Current Poll Question

What is your biggest concern as an SMC faculty member?
 

Ask the Prez

What is the Santa Monica College Faculty Association?

The SMC Faculty Association advances the general welfare of faculty as the exclusive bargaining representative of all part-time and full-time faculty in matters relating to employment conditions and employer-employee relations and grievances, including but not limited to, wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment.

Read all of the questions and answers here.

Join the FA!

To join today, click on "Download Now"!
Find out more about Membership and Agency Fee

You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to download a printable version of SMCFA's membership form.

Download Form Now

Contact Us!

Santa Monica College Faculty Association
1900 Pico Blvd.
Liberal Arts, Room 140
Santa Monica, CA  90405
Phone 310-434-4394
FAX 310-434-3601

President: Mitra Moassessi

Executive Secretary: Janet Watts

www.SMCFA.org

March 2009, Volume 23, Issue 1 - Are You a Sucker or a Jerk? PDF Print E-mail
Originally published in the Advocate in February 1993.
By Jim Prickett

At an Association meeting in 1987 while I was still hourly faculty, I discussed the dilemma we face in holding office hours. The contract states that hourly faculty are not required to hold office hours. Nevertheless, I believed then (and now) that students are entitled to have instructors who hold regularly scheduled office hours. Should I, then, hold uncompensated office hours?

If I held office hours without being paid, I felt like a sucker, since I knew that the district was relying on hourly faculty to perform uncompensated labor.

But if I denied office hours to my students, I felt like a jerk, since I believed students were entitled to them.

Some faculty believe that holding office hours is a professional responsibility even if not compensated. (Holding office hours as a flex activity is a possible, backhanded way of obtain-ing compensation.) Others believe that holding office hours was unprofessional. They argue that our willingness to hold unpaid office hours make it less likely that the district would ever mandate and compensate office hours.

There’s really no correct response to the sucker-jerk dilemma, since neither is acceptable. The real way out of this false, District-created dilemma is a pro rata pay scale so that instructors would be required to hold, and be compensated for, office hours.

The Cervisi Decision has finally become incorporated into EDD routine, and unemployment insurance for any period for which you are not being paid to teach is routinely available. And under the current contract part-timers are being paid for some office hours, and soon will be paid exactly pro-rata to full-timers, making us neither suckers nor jerks.
  		 

 

Follow our negotiations!
Click Here!

 

Join the Job Action Task Force!
Click Here!

 

By AWeb Design