Precarity Comes to the University: The Working Life of a 21st Century Tutor

Undergraduate and graduate student enrolment at universities across North American have been increasing steadily for decades. Yet hiring for tenure-track faculty positions has not increased proportionately. The outcome of these contradictory trends has been an expansion of undergraduate class sizes alongside the growth of a reserve army of academic labourers competing within an ever more constricted academic labour market. In this context, university teaching is being increasingly offloaded onto those phd-holders fortunate enough to obtain ad hoc sessional lecturer positions, which last four months a-piece. With growing class sizes, and footloose sessional instructors, the quality of undergraduate education suffers. Those phd-holders crowded out of the sessional lecturer market, yet who remain committed to education work, find themselves scrambling for employment as precarious ESL teachers or independent tutors. The precarious academic worker of today is thus an effect of a restructured, profit-oriented university system.

The following text presents an interview with one such individual who outlines the conditions of living and working as a precarious academic labourer today.


ClassRoom: How did you end up working as a tutor? (What are your credentials, what other education jobs have you worked?)

Tutor: I’ve been tutoring on and off for about 10 years.  I got my start as an undergrad in an on campus tutoring center, worked at another on campus tutoring center while getting my masters, and worked occasionally under the table while a PhD student.  In the latter case, all of the tutoring I did came from answering queries posted on the department listserv from students seeking a tutor.  My current work as a tutor has come from friends of mine who introduced me to people who needed tutoring.

My most recent tutoring work came about because the last teaching assistant contract I had ran out and I was unable to find work elsewhere.  Despite sending off at least a dozen applications to different universities and colleges in Southern Ontario, I’ve been out of work since April.

As noted above, my credentials are my advanced degrees and 10 years of tutoring experience.  I have also worked as a course instructor, a teaching assistant, and marker-grader.

CR: What ways have you tried to find work?

T: I initially looked for work by asking my friends who are instructors or teaching assistants if they had any students who needed tutoring.  I then printed flyers and posted them around my alma mater’s campus and another campus.  This resulted in three students contacting me to tutor them, but, ultimately, none of these panned out.  I also applied to jobs at tutoring centers.  This led to three interviews, but no jobs with any of the places I interviewed with.  One place interviewed me four times for a tutoring job that would have only been a few hours a week and paid only $20 an hour before ultimately not hiring me.

CR: What are your wages and working conditions like?

T: My wages vary widely from $20 to $55 an hour.  If the student is an undergrad who seems to be paying their own way, then I will charge $20 an hour.  However, if the student appears to be wealthier or has parents who are wealthy and paying, then I will charge closer to $55 an hour.

The working conditions are extremely precarious and thus stressful.  There are no paid sick days, no benefits, and if a student does not pay, there is no recourse.  It is very different from being an instructor or teaching assistant where the pay is still bad and the work precarious, but it least it’s regular while the contract lasts.  A student could drop at any time for any reason.

For instance, I met with a student and he agreed to be tutored two times a week for $20 an hour.  He was supposed to e-mail me more information about his course, but I never heard from him again.

Also, some students act more arrogantly and amorally with a freelance tutor than they do with an instructor or teaching assistant.  For example, a student wanted me to help him with his writing sample for his graduate school applications.  He told me that he wants to get into Harvard.  I spent an hour on the phone with him telling him that he could expect to be poor and unemployed once he obtained his PhD.  He responded by telling me that I was unemployed because I don’t have any publications.  I told him that even those PhDs with publications in top journals, and who have sent in applications across the English-speaking world, and they can’t get interviews.  Once we settled on the details of my tutoring him, he told me that he could find other students in need of tutoring too.  I was grateful to him until he told me that he wanted a finder’s fee of 10%.  I told him that I had spent an hour with him telling him what he could expect during and after grad school, and did not expect any remuneration from him.  After I told him that, he agreed that he did not need to be paid a finder’s fee.  An hour after I got off the phone with him he called me back to ask if I would ghostwrite an essay for a friend.  His friend would pay me $50 for a 750-word paper.  I was aghast and refused.  I was supposed to call him back two weeks later to start tutoring him, but I didn’t want to work with him anymore.  I don’t know what I would have done if I did not have savings and the support of my family to help me not have to work for just anybody.

CR: Who are your clients? Who typically ends up with a private tutor like you?

T: So far, my clients are a student at a prestigious private high school and a York University student.  The former student comes from a wealthy family, so I charge his parents $50 an hour.  I found him through a friend who used to tutor under the table while doing her PhD.  She is now a full-time professor at Seneca College, so she passed this student onto me.  The latter student has a disability and is reimbursed by York’s Disability Center.  I charge her $35 an hour.  A friend of mine who is an instructor at York was approached by one of her students looking for a tutor.

CR: Tutoring seems extremely isolating. Do you ever interact with other tutors?

T: It is isolating.  The only other tutor I’ve interacted with was a tutor I recognized as a customer at York’s former grad pub.  He is an older guy who is a full-time free-lance tutor.  I saw him on campus in September when I was posting flyers.  He was on his way somewhere and I asked him some quick questions.  Basically he told me that he started tutoring by posting flyers around campus and he has been able to survive on word of mouth since then.  He also told me he charges $35 an hour.  I didn’t ask about his credentials or what he tutors as he seemed to be in a hurry.  Other than this one meeting, I have not interacted with any other tutors.

CR: There has been some interesting organizing by ESL teachers in recent years (for example the work of the IWW and the Angry Language Brigade in the UK). What possibilities, if any, do you see for organizing precarious education workers like yourself?

T: I briefly looked at the Angry Language Brigade’s organizing advice and looks like it geared toward ESL centers and not free-lancers.  In terms of organizing free-lance tutors on a campus such as York’s, finding out where they go for lunch helps.  If the grad pub at York were still open, then it would be easy to find them and talk to them.  As for free-lancers who don’t work with university students, I don’t know how to go about organizing them.  There is a freelancers union online that has resources to help members with clients who won’t pay and things like that.  I just discovered them, so I don’t know how helpful they could be.

CR: What are the major challenges those who are interested in organizing with precarious education workers?

T: The greatest challenge is simply finding the workers to organize them in the first place.

The second would probably be getting over the perception that unionism is a bad thing.  I am only going by how the freelance tutors I met at York responded to the strike by CUPE 3903 in 2008-09.  They were unhappy with us (I was a member then) because we taking away business for them and they did not know how they were going to survive in the meantime.  When I brought up the issues over which we were on strike they were dismissive and simply reiterated how they were being negatively affected.

Lastly, I don’t know what kind of tactics could be used when often are work place is the students home or café.