Stuck in a Two-Tier Jam

Getting out of the two-tier jam that afflicts the vast majority of faculty in California Community Colleges can start by amending the CA Ed Code article that created the unique part-time temporary faculty tier. Only California has anything like it. Its impact on the community colleges has been terrible -for students, first of all, but also for faculty.

The way you amend the Ed Code is by passing a bill in both houses of the legislature and getting the Governor to sign it.

What should this bill do?  It should simply get rid of Section 87482.5(a).   Just get rid of it!!!!

That section reads:

Section 87482.5. (a): Notwithstanding any other law, a person who is employed to teach adult or community college classes for not more than 67 percent of the hours per week considered a full-time assignment for regular employees having comparable duties shall be classified as a temporary employee, and shall not become a contract employee under Section 87604.

While this section of the Ed Code was originally intended to discourage administrators of community college districts from loading up faculty with part-time temporary faculty by making it a time-consuming and fussy task, the result has been the opposite: districts have instead increased administrative responsibilities (and administrative positions) in order to patrol the schedules and stop any part-timer from working more than 67% and triggering re-classification.

Section 87482.5 is why the majority of California’s 1.8 million community college students are taught by a faculty of whom about 70 percent, or around 38,000, are employed on a basis that is both part-time and temporary.  Part-time means that they do not work at any one district full-time. They work 67% or less, usually a lot less. Temporary means that they do not have expectation of re-employment. This affects the quality of the education students get. Students lose out when their faculty have to work at multiple campuses to make up a full load and cannot promise continuity of teaching, counseling, or advocacy in the forums of governance and the public sphere.

This situation is unique to California. Although other states employ faculty in higher ed, including community colleges, as temporaries (also called adjuncts) no other state prohibits adjuncts from working full-time at a college or university. So while it’s true that in other states the adjunct problem takes the form of faculty who are not tenure-line and are teaching full-time for adjunct wages, at least they can do all their teaching in one place.

Incremental change has not worked

The two kinds of issues that part-timers in California try to address at the bargaining table are compensation, which includes benefits, and job security. Bargaining for increased wages has been somewhat successful in a few cases.  On the other hand, attempts to bargain versions of job security, even simple seniority lists, have been generally unsuccessful. Employers, especially public sector employers, will give away money long before they give away power, and job security is a form of power.

However, without job security, more money per class does not protect part-timers from sudden losses in income. If one expects to teach three classes in a semester, at $6,000 each, and one class is suddenly cancelled or given to someone else, the fact that the $6,000 per class is a higher wage than last year’s $5,500 per class wage is no comfort.

Even in a district where bargaining has achieved parity in wages (same pay per class for part-timers as for full-timers; same salary schedule), the two-tier system remains in place. Even in places where there is parity, there is no way for a part-timer to earn the same as a full-timer because a part-timer is, by definition, only allowed to work 67% of a full time load.

The “Consolidation” bills and the $200M for healthcare

Previous attempts to address the two-tier problem have been to raise the cap – not actually eliminate it from the Ed Code, but just “lift” it somewhat.  But even lifting the cap keeps the cap in place. Like being “a little bit pregnant,” it doesn’t solve the two-tier problem.

This “lift the cap” approach has been tried twice. Each time, a bill has been sent from the California Legislature to Governor Newsom’s desk to allow part-time temporary faculty to work up to 85% of a full-time load without triggering re-classification.  The benefit to students and institutions would be that faculty would be able to consolidate their teaching to a single district and contribute to the student and institutional life outside the classroom. The benefit to faculty would be avoiding scheduling conflicts, long commutes and duplication of institutional commitments. The administrative busy work of patrolling the schedule to prevent someone working too much would stay in place.

Both consolidation bills (AB 375 and AB 1856) were vetoed by Governor Newsom.  The financial arguments provided to support his vetoes have been widely criticized as inaccurate but also wrong-headed.

In his second veto message (September 2022) Governor Newsom noted that the 2022 Budget Act would provide $200 million in ongoing funding to incentivize community colleges to provide health insurance for part-time faculty at the community colleges.  This is great. It will save lives. One catch is that the part-timers at each district would have to persuade their union to make an effort to bargain access to this money with their district. The districts should have no problem saying yes – it’s basically free money. The challenge is an organizing challenge: getting the news out, getting part-timers to look towards their unions for support, getting the unions to step up and do the work of bargaining.

What does structural change look like?

These “consolidation bills” demanded incremental change. Even with the sweetener of access to health care money does, they did not count as the kind of structural change that is needed.  Both consolidation bills preserved the two tiers of the current system; they just raised the cap on the lower tier. Both of them crashed.

The only remaining choice is to turn away from incremental change and work for structural change. The first step would be to just get rid of Ed Code 87482.5(a). There are some other items in the Ed Code that have to do with how 87482.5(a) is implemented; those would simply get dropped out of the statute.

Maybe Governor Newsom vetoed the consolidation bills because he was saying, “This isn’t good enough. Bring me a bill that wipes out the two-tier system entirely.” This may be giving him credit he doesn’t deserve, but it would be consistent with the US “ticket to fight” labor system, in which highly combustible issues that involve thousands or millions of people – like the right to form a union – are basically tossed to the crowd of people who care about it to let them fight it out.

If the two-tier system were eliminated and the California community college employed faculty on the basis of equal pay for equal work, it would become a one-tier system. So what would that look like?  

That’s when the fight could start. I hope I’m around to see what happens.