This is the sixth in a series about collective bargaining in the San Francisco Community College District. I was a Union activist in the late '70s and early '80s when collective bargaining for community college faculty was passed into law in California. I detailed the steps along the way to negotiating a contract in the previous five parts of this series (see below for links). In this part I wanted to talk about the plight of part-time faculty, how we started to do something about it in our first contract, and how that small start has led to a much better situation in our District at the present time.
Part-time (or adjunct) faculty are cheaper. That's always been the bottom line for educational institutions. Oh, we always heard about how hiring part-timers added to "flexibility" for the institution, but maintaining a cadre of part-time faculty who had been at the institution for ten or more years seemed to contradict that argument. Then we heard that the people who were working part-time were all happy to be in that position, and weren't interested in joining the ranks of the full-time faculty. In our District, we did several surveys during our negotiations which showed a strong majority interested in a full-time job.
In order to make enough money to live on, part-time faculty often become "freeway flyers," spending hours on the road driving from one academic institution to another. They often teach as many total hours as a full-time faculty member or more, without the tenure, benefits, or salary. In some districts, there is hostility between the part- and full-time faculty, and part-time faculty are sometimes not included in full-time academic senates or bargaining units.
In our District, back when we started organizing for a collective bargaining election in 1976, we decided to go for a "wall-to-wall" unit, including every faculty member in the District, excluding department chairs. Some faculty were unhappy with that decision, but the majority supported it, and after a long struggle we won the right to bargain for both part- and full-time faculty, and negotiated our first contract.
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