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"Responsive to the dynamics of the academic job market"? A job market is where you rent someone's life; then you can command them. As in any market, you have th

"Responsive to the dynamics of the academic job market"? A job market is where you rent someone's life; then you can command them. As in any market, you have the incentive to pay less and get more; the other person has the opposite incentive. An area of antagonism. You seem not to prefer the frame of wealth distribution. Instead, your post reframes it into terms that school administrators prefer, as if we are supposed to care what bureaucrats think. A recent analysis of replacing people with lower-paid workers: "The second claim is that low-wage workers are easily replaceable and offer no benefit to society. This is the argument aimed at service workers, who are on strike because they make so little they cannot afford food or rent." (http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/09/2013923101543956539.html http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/09/20139231015...) Perhaps professor Vojtko herself saw this as a larger struggle between bosses and workers: "Contrary to what the Duquesne administration would have the public believe, she sought out and strongly supported the new union." (http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/adjuncts-class-and-fear/ http://workingclassstudies.wordpress.com/2013/09/23/adjuncts...) We still spend money — but on administration rather than teaching/research: "The last thirty years have seen a veritable explosion of the proportion of working hours spent on administrative tasks at the expense of pretty much everything else. In my own university, for instance, we have more administrators than faculty members, and the faculty members, too, are expected to spend at least as much time on administration as on teaching and research combined. The same is true, more or less, at universities worldwide." (http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars http://thebaffler.com/past/of_flying_cars) Hope some of these sources answers your questions, and puts them into the greater context?

_dps 13y ago
> A job market is where you rent someone's life; then you command them. This seems like a one-sided and unproductively emotional framing. One could easily flip the emotional bias and say "A job market is where greedy people with skills stubbornly refuse to volunteer their help unless they get paid for it." In fact, I suspect that's exactly how some might characterize the "job market" for independent medical services where the employer is the patient. Here's my suggestion for a neutral take: a job market is a mechanism where people who are willing to take on responsibilities are paid money by people who would like to delegate responsibilities. The current dynamics of the academic job market (and many other markets for people with conventional liberal arts education) suggest that fewer people want to delegate those responsibilities, and more people are willing to take on those responsibilities. This is not a market-created problem, it is a social problem (i.e. we have somehow encouraged far too many people to invest in educations that don't line up with current and near-future demand for responsibility-delegation). As to your point about intrinsic antagonism: naturally, in any negotiation there is a zero-sum element on the margin, i.e. while we both benefit we can still argue over how the mutual gains are to be distributed. On the one hand, this is a valid point, and the asymmetry of leverage in this on-the-margin zero-sum negotiation between employers and employees is an excellent theoretical argument for labor regulations and labor unions. On the other hand, framing the labor negotiation as zero sum overall is, I believe, counter to even Marxist [0] analysis of labor relations. [0] My lay understanding of Marxist labor relation theory is that it argues capital obtains the lion's share of the mutual benefits (or "surplus value") arising from delegation, but it does not argue that the exchange is what we would nowadays call zero-sum on an overall basis.

_dps 13y ago

> A job market is where you rent someone's life; then you command them. This seems like a one-sided and unproductively emotional framing. One could easily flip the emotional bias and say "A job market is where greedy people with skills stubbornly refuse to volunteer their help unless they get paid for it." In fact, I suspect that's exactly how some might characterize the "job market" for independent medical services where the employer is the patient. Here's my suggestion for a neutral take: a job market is a mechanism where people who are willing to take on responsibilities are paid money by people who would like to delegate responsibilities. The current dynamics of the academic job market (and many other markets for people with conventional liberal arts education) suggest that fewer people want to delegate those responsibilities, and more people are willing to take on those responsibilities. This is not a market-created problem, it is a social problem (i.e. we have somehow encouraged far too many people to invest in educations that don't line up with current and near-future demand for responsibility-delegation). As to your point about intrinsic antagonism: naturally, in any negotiation there is a zero-sum element on the margin, i.e. while we both benefit we can still argue over how the mutual gains are to be distributed. On the one hand, this is a valid point, and the asymmetry of leverage in this on-the-margin zero-sum negotiation between employers and employees is an excellent theoretical argument for labor regulations and labor unions. On the other hand, framing the labor negotiation as zero sum overall is, I believe, counter to even Marxist [0] analysis of labor relations. [0] My lay understanding of Marxist labor relation theory is that it argues capital obtains the lion's share of the mutual benefits (or "surplus value") arising from delegation, but it does not argue that the exchange is what we would nowadays call zero-sum on an overall basis.