AFT wants cut in adjunct abuse in higher ed bill

After the House of Representatives recently passed a bill shifting college financial aid away from private banks and more toward grants directly to students, the president of the American Federation of Teachers sent a letter to the House saying that the final version of the bill should inclusion language on the abuse of adjunct faculty:

The lack of attention paid to the loss of full-time tenured faculty positions, and the overwhelming growth of poorly paid part-time faculty, has been taking a toll on higher education for many years. Today, almost three out of four undergraduate instructors are contingent rather than permanent full-time faculty members-contingent faculty members teach a majority of the nation's undergraduate courses. Unless we take steps to reverse course, this trend will greatly impair the ability of our colleges and universities to reach the national goals Congress has set for them.

Specifically, we believe it is essential that programs designed to improve persistence and completion, especially those targeted at community colleges, should include provisions that encourage institutions to strengthen their instructional workforce by creating additional full-time faculty positions or providing more stability and equitable compensation for part-time faculty.

FULL TEXT

I was grateful to see this campaign, but concerned about the weak language, and added the following note to the post the on the AFT website, and to my letter to our senators:

You should not just ask for language to "encourage" or "permit" this but REQUIRE it, and not just "reduce" unequal pay and compensation but END it.

Too many college administrators not only do not make ending these inequities a priority, but they actively fight against ending them.

We can not depend on them to act responsibly without forceful legislation requiring them to do so.

I also fail to see why our union can't say that schools are economically abusing people who have dedicated their lives to education, including, in many cases, not giving us health insurance, or not giving us enough to cover our families as well.

If we are going to get on the radar, we aren't going to do it by soft-pedaling the problem.

Frankly, there is potentially a very brief window for progressive action in Washington. If Democrats do not pass a strong health insurance reform bill, that window will begin to close and might well be gone after the 2010 election. If they do pass good legislation, there will be momentum that we should ride to get major things done.

We must set our sights higher than glacial, incremental change or we won't get any change at all.

LINK to write letter to senators

Article on AFT president's letter

We should use the AFT link to write to show the AFT that we appreciate the effort, but I would also ask that you compose your own letter to our senators and congressman about H.R. 3221 with stronger language than the campaign.

Labor Secretary on NPR sidesteps part timer question

As I was leaving one of my two jobs the other day, I turned on NPR and heard Labor Secretary Hilda Solis on some NPR show taking calls. The first one I heard was from a part timer who laid out our problems pretty well: paid far less than full time colleagues, often no get no benefits, the lessened availability to students as we zip from campus to campus to patch together enough to survive, and the irony of all that given how important the president has said community colleges are. He also noted that a lot of the stimulus money went to one time building projects instead of persistent abuses like this.

Her answer was disturbing. She hemmed and hawed a lot and said this was primarily a state issue, and their job was mostly to insure that contracts were enforced. She went on to say it would be tough to fix issues like this because of the current budget crisis.

Even the host of the show said their would was little in her answer that would comfort the person asking the question.

While Solis is obviously better than the Bush secretary of labor who called teachers' unions terrorists, her answer is unacceptable for a number of reasons.

For one, the federal government intervenes in education at the state level all the time. It forced the steaming pile of excrement No Child Left Behind on K-12 schools, and more admirably, sets anti-discrimination conditions on colleges that take federal money. It doesn't take too much creativity to see how they could set minimum academic labor standards on colleges and universities.

I would have some sympathy for the budget argument if the first thing the Obama administration had done WASN'T giving nearly a trillion dollars to people on Wall Street who caused more economic harm than any terrorists could in their wildest dreams. He just recently reappointed Ben Bernanke who gave trillions more to the same crooks and refused to tell Congress how much he gave to which ones.

Wall Street hurts people on purpose to further enrich a very, very few. We do our jobs in hope that those we serve will be better citizens and better able to support their families. It is offensive for a supposedly Democratic administration to say they can do nothing for us while they give more than enough to fix our problems to sociopathic trust fund babies on Wall Street who spend the money on bonuses and parties and squirrel the rest away in offshore accounts.

audio of question & her answer

TRANSCRIPT OF PART TIMER QUESTION:

CONAN: We're speaking with the secretary of labor, Hilda Solis. You're listening to TALK OF THE NATION from NPR News. And this email from Betsy(ph) in Cape Cod: I'm a part-time community college faculty member. We earn a small fraction of the salary our full-time colleagues earn for doing the same job, and many of us get no benefits. The stimulus money that was supposed to be going to keep jobs is frequently going instead to one-time capital projects. Even those of us who Re unionized - and we are the minority - are unable in the main to strike so there is very little we can do during contract negotiations. If educating people is as important as the president said, is strengthening faculty salaries, benefits and job security part of your agenda? If so, how do you propose to do it?

Sec. SOLIS: Wow. That's a big challenge. But it's one that I understand well as a former trustee of a community college and understand well the challenges, because many states by the way, who provide most of the bulk of support for funding for community colleges, their revenue has gone down. So, I know even in my own state of California many people have been pink-slipped, laid off. They've had to reduce class size and actually turn away a number of students that want to enroll in the fall, or postpone their education. So, I understand there has to be a need to help provide assistance and leadership for community colleges. And just to give you an idea, most of the training money that DOL is putting out - a lot of it will be going in partnership with community colleges. So, there will be an opportunity to hire up, to bring in more faculty and to also expand the services that community colleges offer because they are by and large the people that entertain the most number of people who go into a higher education.

CONAN: I didn't hear a lot in there that would make her happier about the conditions in which she works.

Sec. SOLIS: A lot of - I think a lot of that - certainly we want to make sure that contracts are respected, collective bargaining agreements. There's always been an issue with respect to different bargaining groups, or groups that are represented in bargaining groups, that want to be a part of that. So, I think the continuance of involvement on the part of part-time faculty members I think is a legitimate issue and should be looked at. Because as it stands, you also find that that faculty member is not as inclined to stay committed to those groups of students that they do teach because they're off to different - other -what they call, freeway traveling or teaching…

CONAN: Mm-hmm.

Sec. SOLIS: …because they're going to find wherever they can get their salary paid. And it's unfortunate that that's what it's kind of turned to. I hope that we could end that in some way. But right now with the recession being what it is, I think it's going to be difficult.

Talk of the Nation, Aug. 25, 2009

Obama's Community College Initiative gives hope but needs change

Gabriel Arana at The American Prospect gets what's wrong with the community college system:

Obama’s plan for community colleges is not broad enough in scope to address all these concerns, but it can still be designed so it does not perpetuate the problem. Washington, D.C.-based higher education expert Ben Miller suggests limiting what portion of the federal grants to community colleges can go to administrative costs; the fact that the money is dispersed through program-specific grants as opposed to blanket, TARP-like disbursements, he also points out, will prevent the sort of waste and lack of transparency we have seen with the economic stimulus. But this initiative is a drop in the bucket: a lot more needs to be done to stop the corporatizing trend that has steadily transformed our colleges and universities.

One piece of the solution lies in adjunct and faculty unionization. Non-unionized adjuncts do most of the instructional work in higher education, yet they generally have little job security, rarely receive health and retirement benefits, and are paid about a quarter as much per course as tenured faculty. Many dart from campus to campus to try to earn a living. But those at schools with an adjunct union fare much better: adjuncts at NYU, who unionized in 2004, have been able to negotiate some of the highest salaries for adjuncts and contracts that guarantee continued teaching assignments.

His solution of more unionization is great, but legislation is required to end the worst abuses of adjunct faculty. Such legislation should include:

• every college or university have at least three-fourths of their faculty members be full time, tenure track

• that part time faculty get the same pay per class as their full time peers with the same qualifications and length of service

• that part time non-tenure track faculty be offered at least proportionate benefits compared to their full time tenure track peers

These are necessary not only for the welfare of the faculty but of students. Faculty who are racing around from campus to campus to make ends meet are less likely to be available to students outside of class.

Further, while unions are the best way to raise workers' income, no one should have to negotiate their way out of discrimination and unequal compensation. That should be a matter of law. It is also difficult to negotiate when two classes of workers have been created because the employer can always say that giving to one takes away from another.

Here's my comment I posted on Arana's article:

Thanks for mentioning the abuse of adjunct faculty.

It's ironic that for all our society's bluster about valuing education, we treat those who dedicate their lives to providing it as fools and patsies.

I have to patch together two community college teaching jobs to make a living, and worked eight years before one of my schools offered me health insurance. It took about as long before I could make payments on the student loans for the degrees required to do the job. And my story is not unique.

It is time for this system of abuse to change.

The author's point on the corporatizing of higher ed is also dead on. Wall Street just came close to destroying the world economy--why exactly should we apply that not just failed but deadly toxic model to higher education?

Obama expands student loan forgiveness to ALL educators

The Obama administration has expanded the student loan forgiveness program, which previously only went to educators in high risk communities, to all educators and in fact, all public servants.

If you make payments for ten years, the rest of your debt is forgiven.

This is coupled with another program, Income Based Repayment (IBR) that will dramatically reduce payments for most borrowers and forgive their loans after 25 years. PLUS loans are not eligible.

The Department of Education has put up an IBR calculator, so you can see how much your payments will go down. I owe a little over $100,000, and my monthly payments are about $729. I originally only owed about $50,000, but it was so difficult to make the payments regularly until the last couple of years that my debt doubled.

Running my numbers through the IBR calculator, my payments dropped to $450, so I'll end up paying $54,000 more. Under the old system, I would have paid $218,000 more, so I'll save three-fourths. I've already paid $18,000, so I'll still end paying a more than my original debt--but not four times more.

This will definitely have a "trickle up" effect in my case. I'll be able to make a down payment on a house that much sooner, and others will likely do the same or get a new car or appliance sooner than they otherwise would have, which will help get the economy moving again.

For more information, read the Department of Education press release.

Here's the application for IBR if you're repaying your loans directly to the Department of Education. If you have a federally guaranteed loan you're repaying to a bank, contact your lender.

The application for loan forgiveness hasn't been posted yet.

Here's the actual regulation change for forgiveness.

PS: I would like to take credit for this since I wrote a letter asking the Obama administration to do it, but when I read the reg, the change was in the pipe before that.

administrators think like a bank--faculty think like a credit union

Higher education faculty and administrators continue to butt heads because they see colleges as two very different things. Administrators see them like banks or corporations, and themselves as CEO's, and faculty see college as more like a credit union.

For those who aren't familiar with credit unions, they are owned and run by their employees and customers, so they have a vested interest in seeing that employees are treated fairly, customers are well-taken care of, and of course that the credit union itself continues to be solvent. This is more or less how faculty see the college, as a community of scholars that should take care of all its members. Students should get a good education for their money, faculty should be able to make enough to support their families, and yes even administrators should be fairly compensated for their duties of making sure the electric bill gets paid and enough buildings are built to hold all the classes.

That is profoundly different from the bank or corporate model. A bank is concerned for the financial welfare of shareholders and a small group of senior executives. Customers and lower level employees exist only to enrich that group.

Ideally, market forces could pressure them to provide a similar product to the credit union since one way to make a profit is to provide the best product at the best price.

Unfortunately, there are less admirable ways to reward those shareholders.

For example, they could provide progressively shoddier products for the same price and hope their customers don't notice. This was the path GM and Chrysler took beginning in the 70's. It worked for a while, but now they are teetering on bankruptcy. In higher education, there are any number of ways they can do this. One is by increasing class sizes and converting too many in person classes to online. Administrators actually have the nerve to call increasing class size "productivity" when it is really the opposite--increasing the appearance of education while delivering a diluted version of the reality.

The other way they can reward the few at the expense of the many is relying heavily on underpaid part time workers. This is done more in higher ed than just about any other industry except maybe Walmart. This also creates the false impression of a labor "glut" because underpaid part time faculty work more than a full time load by stringing several jobs together. The few who do get full time jobs are pressured to teach more than a full load, so administrators get their money's worth for what they are forced to pay out in benefits. If both full timers and part timers are overworked, that means fewer total jobs will be available.

Administrators also measure their success in bookkeeping games more than the quality or even quantity of education delivered. Here in California, this is most obvious in the budgeting of "reserves," money given by the state that districts put in the bank instead of spending on education. A small percentage of this is required to cover things they can't cut in bad years like pensions, but districts sock away far more--the highest I heard was something like 25%--and at the same time they will be denying faculty health insurance benefits in labor negotiations, cutting jobs, or even doing away with the school paper at most campuses as happened in one district where I work. This seems an awful lot like the problem with GM and Enron--they got so wrapped up in short term profits that they made crappy products and fired people to look profitable on paper while they were really undermining public trust which eventually leads to no customers, no products, and no profits.

Higher ed and community colleges also ape the corporate practice of giving ever higher salaries to top executives while cutting salaries of faculty or even cutting faculty jobs. At several districts where I worked, the chancellor made a six figure salary, more than the governor of California. This serves two purposes that are both bad for education: one is it makes top administrators as a breed apart from the faculty they work with. People who actually teach are no better than "burger flippers" as the VP at one of my schools said to union leaders. The inflated salary is also necessary because the job requires a rare skill that is cherished in the corporate world as well--being able to harm others without hesitation or losing sleep. They must be able to fire people and deny them things like health insurance solely to pad profits or in the case of community colleges, pad their reserves.

I ran this corporate analogy by a couple of people and one person objected--he said when he worked in the corporate world, he was actually treated and compensated better than he ever had been teaching at community college.

There is another weakness with the analogy as well. The corporate world went through a phase of laying off middle managers, partly to legitimately trim bloat, but also as part of gaming the books to look more profitable than they really were. Community college administrators do the exact opposite. Shortly after one of my districts closed the school paper at two out of three campuses, the new chancellor decided the district needed a new VP, whose salary would be double the budget of the student papers he closed. They also push to replace department chairs, who are faculty, with deans, who are administrators and typically paid far more. Why replace someone with a person paid far more? To extinguish something that has existed at colleges and universities for centuries but hasn't existed in the corporate world, a form of democracy called "shared governance." The idea is administrators have control of money issues, and faculty control all things actually related to teaching. This division of labor has been very successful, but is uncomfortably close to a cooperative, a "socialist" business structure that corporations will not tolerate, and part of the reason why we and NATO invaded Yugoslavia--to forcibly convert the cooperative businesses there to a corporate model that would benefit the few (most living in another country) at the expense of the many. By replacing faculty managers with administrator ones, they are trying to snuff out all expectation in faculty of having control over the job and eventually even over the content they teach.

A final weakness with the analogy is that public universities and colleges have a very different relationship with for-profit businesses than those businesses have with each other. A for-profit business will always try to buy people (labor) and things for the lowest price possible to increase their profits. Public colleges and universities will try to buy people for the lowest price possible (except top execs) but not so with things. This is because they get most of their money from the state but their boards of trustees are composed of local business people who see their position as a way to add to their profits--not by creating a more educated workforce that therefore has more buying power, but by swinging contracts toward themselves or their cronies. For administrators, the payoff is more direct in the form of kickbacks. I have heard stories about this my whole teaching career. One faculty member, now retired, told me he served on a committee that worked for months evaluating software only to be have their choice over-ruled by an administrator and different, more expensive software bought instead. Did the person who made this decision know more than the people who would actually be using it day in and day out?

No.

I actually got to experience kickbacks first hand. I was evaluating a piece of equipment for possible purchase and use in the classroom, and the vendor was dropping off a cart of samples for students to try out, but had one in a box by itself that they handed to me. They said they thought it was important for me to have one to play around with myself. I asked when I needed to return it to them, and they said I didn't. I had no use for the gadget, but they clearly thought it would sway my decision (as if I had the power to decide to buy their stuff). The same thing probably goes on with bigger bribes at the district level.

The most recent case I heard was about a school district that paid more than twice market value for a piece of property in the midst of a real estate glut and collapsed market. What are the odds that part of that overpayment didn't end up in the pocket of the administrator who made the purchase?

Clearly, in the ways that colleges and universities diverge from the corporate model, it is for the worse, and the differences that are good they are trying to undo.

The consequences of choosing the corporate model over the cooperative one are not hypothetical or small.

I was talking to a retired faculty member about the current budget debacle here in California and the misplaced priorities of administrators, and he said he wondered how long it was until the whole education system collapsed too--the way Wall Street already has.

As Wall Street and banks have crumbled, choking on their own greed and incompetence, more and more consumers are realizing that credit unions are a safer and more stable place to put their money. If we trust that model with our money, shouldn't we trust it with our kids' college education too?

even conservative magazine calls student loans a SCAM

In a review of a book on student loans, the conservative National Review pointed out that the system is rigged to benefit lenders more than students and remarkably recommends a solution that I'm pretty sure I first heard from Howard Dean.

Ironically, this is not just a problem for students, but for too many higher education faculty who get in debt up to their eyeballs to get the degrees required to do their jobs only to find that they don't make enough to pay back those loans or at times even have income every month.

KEY EXCERPTS:

Lenders of First Resort
More and more, student lending is becoming a rigged game.

By Robert VerBruggen


But there is a very important story in this book: Collinge, who is himself buried in defaulted debt, explores the alliances that student-loan companies have established with universities and the government. By sharing profits with schools in exchange for preferential treatment, the industry’s biggest players have shielded themselves from free-market competition; and through intense government lobbying, the industry has secured exemptions from laws that apply to other forms of lending. No matter how wrongheaded his analysis, Collinge’s facts should evoke cringes from Americans of all political stripes.

Schools’ relationships with the major lenders will come as a shock to many — especially those who’ve taken advice from purportedly neutral university employees. Through “school as lender” programs, lenders can essentially give schools a cut of the profits in return for financial-aid officials’ steering borrowers their way. (Technically, the school makes the loan, and then the lender buys the debt at a premium.) Lenders often sweeten the deal by offering officials lavish parties and trips. Sometimes, lenders have even run financial-aid call centers on universities’ behalf, with lenders’ employees claiming to represent the schools.

***

Today it’s a fully private entity, but Sallie and other big lenders have used their size and sway on Capitol Hill to their great benefit. For example, while there have long been limits on bankruptcy protection for student loans (some worry that it’s tempting to file for bankruptcy right after graduating), the student-loan industry managed to eliminate bankruptcy protection in 2005. No matter how long it’s been since you took out the loan, and no matter the size to which the debt has ballooned, you typically cannot discharge a student loan in bankruptcy. One can argue that bankruptcy laws in general should be stronger than they are, but it’s hard to make the case that student loans should be treated so differently from every other form of debt.


***

Many other foolish ideas have been adopted. According to federal law, a borrower can only consolidate his student loans once; then he’s stuck with that lender, even if a different lender is willing to pay off the loan and accept a lower interest rate. Also, to punish those who don’t pay their debts fast enough, collectors can have borrowers’ professional licenses taken away. Obviously, without being able to practice in the field for which they borrowed money to train, there’s little hope of these folks’ digging their way out of debt.

***

There are plenty of better ideas for rejiggering the way we pay for college. One is for students to give up a percentage of their income after graduation, instead of making traditional tuition and loan payments. Not only would this go easy on folks who have money troubles (no income, no payments due), it would take the burden off parents and the government. It would also provide schools with a very explicit way to compete on price: With loans, grants, and parental dollars out of the way, a student would have to ask himself if it was really worth X percent of his income to go with college A instead of college B...

***

FULL TEXT

To find out more & take action, go to Student Loan Justice.

What's it like to be higher ed adjunct faculty? Tell your story

For decades, higher education has been aping the personnel practices of corporate America and relying more and more on part time, temporary, and non-tenure track faculty, especially to teach the course required for graduation.

While this is great for administrators to free up money in their budget for other things, it can wreck havoc on the lives of those who didn't expect to get rich teaching but did expect to be able to pay their rent and student loan payments every month and know that they'd continue to have a job if they were doing it relatively well.

Various groups have been working on changing this at the state level, and adjuncts and contingent faculty are finally starting to come together at a national level in groups like the New Majority Faculty, which I am a part of.

To help us figure out which things to focus on changing, WE NEED YOUR STORIES.

You can post them as text in the comments of this article or if you are feeling more multimedia, as a video reply to this youtube thread.

Tell us what has happened to you as an adjunct, non-tenure track, part time, temporary (usually all of the above) faculty member in higher education, both on the job and in your personal life as a consequence of having a job.

For example, I told my own story here, and the story of an instructor who resorted to going through the trash for pop cans to make ends meet. I have known instructors who still lived with their parents into their fifties and others who have had marriages unravel because their income didn't live up to their spouse's expectations for someone with their education level.

On the professional front, a friend of mine set up a PACE program for his college, then when the time came to give someone a full-time tenure track job to run it, they hired someone from outside the school (who promptly asked my friend how to do his job since he had padded his resume). Just recently, this instructor was fired from his community college after eighteen years of service, most likely because he was vice president of the part time faculty union.

Your stories will not only help us figure out what to fight for but give us powerful evidence to present to legislators and groups that work on higher education issues that using Walmart labor practices does real harm to real people.

If you wish to remain anonymous, that's fine, though the more specific the details, the more useful your story will be, for example, say what state you are in, whether you are at a two-year or four-year college or research university, public or private, what discipline you teach in, your qualifications to teach, and how long you've been doing it. Any information you don't want to include is okay though.

Post written stories

Post video stories

Lack of tenure track jobs will drive future scientists out of US universities

A Princeton department chair gets it: treating faculty like toilet paper might seem to make economic sense in the short term, but in the long term it will kill our higher education system.

I would go further than he does and say that lack of tenure track positions for those who choose to focus on TEACHING future scientists (and businessmen, teachers, and political leaders) is already killing them personally.

If someone chooses to teach or be an academic, they don't expect to get rich, but they do expect to be able to pay back their student loans, get health insurance, and support a family.

KEY EXCERPTS:

Nation needs recovery plan for science faculty jobs

By David Spergel
chair of the department of astrophysical sciences at Princeton University

February 28th, 2009

Even if the economy were to recover over the next one to two years, the academic job market for the next few years is likely to be bleak. It will probably take several years for university finances to recover. Even more significantly, the collapse of the stock market has led many faculty members to defer retirement plans. Many professors in their late 60s and early 70s who were planning to retire in the next two to three years have decided to stay on and work for an additional few years so that they can recover some of their market losses.

While this choice makes a great deal of sense for each individual, it will likely have tragic side effects. If all of the faculty members who were planning on retiring at age 67 defer retirement to 72, then universities will not be able to hire any new faculty for the next five years! (This claim rests on the assumption that universities are not likely to rapidly grow their faculty size during an economic downturn and early in the recovery.) When the current cohort of 67-year-olds and the current cohort of 62-year-olds retire over the next five to 10 years, this wave of retirements may create a job bump; however, the next several years will be a difficult time for any scholar seeking a faculty position.

***

The lack of tenure-track jobs in the United States will likely lead many of our best young U.S.-trained scientists and engineers to seek faculty positions in Europe and Asia, or to abandon their scientific careers. Many of our promising young Ph.D.s are foreign-born scientists who will likely return to their home countries. Most other advanced nations have mandatory retirement ages at their universities and do not have retirement pensions connected to the stock market.

FULL TEXT (includes his solution)

New Majority Faculty collecting stories from part time, contingent, and other non-tenure track higher ed faculty

There's a new NATIONAL group for adjuncts, part timers, contingent faculty, and whatever else colleges and universities call the instructors who do most of the teaching but get few of benefits like job security, equal pay, and often not even health insurance.

They want to hear your story about being an adjunct, and start to figure out what we can do together to change things.

You can post on Youtube, in response to this this video:

(click pic to see flick)

Here's sort of what they're looking for (sound track and other production optional):

INSIDE HIRING: the parable of the faithful girlfriend not chosen as a wife

Once there was a man who was pretty successful in life, but he could not have done it without his faithful girlfriend. She fixed his breakfast, washed his clothes, took care of him when he was sick, bore his children and raised them well, and even helped him with his work when he fell behind.

She was wife in all but name and benefits. She didn't get on his health insurance, would inherit nothing when he dies, and when he went on vacation, he wouldn't take her.

One day, he announced that he wanted to finally get married. The girlfriend was giddy and asked, "When do I get the ring?"

"Well," he said, "I don't know that I'm going to marry YOU. But you are welcome to compete for the position. Just come down to the Harem Hut tomorrow.

When she arrived, she found that it was a strip club. The other women dancing in g-strings were young and thin and sleek, but the girlfriend had stretch marks from having the man's children and she had put on weight because she had often skipped going to the gym to help him catch up on his work. And when it was her turn to dance, she moved awkwardly about the stage in a manner that was hardly seductive at all, especially compared to the young women who still danced every night.

Then the man questioned all the women about how they would keep house and raise his children. The young women all said they would keep his as spotless as an operating room and his children would grow up to be presidents and Nobel Prize winning scientists. This pleased the man very much. When he asked his girlfriend of many years the same questions, "You know how I would clean your house because you have seen it every day. You know how I would raise your children because I already have. I don't know if any of them will win the Nobel Prize or be president, but they seem to be happy people, more successful than you or I, and they will care for us in our old age." Her answers were not as impressive, but undeniably true. Nonetheless, the man refused to judge based on what he had seen with his own eyes, and only take into account what the contestants said.

And so the man chose one of the young women and not the girlfriend who had served him faithfully for many years.

Within six months, the young woman had drained his bank accounts, stolen his car, filed for divorce, and sold one of his kidneys.

He called the girlfriend to his side and said, "I must find another wife. Give me a ride to the Harem Hut."

"Don't you think this a stupid way to choose a wife?" she said in exasperation.

"Nonsense," he said. "This is the best way to do it. Most of the young girls do not betray the men who choose them and sell their kidneys."

"Wouldn't it make more sense to choose me since I have served you faithfully for years?" she said.

"I would have," he said, "If you had answered the questions more artfully, lost some weight, and brushed up on your dance steps. But you are welcome to try again. Some of my friends have actually married their girlfriends, so it's not like it never happens."

She should not have come back because of his ungratefulness, but she had little choice since it was the custom of all the men in the land to ask prospective wives questions and grade their dances, and she was no longer young, so the men who didn't know her would not pick her in any case.

This time the man chose another young woman, and this one did not rob him, but really knew nothing about being a wife (in spite of her clever answers and seductive dance), so she asked the girlfriend what to do. The girlfriend helped her, and their children grew up as brothers and sisters and were equally successful in life, regardless of whether their mother was wife or the girlfriend. Sometimes when they were alone, the wife would even tell the girlfriend that if she ever decided to leave the man, she would tell him to marry the girlfriend.

The wife did leave him after they had been married long enough for her to get half the property in the divorce, but by then the girlfriend was dead, so her promise didn't matter.

***

This is what the hiring process is like for an adjunct. We serve an institution faithfully for years, teaching the same classes as our full time counterparts, serving on committees when we are allowed, and doing all the things faculty are supposed to do only without receiving the same rewards.

Then when it comes time to hire someone for a full time job, the hiring committee thinks they are doing us a great favor by giving us an interview and treating us exactly the same as someone they don't know. They don't often hire the person who steals their kidneys, but they will pick someone flashy and glib or bubbly because they are just out of grad school, only to then ask the part timer to tell the new full timer how to do their job--but they would NEVER lose their kidneys or hire someone who needed on the job training if they chose based on what they had seen over years instead of over a few minutes.

This is why community college districts must be required to offer full time jobs to part timers before they open it up to outside applicants.

And because hiring committees can't seem to tell the difference between a good life partner and a good lap dance.

Einstein was smart enough to join a UNION

Some Republican congressman posted a video reinforcing the stereotype that all union members are foul-mouthed, ignorant, blue collar goons.

I wonder if that's what he thinks actors like Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger, his neighborhood cop, firemen, and elementary school teachers are like.

Even Albert Einstein was smart enough to join a union and advocate that others do the same.

click to see full-sized

VIDEO: Student loan debt crushing students & grads on Democracy Now!

As the Obama administration continues to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out the nations banking system, a growing movement is calling on the government to do more to help students struggling to pay for college.

These are some of their stories.

click pic to see flick

Transcript & links

Tell your student loan story

Take action with Jesse Jackson

TO OBAMA: expand student loan forgiveness to ALL teachers

I read that Obama reads ten letters from the public a day, so I've sent a couple, like this:

President Obama,

Thank you for your emphasis on education in your recent state of the union and Saturday radio address.

There is one thing you could do that would be a tremendous encouragement to current educators and encourage others to become teachers: expand the student loan forgiveness program to all K-12 and public college instructors.

Those who currently get student loan forgiveness could get it at an increased pace or some additional incentive like a tax credit.

I teach community college, and because most schools hire mostly part time instructors at as little as a quarter the pay of full time faculty and don't us health benefits (I didn't get any from from any of my schools for the first eight years I taught), I was not able to make consistent payments on my student loans until just the last two or three years.

Consequently, my debt doubled from $50,000 to over $100,000, and my payments are greater than my rent.

The overuse and abuse of part time faculty at community colleges needs to be ended as well, but expanding the forgiveness of student loans would tell society that our work deserves at least one-tenth of one percent as much of the financial recognition that Wall Street gave themselves in bonuses with the bailout money.

Sincerely,

PS: You can write Obama yourself too.

Will Obama let colleges keep treating faculty like Walmart workers?

The Huffington Post ran a good article on how colleges and universities abuse most of their faculty by having two separate and unequal classes: one paid far less per class to do the same job and usually given no job security or health benefits.

The best part of the article is the bit when she asks administrators if they aren't ashamed of doing this (which I have included at the end). I asked the same thing on the discussion board at The Chronicle of Higher Education, and administrators actually said it was our own fault because adjuncts are stupid enough to take the jobs.

KEY EXCERPTS:






Gina Nahai

Posted December 14, 2008 | 09:30 PM (EST)

The Great Shame of America's Colleges

You think Wal-Mart employees are exploited?

What if I told you that all over this country, major institutions created and sustained with a mission to pursue the betterment of mankind, colleges and universities that sit on billion dollar endowments are using the current economic crisis to further enrich themselves at the expense of the meager livelihood of long-time faculty? That at the same time as they claim to be the guardians of knowledge and the champions of the arts, they treat their faculty to the legal and financial equivalent of what migrant day laborers earn by standing outside Home Depot?

Freeway Flyers: aka "adjunct professors", aka "teaching professionals." They're the dirty little secret of universities and colleges all around the United States. They're the PhDs with decades of teaching experience, award-winning artists, published authors whose names and reputations draw students to the universities, whose work justifies the $50,000/year tuition, raises the million-dollar donations, earns the sought after rankings in USA Today's annual poll.

In exchange for all that, they are hired only on a part-time basis, made to sign a pledge that they will not work more than twenty hours a week and will not--not now, not ever--have a claim to health or retirement or any other kind of benefits, not even a parking pass. That they are "at will" employees who can be let go at any time, for any reason. Their salaries are so meager, they have to teach two, three, sometimes five classes a semester, at five different universities, just to pay their rent. That's why they're called Freeway Flyers. One writer I knew taught for twenty years at a Southern California college with more money than the GNP of a small country. He was paid so little, he had to supplement his income by working the graveyard shift at airport gift shops. He was the author of one of the biggest literary novels of the 20th century; when he died, his family couldn't afford to bury him. Another guy--a teacher of mine from the days when I was a student of writing--drove four hours each way to teach the same class for twenty-seven years. He made something near $3,000 a semester. He was recently let go because the school could take advantage of the rising unemployment rates to hire a younger person for less than $3,000.

***

Aren't the heads of these colleges ashamed of the exploitation? Wouldn't they want to do the right thing even if they don't have to?

I've asked many of them these questions, especially recently. One of them was a former peace corps volunteer. Their answers are short and scripted: "Of course we want to do the right thing; but only when possible." His colleague, another dean, lamented openly the fact that out of every professor on their payroll, there was one who could not be let go or forced to work for half her usual salary because that one, unfortunately, had a contract. Not that anyone's unhappy with the professor's work, mind you. They just don't like paying more than they have to.

FULL TEXT

Even during the darkest days of the Bush administration, higher education was an island of reasoned debate and progressive dissent. This apartheid faculty system, with a small minority given decent pay and job security, and the rest exploited and abused, is part of the right's decades long effort to crush any sources of opposition. As Karl Rove said:

As people do better, they start voting like Republicans --- unless they have too much education and vote Democratic, which proves there can be too much of a good thing.

(from The New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2001)

Anything that threatens Karl Rove and his kindred spirits in the GOP should be protected and rewarded.

If you think this abuse of faculty is something that should change, tell the incoming Obama administration.

Next CA Senate leader supports equal pay for equal work--for LEGISLATORS

As part of their deal with Arnold on the budget, California legislators may be cutting their salaries, but only of those starting a new term this year, not those in the middle of a term, so three-fourths would get the cut and one-fourth wouldn't.

Wow, an arbitrary difference in pay scales not based on qualifications or work done, but strictly as a cost saving measure--who would allow something like that?

Not the California legislature, at least not when THEIR six figure incomes are at stake.

Will legislators now finally be as outraged about part time community college faculty being paid as little as 25% as much as their full time counterparts with the same qualifications to teach the exact same classes?

Part time faculty make up three-fourths of those who teach community college, but our hours are capped in any one district so we have to patch several jobs together to make a living, and unlike state legislators, it doesn't add up to six figures or often even include health insurance.

For 40 years, the California legislature has allowed this discrimination to persist, and hasn't changed the law that allows it, but only passed toothless resolutions that changed little to nothing.

Now that California legislators have had a taste of pay discrimination, will they take more forceful action to end it against community college educators?

The legislator quoted in the piece as opposing unequal pay, Sen. Darrell Steinberg, is scheduled to be a leader in the Senate.

Write him a letter, thanking him for supporting the concept of equal pay for equal work, tell him you look forward to his quick, real action on this for part time faculty who have been discriminated against for 40 years with the legislature's approval, and not just resolutions of intentions to do nothing.

Email contact page for CA state Darrell Steinberg

Since legislators filter out emails that aren't from their constituents, you may want to snail mail, fax, or call him:

Phone: (916) 651-4006
Fax: (916) 323-2263

Capitol Office State Capitol, Room 4035 Sacramento, CA 95814

District Office 1020 N Street, #576 Sacramento, CA 95814

North Highlands District Office 5722 Watt Avenue North Highlands, CA 95660

You should also write your own state legislators and let them know you share their pain. You can find out who represents you and how to contact them HERE.

This is also worth a letter to the paper legislators read and that ran the story, the Sacramento Bee.

Sacramento Bee Letter Submissions

KEY EXCERPTS:

This story is taken from Sacbee / News / AP State News.
Most California legislators could be hit with pay cut
By STEVE LAWRENCE - Associated Press Writer
Published 12:09 pm PDT Sunday, June 8, 2008

Some California legislators might claim to be victims of pay discrimination if the commission that sets state elected officials' salaries decides this week to impose its first pay cut.

But Jim Evans, a spokesman for Sen. Darrell Steinberg, the Sacramento Democrat who is scheduled to become the Senate's top leader later this year, said a proposal to cut some legislators' salaries but not others "would seem to violate an equal-pay-for-equal-work standard and would be seen as inherently unfair."

FULL TEXT

VIDEO: Indiana Jones, part time faculty

You have to listen carefully to his answer at the end:

Part Timer Load Boosted from 60% to 67% in Bill Passed in CA Assembly 60-0 , Now Goes to State Senate

It's not equal pay, but it will make life easier for some part timers in California.

The California Assembly voted 60-0 in favor of AB591, a bill raising the cap on part time faculty loads to 67%.

For the past forty years, part time faculty have been limited to working 60% of a full time load in any one district. This has made life especially difficult for those who taught five unit classes like foreign language instructors since it meant they could only teach one class per district and would need at least three different districts to put together the equivalent of a full load.

This bill would allow those instructors and others to teach ten units in any one district.

AB 591 originally included broader reforms including requiring equal pay and benefits for part timers, but those provisions were cut since budget cuts this year makes bills with new spending unlikely to pass.

The CFT’s lobbyist, Judith Michaels, convinced the group that originally pushed the bill, the California Part Time Faculty Association (CPFA), and the legislator who sponsored the bill, Assemblymember Mervyn Dymally, to amend the bill to include the 67% cap since the part time faculty committee had recently asked for legislation raising the cap and the broader community college council voted in favor of it.

The bill could make an equally speedy passage in the California Senate if the people affected by it would contact their state senators and tell them what to do.

How to Contact CA Senators about Raising Cap on Part Timer Loads to 67%

For every person who contacts an elected official, they assume there are ten more people who have the same opinion but are too lazy to make the effort to bug them. So if you call or email your legislators, it’s like you’re getting to vote ten times.

You can find out who your state senator is and their contact info by going to this link and entering your zip code:

FIND YOUR CA LEGISLATORS

When you call or write, just tell them you support (or oppose) AB 591, and that you are a faculty member yourself.

death of the trash digging professor

Sometimes I think we understate the harm done to us by the abusive and discriminatory adjunct system because we are embarrassed. Few people are comfortable telling the whole world that their checks bounced, their significant other left them because they couldn't get a "real" job, or that they still live in parents' basement at 50. If you can't bring yourself to tell your story, tell this guy's, originally told by Barbara McKenna in AFT on Campus:

Adjunct teacher Marty Slobin’s obituary in the Dec. 12, 2000 edition of the Detroit Free Press is moving for its brevity. It memorializes the lecturer who had received a distinguished teaching award from the University of Michigan-Dearborn just the year before and who also taught at Wayne State University and Henry Ford Community College.

“Words cannot describe what this man does in the classroom,” a former student says.

Outside the classroom, Slobin commuted to his teaching jobs on three campuses by bus because he could not afford to keep a car.

“Marty’s whole life was devoted to his students and his teaching,” says a fellow professor.

Suffering from heart disease, Slobin could not afford the treatment—surgery—because the income he lost during a convalescence would make it impossible for him to keep up his health insurance premium payments.

Slobin had “succeeded in making the study of political science meaningful in the lives of his students,” the paper quotes Bernard Klein, a former interim chancellor of the university.

At one point, the university asked Slobin to stop going through the trash in search of the pop cans he returned to collect their deposit refunds.

“I attended his class on congressional elections earlier this fall,” says the university chancellor, Daniel Little, “and was able to see firsthand the respect and affection his students felt for him.”

Slobin, 55, died on Dec. 6 in his office after a heart attack. He was so poor, says Bonnie Halloran, president of the Lecturers Employee Organization (LEO)/AFT at the University of Michigan, that faculty at Dearborn and the neighboring community college took up a collection to pay for his funeral.

FULL TEXT

If your story isn't as extreme as his, it's probably because you have a job in another industry, a spouse, or some other relative who takes up the slack. Without one of those safety nets, most of us could be this guy.

LETTER TO LEGISLATORS: Grandparents paid for me to go to college, now they pay for me to TEACH college

A letter I sent to my assemblymember, and members of the Assembly Higher Education Committee:

Assemblymember,

My grandparents gave me money to go to college.

Now they have to give me money to TEACH college.

I thought if I got a master’s degree and taught college, I’d be able to support myself. But because I can only get part time faculty jobs that pay as little as a third as much as a full time teaching job per class, offer no health insurance most of the time, and have gaps in pay between semesters and no guarantee of work or enough classes to survive from semester to semester, I have to ask my 86 year old grandfather and his 89 year old wife to help me out.

My grandfather is proud to help me because I'm the most educated person in my family, and being a "professor" looks like part of that American Dream about each generation doing better than the one before.

Ironically, with two years of college, he was able to own a house and support a stay at home mom and three kids by my age while I consider myself lucky to make my rent, and that I have one school that provides health insurance for me alone (no family allowed).

I taught for eight years at four different districts before any of them offered me health insurance. Before that, I was paying $200 a month out of pocket for a long-term medication.

I took out $50,000 in student loans to get the degree that’s required to do my job. That’s ballooned to over $100,000 with interest because it’s been tough to pay with irregular work and having to pay for any medical expenses out of pocket for eight years. My student loan payments are more than my rent.

I also work more than a full time load when my multiple jobs are added together, and split the difference between what I can teach effectively and the number of classes I need to pay my bills.

I wish my story were unique, but I know many part time faculty members who only have health insurance through their spouses or have none when a major medical crisis like cancer comes up. Others still live with their parents in their forties and fifties because they love teaching in spite of how we are treated.

Community college districts do this with the legal fiction, allowed by state law, that we are "temporary" employees even though most of us will work in the same districts for decades. They only offer us part time jobs to avoid providing health insurance or fair pay even though when you add the multiple schools most of us are employed by, we work more than full time for these state-financed schools.

What kind of morals and what about the value of education are we teaching our students when college instructors are treated like suckers and Walmart employees?

Something is profoundly wrong when our education system is aping the worst practices of the private sector rather than leading by example. Administrators have failed to act responsibly in these matters and need more guidance from the legislature.

If the Assembly approves AB 1343 or AB 591, it would go a long way toward ending these abuses.

Sincerely,

To support these bills, you can comment directly on them at these links:

AB 1343 comment form

AB 591 comment form

Cross-posted at FACE Talk

Get candidates (even presidential ones) on record about FACE during primary season

Most of the time when you talk to politicians about correcting a basic injustice they will complain about how much money it costs, how the opposition party or other interests will resist it, or how it will never be signed by your governor.

There is one time when politicians, particularly Democrats, are EAGER, to promise action to educators: when they are running against an opponent in the primaries. They can't afford to have a key constituency like us apathetic and despondent on election day.

In California's last governor's race, I got the democratic candidates for governor on the record supporting equal pay and ending discrimination against part time faculty

(unfortunately, the winner was running against Arnold Schwarzenegger, and unlike Arnold, he hadn't made dozens of action movies that could be played on continuous loop on cable before the election).

All it took to get that promise was showing up at a candidates forum on a Saturday afternoon, and writing a question on a little card. I wrote a follow up letter to the winner to get him to confirm his promise in writing, which he did.

If your state has a governor's race or a contested primary for your state legislator, go ask them. If the seat isn't contested or the likely winner isn't likely to support equal rights for part time faculty, ask them anyway. You can use it to remind other faculty members why they SHOULDN'T vote for that person.

Since this is a presidential election year, you have an opportunity to take this a level higher.

When you find out a presidential primary candidate will be in your area glad-handing, show up and ask them if they would sign a bill ending discrimination in pay and benefits against part time and contingent faculty.

The Democratic candidates are desperate to get labor support and will be unlikely to say no. John Edwards in particular has made being labor-friendly a centerpiece of his campaign.

If you can get it on tape or video, even with your phone camera, so you can post it online, even better.

Does this mean the candidate will push legislation or even sign a bill if elected president?

Who knows.

But if you get them on the record saying they will, you can use that to draw attention to the abuse of adjunct faculty and to show state legislators that they are behind the curve and better act fast if they don't want to end up looking like the Orville Faubus of the 21st Century.

Cross-posted at FACE Talk




democratic primary presidential candidate john edwards orville faubus campaign promise part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california community college auditor labor union aft american federation of teachers

BARBARA EHRENREICH on Part Time Faculty in "CEOs vs. Slaves"

We are mentioned in paragraph seven:

But a parallel kind of splitting is going in many of the professions. Top-ranked college professors, for example, enjoy salaries of several hundred thousand a year, often augmented by consulting fees and earnings from their patents or biotech companies. At the other end of the professoriate, you have adjunct teachers toiling away for about $5000 a semester or less, with no benefits or chance of tenure. There was a story a few years ago about an adjunct who commuted to his classes from a homeless shelter in Manhattan, and adjuncts who moonlight as waitresses or cleaning ladies are legion.

FULL TEXT

The next paragraph talks about people who should be our natural allies, lawyers and other advanced degree "perma-temps," who mistakenly thought that if they got a masters or higher, they would at least have secured a place in the middle class.

This is why attacking the definition of temporary may be an issue that resonates with people outside academia.

The temping industry and model of employment has grown far beyond fluctuations in companies' demand for labor as might happen with tax accountants for example. Instead, like our situation, many businesses have a constant rotating cadre of temps to avoid benefits or employees who accumulate seniority or much scrutiny about why someone is let go.

Since a lot of people will be reading this story, you might want to post a testimonial comment about how you have been screwed as an adjunct in the comment section at the end, to raise public awareness.

POST COMMENTS AT BOTTOM

And contact Ehrenreich with your stories and what we are trying to change, so she might revisit this issue in another column in the future.

EHRENREICH CONTACT PAGE

She also has a blog & organization for screwed professionals.

This is the first I've seen of her blog, but it's worth a look.

Barbara Ehrenreich temporary part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california health insurance retirement benefits AFT FACE Faculty and College Excellence community college nickled and dimed bait and switch middle class labor union discrimination legislation

AFT fights abuse of Part Timers with national FACE campaign

The American Federation of Teachers has introduced legislation in eleven states to end the separate and unequal treatment of part time faculty.

While there are differences in the wording of the bills in various states, but a couple of principles run through all of them:

• equal pay for equal work

• health and other benefits for part time faculty

• reversing the trend of relying on part time faculty instead of a full time tenured instructored corps.

The strongest language for equal pay is in the Washington state bill:

____________________________________
WA Senate Bill 5020

Section 3
Paragraph2

...part-time faculty must be paid on a pro rata basis, based upon the percentage of full-time faculty teaching load. For example, part-time faculty who work fifty percent of a full-time teaching load must be paid fifty percent of a full time salary.

WA LEGISLATURE PAGE ON BILL
____________________________________

Other paragraphs work out the consequences of that like how you move up the scale, so if you work a 50% load, you move up 50% of a full time step. That sounds fair.

Here in California, the AFT has a bill in the pipe, AB 1343, and CPFA, the California Part Time Faculty Association, has introduced a similar bill, AB 591.

You can track both by going to the California legislation search page and entering the bill number (for some reason, they don't keep set addresses for the bills).

You can see all the FACE bills and info on the FACE campaign at FACE.AFT.org.

If you live in one of the states where they have these bills, write your state legislators telling them to support it, and find out from the AFT who is running your states campaign and ask what you can do to help. If you aren't in one of those states, call up your union leadership and ask why they haven't introduced a similar bill.


FACE Faculty and College Excellence health insurance retirement benefits washington part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california community college seattle post intelligencer labor union discrimination legislation

class action lawsuit got health insurance for PTers in WA state--did it help equal pay bill?

The judge in the health insurance case slammed the legal fiction that we are "temporary" employees even after working in a district for decades:

law firm of Bendich, Stobaugh and Strong, P.C.

The settlement ends a five-year class action lawsuit filed by Eva Mader of Bellevue and Teresa Knudsen of Spokane. They worked more than half-time for 21 and 10 years, respectively. In June 2003, the Washington Supreme Court ruled in favor of the instructors and reversed decisions by the Health Care Authority, the Superior Court, and the Court of Appeals that denied the part-time instructors health care benefits in the summer, even though full-time instructors, who also do not work in the summer, have benefits all year.

The Health Care Authority had said that Mader, who worked for 21 years, was not eligible because she was a “temporary” quarter-to-quarter employee. The Supreme Court ruled that the Authority “must examine the actual work circumstances of a state employee, rather than the contracts or titles under which he or she is employed, to determine whether an employee is eligible for state-paid health benefits.” The Court said, “Twenty-one years is not a temporary position.”

http://www.bs-s.com/ptfhc.htm

This is the kind of thing that should put the fear of God in legislators. They need to know that if they don't end this separate and unequal system, we will seek other remedies. Frankly, I don't see much downside to this, in light of the victories WA got on retirement benefits too, and it probably gives their legislature an incentive to treat the pending equal pay bill seriously since they know a judge may correct their morally and constitutionally defective work if they don't.

Retirement lawsuit in WA state:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/coll04.shtml

Campus Equity Week update from WA state:
http://www.campusequityweek.org/CampusEquityWeek/articles/update-wa.htm

Politicians seem to respond to only one of three things:

1. donations


2. a large number of angry people


3. court orders

The first two have gotten mixed results at best here in California. Maybe the relevant committees in the legislature need to know we are considering this, so they could pre-empt it with legislation, and look like the good guys.





campus equity week class action lawsuit health insurance retirement benefits washington part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california community college seattle post intelligencer labor union Bendich Stobaugh and Strong

Angelides letter supports equal pay for part timers

The key sentence says:

I support salary equity for part time faculty to ensure that the state of California can continue to attract and retain talented and dedicated community college instructors.

Phil Angelides 4/20/06

Click letter to see full-sized.

phil angelides for governor campaign promise part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california community college auditor labor union aft american federation of teachers

Board votes against even PRINCIPLE of equal pay for part timers

The mechanism for achieving parity set up in AB 420 seems to assume that trustees and administrators have the welfare of the faculty at heart, and merely differ with us about how to look after it.

They do not.

Those of us who have worked for districts where they don't even make the pretense of providing part timers with health care know this. They literally do not care if we drop dead.

And now, the board of trustees of one district has voted against even the PRINCIPLE of equal pay for part timers.

This evidence should be presented to legislators to show that if equal pay is not REQUIRED BY LAW, districts will drag their feet, and even when it is achieved in some places, try to roll it back when they get in a budget jam or just want to pad their reserves even further.

A law like this already exists for K-12, and has been proposed in Washington state. We need an equal pay law here too.

These guys don't seem to have a webpage yet, so I'm passing it along for them.

The gist is in the first paragraph.

From Adjunct Faculty United of North Orange:

(DRAFT) FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

On Tuesday, May 9, the North Orange County Community College District Board of Trustees voted “no” on the principle of parity for part-time faculty. Adjunct Faculty United, the union that represents all part-time faculty in the district, had asked the board to take a public stand in favor of the principle of “equal pay for equal work” for all faculty.

In the North Orange County Community College District, comprised of Fullerton College, Cypress College, and the School of Continuing Education, part-time faculty (who make up two-thirds of all faculty), get about 50% of what full-time faculty make when they teach the same classes. This is different from what part-time teachers make in the K-12 system, where a teacher with the same credentials and same experience is paid at the same rate as an equally qualified full-time teacher.

Four trustees, Leonard Lahtinen, Michael Matsuda, and the two student trustees (whose votes are only advisory), voted Tuesday in favor of pay parity. Five trustees, Donna Miller, Jeff Brown, Molly McClanahan, Manny Ontiveros, and Barbara Dunsheath, voted against the resolution. Four of the five trustees who opposed the equal pay principle are up for re-election later this year.

NOCCCD Chancellor Jerry Hunter encouraged the trustees to vote “no”, saying that a positive vote would set a bad precedent, that the board should put this issue into the hands of the district negotiating team.

Denny Konshak, chief negotiator for the part-time faculty, objects, saying that it is both proper and right for the trustees to take a public stand in favor of the principle of pay parity, and then leave the details to be worked out at the negotiating table. President of Adjunct Faculty United, Sam Russo, agrees: “In the five years we’ve had our union, the district’s negotiators have staunchly refused to subscribe to any reasonable definition of pay parity for its part-time instructors. It’s time these trustees, who are publicly elected and accountable, take a firm stand on this basic principle in the American workplace and send a real message to their employees and their negotiating team.”

Several trustees stated that they were concerned that their “no” vote might send the wrong message to their part-time faculty, but still opposed the motion that would have made equal pay a goal in NOCCCD. At least one trustee seemed surprised that his district paid $30 an hour less than a neighboring community college district. Reasons for opposing the goal of pay parity with full-timers included: we don’t know what “equal” means, and the college district might be sued some time in the future if they don’t live up to this principle.

Founding president of Adjunct Faculty United, Linda Cushing, also spoke at the board meeting in favor of the principle of “equal pay for equal work” She addresses the trustees’ fear that they will be sued if they do not reach that goal. Cushing said, “At the beginning of the board meeting, everybody, including the trustees, recited the Pledge of Allegiance, saying they subscribed to the principle of ‘liberty and justice for all’. Tell me the board is equally worried about a mythical lawsuit by someone charging them with violating liberty and justice.”

A number of other community college districts, such as San Francisco City College, Cabrillo College, and San Jose-Evergreen CCD, have put themselves on record supporting the principle of equal pay for part-time faculty when the funds become available.

_________________________

For more information, contact:

Sam Russo
Office: 714-526-5759
Home: 714 –961-8058
Cell: 714-290-1685
Srusso@elcamino.cc.ca

Denny Konshak
Home: 714-962-4766

My addition:

To share your thoughts with the NOCCCD trustees:

http://nocccd.cc.ca.us/Trustees/TrusteeBios.htm



North Orange County Community College District NOCCCD Adjunct Faculty United Donna Miller Jeff Brown Molly McClanahan Manny Ontiveros Barbara Dunsheath Chancellor Jerry Hunter
part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california community college auditor labor union aft american federation of teachers

Both Dems for governor will sign EQUAL PAY FOR PART TIMERS bill

At a candidates forum in Culver City yesterday, both Phil Angelides and Steve Westley said they would sign a bill for equal pay for part timers in response to my question. When Pacifica posts the audio file, I will post it here.

Westley said he has taught college before and accurately described our life as "freeway flyers." Without hesitation, Angelides said he would support it itoo.

If someone has a chance to see them in other forums and ask the same question, they should, and make it clear it's something we'll hold them to.

Then we should work to put a bill in front of whichever ends up in office.




phil angelides for governor steve westley for governor campaign promise part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california community college auditor labor union aft american federation of teachers

AFT resolution on equal pay for part timers

Resolution on Part-time Faculty Compensation and Benefits (2000)

[excerpt]

RESOLVED, that the AFT mobilize at all levels through organizing, bargaining and public policy advocacy to end the financial and professional exploitation of part-time faculty...

RESOLVED, that the AFT promote the principle of equal pay and benefits for equal work for part-time faculty with equivalent qualifications and experience...

FULL TEXT

part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california community college auditor labor union aft american federation of teachers

CA Academic Senate on equal pay for part timers

The Academic Senate for California Community Colleges did a report, "Part-Time Faculty: A Principled Perspective," that listed several studies and government agencies that said part timers should get equal pay for equal work. The problem was they no one wanted to vote to force districts to do this.

How can so many people say that it is wrong to do something, but essentially do nothing to stop it?

They also seem to ignore the fact that in addition to saving money, underpaying part timers gives districts an edge in collective bargaining--they can make it seem like any part timer gain takes away from full timers, and vice versa, one of the oldest union-busting tricks in the book: divide and conquer. That hardly fits their goals of having one unified faculty.

The only argument in favor of keeping unequal pay for part timers is that it will cost money to fix it. But have you ever noticed how creative districts are about finding money for buildings and executive salaries and perks? That creativity will kick in on equal pay if it becomes the law.

Excerpts on equal pay from "Part-Time Faculty: A Principled Perspective":

The Council of Faculty Organizations (COFO) Faculty Equity Statement.

[adopted by the Academic Senate in 1996]

Part-time faculty should be accorded fair compensation, professional respect and due process. It is the recognized role and responsibility of individual bargaining agents to make the contractual gains that will benefit part-time faculty which in turn will improve the educational quality of the institutions that employ them. However, we, the representatives to COFO, urge support for the following rights for part-time faculty: pro-rata pay, contractual considerations for full-time positions, health benefits, seniority on re-hire rights, paid office hours, legitimate STRS pension opportunities and true professional status relating to teaching and learning issues.

Comparable Pay for Comparable Work

Responding to early concerns about the System's overuse and abuse of temporary assignments, the Board of Governors adopted a policy of "equal pay for equal work" in 1977.

Board of Governor's Policy on Pro Rata Pay, Adopted March, 1977

The Board of Governors finds no basis for differing pay schedules for full-time and part-time Community College faculty members where in class and out of class responsibilities are the same. Therefore, in such instances the Board of Governors supports equal pay for equal work (pro rata pay). In instances where part-time faculty have less than the same responsibilities for out of class activities the Board of Governors favors pro rata pay for them equal to that which would be paid to full-time instructors for similar classroom activities.

Assembly Bill 420 (Wildman)

AB 420, in its initial form, would have required that "each person employed by a community college district as a temporary academic employee shall be compensated at a salary or hourly rate that is directly proportional to the salary of a full-time regular employee with comparable training and experience." It would also have established in law a minimum of part-time faculty benefits pro-rated with regard to full-time faculty benefits as well as a seniority-based system of preference for reappointment of part-time faculty continuously employed for three academic years.

Though the bill rapidly passed through Assembly committees and on to the Senate Education Committee, concerns were raised by the Chancellor's Office and local college and district administrators regarding the seniority-based rehire provisions. [final form was largely gutted with only token nods toward equal pay]

The California Postsecondary Education Commission (CPEC) Report

• The Commission recommends that local community college districts be encouraged to develop salary schedules for part-time faculty members which have structures more comparable to that of full-time faculty.

• The Commission recommends local community college districts examine the current distribution of compensation resources among part-time and full-time faculty within their district, particularly in those districts where the difference between full-time and part-time faculty salaries is greatest.

Using this classification of what constitutes teaching activities, CPEC calculated that, on average 81% of a full-time faculty member's activities were teaching-related (19% were the sum of advising, administrative, and other activities). Recognizing that the distinction between "advising" and "office hours" is based largely on contractual language rather than the teaching-related nature of the work, and that elements of the "administrative" and "other" classifications would more appropriately be classified as teaching-related, we can see the CPEC study as a confirmation of the State Auditor's determination that part-time faculty are currently expected to fulfill 88% of the duties of a full-time faculty member. Further, since CPEC, like the State Auditor's assumptions, ignored the fact that faculty report working significantly more than the standard 40-hour week, the CPEC analysis supports the view that the current teaching activities of full-time faculty are about 90-91% of their total professional activities.


Recommendations to Local Academic Senates

1. The Academic Senate recommends that local senates work with their local collective bargaining agent, administration and board of trustees to establish principled definitions and policies regarding part-time faculty pay equity, "comparable pay for comparable work" and what should be the professional expectations of all faculty.

FULL REPORT

part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california community college auditor labor union chancellor Part-Time Faculty: A Principled Perspective board of governors California Postsecondary Education Commission cpec Council of Faculty Organizations cofo

CA State Auditor's report on part time pay

When the California State Auditor investigated part time compensation in 2000, they found that if a part timer worked the same hours as a full timer, they would still make 31% less.

The auditor also point out the hypocrisy at all levels on this--while legislators, the state chancellor, and even some administrators (that last one is unlikely) support the concept of equal pay for equal work, it is not given the force of law so that districts have "flexibility" at the bargaining table. In essence, the auditor acknowledges that school districts are cutting ethical corners to balance their budgets.

California State Auditor/Bureau of State Audits
Summary of Report 2000-107 - June 2000

California Community Colleges:
Part-Time Faculty Are Compensated Less Than Full-Time Faculty for Teaching Activities

(excerpt)

...For the fall 1999 semester, the districts reported to the Chancellor's Office a total population of 41,754 teaching faculty, of which 28,180 (67 percent) were classified as part-time and 13,574 (33 percent) as full-time...

Overall, part-time faculty earn lower wages and receive fewer benefits for teaching activities than full-time faculty with similar education and experience. Specifically, at the eight districts we reviewed, if part-time faculty were to teach a full course load at their current pay, they would receive an average of $13,042 (or 31 percent) less in annual wages than full-time faculty for teaching activities. In addition, none of the eight districts enhance the pay rate of part-time faculty who have more education and experience as attractively as they do for their full-time instructors. Also, by working in more than one district, some part-time faculty teach as many classes as full-time faculty but receive less for their efforts. Furthermore, the eight districts either do not provide medical benefits to part-time faculty or provide such benefits with restrictions that are not imposed on full-time faculty. Finally, it is more difficult for part-time faculty to obtain the retirement benefits provided to full-time faculty.

Depending on one's policy perspective, the unequal compensation of part-time faculty either creates problems that should be addressed or reflects an appropriate balance of market conditions at the local level that should not be tampered with. In particular, all of the eight districts we reviewed indicated that the existing pay disparity between part-time and full-time faculty creates a financial incentive to use part-time faculty over full-time faculty his incentive is not in keeping with current Chancellor's Office standards, which stress the importance of maintaining a balance between part-time and full-time faculty to ensure the quality of a CCC education. Furthermore, legislative intent, Chancellor's Office policy, and some district administrators' views support equal pay for equal work for part-time faculty. The general argument is that since the colleges hold part-time faculty to the same standards as full-time faculty, they should offer them the same pay. On the other hand, the former governor, the Chancellor's Office, and certain district administrators oppose mandating equal pay for equal work because it would interfere with the collective bargaining process and limit local flexibility....

SUMMARY

FULL REPORT (PDF)

part time faculty adjunct faculty equal pay for equal work pro rata pay california community college auditor labor union chancellor California Community Colleges: Part-Time Faculty Are Compensated Less Than Full-Time Faculty for Teaching Activities

K-12 equal pay for part timers CA law

California Education Code:

45025. Any person employed by a district in a position requiring certification qualifications who serves less than the minimum schoolday as defined in Sections 46112 to 46116, inclusive, or 46141 may specifically contract to serve as a part-time employee. In fixing the compensation of part-time employees, governing boards shall provide an amount which bears the same ratio to the amount provided full-time employees as the time actually served by such part-time employees bears to the time actually served by full-time employees of the same grade or assignment. This section shall not apply to any person classified as a temporary employee under Sections 44919 and 44888, or any person employed as a part-time employee above and beyond his employment as a full-time employee in the same school district.

http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/cacodes/edc/45022-45061.5.html

The loophole in this law is the same one used on part timers at the community college--the legal fiction that we are temporary employees.

If we work at the same school continuously for five, ten, or twenty years, we are hardly temporary.