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Negotiations Spotlight: Improving Load Factor (December 2010) |
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By Howard A. Stahl
Introduction
For many contract cycles now, proposals to improve load factors have been a part of what your Faculty Association has brought to the negotiating table with the district. Load factor is a fractional value less than or equal to 1.0, which is assigned to a course during the curriculum approval process. Lecture-oriented classes get assigned a load factor of 1.0. Activity or studio-oriented classes get assigned a load factor less than 1.0, such as 0.882, 0.875, 0.75 or 0.6. As I explained in an earlier FAB article in December, 2009 (available online from our newsletter archive), full-time faculty teaching courses with lower load factors end up having to work many more classroom hours each week of a semester. As a result of these additional hours, faculty teaching courses with lower load factors are not often available to serve on campus committees and therefore cannot participate in shared governance activities to the extent they desire. This lack of participation and visibility further compounds the problems faced by faculty teaching courses with lower load factors, as their departments are often the ones fighting for viability because their departments have so few (some have only one!) full-time faculty members. Many less-than-load factor 1.0 departments have not had a new full-time hire in decades.
The 2008 Load Factor Workgroup
During the last contract cycle, the negotiating team created a Load Factor Workgroup to study this problem. It met during Spring semester of 2008, chaired by myself and included Chris Fria (Design Technology), Marc Trujillo (Art), Elaine Roque (Kinesiology) and David Zehr (English). Many other interested faculty regularly participated in this study group including Fariba Bolandhemat (CSIS) and Diane Gross (CSIS). The group reviewed the work of an earlier District/Faculty Association committee that studied this problem in Spring, 2002. The group invited faculty members in each of the departments that has courses with load factors less than 1.0 to speak to the workgroup about how load factor affects them, their curriculum and their students. Faculty from Dance, Fashion, Film Studies, ESL, CSIS, Entertainment Technology and Nursing spoke to the committee in person or in email. In addition, the workgroup reviewed a number of alternative models used at other colleges and universities around the country. The workgroup provided recommendations to the negotiating team on how to address the load factor system and the inequities it has caused.
Current Proposals And Negotiations
To date, there have been ten negotiating sessions stretching over the past five months with the district. Load factor proposals have been discussed at nearly each and every session. Your negotiation team has continually argued for an improvement in course load factors which would make progress toward the goal of load factor parity for all credit teaching faculty. As we have argued, it was not that long ago that courses with a load factor of 0.714 were increased to 0.75. And at that same time, courses with a load factor of 0.833 were increased to 0.875. Progress along these lines seems long overdue.
In response, the district claims there is no load factor parity problem and does not agree that any kind of injustice exists or that the existing bias against non-lecture-based classes need to be corrected in any way. Clearly, we still have a long way to go in educating our administration about how the load factor system actually works and its unintended consequences on our working conditions, our curriculum and our students.
Conclusion
As progress on load factor stalls at the negotiating table, I invite interested faculty to join with me to educate the administration to improve this lack of parity problem and reduce the bias contained in the existing load factor system.
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