Advocate Online

NEA Affiliates in Action

Organizing
Illinois Governor George Ryan has signed into law a measure that allows part-time faculty in the state’s community colleges who teach six or more hours the right to union representation.

Prior to enactment of this law, part-timers were the only group of education employees in Illinois denied this right. The new law simply changes the definition of a “short-term” employee to include adjunct faculty under the Illinois Education Labor Relations Act.

The Illinois Education Association, which lobbied extensively for the bill, notes that as many as 20,000 faculty in the state will be covered by this new law, many of whom have been waiting for a long time to begin forming bargaining units.

The battle to win bargaining rights for part-time faculty began when the Illinois Educational Labor Board denied a group of Harper College adjunct faculty the right to organize a union with IEA in 1990, ruling that adjuncts were ineligible because they weren’t guaranteed re-employment each year.

Contracts
A salary dispute between the Pasadena City College and PCC/California Teachers Association, the NEA affiliate representing the California community college’s full- and part-time faculty, could lead to a strike, president John Jacobs said recently. The faculty has been working without a contract since the 1999-00 school year and the college board imposed a settlement on the faculty for the 2000-01 school year.

Jacobs said he doesn’t expect the two sides to reach an agreement in the near future for 2001-02 or the current year.

The union has asked for an 11 percent raise for full-time teachers and 13 percent raise for part-timers, while the college has countered with an offer of less than half that amount.

“My guess is that we’ll wind up in fact-finding and then they’ll impose a salary on us, but that won’t happen before late fall,” Jacobs said. In that scenario, he said, a strike is likely.

The college has about 400 full-time and 900 part-time faculty. The union notes that the Pasadena salary scale ranks 67 out of 72 community colleges in the state.

Campus Activities
The higher education affiliates of the Massachusetts Teachers Association have been in high gear ever since Massachusetts Acting Governor Jane Swift vetoed collectively bargained raises for more than 12,000 state college and university employees.

Aside from lobbying and legal actions by the unions affected, thousands of faculty and staff took part in union-organized community coffee breaks at all 28 public higher education campuses across the state on September 5. A series of community lunch breaks on all the campuses is slated for September 25.

“Several strategies to fund the contracts are being considered,” said MTA President Catherine Boudreau. “These may include legal, legislative, on-campus, and other actions. We are outraged but not dispirited. The governor and the legislature know we won’t go away until those contracts are funded.”

The Lane Community College Education Association (LCCEA) in Oregon has prevailed in a mid-contract interest arbitration over workload for all of its mechanical technologies (MT) instructors. Under the arbitration award, full-time MT instructors will receive a retroactive 10 percent pay increase for the years 1999-00 and 2000-01. In addition, the instructors will receive overload pay from 2001 forward for extra work. Retroactive pay is still being calculated, but it will easily exceed $100,000.

The United Faculty of Florida has beaten back attempts by Governor Jeb Bush to substitute bonuses for increases in faculty salaries this year.

Thanks to lobbying efforts by the United Faculty of Florida, the joint NEA-AFT affiliate representing Florida State University system faculty, the Florida legislature passed a budget that includes a 2.5 percent pay raise for state employees, including university faculty, effective October 1.

“Faculty have prevailed on the salary issue,” said United Faculty of Florida President Tom Auxter. “The governor tried to force on us a bizarre bonus scheme that would have meant no salary increase for any university faculty member.”