National Adjunct Walkout Day (NAWD), scheduled for 25 February 2015, was organized by adjuncts on a campus-by-campus basis. The MLA Executive Council and the Committee on Contingent Labor in the Profession conducted the MLA Action for Allies event in conjunction with NAWD.* We called on all tenure-track faculty members and administrators to participate in the MLA action by doing the following four things:
• Sign up as an ally.
• Complete the series of questions the MLA has created as a tool for evaluating the use of contingent faculty members in their department.
• Gather the full-time, part-time, tenure-track, and adjunct faculty members of their department for a meeting at which they might discuss the answers they gave to the evaluative questions and review the MLA’s resources on the academic workforce.
• Report what they learned about the situation on their campus and tell the MLA how it can help departments make progress on action issues on campuses and in the MLA.
* The MLA supports the aims of efforts such as National Adjunct Walkout Day and National Adjunct Action Week with the proviso that the MLA does not support, encourage, or condone violating state laws, such as New York State’s Taylor Law (the Public Employees Fair Employment Act).