It is with much interest that I read The San Diego Union-Tribune Sunday business feature on the “gig economy.”

Gig workers contract with employers one-on-one to provide specified services be they delivering fast-food meals or taxi services in one’s private vehicle. They are paid for each service they provide, such as one meal delivery or one across-town ride. There is no job security nor guarantee of work, no benefits and no company-sponsored health insurance.

Gig workers, as a rule, are all paid equally for these services. I have never heard of one Uber driver being paid more per mile or minute than another.

The world of higher education is filled with “gig” workers called adjunct professors, also known as contingent faculty, non-tenured faculty, or part-time faculty. The educators, almost all with Master’s degrees and doctorates, work as “gig” professors.

They are hired semester-to-semester and paid piecemeal for each class they teach. They are not “employees” in the traditional sense but true gig workers as you describe, and have no benefits or health care plans.

Unlike gig workers for Door Dash or Uber, the adjunct professors are part of a two-tier pay system one does not see in other gigs.

While full-time, tenured professors get a base pay, with the average pay for a community college professor as $72,470, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In some college districts, up to 75% of all instruction is done by these “gig” adjuncts.

The outrageous inequity is clear.

There are two pay schedules for employees doing the same work. The full-timer gets paid a salary of $72,000 and teaches an average of five classes, with an amount of administrative duties while the adjunct is paid $4000 (or less) for five classes for a total pay of $20,000.

So we have $72,000 versus $20,000 for doing the same amount of work. Are we to assume the difference of $52,000 if for the administrative work? Isn’t that what the districts have handsomely-paid administrators for? Community college officers and administrators make an upwards of $150,000 per year, with additional pay for additional duties.

Adding to the pay disparity is the 67% State-mandated course cap for adjuncts in the state of California stating that no adjunct may teach more than a 67% percent load of full-time faculty, leaving adjuncts to cobble together a living teaching across several college districts, hence their nickname of “freeway flyers.”

No one ever heard of one Uber driver being paid $15.00 for delivering a passenger to his destination while another drivers gets $50.00.

This grossly unfair two-tier pay system is business as usual in the world of higher education and is the elephant in the living room. Being a “gig” free-lancer is one thing, an institutional two-tier pay system is yet another.

Dorothy Gaffney-Madsen

San Diego, CA

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