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AFA DIALOGUE

An Open Forum for Faculty at Santa Rosa Junior College

The AFA Dialogue has been created to air concerns of all faculty. The AFA Update is the factual voice of AFA, while the AFA Dialogue encourages conversation and publishes personal opinions about workplace issues and political concerns. We invite any faculty member to submit letters, articles, or opinion pieces. The opinions contained herein are solely those of the writer, and AFA neither condones nor condemns these opinions. AFA reserves editorial prerogatives.

AFA welcomes your feedback!

Submit comments, letters, and/or articles via email to afa@santarosa.edu or via fax to (707) 524-1762

AFA members who submit original articles of 500 words or more that are published in an issue of the AFA Dialogue will be awarded a Stipend of up to $200.

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What Should be the AFA's Negotiating Priorities This Year?

by Mark Anthony Wilson, Adjunct Faculty Member Art Department

As the All Faculty Association engages in the annual contract negotiations with the administration for full time and adjunct faculty at SRJC, what items should be the top priorities? Clearly among the priorities on the agenda should be some system for the goal of pay parity for adjunct faculty. This topic was addressed in two earlier AFA dialogue pieces: "Equal Pay for Equal Work" (Lara Branen-Ahumada, April 23, 2013) and "Fairness and the Fate of the College" (Terry Mulcaire, December 6, 2010). However, as an adjunct member of the SRJC faculty for the past 17 years, I would like to offer my personal perspective on this issue—one that I know is shared by a number of my fellow adjuncts.

The one priority that seems to have gotten lost in the shuffle during this era of deep cuts is one I feel should be at the top of the list on the basis of simple fairness and retaining academic excellence at SRJC. The AFA should make it a top priority to restore, in reasonable increments, those cuts to the pay schedule that have disproportionately affected hourly instructors since 2009.

According to information from the AFA website, the hourly lecture rates for adjunct faculty have had two incremental cuts since Spring 2010. These cuts averaged 6.8 percent in Spring 2010 due to the state's ending of the categorical funds that were designated for enhancing the hourly pay schedule, followed by 2 percent more in Summer 2010 to subsidize the Adjunct Medical Benefits Program. This totaled roughly an 8.8 percent pay cut for all SRJC adjunct (and contract overload) faculty. These cuts were imposed before the vote in August of 2010, which put in place a total of 4.16 percent cuts across the board to the entire faculty. The net effect has been that for the past three years, adjunct faculty have been struggling with nearly a 9 percent greater salary reduction than the full time faculty. I voted for the across-the-board cuts to faculty salaries in August 2010, as a necessary measure to avoid the possibility of the administration having to cut up to an additional 500 classes from the 2010-2011 course schedule.

In response to the argument that the reductions were not really pay cuts because they came from the special stipend, I would say, "If it looks like a pay cut, and it feels like a pay cut, and it acts like a pay cut, it IS a pay cut." I know that my monthly paycheck was reduced by nearly $450 from what it was before these cuts for teaching the same load (60 percent). In addition, in response to the argument that most adjunct faculty could more easily afford such pay cuts since adjuncts don't generally rely on their SRJC paychecks as their main income, I would say that most adjunct faculty members in my department (Art), who have been here for ten years or more, DO depend on their SRJC paycheck to pay their monthly living expenses.

Obviously, any restoring of categorical funding to hourly pay schedules would have to be done gradually, and subject to various triggers. For example, with the extra money Governor Brown has pledged to community colleges from the passage of Proposition 30, and the greater-than-expected revenues from State income taxes this year, it would be reasonable to start by restoring, say 3 percent to adjunct hourly rates for those instructors who had been teaching at least a 40 percent load at SRJC for at least ten semesters. This could then be extended to the more recent and new hires to the adjunct pool in perhaps the next academic year, if the revenues from Proposition 30 and/or state income tax revenues continue at or above the current levels. The rest of the adjunct cuts could then be restored over the next two years or so, again depending on the revenue flows from the state to community colleges. This is just a suggestion, and it would naturally be subject to careful calculations by both the AFA and the District during their negotiations. Various factors might require a different equation than this, and other formulas might be more acceptable to the overall teaching staff. While we all appreciate the 5.3 percent pay increase that all faculty received this year, that still does not fully address the pay parity issue, since, due to the above-mentioned pay cuts, adjunct faculty who have been here more than five years are making up for greater pay cuts than those of the full time faculty.

The main point here is that institutions, like societies, can only function well in times of shortages if they adhere to the principle of shared sacrifice. So restoring some of the categorical funding for all community colleges should include gradually restoring the pay cuts that were imposed on SRJC's adjunct faculty over the past several years. Since the adjunct faculty members at SRJC have made the greatest sacrifices during the recent recession, it seems only fair that they should recover some of what they gave up now that the State's finances are improving.

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