By Martin M. Goldstein

    We knew at the conclusion of the last negotiations, in which Associate Faculty status was reinvigorated,  that we were going to have to develop protocols for problems that would arise that were not specifically addressed in the contract language. We’d work them out during the time between negotiations, we said, and incorporate them into the next contract.

    That was the plan, part of the ethos we were trying to establish: the idea that in some areas we could trust each other enough to accept that we could and would solve future problems together. Shared governance, in a nutshell; common sense, really, especially when you’re trying to do something new, (i.e., give PTers a little bit of job security.)

    Happily enough, recent discussions between the FA and the administration concerning an Associate Faculty member with an unexpected problem have been following that course. Here’s the situation:

    He had been assigned a new five hour course which had not filled and had been canceled, and given that this five hour course was his only SMC class, he was suddenly without any employment here. Meanwhile three brand new PT faculty had been hired to teach sections of the class he had formally taught, but there were not enough students left to create a new section for him.

    Now Associate Faculty status doesn’t guarantee your load each semester, but rather the total “yearly” load (Fall and Spring only; intersessions are not part of it, yet.)  So why not make up his ten hour AF requirement by giving him two five hour classes in the Spring, if he can’t have his one five hour in the Fall?

   

 

 

Working the System

A Saga of Associate Faculty Status

SMC Hourly Advocate, October, 2002

    Well, there’s something called the “60% Law,” which prohibits you from teaching more than a 60% (9 hour) load at any one CC per semester. Actually, it doesn’t prohibit you from doing this, but if you do, some case law says that you automatically become tenured which is something they don’t want to happen because then they have to pay you full time salary.  Once the salary differential between FT and PTers disappears, of course, (i.e., 100% parity ) it won’t make any difference, and both the 60% law and the entire two-tier pay schedule for FT and PT will find their way to the appropriate dust bins of history.

    But right now we’re stuck with it. He had to have his class this semester, which meant bumping one of those new PTers -- but it is specifically forbidden in the contract for one PTer to bump another.

    Well, without having to cut the baby in two, a wise and proper solution was worked out. The FA and the administration are negotiating a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) allowing, in this kind of situation, the new PTer to be bumped in favor of one with AF status when no other solution can be found -- just as a PTer, even one with AF status could be bumped by a full time faculty member. That’s life, or more relevantly, what it says (or will say) in the contract.

    In the meantime, a new section was created for our AF member, and so he has the job, and the rights we had bargained for, which was his guaranteed yearly load. He had to have a class this semester to get that load, and he got it.

    Thus to Lantz Simpson and Robert Flores for the FA, and Randy Lawson and Robert Sammis for the college, our compliments on a job well done. Sometimes the system works.