March 14, 1996

INDECENT PROPOSALS

ll managers work 12 months a year except for the following: Director of Learning Resources, 11 months; Director of Athletics, 11.5 months; Director of Nursing/Allied Health, 11 months; Director of Counseling, 11.5 months; Director of DSPS/Learning Skills, 11.5 months; Director of Matriculation and Research 11 months; and Director of Student Development, 11 months. In reference to CCFT's just released Special Salary Edition, do keep in mind that we purposefully referred to increases in monthly amounts. We did not want to give credibility to the administrative shell game managers use when discussing annual salaries. A number of managers (as shown in our salary flyer) received raises, for example, at some point between April 1995 and March 1996. On another note, management may respond by saying that it reduced some mid-managers' positions from 12 months to 11 months and saved money. That does not change the fact that those managers' "hourly" wage, so to speak, increased, and for some, dramatically. Nor does it change the fact that if the new management salary schedule is approved by the Board, beginning in July (with the new fiscal year), managers who have not yet reached the top of their salary schedule will get monthly increases that will raise their annual salary substantively; so, in essence, their position may have been reduced by a month's time, but they will be making more money per year. Also, there is no guarantee that the above managers may not have their positions increased to 12 months at any time. For example, the Nursing Director's position was increased last year from 10.5 months to 11 months. Also, remember, the Director of Counseling was a division chair less than two years ago at a 10 month contract; as Director, the time was raised to 11 months, and now it's 11.5 months. So, as you can see, the time can fluctuate. And with the two new managerial positions added this year, we see an overall increase in administrative salary spending.

We're sure that many faculty simply are disturbed by the amount of money managers make. That is not CCFT's primary focus. We are disturbed by the amount of increase proposed by the new management salary schedule. And although CCFT has no direct influence over managers' salaries, we can speak to the district's "ability to pay" when it comes to faculty salaries and when a proposal diverts a great deal of money from the available and limited pot of funds.

A few weeks ago, one of my colleagues had a career specialist speak to her students about the job market, career trends, and ways to prepare for future occupations. As it turned out, the overriding theme was one with which we are all familiar: the trend toward part-time jobs, no health care benefits, more education needed to get a job, and lower salaries when you finally get one, etc. My colleague and her students were left rather depressed at this disheartening news, and we talked about it afterwards.

The thing that struck my friend the most was how this specialist expected the students to just accept the occupational trends and its dire consequences. My colleague wanted to jump up and shout to her students, "It doesn't have to be that way! You don't have to accept that! You can get active!"

I couldn't agree more. In fact, the trend that we see nationally, we also see on a local scale. On this campus we also are expected to passively accept the dire consequences of a recession and limited budgets. Because, for example, we do not replace full-time faculty at the same rate that we lose them, much less increase the ratio of full timers to part timers, our job responsibilities grow without commensurate compensation, and we suffer more and more from overwork, frustration, stress, and burnout. Yet, like those students in my colleague's classroom, faculty are expected to suffer it quietly, as if protesting somehow makes us less professional. However, I am convinced that speaking up for professional and occupational standards makes us more professional, not less.

As the conversation with my colleague progressed, I was struck by how the gap between the haves and the have nots grows ever wider, even here on our own campus. Last May, the Board approved, in concept, a new salary schedule for all administrators, hoping to place them at or near the median of their counterparts at other colleges while abandoning that very concept for the faculty.

Likewise, all administrators have campus-bought computers on their desks, yet very few faculty do. I hear administrators complain about not being able to e-mail certain offices on campus, whereas most of us don't even have a computer from which to send or receive e-mail in the first place.

Perhaps some of the most egregious examples of the gap between the haves and have nots on campus are recent management violations of due process and free speech rights (In one case, without authorization last month a manager confiscated and disposed of a faculty member's personal and political commentary on a staff bulletin board because the manager did not believe that off-campus political activities belonged on campus.). Too often people in powerful positions forget that they must follow established rules of conduct, even if it means that things get done a little more slowly or that they will have to work with someone with whom they don't particularly agree or even like.

So, what's a labor union good for, anyway? (You were wondering when I was going to get to that.) And why should professionals belong to a union? One good reason is that people aren't perfect. Administrators sometimes make mistakes with due process rights, falsely interpret contracts, and wrongly implement policies, and all too often they don't want to remedy their mistakes. Campus unions act as watchdogs for those inevitable errors. Negotiated union contracts protect faculty as well as management by providing fair, clearly defined, enforceable dispute resolution procedures. And believe me, anyone can find themselves needing those procedures at any time.

Professional labor unions help keep workplaces safe from hazards. They keep jobs protected against management whim. Unions help keep professional and educational standards intact, such as limiting class size increases when administrators see such increases as ways to save money. Unions, through negotiated contracts, provide means for faculty to receive fair compensation for work done, in lieu of broken "gentlemanly agreements" (witness the death of "The Formula" a few years ago and the violation of agreements to wait on the proposed management salary schedule). Unions help protect health care benefits. Professional unions help ensure balanced input into major campus decisions by negotiating the placement of faculty union members onto major committees. Professionals who are union members can be proud of their association, for they are promoting professional standards, accountability, and dignity of the highest sort.

I have some advice to the colleague whom I mentioned at the beginning of this article. I say to her, "Help your students realize that economics doesn't have to drive all societal decisions. Show them that they do have power. Let your students know that their education does mean something. Help your students realize that they can have dignity, fairness, and security in whatever occupation they choose." One way to have those things is to organize and join a labor union. For until we live in a perfect world, labor unions are a viable, even vital, choice for our graduates and, for us, as professionals, as well.

CCFT would like to thank Board President Ellen Harper for extending the first reading of the management salary schedule to the April meeting. We felt that she was listening to the faculty.

We would also like to commend Marie Kiersch for her independent voting at the March Board meeting. Further, it is evident that Ms. Kiersch really does her homework prior to Board meetings and cares about the Cuesta student.

At a prior meeting, when the Board was discussing the academic calendar, Jim Brabeck questioned why we were discussing calendar at all. He said that in the past it hadn't been done this way and felt that the calendar was a student, and not a faculty, issue. When we responded that the law provided for union representation in matters of calendar, he expressed frustration at being constrained by the law and stated that he thought the law should be changed. CCFT expects that the entire Board of Trustees be intimately familiar with the laws governing collective bargaining. It will prevent many misunderstandings in the future.

Subsequent to a bargained agreement between CCFT and management, 3 1/2 faculty members of the Staff Development Committee ( and the Faculty Flex Committee) are now appointed by CCFT (the "1/2" represents a joint appointment with the Academic Senate). CCFT has worked hard this year to make the flex program more responsive to faculty. The CCFT appointees on the Staff Development Committee are moving ahead in conjunction with the coordinator and the other committee members to bring positive change to the program.

I asked Marilyn Rossa to appoint me to the Committee because I believe the flex program at Cuesta needs to better serve the individual and discipline-based needs of the faculty. The program at Cuesta has not been particularly flexible, and it has followed the high-school workshop/inservice model of faculty professional development, instead of the college model as intended in AB 1725. There is a growing consensus in the committee that faculty, as professionals, are in the best position to determine their development needs. A program that is truly flexible and truly serves the faculty entails several reforms or at least changes in emphasis in the existing program:

1. A change in ethos: Flex activity forms and publicity should emphasize that individual projects (e.g., reading programs, curriculum revisions) and conference attendance are encouraged, even preferred ways, to meet flex requirements. Title 5 does not require or assume that campus-based workshops are the only or primary way to fulfill these requirements. Workshops should be available, but they need not be the focus of the program.

2. Real flexibility: Workshops need not be scheduled during flex days only, and flex days are not only workshop days. Faculty in their divisions might, for example, want to schedule technology sessions at any time during the academic year, and they should be encouraged to do so. Similarly, faculty might want to spend a flex day catching up on journal reading, rather than attending a workshop on campus (This latter example is possible now, but too many faculty have come to believe that "flex day" means "workshop day."). Most important, faculty should be able--and state regulations have never prohibited it--to receive flex credit during the hours of 8:00-4:00. Regulations only preclude faculty from claiming flex credit for times that they are normally in class or holding office hours. Cuesta faculty should no longer find themselves in the ridiculous bureaucratic illogic of attending or participating in professional conferences during week days and not being able to claim flex credit for them. Finally, whereas flex hour accountability is required by the state, scheduling and reporting flex activities should be made easy, and all forms should be guided by a presumption of faculty professionalism.

3. District Required Day : A District, through the process of shared governance, may schedule a district required day, but it is not mandatory to do so. My feeling is that a semesterly coming together of the campus is a good idea, an opportunity for the kind of formalities that help bind communities together. But there is no automatic good reason to assume the burden for the expense of an outside speaker, and there is certainly nothing written in stone that workshops must be held that day. This is why the Faculty Flex Committee has substituted division-/discipline-based activities on district-required day for workshops this Spring semester: let faculty in their divisions decide what their professional development requires ( We apologize for the short notice this semester).

4. Distribution of funds: The first priority for scarce funds should be requests for off-campus conference/workshop attendance. We do not need to use these funds for expensive speakers or morning muffins on district required day (The faculty and classified unions offered to supply district required day refreshments to preserve Staff Development funds, but after the union offer was made, Dr. Mitchell chose to pay for the muffins out of her own budget). We also need to develop guidelines for management requests for funds. Whereas extensive guidelines exist for faculty and classified, none exist for management. The guidelines, in general, need to be revisited.

If you have questions, concerns, or new ideas, please be in touch with Susan Marsala.

At the bargaining session of February 26, management made clear its misinterpretation of CCFT's faculty evaluation proposal. When questioned, management stated that it knew CCFT was not eliminating the student component from the evaluation process as it had claimed in two prior "fact sheets." In our view, no satisfactory answer was given to our inquiry about why the District would have stated such. Management hoped we could all move on from there. We appreciate management's acknowledgment and also its toning down of the latest "fact sheet." CCFT would like nothing better than to have a collegial relationship with management. But that relationship must be based on truths.

We're sure that faculty do not enjoy reading about the discord between CCFT and the administration. Let us assure you; we wish relations were better. However, we feel we have no choice but to inform the faculty when issues arise that damage CCFT's credibility or affect faculty's jobs.

We extend our hand to management in collegiality and professionalism. We want nothing more than a fair contract and equity for all faculty.

EDITOR: Marilyn Rossa

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