Weiqing Xu A04 Week 8

The reading assigned this week is “Resistance Is Not Futile: From #adjuncthustle to Hell Yeah!” The author, Genevieve Erin O'Brien, found her situation was almost the same as the “garment workers, domestic workers and restaurant workers” when she received the answers from students after asked the class, “How are these workers exploited?”. “They have to work long hours.”, “they have production speed ups.”, and “they have to pay for parking!” are all included. Though some of these answers show the insufficient living experiences of life, the author still felt not comfortable when she found these answers also fit her perfectly. It’s totally reasonable for her to uncomfortable from my perspective. I don’t mean that these workers have inferior social status; what I want to say is, the pay and treatment the author received is unmatched in terms of her education and the content of her worker. The more important point is, the variance of salaries or other bonus are relatively small within the “workers”, however, the variance can be extremely huge in the group “professor”; what’s more irritating fact is, this kind of variance is not decided by the quality of work the professors provide, but by gender, by race, or by ages. This variance is decided when you are born but not by the progress that you have made in the following years.

Reference
O’Brien, G. (2020). “Resistance Is Not Futile: From #adjuncthustle to Hell Yeah!” in Academia”. Fight Tower. Rutgers University Press.

Photo is retrieved from: https://www.bbc.com/news/education-46473269