Assistant professors in my college start at $44K, with no contributions made to Social Security. Those who started in 2008 or later have never had raises. This is to teach a wide range of undergraduate and graduate courses, 3/3, with 30% of time dedicated to research and the expectation of a book and articles for tenure.
Travel funding and library budget are negligible. We have paper, printing, some xeroxing and postage, phones in our offices that can make local calls, and computers. We paint our own offices, but they are still cleaned for us so far. Offices and classrooms are heated and air conditioned 8AM-5PM on days when students are present. Our building has running water but this water is not heated, much to the shock of northerners.
Instructors start at $38K, teaching a limited range of beginning and intermediate courses, 5/5, without other responsibilities. They usually take overloads such that they actually teach 6/7, in addition to other jobs at the community college, or tutoring, or in construction. With the extra classes and the summer classes they make more total money than the newer professors. They work hard, but there is not a great deal of difference in total amount of money had and work done between these two groups.
There is a permanent war between instructors and professors about the content of the freshman and sophomore courses. The professors want more taught, but the instructors say that means more work and that they are not paid enough to do it. The professors are required to meet certain teaching standards in these courses, and the instructors are not evaluated in the same way.
Indeed, professors and instructors do not have the same class interests and that is why the lower division courses are a site of struggle. I see these things as clearly as I do because I am friends with some instructors and they articulate their motivations in a less guarded way after hours than they do during the work week.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
I often think this is why professors need to understand themselves as workers, rather than as holders of the white collar position of privilege this job was as recently as twenty years ago, and enter into unions with instructors for collective bargaining in the collective interest. $6K and a 2-course release per semester (by comparison to the instructor labor) is just not that special.
At my institution, the union effort made a major strategic error not to include full-time contract faculty in the bargaining unit — it only organized part-time instructors. I suspect it was because the effort took so long, and they did not adjust as adjuncts were no longer just part-time, but full-time, too. As a result, the institution merely eliminated part-time positions by making them full-time with unworkable courseloads. Folks with tenure, even of my generation, still think they’re pretty special, though. And for such small potatoes. It’s quite annoying.
I am for unionization. The course release isn’t a straight-up release, though — you are teaching a wide range of courses that actually require your PhD level expertise, and you have research and service.
We don’t have adjuncts, thank God. But there is variety of attitudes among the instructors — some see themselves as professionals and others as casual labor, and many of the latter see advantages in keeping it that way. Most of them are pretty conservative and vote for right to work candidates.
Most professors believe in more rights than that but are not AAUP members and think it is a “union” — and think shared governance is bunk. They will be saved when the flood comes because they know someone in the big house, and so on.
Normally I would consider the instructors the expressed and exploited class, or expect them to be, but in this situation I think it is the professors who are, especially the assistant and now also some associate ones.
But also: what I was thinking about when I wrote the post was that the technical problem, the problem about making the classes good, is money. Instructors want more classes, to add adjunct pay to their salaries and thus make more, which means there are certain kinds of work they do not want to assign. Professors feel professionally obliged to assign such work but really do not have more effective time or money than instructors. Yet we cannot discuss these things directly when we meet to plan the actual classes…