This is from a national group supporting adjunct educators called “Precarious Faculty Rising” and was posted by one of Democracy Chronicles’ contacts with the adjunct union push. She is also very active in Washington State on this issue and we expect more to be posted here on DC from Vanessa Vaile going forward. She can be contacted at @VanessaVaile.

See more on the following article at the “Precarious Faculty Rising” website:

⌘REMINDER⌘

To reiterate, we are #notNFM: not this blog, FB page A new faculty majority, twitter streams nor other blogs and social media sites tentatively designated Precarious Faculty Rising (PFR). These pages are part of an open, informal network of precarious faculty information, support and advocacy sites – NOT an organization!

Please revisit the following posts: “on recent social media changes” December 15, 2013; “blog updates—new pages and; other confusion mitigation” December 18, 2013; and “#PFR network: blog AND; #socialmedia directions” January 15, 2014

We are all working toward a common goal, just on different tracks. Cooperation and coordinating efforts make more sense than conflict and competition — let’s leave that behind us in the realm of higher ed hierarchy and #badmin that we want to change.

Are #adjuncts worth helping?

by Jack Longmate as posted to Contingent Academics Mailing List

First, take a look at this from the “precarious faculty” archives, Sunday, February 20, 2011 Trend Watching: Jack vs WEA, #StateSOS, Taylorized!

Adjuncts vs. full-time faculty, a Community College Spotlight column, covers mostly Jack & WA HB1631 [an earlier version of 1348, below] kerfuffle (why Jack Longmate along with Wisconsin protesters and former AUC classmates occupying Tahrir Square are my personal heroes)… “Jack vs WEA” counts as a trend because we’re going to see more of it, official rhetoric to the contrary not withstanding. Read your labor history. Nothing new under the sun.

When you finish reading Jack’s post below, please read the latest Contractually Bound column, Six myths about contract faculty in Canada. Pay particular attention to #3 (which could have been written by one of the WA adjuncts Jack describes in 6-9 below).

1. On Friday, Feb 28, I testified in a Washington state legislative hearing against HB 1348, a bill very strongly supported by tenured faculty and by some part-time faculty.  It has since died for this session. (Should anyone wish to view the hearing, it is viewable at https://www.tvw.org/index.php?option=com_tvwplayer&eventID=2014020206; the hearing on HB 1348 begins at the 39:40; my testimony at the 45:50 mark)

2.  Late Friday also, I read the Noam Chomsky text that Robin J Sowards assembled from a February conference in Pittsburgh, and aspects from two things have been swirling in my mind since.

3. As background for the legislation, in Washington state, the funding for pay step increments for community and technical college faculty (1) must necessarily come from the legislature and (2) are the result of a special appropriation, which means there’s no guarantee that increments will be funded each year; when the legislature doesn’t fund increments, it leaves tenured faculty in a situation where they may have qualified for a pay raise but may not get it.  Everyone agrees that this is a problem.

From 2003 through 2011 or so, the faculty unions in Washington state have supported legislation to make increments a regular part of the state operating budget.  Those efforts have failed. The current bill, HB 1348, would instead compel the local colleges, as opposed to the legislature, to fund the salary steps established in their collective bargaining agreements (totaling roughly $10 million a year) through locally generated revenue, such as tuition, contracts or grants, international ESL programs, etc.

4.  While increments are supposed to be for “faculty,” they are, in effect, a full-time faculty benefit.  All full-time faculty have an increment salary schedule while two thirds of the colleges have none for their part-time faculty (and those that do have decidedly discounted steps). Keith Hoeller compiled data showing that between 1999 and 2004, 90% of the increment appropriations went to full-time faculty; only 10 to part-time faculty, which reflects the paucity of part-time faculty increment systems in the state’s 30 college districts. As HB 1348 would fund increments established in the collective bargaining agreements but since most part-timers don’t have increments schedules, most part-timers would not benefit. Some understand that if HB 1348 were to pass, the unions would then strive to bargain part-time increments too.  But this is unlikely.

First, with the transferring of the funding of increments from the state budget to the colleges (termed by some trustees to be an unfunded mandate), using local funds previously committed to other purposes, the colleges will likely be very, very reluctant to add any increments for employees that have never had them or add any other new encumbrances.