All teachers are equal and work hard at the community colleges. Awarding only 25% is unfair and discriminatory. The teachers' "unions" are undemocratic, and there are faculty who treat meetings like an elite social club, not a union. The legislature has a duty to ensure fair representation, not to prop up social clubs. The "increment" bill will only give more money to 25% of the teachers, and leave 75% out in the cold. This situation is unfair to 75% of the teachers, to 100% of the students, and to the entire community.

Keith's article is an excellent article. The legislature should take note.

This is like the uninsured attacking health care reform because everyone should suffer without it like they do. As a full-time faculty member I spent countless hours working on greater pay parity between full and part-time faculty that resulted in a new salary schedule at our college. We also, in better times, worked to convert more part-time positions to full time positions. The end result of this concern for the part-timers: our instructional costs are higher than the other institutions that exploit part-timers at even greater levels and now we are having to lay off more full-time faculty than most other institutions. Some reward.

Mr. Hoeller seems to think there is this magical repository of funds that will magically open up for the contingent faculty when they separate from the full timers. Can't you understand that the entire system is, and always has been, woefully underfunded which is why the part-timers are there to be exploited in the first place? It is like the old joke where the new arrival is touring Hell and is asked where he wants to spend his time for eternity and he selects the room where everyone is standing in excrement. Once he has selected a voice announces, "your break is over everyone stand on your heads now." Or maybe he would just like to hasten the day when everyone is like Western Governors "University" where there are no faculty at all.

As always, Keith described the community college academic apartheid situation perfectly. I look forward to the day that lawmakers recognize that tenured faculty are overpaid and underworked, to the detriment of adjunct faculty, students and taxpayers. Salaries for greedy tenured faculty are driving up the price of tuition faster than petroleum. Middle-class families can no longer afford to send their kids to the UW. I can't wait until the Legislature gets a clue and abolishes tenure!
Cheesehead Northwest

When bad times happen in fiction, such as recessions with severely underpaid and exploited workers losing the jobs, in comes a hero with a remedy and justice.

Alas, as Hoeller’s clear writing attests, no heroes loom on the horizon for our state’s adjunct faculty. Unlike other industries where unions might offer the hope of protection, the faculty unions here condone the raiding of adjunct jobs by full-time tenured faculty. The Democratic party, the traditional ally of the American worker, seems more intent on pleasing the faculty unions than protecting the exploited and unappreciated adjunct faculty workers who keep our state’s community and technical college system afloat.

The one ray of hope is that things are better elsewhere. In British Columbian unions, union members don't take other union members' jobs; full-time faculty are barred from teaching overtime. There, part-time faculty face no workload cap as they do in Washington and they are paid on the same scale as full-time faculty.

In fiction, most of the time, the good guys find a way to win, even when they face what seem to be overwhelming odds.

Jack Longmate
Adjunct English Instructor,
Olympic College, Bremerton

Keith addresses the inequalities existing in higher education as well as its inability to think outside the box.

The larger picture sketched here offers a perfect demonstration of why unions continue to spiral in a downward tailspin. Unions are losing power because they have become craft guilds that are solely concerned with the selfish economic interests of their members. In this instance the tenured faculty feels no solidarity with the plight of the underclass of teaching adjuncts who are exploited shamelessly "to balance the budget." Rather, the tenured teachers identify with and are manipulated by the college administrators.

Where is John L. Lewis now that we really need him?

I agree. Part-time community college AND technical college faculty (maybe also the 4-year college & university part-timers too?) need to be paid equitably, ie, part-timers/adjuncts at the same hourly rate adjusted for educational level and years of experience just like the full-timers--based on how K-12 teachers/nurses/counselors, etc. are paid. I'm a technical college student; the teachers I have are good; however, I'd really like to know that the part-timers are paid at par with their full-time, tenured colleagues. And provided with office space and support services at the equivalent of their full-time colleagues. Washington State Legislature, are you listening? Even during the time of straitened budgets?

Well put, woofer, and it's not just about unions or higher education. In times of crisis, we now seem to want to further divide ourselves rather than pull together.

The majority of adjunct faculty in this state are in no way deprived of the fundamental right to choose their own union. Nothing legally prevents adjuncts from joining whichever organization they wish, whether it is the AFT, NEA, the AAUP, or, for that matter, the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association. Nor are they usually required, as are full-time faculty, to pay union dues. However, neither adjunct interests, nor the interests of educators in general, would be well-served by having separate full-time and adjunct-faculty bargaining units which could then be played off against each other. What adjuncts need to do is buy in to the existing unions more solidly. If the unions have not represented the adjuncts’ interests as much as they should have, adjuncts can change that through voluntary union membership, voting in union elections and greater investment in union activism. If the great majority of adjuncts do not choose to join their unions, and therefore do not vote in union meetings, they only disenfranchise themselves. The solution is to become union-brothers and union-sisters and demand our place at the same table as colleagues. My understanding is that exactly this has happened now at at least one community college in the state, where the local has been changed by adjunct activism, and moonlighting by full-time faculty has now been banned. This model, one of collegiality, faculty solidarity, and greater participation in the existing bargaining units, is the strategy that adjunct faculty should be following in defending their rights and interests.
Andrew V. Jeffery
Adjunct Instructor of Philosophy
Green River Community College

Andrew Jeffery's post of 1 May is incorrect in suggesting that "adjunct faculty in this state are in no way deprived of the fundamental right to choose their own union." A PERC ruling, based on a Green River Community College claim, determined that adjunct faculty on each campus must be part of a common bargaining unit with full-time faculty at their college. That is, adjuncts are obligated to join the same union as the tenured faculty.

Regarding the suggestion that adjuncts join forces with their tenured faculty bretheren to pull for across the board, perhaps if existing faculty unions were to address the needs of adjuncts, that option might happen. As it is, where union membership is voluntary, very few adjuncts join the union.

Mr. Jeffery also makes reference to "one community college in the state, where the local has been changed by adjunct activism, and moonlighting by full-time faculty has now been banned." This mystery college is news to me. At Olympic College in Bremerton, the current Collective Bargaining Agreement, for the first time, has imposed limits on overtime (moonlighting) that tenured faculty may teach--no more than 167 percent.

Full-time faculty overtime is banned in many of the colleges of British Columbia. One result of that is job security for part-timers, since full-time faculty are prevented from taking part-time faculty jobs at will, as is commonplace on AFT and WEA colleges in this state.

Sincerely yours,

Jack Longmate
Adjunct English Instructor
Olympic College

I must concede the first point in my colleague Jack Longmate's response to my comment of May 1st: "freedom to form or join a union" means very little if that "union" cannot be one's recognized bargaining unit. I stand corrected on that point.

But, secondly, my description of the "mystery college" was at most only slightly hyperbolic: while, in the Seattle Community College District, moonlighting by full-time faculty has not been entirely "banned," they have created a list of "Priority Hire Part-timers," and stipulated, in their contract, that full-time faculty cannot get a moonlighting/overload assignment until after their Priority Hire Part-timers are offered classes. Seperate from the contract, their union also encourages full-timers to forego overloads in favor of keeping part-timers employed. This, note, in a local chapter of the AFT that Ms. Knudsen claims is so "undemocratic."

All this goes to support my main point, which is, to reiterate, that the main obstacle to the full enfranchisement of adjunct faculty within their unions is the adjuncts themselves--our own apolitical detachment as individuals and, overall, as group. Mr Longmate puts the cart before the horse when he suggests that IF the the unions were to address the needs of adjuncts, then adjuncts might "join forces with their tenured faculty brethern to pull across the board"--we adjuncts need to think of it exactly the other way around: if adjuncts voluntarily "buy in" to their unions in sufficient numbers, become members and involve themselves in their locals, they can change the priorities of the existing unions from the bottom up. The experience of the Seattle Community College local demonstrates this concretely.

Sincerely,

Andrew V. Jeffery

If the Seattle Community College union is the best in WA that Mr. Jeffery can cite, I'd really hate to work at any other college. I'm a Seattle CC PT teacher and can attest that the union attracts very little activism here (shortly before the AFT-WA conference, the Seattle union was recently begging for more volunteers to be delegates, as only 5 of the possible 28 Seattle seats had been filled). And since there are many non-priority PTers in Seattle, is it fair that they are subject to bumping due to overloads requested by FTers? Is it fair at all that FTers can even seek overloads while priority PTers are de facto capped at 67% time?
And how about the college where Jeffery works or all the other colleges in WA? How "fair" are they for PTers?
The problem with PTers becoming active in FT-dominated unions is that they are perennially subject to babysitting if they start thinking/acting in a meaningful fashion. PTers will only start to gain leverage in proportion to how much they insist on acting independently from FTers, regardless of whether they are in one union or in separate unions.

I have worked as a part time instructor at three different community colleges in Washington State for the past 20 years. I have never felt the threat of losing this job, but I do in this current climate! My income has been reduced 35% this past year while tenured faculty in my current department are teaching up to 167% of a full time load and bumping part time instructors! The administration and union actually have agreed to target adjunct's benefits as a way to try to balance the budget in this particular round of cuts. So, adjuncts with 10+ years of loyal service were offered a token 5 credits in the busy Fall Quarter, while new part time faculty were hired and also offered 5 credits, all so the college can avoid having to ante up and pay benefits to the part timers.
It is SO DISAPPOINTING to realize that the union representing me is truly against me and just using me to guard their own interests!

It is about time for part time instructors to separate from the tenured track union or none of us will remain if the budget continues to decline. The only teachers left to educate in the colleges will be burned out, spread thin, tenured track professors who have died in their secure-for-life jobs. Yuck!

I was the person who won the law suit against the cc's that enabled part-timers to get unemployment in the 1980s. All that was necessary was providing the minimal amount of time spent teaching a course.At that time there was an even larger "separation" between part-timers and the tenured than there is now. But face it, every aspect of our society is now doing all it can to maximize access to as cheap labor as possible--and it is abundantly available.