Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize? They seem like more obvious candidates: Terrible pay, no job security, and a smart, highly educated group of people. They have nothing to lose but their crappy jobs. I'm sure they can see it as well as I can; can someone here shed light on it?
I would guess that they didn't historically unionize because they were a much smaller group - a higher proportion of faculty had tenure and thus job security. Also, I wonder if they were better paid before universities in the U.S. became focused on money as their primary mission (income; expenses; patents; spin-offs; research grants; tuition; and of course the whole purpose of education became future salary, not trivial things like knowledge, understanding, thought, and the welfare of civilization).
> Why don't the non-tenured (and non-tenure track) faculty unionize?
They do; traditional higher education unions like AFT have organized wall-to-wall (single faculty unions encompassing adjuncts and tenure-track faculty) in public institutions, while unions centered outside the higher education space (notably, SEIU) have organized adjunct-only unions in a number of private insitutions (the Supreme Court ruled in 1980 that private institution full-time faculty are managerial and thus do not have collective bargaining rights in US law, which is why wall-to-wall only happens in public institutions.)
Why doesn't any group of people that work together unionize? Generally, someone has to put in the time and effort to make that happen, and at many employers there is no one willing to make the sacrifice of time, energy and potentially their job to unionize their workplace.
The non-tenure (adjunct) faculty at Duke unionized. There was an effort to unionize graduate students using the same union (SEIU). It failed to win the vote.
I would guess that they didn't historically unionize because they were a much smaller group - a higher proportion of faculty had tenure and thus job security. Also, I wonder if they were better paid before universities in the U.S. became focused on money as their primary mission (income; expenses; patents; spin-offs; research grants; tuition; and of course the whole purpose of education became future salary, not trivial things like knowledge, understanding, thought, and the welfare of civilization).