience, and disability and health statuses. Consider higher ed in the context of America’s workforce, which is undergoing unprecedented seismic shifts—with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic and concomitant lockdowns, workers started to rethink their relationship to their jobs (McKinsey & Company, 2022). Many workers now report their new top concerns as being able to work remotely, organize safer workplaces and better wages, and shifting priorities from “workism” to non-work pursuits. Corporations are flirting with the four-day work week* and alternative productivity models. Remote work is undergoing a natural test case and has largely been found to increase worker productivity (George et al., 2021) though managers and workers differ in their perceptions of remote work outcomes (Tsipursky, 2022). Labor is in our zeitgeist because work leads to self-efficacy and for most, give meaning to their lives. And with the increase in union organizing—across many different sectors including ones not historically pro-union, like the tech sector—workers have begun to recognize their value.
The last fifty years, however, have seen limited gains for American workers, including stagnant wages, increased cost of living, and an increase in overall working hours (Lee, 2022). Americans work more than their French, German, and Japanese counterparts (International Labor Organization). And the 2008 financial collapse saw the devastation of stable middle class jobs in favor of part-time, low wage work (McCallum, 2020). For these reasons, and more, over 40 million Americans changed their jobs the past several years. While many bemoaned “the great resignation,” it is more accurate to say that the workforce has undergone a “great reshuffle” (Meister, 2022). Time is now seen as an invaluable commodity (Stolzoff, 2023).
As a scholar, I’m attuned to the underlying sentiment around workers and labor in the media landscape. My research reveals that the attitudes about labor and productivity differ greatly between workers and management. The most fascinating connections, however, between rhetoric and work are the ones that center on the conflation of individual health and well-being with the well-being of the nation. In the early days of the pandemic, we often heard such rhetoric from politicians and from our government—for example, that keeping the economy open was more important than individual lives. As Lieutenant Governor of Texas, Dan Patrick, suggested elderly grandparents are willing to die for the benefit of the economy and the nation (Levin, 2020). The trade-off between individual and economic benefits also came to light in government policies around who was labeled an essential worker (and, later, who received work from home privileges and who did not). This rhetorical flip flopping became a catalyst for labor organizing which, in turn, shifted the identities of many care workers. And, as the essential worker as “hero” narrative was replaced with less favorable interpretations of care workers labor, healthcare workers and teachers, for example, left their jobs in droves (McCallum, 2022). The rhetorical figurations of workers, deeply impacts not only the workplace but worker identity; this is not just an economic or governmental issue.
Higher education has followed a similar trajectory over the last half century with the hollowing-out of tenure, “adjunctification” of the professorate, and the de-skilling of many university-based jobs moved to part-time student and staff lines. The supply of people who want to work in universities is far higher than the demand for workers, so wages (considered broadly) have stagnated or fallen. At the same time, the cost of a college education has ballooned, as has the number of administrators staffing colleges and universities. The Covid-19 pandemic accelerated labor organizing as the recent strikes at Rutgers University of California—among many others—demonstrate (Iafolla, 2023). We are also in an unprecedented moment for academic workers organizing and unionizing (Barnes & Thornburg LLP, 2023). Yet the patchwork system of laws and regulations that public and private higher education institutions follow deeply impacts who can organize and form a union.
My research is centered on the impact of aging on the academic worker and workplace. If the local, state, and federal laws that dictate who can unionize and who is prohibited, the complex set of roles that academic workers occupy further complicates the landscape. For example, tenure track faculty at private institutions are not allowed to unionize because they were determined to be managers by the 1980 Yeshiva ruling (AAUP), yet non-tenure track faculty and staff are excluded from this SCOTUS ruling. At public universities and colleges, all workers can unionize. Still, the stakes of unionization are high. Intimation, misinformation, and downright retaliation are some of the barriers to organize. The stakes are highest for the most precarious university workers, like adjuncts and other part-time, non-benefitted, workers. Many institutions engage in union busting tactics including intimidation, misinformation and retaliation (AAUP; Fang, 2022).
The patchwork system of rules around union organizing as well as retaliation—combined with the Covid-19 pandemic and a better than average job market—have been catalysts for many university workers. Another, darker side to this tale is the ongoing exploitation of workers in higher education. Non-tenure track workers now many up over 70% of the professoriate with national numbers hovering in the mid-20% range for TT lines. At the same time, academic freedom is being challenged in states across the country; last year 53 bills have been introduced to state legislature to restrict teaching and research in higher education (Levenstein and Mittelstadt, 2022). States such as Florida, Texas, and Ohio passed bills that restrict DEI and other cultural touchpoints in higher education curricula even as political factotums are being named to the highest administrative positions at public universities, hundreds of colleges and universities are struggling with solvency issues (The Hechinger Report, 2020). Amid these large-scale concerns, the health and well-being of academic workers might not seem like a top issue. Still, given the widespread precarity of most academic workers, and the bleak financial climate at many higher education institutions, now is an important moment to evaluate how academic workers are treated and what lies ahead as they continue to age into their work—and to look at why they don’t switch careers, into healthier, in-demand industries.
Already, academic workers are more likely to delay retirement out of financial concerns. And, given the large number of non-benefitted at-will academic workers, there is a crisis on our hands for aging as an academic worker. While this issue is framed as a cost-basis problem for schools (or the government), I’m interested in understanding how academic workers navigate their institution’s wellness-related policies, such as different types of medical leave, short-term and long-term disability, FMLA, and other unpaid and paid policies. I want to survey academic workers to understand how these things work.
Navigating policies in any workplace can be challenging. My hope is that more research on academic workers leads to measurable and consistent reform in U.S. higher education that is better prepared for the kinds of precarious workers it currently hires, rather than tenure track ones it previously hired. Yet the individualistic nature of higher education makes it difficult, even among tenured faculty, to navigate job expectations and leave policies, especially during unanticipated health crises. Add to this erosion of worker benefits (e.g., retirement contributions, leave policies, and insurance plans) for staff and faculty, alike, and we are headed for a perfect storm of aging, ill, and disabled academic workers. We need better structures in place to prepare and to advocate for meaningful workplace policies and support.