The Plight of Academic Workers Living on $17,000 a Year

As academic workers, we teach 20 hours a week, and then we do research for at least 20 to 40 hours a week, in service to the community and the university. We are paid for our teaching work, but the research we do, creating knowledge, is unpaid. We make $17,000 a year. I’m going to say that again. I do this with my students, I say ‘I’m going to say this again, write it down. We make only $17,000 a year.’ We make only $17,000 a year in a town where almost that entire paycheck goes to rent. So today I’m going to talk about how academic workers try to get by on $17,000 a year. These are not just my stories. These are the stories of many. I elicited responses from other graduate student workers, and received this litany of creative, difficult and sometimes illegal ways that we struggle to live; a collective narrative of trying to make it in Santa Cruz on $17,000 a year.

Towards Mediocrity is documenting some of the struggles of student-workers from the University of California — TAs, readers, and tutors — stories that are “shared during bargaining for UAW 2865, the UC Student-Workers’ Union, in the campaign for a new, fair contract for student-workers.”

Aaron Barlow, a tenured professor, has noted previously why the academic community should stand by these workers: “Few of us tenured professors have had to struggle the way contingent hires do, yet there are, among them, people whose writing and research is the equal of any of ours — and that is done in nearly impossible situations.”

Academic workers often have to take on one or two additional jobs to make ends meet, which can affect the quality of teaching in the classroom: “There is nothing wrong with being a bartender. My mother is still doing it at 66 years of age. I think though, when it comes to being able to deliver quality education, that it’s not so good for my students that their teacher is spending that much time in a bar.”

Photo: Scott Feldstein

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