Adjunct Professors Launch Bid to Unionize at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts (Exclusive)

Katie Kilkenny
·9 min read
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“I love the school. I bleed cardinal and gold,” says Katy Garretson. The Punky Brewster, Frasier and Fuller House director, who holds two degrees from the University of Southern California, has gotten football season tickets since she was 18 years old and even hosted a Trojan marching band at her wedding.

Still, after she came to USC five years ago to teach at its prestigious School of Cinematic Arts as an adjunct professor, “to say that I was shocked would be an understatement, at the working conditions that the adjuncts are working under.” She was initially struck by the fact that there were only two full-time female professors in the directing program and that adjunct instructors do not get designated parking on campus free of charge (options include paying a $20 flat rate for USC parking or finding street parking, which can be difficult around the school). But other issues surfaced: The pay was low — one year, her accountant thought her reported income from the school was a typo — and she observed that adjuncts put in unpaid time to serve on various committees, prepare for and follow up on courses and meet with students. Meanwhile, management determined which classes adjuncts would teach and when, complicating their work outside USC.

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Now, a number of adjuncts at the top-rated film school are looking to change these conditions and others. On Wednesday, a group of instructors, including Garretson, is asking the institution’s administration to voluntarily recognize the United Auto Workers as the bargaining representative for a group of roughly 250 part-time and adjunct workers. With a supermajority having signed union cards, the group is also prepared to file a petition for a union election with the National Labor Relations Board. “We’re not trying to tear down the house,” says Garretson, who emphasizes that she loves teaching at USC. “We are trying to create a fair system and a respectful system at the cinema school. The students deserve it. The people paying the money for their students to go here deserve it. The university as a whole deserves it.”

In a statement to The Hollywood Reporter, the USC School of Cinematic Arts said, “The School of Cinematic Arts highly values our adjunct professors who are invaluable to our mission. They bring a wealth of expertise, experience and currency to the school and enhance our students’ educational experience. We also appreciate and respect the direct, collegial, and cooperative relationship we have with our adjunct professors and their participation in shared governance. We do not believe they need a third party to speak for them. We remain committed to continuing to provide fair compensation and will continue to directly respond to their concerns and needs as they arise.”

Befitting an institution that has graduated Ryan Coogler, Ron Howard and Shonda Rhimes, many of these adjuncts — generally working professionals in the industry — are entertainment union members, some with Writers Guild of America, Sundance Film Festival and Emmy awards to their name. Comprising over 71 percent of the fall semester’s faculty, the cohort teaches both “core” curriculum courses, or required courses for students, and advanced classes, despite what the group claims is unusually low pay when compared with peer institutions. Though the figure varies per division and per number of class credits, some faculty members report receiving mid-$30s an hour for a two-credit course and low-$40s an hour for a four-credit course. That’s compared with UAW-represented adjuncts at New York University, whose latest contract provides most with a minimum of around $200 an hour, and The New School, where adjuncts receive a minimum of $141 an hour during the current academic year for a lecture or seminar.

Meanwhile, the group alleges that the university is beginning to restrict adjuncts from teaching second classes, which typically provide these workers with enough hours to qualify for USC-provided health insurance. With the union drive, the instructors are in part looking to preserve these benefits, which they say can be a lifeline for Hollywood creatives. About a year ago, members of the unionizing group began hearing from supervisors that the school was seeking to restrict adjuncts to one course; while some longtime teachers would for now get to maintain their second class and their benefits, with no guarantee that that situation would continue, others were seeing their course load decrease. That situation alarmed some who had grown to rely on USC insurance. Explains adjunct associate professor in screenwriting and writer Peter Gamble (Office Uprising), who is not teaching at the school this year, “You don’t always have insurance in our industry. You have years that are lean years [when] you don’t get insurance through the guild.”

Gamble experienced the importance of this safety net firsthand nearly 13 years ago, after his then-7-month-old daughter struggled to breathe one night and turned blue. After two months of medical tests that Gamble says he could only afford due to the university-provided health insurance, he learned his daughter had a rare heart defect. She had an operation and now “she’s a beautiful 13-year-old,” he says. “That insurance literally kept my family alive.”

Adjunct Faculty Alliance Logo
The USC Adjunct Faculty Alliance Logo

The group argues that adjuncts being restricted to only one course will result in more turnover in professors, which in turn could lower the quality of students’ education. While some current adjuncts have been losing second courses, new job listings have been posted online for those same classes, say members of the group (THR has seen a link for one such posting). The prospect of new instructors being tapped to take on those classes was the reason producer and adjunct associate professor in production Navid Mcilhargey (RocknRolla, Modern Love) joined the unionization effort. “I started thinking if they take away one of my classes, two things are going to happen,” he says. “One, I can’t help those students in that class. And two, they’re going to have an [instructor] teaching something who can’t call Jason Blum and can’t call Charles King. Last year in the spring, I helped eight or nine students get jobs after they graduated.”

With their unionization drive, the group is also seeking pay increases, cost-of-living raises and multiyear contracts that provide more stability in their jobs — instructors say they do not know which courses they are being offered for the next semester and when until the middle of the previous one, making future planning for working industry professionals difficult. They say they face issues of unpaid work: that they are not paid for prep time for courses like writing syllabi, for nearly all committee work (the admissions committee does provide a stipend) and for trainings, like cybersecurity and human resources trainings. According to organizers, USC’s administration designates the hours adjuncts are supposed to work in a grid format and instructors must request overtime and get it approved to be paid for it. “But there’s sort of an unspoken rule that if you do that, you will be encouraged to stop doing those extra hours. So I work so many hours that don’t fall in my grid,” says cinematographer and adjunct assistant professor in production Jeremy Royce (He Dreams of Giants). Several who spoke to THR said they felt they needed work more hours than what they are paid for to support students.

The adjuncts’ organizing campaign began small, without union involvement. At the advice of a colleague, James Savoca, an indie director (Around June) and adjunct associate professor in production, began talking to a group of frustrated peers about major workplace issues they could raise to the administration. “My idea was to basically get a dozen people and we would talk about one, two, three big-ticket items that we liked,” Savoca says. Unionizing wasn’t on his radar until he received a call one day from an organizer with the Service Employees International Union. The idea was intriguing to him and his peers, and they began working with SEIU to get adjuncts to sign union cards. But after taking a few meetings with UAW and learning about its different approach, the group pivoted to working with the latter union, which also represents graduate student workers at USC. The adjunct group now has organizers in all of the major divisions at the School of Cinematic Arts — from animation to producing to interactive media and games — and as of press time over 77 percent of the adjunct faculty had signed union cards.

Getting there took some grassroots organizing. The group compiled a spreadsheet listing all their fellow adjuncts and their phone number and emails in August. They started with the people they knew to gauge their interest in unionizing, and then broadened the effort out: Says screenwriter and adjunct professor in writing Robert Ramsey (Intolerable Cruelty), the group studied “the USC schedule of courses with absolute obsessive-compulsive kind of exactitude and began to calculate when certain teachers that hadn’t heard the message were finishing a class.” Volunteers then greeted those teachers after class and talked to them about unionizing. “It was old-fashioned union building in the halls of the School of Cinematic Arts. Honestly, it was quite exhilarating,” says Ramsey.

The group hopes that USC’s film school will see the logic in their union drive, or at least be swayed by the number of adjuncts that have signed union cards. The effort comes at a moment when labor organizing and actions are exploding within academia: Schools from Columbia University to Rutgers University have seen strikes within the past few years, culminating with University of California graduate workers staging the largest-ever strike of higher education professionals in late 2022. Hollywood, meanwhile, is still recovering from a rare double strike of writers and actors that throttled mainstream film and television production for nearly half a year and concluded earlier in the month. Even in this environment, at the USC film school, “People are scared because of the idea of could we be retaliated against,” says Gamble. “The idea is, ‘Will this screw up my chance of having a full-time [position] at some point?’”

Still, he adds, “We’re in an industry where stories have power and we believe in the power of stories. And so I’m hoping that by telling our story and not making it more than what it is, but just telling what it really is, that that’ll have power.”

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