This is the sixth in a series about collective bargaining in the San Francisco Community College District. I was a Union activist in the late '70s and early '80s when collective bargaining for community college faculty was passed into law in California. I detailed the steps along the way to negotiating a contract in the previous five parts of this series (see below for links). In this part I wanted to talk about the plight of part-time faculty, how we started to do something about it in our first contract, and how that small start has led to a much better situation in our District at the present time.
Part-time (or adjunct) faculty are cheaper. That's always been the bottom line for educational institutions. Oh, we always heard about how hiring part-timers added to "flexibility" for the institution, but maintaining a cadre of part-time faculty who had been at the institution for ten or more years seemed to contradict that argument. Then we heard that the people who were working part-time were all happy to be in that position, and weren't interested in joining the ranks of the full-time faculty. In our District, we did several surveys during our negotiations which showed a strong majority interested in a full-time job.
In order to make enough money to live on, part-time faculty often become "freeway flyers," spending hours on the road driving from one academic institution to another. They often teach as many total hours as a full-time faculty member or more, without the tenure, benefits, or salary. In some districts, there is hostility between the part- and full-time faculty, and part-time faculty are sometimes not included in full-time academic senates or bargaining units.
In our District, back when we started organizing for a collective bargaining election in 1976, we decided to go for a "wall-to-wall" unit, including every faculty member in the District, excluding department chairs. Some faculty were unhappy with that decision, but the majority supported it, and after a long struggle we won the right to bargain for both part- and full-time faculty, and negotiated our first contract.
As I explained in previous diaries (see list at the end), our first negotiations were very difficult and took a long time. Besides negotiating successfully for some very important items such as a "Past Practice Clause" whereby anything not included in the contract but deemed a past practice couldn't be changed without negotiations, and a grievance procedure that ended in a third-party binding arbitration, we made some small inroads in the part-time realm.
Up to that point, although full-timers had health, prescription, dental and life insurance benefits, part-timers had none of them. Many part-timers were working 50 to 60% of a load (the maximum allowed to still be part-time) which meant 9 to 18 hours per week. The part-timers were all paid at an hourly rate, regardless of experience or education whereas the full-time faculty were placed on a salary schedule that gave a higher salary for more education and more experience. In addition, full-time faculty who were not at the top of the salary scale moved up an increment for every year of additional experience until they reached the top.
Below is a clip from A Foot in the Door, a 2008 interview of me by Jessica Buchsbaum. Click here for a transcript if you can't see the video.
Although we went into that first negotiation with the goal of getting pro-rata pay and benefits for part-time faculty, we certainly didn't expect to be successful on all accounts. However, we were able to negotiate a pro-rata dental plan for faculty at 50% or more of a load, to last during the spring and fall semester.
From that beginning, we worked at every contract to improve on that, and to bring part-timers closer to pro-rata pay and benefits, as compared to full-time faculty. Over the years, improvements were made, so that currently, part-timers in our District have the same dental and health benefits as full-time faculty, including summer coverage, and have an 86% pro-rata 5 column (columns going up with more education) 12 row (step) salary schedule, with each step increase after two years. They are now paid by load, with an equal amount every month instead of the old method whereby they would be paid for exact hours worked, resulting in some months of smaller salary due to holidays.
The best part is that the District is beginning to realize that it is cheaper to hire a couple full-time faculty instead of the equivalent part-time faculty, and they are occasionally upgrading part-timers to full-time. Things are still not equal, but they are much improved from what they were. Times are tough in education these days; the faculty took a 1% pay cut last academic year, and the year before they agreed to freezing all yearly increments. It's tough to know what is going to happen with the situation in the state, but at least the faculty are together, and having retired last year, I wish them well.
Here is part of a 2008 interview of me by Fred Glass, which is in AFT 2121: The Movie, a video explaining the Union to new Union members. In this clip, I was explaining the difference between Union/District relations when I was active, in the late 70s, early 80s, and now:
Here is the transcript:
"Well I think the difference is that the District was able to do whatever it wanted and nobody really had any legal power to stop them. But after collective bargaining went in, they could no longer do things unilaterally. They had to negotiate. And in the beginning, they didn't negotiate. They did it unilaterally anyway, and we filed unfair labor practices, we took them to court, and we won all the time. Now the District has grown up and the Union has grown up and they work together and they do things together for the students and for the institution. It's nice how it's grown, but it wasn't always that way."
For other parts of this series, you can look here: