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Roots of Unity by Mike Allen, Guild President |
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Mike Allen,
President, |
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Among the many indignities our part-time instructors endure is the fact that their primary pay is based only on their time in the classroom. Not only does this contribute mightily to the fact that part-timer pay rates are much lower than those for full-time faculty, but it also leads to inequities among our various part-timers. To solve both problems, we need to move in the direction of paying part-timer members of our bargaining unit in the same manner that we pay our full-timer members. The method by which we pay full-time instructors at GCC is a common one in higher education. Instructors are expected to work in the classroom a certain number of hours per week, varying by discipline as specified by our contract's load chart. Of course, they also must do associated work outside the classroom, such as preparing for class, helping students with the material and grading. Call all of the work in this paragraph "Instructional." Full-timers are also paid to serve GCC by working on committees and task forces, writing letters of recommendation for students, and keeping current in their fields, but the total amount of time expected for these tasks does not vary by discipline. Call the work in this paragraph "Non-instructional." All full-time instructors are paid using salary schedule A for the combination of their "Instructional" and "Non-Instructional" work. However, since the amount of Non-Instructional work expected is the same, the use of schedule A by all for base pay implies that the amount of expected Instructional work is likewise the same for every discipline. Thus, the load chart simply reflects differences in how Instructional work splits between classroom time and non-classroom time in the various disciplines. However rational and accepted this system may be, though, at GCC it is not the basis for paying part-time instructors. Instead, they are paid in proportion to their classroom hours only, rather than in proportion to their total amount of Instructional work. This rubs many part-timers the wrong way, as it appears to denigrate their Instructional work done outside the classroom. Moreover, this practice especially penalizes part-time instructors in disciplines with small loads, as a correspondingly larger share of their Instructional work is unpaid. An obvious solution to this problem would be to pay part-time instructors the way we pay "full-timers" on partial leave or with a contract that is less than 100% of load. That is, pay part-timers using the same salary schedule A that full-timers use, multiplied by the fraction of their discipline's load they happen to be teaching that term. Indeed, this should serve as the obvious definition of what "pro rata pay for part-timers" at GCC would mean. However, the question arises as to how to proceed, given that the district will claim it can't afford to pay our part-timers this way immediately. The answer is to multiply this pro rata amount by what we could call a "parity" factor that is less than one. The factor could be initially set so as to make "cost neutral" the conversion to schedule A. Then, in that same round of negotiations and all future ones, we can work for increases to schedule A and separately to the parity factor. Increases to the parity factor may be as small as a single percentage point (or even less) per year, but as long as there is steady progress, parity will someday be reached. Having a clear measure of the gap between current part-timer pay and pro rata pay would be a useful byproduct of the conversion process. Moreover, the concept of basing part-time faculty pay on schedule A would solve many problems and end several long-simmering tensions within our bargaining unit. For example, having salary reopeners that address the parity factor directly alongside a uniform percentage raise to schedule A should reduce resentment among full-timers over "bigger raises" (in percentage terms) being given to part-timers. I hope you will join in the discussion over this concept at our Guild meetings and online. & |
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