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The Glendale College Guild is
different from unions I’ve encountered at other colleges. It is more
democratic and has greater participation from its members. To find out
why, I met with six other grey-hairs over beers at the Red Lion to talk
about the Guild’s twenty-four year history.
The bad old days
As the glasses
accumulated, I heard stories from the 1970s. After attending GCC ten
years earlier, Des Kilkeary came back to teach only to find that
all
of his favorite young instructors were
gone, victims of layoffs that periodically decimated the staff. College
finances depended on Glendale’s low property tax rate, and could be
supplemented only by “override” elections that Glendale voters defeated
on all but one occasion. Today we still suffer from this legacy in our
current low state reimbursement rate based on 1970s local funding
levels, a situation that will be remedied partially if equalization
comes through in this year’s budget.
Before 1982,
all important decisions were made “downtown,” where a combined college
and K-12 administration ran the college. The old-timers remembered
pre-employment physicals, including the threat of drug tests. Once Steve
Marsden was refused a meeting with the personnel director, even though
he could see the administrator sitting in her office. “For you, she’s
not in,” explained the secretary. Ron Harlan described going hat in hand
for new biology films and being told there was no budget for
college-level media. It took a hard-fought campaign in 1980 to pass
Proposition X, separating the college from the “unified” K-12 district.
The Guild is born
Then came
California’s Prop 13, freezing property taxes for households and
businesses, prompting even more than the traditional round of layoffs.
The entire Evening College was cut, as were about one one-fourth of
full-time staff.
About the same
time, California state law changed to allow collective bargaining, not
the “meet and confer” representation previously permitted. In 1972, a
small group of faculty had formed Local 2276, affiliated with California
Federation of Teachers/American Federation of Teachers. Now they could
seek to represent the faculty, although they had competition from the
California Teachers Association (CTA), a group popular with older
faculty, and today representing Glendale unified employees as well as
many community college faculty throughout California.
“Why did the
Guild win the election?” I asked, handily it turned out, with the “no
representative” choice edging out the CTA. Foremost, the old-timers
credit a grassroots campaign in which volunteers called all potential
members. The Guild pointed to its willingness to represent all employees
laid off in the Prop 13 fiasco, whereas the CTA would represent only
union members. The Guild wanted to include chairs in the bargaining
unit; the CTA wanted chairs in the administrative unit. Finally, the
Guild promised not to ask for an agency shop as would CTA, a decision
that was reversed two decades later when faculty voted to require
everyone to pay dues for services received from the union.
Everyone had a
horror story to tell when the chronology reached the short but
tumultuous Rex Craig administration from 1982 to 1985. The Guild
president had to make a special request to speak at each Board meeting,
although according to Pete Witt, the secretary sympathized with our
plight and agreed to put the Guild on each agenda. Negotiations were so
unproductive that when a mediator was called in, he gave up, declaring
there was no possibility of agreement. The only upside was that by
riding roughshod over the Guild, Craig succeeded in uniting the faculty.
Of course, during the Davitt administration, things changed. The college
abandoned its professional hired gun negotiators from the upscale
O’Melveney and Myers law firm, opting instead for in-house negotiators
still used today.
Why is the Guild
different?
I still wanted
to know why the Guild has such a high participation rate, with more
members at each meeting than any other district I know, and generally
more respect from the faculty as “our” organization. One answer appears
to be de facto term limits in which the union presidency turned over
seventeen
times since 1972, so that we
never had union officers for life as on other campuses. Union presidents
all returned to the classroom, and never could become aloof from rank
and file concerns.
Campus leaders
today bemoan the difficulty in getting more people to run for office. It
turns out that it always took arm-twisting to convince the new union
president to run, although early Guild presidents Ray Glienna, Pete Witt
and Ron Harlan reminded me that they did so with minimal released time,
no secretarial help and not even email!
Others around
the table pointed to the “college hour” as an important factor in
allowing everyone to get together. The meetings always were social,
sometimes continued at someone’s house to make big decisions such as the
list of negotiating openers. New members were recruited by an active
committee that sought out new hires and explained the importance of the
union, much as part-time representatives do today. Even when there were
contentious issues such as the lab ratio for science courses or the pay
differential for counselors, these never split the union as a
functioning organization. The reason seems to be respect we have for one
another plus a structure that encourages debate and contested elections.
In other words, we practice democracy.
A lesson for
me today is not to forget that the Guild is
our
organization. It derives its strength from rotating leadership, regular
midday college hour, well-attended meetings, and the willingness to
listen to all faculty groups. These are valuable traditions we inherited
from the hard work of the oldsters I met. Salut!
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