On Oct. 22, labor leader and activist Dolores Huerta will speak at Chapman University, talk with University President Daniele Struppa and take questions from the audience. Huerta is the founder of the United Farm Workers (UFW) union and a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom. 

Her leadership has helped to transform the lives of workers in one of the most ferociously marginalized jobs in American history and she effectively shaped the labor movement in this nation in a way few others have done before her.

Huerta’s leadership won farm workers not only better wages and working conditions – including protections from some pesticides – but also healthcare benefits.
The Robert F. Kennedy Medical Plan, part of the original UFW contract, provided medical care to the families of agricultural workers for decades to come. The significance of these healthcare benefits for the people that provide us all with our food should not be overlooked.

Chapman should learn from Huerta the moral importance of looking out for the well-being of employees and their families. In my area of instruction at Chapman, the field of writing studies, most courses are taught by part-time faculty. They are paid, in many cases, less than half the salary full-time facultyare paid for teaching the same course, according to 2016 salary information from Chronicle Data.

Because they are part-time, they do not qualify for the healthcare plans available to full-time faculty, according to the Chapman website. If they or their children get sick, there is nothing Chapman offers in the way of a safety net for them, something that unionized farmworkers have had since the 1960s.

The Modern Language Association (MLA), one of the leading professional organizations in the field of writing studies, has issued statements advocating for the fair treatment of part-time faculty.

They acknowledge the conditions that emerge from unequal status: “The conditions under which most adjunct teachers are employed define them as nonprofessionals… They receive little recognition or respect for their contributions to their departments; almost always they are paid inequitably and receive no fringe benefits.”

Despite this industry-wide exploitation, the MLA guidelines are very clear about what is fair treatment and compensation for university faculty, saying that all teachers should receive basic benefits like health insurance.

One of the most important lessons we can learn from Huerta’s life is that it takes a fight to make conditions more fair for those without much clout. Do we really need to ask her who should be joining the fight?