Thousands of Canadian university professors are underpaid, overworked and constantly dangling on the edge of unemployment, according to a nationwide study by the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT).

The survey of 2,606 contract faculty — short-term university hires who teach courses on a semester- or yearlong basis — found that even though many are hired back year after year, 48 per cent have side jobs outside academia. Another 16 per cent work at multiple universities to make ends meet.

Though contract faculty are expected to maintain the same standards as tenured professors, they’re often paid about a third as much per course. Several respondents said their income from one institution was not enough to bring them above the poverty line.

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The precariousness of their situation, many contract faculty say, has led to major impacts on their mental and physical health, as they scramble to build a financial safety net, and to a decrease in the quality of student education.

“It takes a very heavy emotional toll on you,” said Andrea Eidinger, who has spent eight years teaching on contract at universities and colleges in British Columbia. “I basically have to reapply for my job every four months.”

For this, Eidinger said she gets paid less than minimum wage, as contract faculty salaries don’t take into account time spent preparing courses, marking or emailing students outside office hours.

Sarika Bose has worked as a contract faculty member at the University of British Columbia for 19 years. She said she loves her research, colleagues and students, but “there’s only so many years that you can apply for unemployment insurance every summer.”

The fact that a job could be taken away by simply not being rehired is a major source of stress for her and her colleagues, she said.

“Many of us don’t know if we’ll have a job in August” for the September school year, she said — a concern echoed by CAUT president James Compton.

“Right now there’s people very anxious and busy, trying to cobble together a syllabus for a course that was offered to them at the very last second,” he said.

There is a perception in academia, Compton added, that contract faculty are “happy moonlighters,” content to teach one or two courses per year while making the bulk of their income elsewhere. But the survey found the majority of contract faculty want a tenure-track job — even those who have been teaching for as long as two decades.

Government funding for post-secondary institutions has dropped significantly since the 1980s, when it made up about 80 per cent of overall funds, Compton said. Now, that figure is below 50 per cent. As universities are forced to make up more of their budget from tuition, adding cheap, flexible labour instead of tenure-track positions makes financial sense.

From 2005 to 2015, the report says, the number of professors working part-time, part of the year, increased by 79 per cent.

Compton called contract faculty the “canaries in the academic coal mine.” The issues they’re facing — precariousness, low pay, increased workloads — will soon spread to permanent faculty, he said, unless changes are made “for the health of the university system as a whole.”

“This is not inevitable,” he said. “A different funding model could apply.”

Several universities reached on Labour Day Monday were unable to comment on the study.

The report also found that women and racialized contract faculty are more likely than white men to work more than 15 hours per course per week, and they make less for their trouble. Men are “much more likely” than women to make more than $80,000 per year, and the same holds true for white contract faculty.

Because the report measured total income, not just academic income, the differences “likely reflect pay equity issues in both the academic sector and other sectors,” the report says.

“It’s been anecdotal for a long time, but people have kind of known that,” Bose said. “There seems to be that gendered bias which disadvantages women in particular.”

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The report stressed that contract faculty who stick with their jobs generally do so because they like the work itself, as well as their students and colleagues.

“There are a lot of things I love about my profession. I’m in a place where I get to talk about really important things,” Bose said. “I can expand myself in an academic atmosphere. That’s great!

“What is not so great is that this is the kind of job that’s available: a job that gives me no security, and no assurance for the future.”