A Message from Mike Allen, Chair of Guild Task Force on Adjunct Parity, 2022
Overview
Parity refers to how adjunct (“part-timers”) and contract (“full-timers”) faculty
are compensated – how their pay schedules look (both the ones for Fall/Spring, and
the ones for Winter/Summer), how they are initially placed on them, and what their
responsibilities are for that compensation.
Because contract faculty have professional responsibilities beyond those directly
related to their teaching, GCC agrees with the Guild that pay for adjunct faculty
will be deemed to be at parity when their pay is 87.5% of what contract faculty make
per scheduled hour (class hours and office hours). Currently, most adjunct faculty
at GCC are paid well below this 87.5% level.
When adjunct faculty do opt to engage in this sort of work beyond that directly related
to their teaching, they can apply for extra “ancillary” pay in addition to the money
from their normal pay schedules.
History
Prior to the founding of the Glendale College Guild faculty labor union in 1972, adjunct
faculty were almost-exclusively hired to work in a nearly separate “Evening College”
here at GCC. Adjunct faculty and their concerns were mostly “out of sight, out of
mind” as far as the rest of the college was concerned.
In 1976 the Rodda Act was passed in California, which allowed a single union to exclusively
represent faculty in a state community college district, and the Guild was voted in
for that role in 1979. The Guild struck its first contract with the District in January
1980.
Adjunct faculty were incorporated into this formal bargaining unit, and thus began
a long-term improvement in their treatment and compensation. For example, in the
1980’s the Guild began to negotiate annual raises for adjunct faculty that were often
1 percentage point larger than the raise negotiated for contract faculty, and this
was the first step on a pathway to compensation parity.
In the 1990’s, the California budget first included a dedicated “parity fund” that
could only go towards improving parity further. The Guild initially applied the additional
dollars only to compensation for adjunct instructional work and not to other kinds
of work by adjunct faculty.
Later in the 1990’s, the California budget also included a fund to partially reimburse
districts for their expenditures to subsidize adjunct faculty buying health insurance
through their employer, and the Guild negotiated just such a subsidy with GCC. This
was particularly important at the time since coverage through the Affordable Care
Act (“Obamacare”) wouldn’t become available until 2011.
The Guild later also negotiated a local pot of money from which adjunct faculty can
seek funding for work done at the college which is “ancillary” to their regular assignment.
In the 2000’s, California budgets start to include a dedicated fund to partially reimburse
districts for their pay to adjunct instructors to hold office hours... pay for a limited
number of office hours per week is negotiated for adjunct instructors by the Guild
but at a lower-than-normal rate per hour.
In the 2010’s, pay for adjunct instructors in Summer and Winter terms is raised to
fully match the pay of contract instructors. Also, the number of paid office hours
during Fall & Spring for adjunct instructors was negotiated to no longer be limited,
but rather the same number per unit of load as for full-timers (e.g., an adjunct instructor
teaching 60% of the load for a full-timer in their subject would hold and be paid
for 3 office hours per week, which is 60% of a full-timers 5 office hours per week).
Also, the lower pay rate for office hours (as well as for regular work by non-instructional
adjuncts) was raised to match the adjunct instructor’s normal hourly pay rate.
Future
In 2022, California’s budget includes a massive increase in funding to reimburse community
college districts if they choose to offer much richer health benefits to their adjunct
instructors. GCC and the Guild have negotiated a preliminary agreement that they would
be interested in this option if the state funding actually does completely cover the
increased expense. As of early 2023, we are waiting to see if that’s true. Additionally,
the Guild is recommending restructuring the adjunct faculty pay chart to match the
same “step and column” layout of the contract faculty pay chart, and that the rules
for initial placement on the pay charts also be identical. This would facilitate the
calculation for pay parity at each location on the charts, to see how far each location
is from the 87.5% long-term goal.
