Theme: Part-time issues

Marching toward equity

The AFT and its affiliates, including UUP, have made restoring full-time faculty lines and ending the overuse and exploitation of part-time faculty a top priority for some time.

A new AFT report, “Marching Toward Equity,” scheduled to be released later this month to coincide with Campus Equity Week, highlights the most recent round of advances made by AFT affiliates on behalf of part-timers and other faculty through legislative and political action and collective bargaining gains.

For example, in Washington state, members of the Washington Federation of Teachers (WFT) achieved significant pay increases for part-time faculty through legislative action. The WFT focused its campaign on one basic principle: Equal pay for equal work. Intense, focused lobbying, including creative rallies emphasizing the plight of “freeway fliers” — part-timers who make a living by rushing from campus to campus to teach a course here and another there — paid off when the state Legislature allocated $10 million of state money in the spring of 1999 to be used exclusively for increasing part-time faculty salaries. The Legislature also expanded eligibility for retirement benefits and required each community and technical college to adopt goals designed to increase further part-time salaries and to decrease overreliance on part-timers.

The report also profiles efforts in California, where the California Federation of Teachers has been working to prevent the further erosion of the full-time faculty corps by aiming for a 75-25 ratio of full-timers to part-timers. The federation succeeded in getting passed a “part-time faculty bill of rights,” which expanded eligibility for health insurance and for paid office hours, and mandated a study of part-time faculty employment and compensation patterns.

UUP is highlighted in the report as a model for successfully using the collective bargaining process to achieve “one of the most comprehensive packages of part-time pay and benefits in the country so far.” The current UUP contract won for part-time faculty members guaranteed minimum salaries, on a pro-rated basis of the minimum full-time faculty salary, with guaranteed 3 percent increases during each year of the contract; lump-sum payments up to $500 based on the part-timer’s teaching load; and six months of health insurance for each semester worked.

The report suggests some common lessons from successful legislative or bargaining action:

• Define goals early and develop a simple, unifying message with a slogan, such as “equal pay for equal work.”
• Pick something concrete to rally around, such as a legislative bill, a resolution or a study.
• Develop a coordinated strategy for short- and long-term goals. For example, some unions found their state legislatures to be more receptive to conducting a study on the overuse and exploitation of part-timers as a first step, rather than offering immediate pay parity or new full-time lines.
• Form coalitions with other unions and interested groups.
• Whenever possible, use hard numbers, based on research, to bolster the case to legislators and to the general public.
• Know when and how to compromise while still expressing the long-term message.

— Karen Nelis