USC School of Cinematic Arts adjunct professors have been working overtime.
Adjunct professors within USC’s School of Cinematic Arts will begin voting to unionize on Jan. 31. The vote closes Feb. 22.
If the majority (50.1%) of the SCA adjuncts vote “YES,” then the Adjunct Faculty Alliance-UAW will be recognized as a union and USC will be legally obligated to negotiate a contract. One of the AFA-UAW’s main complaints is that there is no guarantee that adjuncts will instruct the next semester. Critics also say there is no clear path to full-time employment and voting is limited to SCA adjunct professors that are teaching this semester.
“Those of us that are working really hard at it, we meet at a minimum of three times a week,” said James Savoca, adjunct professor in the Division of Film & Television Production.
SCA adjuncts formed a leadership board that delivers weekly newsletters, the “AFA Weekly,” in an effort to keep faculty members up to date on AFA meetings and the timeline of voting.
Peter Gamble, a representative of the AFA-UAW, wrote in a Jan. 16 newsletter that they hope to receive a supermajority vote to obtain the strongest possible position when it comes time to negotiate the terms of a contract with USC.
“[USC] immediately started to use some of the anti-union rhetoric that is essentially boilerplate,” said Moses Journey, an adjunct professor of Cinematic Animation and Digital Arts.
In 2023, the Writers’ Guild of America went on strike for 148 days, and SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, went on strike for 118 days.
“Between the WGA strike and everything that’s been going on here, I’ve made very little money in the last 365 days, and it sure would have been nice to have been paid more fairly and to know that I had backup healthcare at USC if my WGA healthcare fell through,” said Dara Resnik, an adjunct professor in the Cinematic Peter Stark Producing Program.
Teaching at USC is not intended to be an SCA adjunct professor’s main source of income, as the point is for students to learn from someone who actively works in their respective fields of interest.
But many film industry workers have struggled to make ends meet in the last year.
“[USC’s] policies show in our pay, our benefits and in the unpaid work we are asked to do,” wrote Peter Gamble, adjunct associate professor in the Division of Writing for Screen & Television, in an announcement email for an AFA-UAW town hall Zoom meeting. “Many of us are already in unions, and we have seen the power we have when we come together to make our voices heard.”
The AFA-UAW has been communicating with USC through the National Labor Board, and ballots will be sent out with adjuncts’ paychecks.
“I haven’t gotten even a cost of living raise since I started working at USC,” said Journey, who has been an adjunct professor at SCA since 2021. “Parking costs were going up, and I was just wondering, ‘What the heck?’ I even asked them for a token percent raise and actually ended up having less money because of changes in the tax code.”
AFA-UAW first began a movement toward unionization in November after delivering a letter of intent to the USC Provost’s office. Adjuncts were accompanied by many students on their walk through campus. Many students are still showing support.
“I think they’re a big pulling factor for this school,” said Stanley Turner, a freshman studying cinema arts, film and television production. “When we tour SCA, they make a big deal out of having professors that are still actively working in the industry.”
Jacob Pincus, a sophomore student studying cinematic arts, film and television production at SCA, supported unionization.
“SCA has so much money, and they spend it in strange ways,” Pincus said. “Our professors don’t make much money, especially for living in L.A. I think they make less than PhD students. The school has money to give — they just choose not to.”
The adjunct faculty recorded that 80% of their staff supported unionization when the letter was delivered. USC added about 75 new SCA adjunct professors for the spring semester. The AFA-UAW has been tracking down these new adjuncts across the eight schools within SCA by checking class schedules, in an effort to gain their support, Savoca said.
“Most of the professors at SCA are not wealthy by any means,” Pincus said. “That’s why they are teaching.”