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On Monday, Jon Stewart interviewed Robert Seebler, professor of Labor Relations at Cornell.  The subject (natch) was the writer's strike.  Stewart made a very insightful comment, calling writers and educators the new "migrant workers." 

With the increasing lack of tenure-track jobs, more and more people (myself included) have taken writing/teaching gigs wherever they can get them. 

Do you think this new paradigm is bad, or good, for writers/teachers?  For students?  What have you experienced in the "field," as it were?  

This is a very timely topic. I've found that full-time teaching jobs at the high school level are still out there, but full-time college faculty positions are becoming much more difficult to secure, especially in the newest age of budget slashing. The "adjunct professor" is becoming ever more popular. Adjuncts earn far less per class than do full-time professors, and they receive no benefits of course. This is good for college budgets, but I'm not sure it is good for students in this respect. With revolving-door teachers, students can't form the kind of personal and academic relationships with their professors over a period of time that can mean so much. From a professional standpoint, the adjunct system eliminates many lifetime career teaching opportunities.

I don't find anything wrong in an educator/writer being a 'migrant worker' in so far as the status offers ample support & motivation. Teaching & writing are essentially creative & dynamic activities, and migration is not necessarily detrimental to such activies. In fact, a 'migrant worker' may find himself/herself in more challenging and, may be, more amorphous situation to pull out the most creative & dynamic in him or her. Working for a long time in an economically assured & professionally over-protective condition may very well be uncongenial for a creative mind. Migration ( be it geographical or occupational or otherwise) involves a 'displacement' and may thus make room for significant diasporic dimensions. A teacher or a writer shall have to be a person of varied experiences, not always looking for utilitarian certainties in life. He/She definitely requires money & deserves dignity, but a creative mind is like a rolling stone & it gathers moss only by rolling on.

All my writing and teaching assignments have been the Migrant worker type. Mine is perhaps a special case as I prefer it this way.

The reason for my preference is primarily my interest in management consulting, which is my main activity. Teaching, designing training programs and preparing course material is an added activity. However I get some additional advantages also. I get to meet and mix with students from different management institute. I enjoy this. Also I an opportunity to regularly create something new rather than teach the same old subject again and again. I enjoy this.

I believe the students also benefit from this kind of arrangement. They get to learn form many more people with diverse background and experience. This is particularly important for business and management studies.

I think that the paradigm of teachers, most probably, at the collegiate level, has many advantages that have been indicated in the above posts.  I think it is a challenge for any "migrant" worker to establish roots and develop the elements that seem to work well with established roots, such as family and domesticity.  I am not suggesting that these cannot be accomplished with a "migrant" life, but I think it's much harder.  I believe it presents a slight disadvantage to students, who might benefit from the idea of a teacher remaining at an institution over time.  Naturally, anything that benefits institutional development (slashing budgets and benefits for its teaching staff) is something that is disadvantageous to those who are forced to live this nomadic and "migrant" life.