BOSTON – The Simmons Adjunct Union is fighting to negotiate a contract with Simmons University, over a year after they voted to unionize in June 2025.
The Adjunct Union is working with the Service Employees International Union Local 509—which represents graduate students, adjunct faculty, and salaried faculty in institutions across the Boston area.
Simmons adjuncts want a fair deal
Sarah Phenix, an adjunct professor at Simmons, was one of the adjuncts who pushed for unionization. According to Phenix, she never received a raise in her first 12 years teaching at Simmons. This prompted her to reach out to fellow adjuncts in her department.
“I just started asking questions,” she said. “I discovered that the lack of wage increases and the complete absence of cost-of-living increases were intentional, and that they weren’t going to change unless adjuncts unionized.”
Adjuncts are non-salaried faculty at universities and are generally paid per course. Many universities, including Simmons, have slowly transitioned from the traditional full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty to relying on adjuncts. Their labor is cheaper. They often receive fewer benefits than their salaried counterparts. Last year, Simmons employed 362 adjuncts, according to SEIU.
Traditionally, adjunct faculty taught as a side gig. They were usually professionals in their fields brought in for their expertise. Now, many adjuncts are teaching full-time yet are not paid livable wages. According to a recent report by CUPA-HR, adjunct faculty make up around 40% of US college faculty.
“I make $3,850 for a four-month course teaching 16 students,” Phenix explained. “I’ve talked to a lot of adjuncts that have tried to calculate their hourly wage. They’ve calculated it as low as $9.60 an hour.”
Two of Phenix’s contracts from 2016 and 2024 show that despite the eight-year gap, Simmons continued to pay her $3,600 per course.
In addition to fair wages, the Adjunct Union is looking for stronger job security and better communication from the university.
According to Phenix, Simmons adjunct course contracts can be offered with as little as a week’s notice, leaving adjuncts to scramble to prepare appropriate coursework. They can also be cancelled mid-semester, Phenix noted, “without due cause.” She hopes the union contract will prevent that from happening.
If courses are cancelled within two weeks of the start date, adjuncts are paid just $300.
Laura Warweck, the communications officer for Simmons University, provided a statement from David Hollinden, the school’s associate vice president of human resources.
“We are committed to negotiating in good faith with the goal of reaching a mutually acceptable agreement that is aligned with our shared commitment to academic excellence. Out of respect for the collective bargaining process, we are unable to discuss specific matters related to compensation, benefits, or other subjects under negotiation.”
Hollinden also included, “Simmons University values the contributions of our adjunct faculty, whose dedication and commitment support and enrich the academic experience for our students.”
A decades-long struggle to unionize adjuncts
Gary Zabel, a retired philosophy professor at UMass Boston, became involved with organizing fellow UMB adjuncts in the Part-time Faculty Committee of the Faculty-Staff Union, an affiliate of the National Education Association, fighting for medical benefits in the late 1990s. Though UMB adjuncts had already been in the FSU for some time, they still lacked parity with full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty in a number of key areas like wages, seniority, retirement, and benefits.
“We pushed the issue … we won big,” he said, explaining that under this drive, adjuncts won medical benefits and a pay increase in 1998. He connected with a sibling organization based at the City University of New York graduate school. Eventually, Zabel’s organizing efforts snowballed into connecting with adjunct organizers around the US and Canada to form the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor at a Boston conference in 1999. But virtually all adjunct unions were at public colleges like UMB at that time.
The history of adjuncts unionizing is a long, fraught one, particularly for adjuncts at private colleges, Zabel explained. In 1979, the National Labor Relations Board v. Yeshiva University court case classified tenure-track and tenured faculty at private colleges like Simmons and Emerson College as “managerial employees,” leaving them unable to organize.
Adjuncts weren’t included under that definition. But it still took longer for successful union drives to get started at private colleges than at public colleges. In 2001, adjuncts at Emerson College voted to unionize as the Affiliated Faculty of Emerson College, part of the American Association of University Professors, with their first contract ratified in 2004.
SEIU Local 509 began a concerted drive to organize Boston-area private college adjuncts, part of a larger national effort, in 2013, helping adjuncts at Tufts University to unionize that year, Lesley University adjuncts in 2014, and Boston University adjuncts in 2015.
The organizing torch is passed to Simmons adjuncts
Laurie Laporte has been an adjunct at BU since she received her PhD there in 2007 and helped to organize its adjunct union.
“I had sort of initially thought my graduate school career and my teaching career would be this kind of interim position … then you get a tenure track job, or you do research, or you find something else … just sort of over time, [it] became a more regular set of appointments that every semester I would be asked to teach again,” she explained.
Her own experience in the adjunct system led her to join the BU unionization drive.
As a union member for 11 years, Laporte is now working to help support Simmons adjuncts.
Bargaining sessions are continuing through the summer.
