A Tale of Greed and Gluttony: The California Part-Time Faculty Equity Fund Boondoggle
by Chris Cumo and P.D. Lesko
Since 2001, thanks to the Part-Time Faculty Equity Pay Law, legislators in California have, yearly, earmarked $57 million dollars in tax money to go toward pay increases for the state’s 35,740 part-time faculty. Prior to the passage of the Part-Time Faculty Equity Pay Law, a typical part-timer teaching four courses per semester earned an average annual salary of $20,000.
According to data recently released by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office in Sacramento and analyzed by California Community College Legislative Analyst Chris Storer, in the 2001-2002 fiscal year, college officials dispersed only $47.6 million of the $57 million to faculty. Of that $47.6 million that officials did distribute to faculty, not all ended up in the paychecks of part-time faculty. Full-time faculty have pocketed millions of dollars of the equity pay the state’s legislators and taxpayers were led to believe would go toward bolstering the pay of the state’s temporary faculty.
Michael Ludder teaches part-time, and is Council Member of the All Faculty Association (AFT Local 1946) at Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa, California. There, the average pay for adjuncts is $72.35 per contact hour, nearly $18 above the statewide average. However, Ludder estimates that being an adjunct has cost him $100,000 over the last eight years, money he would have pocketed were he full-time. To add insult to injury, the Executive Board of the All Faculty Association, which represents both full and part-time faculty at Santa Rosa Junior College, recently removed Ludder from the union’s negotiating team.
Ludder’s sin? He objected to part-time faculty equity pay money being distributed to the college’s full-time faculty.
MILLIONS IN PART-TIME FACULTY EQUITY MONEY POCKETED BY FULL-TIME FACULTY
“It’s a very controversial issue,” says Ben Lett, Interim Executive Vice President for Business and Administration at Compton College in Compton. “It hasn’t been resolved yet.”
The issue of full-time faculty pocketing part-time faculty equity pay money turns on how one interprets the teaching-equivalency premise, and the Part-Time Faculty Equity Pay Law (SB 739).
“We believe that teaching is teaching, and teachers are teachers,” says Martin Goldstein, California Part-Time Faculty Association Director of Public Relations. “We all put in usually more than our fair share of time per class, only part-timers are paid less for it.”
Goldstein believes equity money belongs to California’s 35,740 part-time faculty. In fact, full parity isn’t enough for him. Goldstein wants equity money to boast part-time pay above $1 for every $1 full-time faculty earn per course, with the amount above $1 to compensate for the fact that adjuncts lack job security.
Philip Hartley, Assistant Superintendent of the Santa Clarita Community College District and Executive Vice President of the College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita, agrees that teaching is teaching, but doesn’t think this principle merits equal pay for adjuncts. Full-time faculty, he says, have a different contractual relationship with a college than do part-time instructors, one that demands greater responsibility. Hartley cites the example of a corporation with a CEO and a custodian. The custodian may have a more physically demanding job, but the CEO has the greater responsibility and so the greater pay. The same, he reasons, holds true for full-time faculty.
Carl Friedlander, Los Angeles College Faculty Guild President, believes that the same work should carry the same pay, a principle that would collapse, he believes, if part-time faculty collected equity pay for a course, but full-time faculty did not collect equity pay for overload work. Other union officials wonder why the Los Angeles Community College District should give equity pay to adjuncts who work as full-time faculty at another institution, but not to the “in-house” full-time faculty. Los Angeles College Faculty Guild Assistant to the President, Don Sparks, points out that some adjuncts work full-time in business, and earn more per year than the district’s full-time faculty. Why, Sparks argues, should such adjuncts have special claim to equity pay?
As a result, where collective-bargaining agreements permit it, full-time faculty receive equity pay for teaching courses above their regular course loads, so-called “overload” courses.
“We consider overloads and adjunct loads as hourly assignments, and both are treated the same,” says Deborah Sweitzer, Chief Negotiator for the All Faculty Association at Santa Rosa Junior College in Santa Rosa. “There is no distinction between an adjunct who works full-time somewhere else and a full-timer who also works an overload here.”
Union leaders at San Jose Community College agree. On August 26, 2002 union officials of the San Jose/Evergreen Faculty Association, AFT local 6157, announced “Victory!” in the organization’s newsletter. “Full-time Faculty that Worked Overload and Part-time Faculty Receive 7.46 percent Retroactive Pay.” In an unsigned piece, a union official writes, “As many of you are aware, the [San Jose/Evergreen] Faculty Association signed a tentative agreement with the District on the Part-time Equity Money allocated by the state. All adjunct faculty, and many tenured faculty who worked overload, received checks on June 27th for 7.46 percent of all appropriate earnings from Fall 2001 through Spring 2002.”
Local 6157’s full-time faculty union members received their equity fund checks 30 days before the part-timers.
However, at other union locals, leaders have interpreted the letter and spirit of the Equity Pay law differently.
On October 16, 2001 members of AFT local 2276, at Glendale Community College met and voted “[n]ot to apply Part-time equity funds to the full time overload salary scale,” according to minutes from the monthly membership meeting held that day.
In the October 2001 issue of the San Mateo Community College union newsletter, The Advocate, Part-Time Faculty Coordinator Paddy Moran writes that the District “will receive $1 million to go solely to part-time faculty salaries.”
In the October of 2002 issue of The Advocate, San Mateo union co-President Joaquin Rivera announced the distribution of the 2001-2002 equity funds. Rivera writes: “I want to remind you that the purpose of these equity funds is to improve the salaries of part-time faculty. The actual language in the law (SB 739) states that ‘these funds are to be used to assist districts in making part-time salaries more comparable to full-time salaries,’ so using the equity money to improve only the salaries of part-time faculty is consistent with both the language and the intent of the law.”
Santa Rosa Junior College’s Michael Ludder calls the diversion of equity money to full-time faculty “the elephant in the china shop.”
The size of the elephant is difficult to gauge.
Santa Rosa Junior College received $1,040,846 from the state legislature in fiscal year 2001-2002. If full-time faculty devoured 20 percent of the equity pie, as Michael Ludder estimates, they pocketed $208,169.20.
In a December 2001 article from the Santa Rosa union’s monthly newsletter, AFA Update, an unidentified union official writes about the anticipated division of the 2001-2002 equity pie: “[b]ased on the number of hours taught as hourly assignments in each unit, Unit A [part-time faculty] will receive $933,639 and Unit B [full-time faculty] will receive $107,207, effective this academic year.” According to the newsletter, then, full-time faculty at the college received 10.3 percent of the total equity fund allotment that year.
Analyst Chris Storer estimates that each year 15 percent of part-time faculty equity money goes to full-time faculty. Mary Millet, Co-President of Palomar Faculty Federation and California Federation of Teachers Part-Time Faculty Coordinator, estimates the proportion of part-time faculty equity pay distributed to full-time faculty as between one-quarter and one-third of the total.
According to these estimates, then, between 2001-2003, full-time faculty at the 72 districts pocketed part-time faculty equity pay totalling anywhere from $17.1 to $31.3 million dollars.
How much equity money, on average, goes to an individual teaching part-time and to her full-time colleague? Paul Simmons, Director of Professional Development at the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges in Sacramento, has no estimate. No one at the California Community College Chancellor’s Office, or with the California Secretary of Education would hazard a guess. However, the Chancellor’s Office “Report on Staffing for Fall 2003” lists 17,345 tenure or tenure-eligible faculty and 35,740 temporary faculty. Using these numbers, during 2001-2002 a full-timer received an average of $686.08, and each part-timer an average of $998.89.
Fusako Yokotobi is the Vice Chancellor of Human Resources for the California Community College Chancellor’s Office. She emphasizes the difficulty of keeping track of who gets what equity money under California’s modern-day equivalent of feudalism: each of the 72 community college districts is autonomous and bargains with faculty over how to divide the part-time faculty equity pie.
For example, Compton College dispersed 40 percent of its $648,948 allotment over both fiscal years 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 to full-time faculty, says Interim Executive Vice President for Business and Administration Ben Lett.
Since 2001, in the Los Angeles Community College District, the full-time faculty teaching overload courses have taken home either 30 or 22 percent of the District’s yearly $5 million dollar part-time equity pay fund allotment, depending on to whom you speak. Los Angeles College Faculty Guild Part-Time Representative Deborah Kaye wrote in an e-mail that “[a]bout 70 percent of the equity money went to 2,476 part-timers and about 30 percent to full-timers doing additional assignments.” Los Angeles College Faculty Guild President Carl Friedlander put the percentage of equity pay distributed to full-time union members at 22 percent.
Between 2001-2003, the Los Angeles College Faculty Guild received a total of $10,487,067 in equity funds—the state’s largest single distribution. During the course of that time, $2,621,766.75 was dispersed to full-time faculty, and the remaining $7,865,300.25 was distributed to the part-time faculty. In Fall 2002, the Los Angeles Community College District employed 1,665 full-time staff including administrators, librarians, counselors and others in non-teaching assignments and 2,497 adjuncts, says George Prather, the district’s Chief of the Office of Institutional Research and Information.
College and union officials from other districts throughout the state reported similar distribution breakdowns:
- At the San Francisco Community College District, Community College Teachers of San Francisco (AFT local 2121) President Allan Fisher estimates full-time faculty receive between five and 20 percent of the District’s yearly $1.9 million allotment.
- At Ventura County Community College District, Ventura County Federation of Teachers Executive Director Ruth Hunt estimates full-time faculty union members receive 17 percent of the yearly $1.36 million allotment.
- Bennett Oppenheim, Negotiator for United Faculty of Ohlone at Ohlone College in Fremont puts the percentage of equity money given to full-time faculty at seven percent of the college’s yearly $400,000 state allotment.
- At Victor Valley College in Victorville, California, James E. Williams, Vice President of Administrative Services, says that full-time faculty receive, on average, 4.5 percent of the $429,000 allotted to part-time faculty.
MISSING, INACCURATE & INCOMPLETE EXPENDITURE REPORTS
According to an October 2, 2002 California Community College Chancellor’s Office memorandum, each district was required to file an independently audited expenditure report, a copy of the negotiated equity agreement between district and faculty, salary schedules for full- and part-time faculty, and the calculations that show how a district spends the part-time equity funds.
Adjunct Advocate asked the Chancellor’s Office to provide copies of all independently audited reports filed between 2001-2003. Examination of the information showed that many colleges have filed neither the ependiture reports nor any required supporting documentation.
These missing or incomplete expenditure reports represent $25 million dollars in taxpayer money for which officials at the community colleges, unions, and the Chancellor’s Office cannot account. This amount represents almost one-quarter of the $114 million in part-time faculty equity pay distributed to the 72 districts in California between 2001-2003.
Audited reports filed by 34 districts for fiscal years 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 provided to the Adjunct Advocate by the Chancellor Office, and examined in detail, show that only Los Angeles and Santa Clarita provided all of the required financial records.
Of the remaining 32 district reports examined, 19 filed no expenditure reports for either one or both fiscal years. There were reports that listed $0 for total distribution, blank reports, reports in which the math is incorrect, and reports in which districts shifted money from the fiscal year of appropriation to the next fiscal year.
Lassen Community College’s audited expenditure reports did not appear among those provided to the Adjunct Advocate by the Community College of California Chancellor’s Office.
When asked about the missing expenditure reports in early-March 2004, John Nahlen, Lassen’s Dean of Administrative Services, responded by saying that adjuncts had received all of their equity pay allotments. Dean Nahlen also said that he had sent an “e-mail report” to Fred Harris, the Chancellor’s Office Director of College Finance and Facilities Planning. When asked, Fred Harris said that he had no recollection of having received or seen Nahlen’s e-mail report.
[Editor’s note: In late-March 2004, Interim Public Information Officer Cheryl Fong at the California Community College Chancellor’s Office confirmed receipt of fiscal reports for 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 from Lassen College. The reports were dated 24 March 2004, and each lists single line item, a total of $128,560 in equity pay distributed. Both reports are signed by Lassen Community College President Homer L. Cissell.]
At the Peralta Community College District in Alameda, District officials there have never filed the required expenditure reports. The District distributes money “as a one-time only payment which shall not be part of the base,” according to the September 2002 agreement between Peralta Community College District and Peralta Federation of Teachers. Such distribution methods make it virtually impossible to track total distribution of the $1.7 million Peralta is supposed to have distributed during that time, or to guess how much of the total distribution part-time faculty received. Peralta administrators did not return phone calls to confirm whether the district had distributed equity pay money.
Chaffey Community College District filed no report in 2001-2002. Director of Budgeting Services Anita D. Undercoffer says Chaffey gave part-time faculty all equity funds that year, but filed no report because the college was “negotiating a contract with them.” However, the Chancellor’s Office October 2002 memo clearly states that in such situations a college should file, “a brief narrative describing the status of negotiations and the prospects for timely and successful conclusion of negotiations.”
Chaffey Community College filed a report with the Chancellor’s Office in 2002-2003. In that report, the college claims it distributed its state allocated $663,378 in equity money plus an additional $6.2 million in equity money from its own budget. As a result, each adjunct at the school should have received an equity pay distribution equal to $11,979.79.
Frank Sullivan has taught physical education part-time at Chaffey for nine years, and teaches 14 credits per semester, one credit shy of a full-time load. He received $2000 in equity pay in 2002-2003.
Chaffey officials did not respond to repeated requests for a comment.
At Mt. San Jacinto College, officials filed reports in both 2001-2002 and 2002-2003 showing a distribution of $367,018 to part-time faculty.
“Mt. San Jacinto College has paid 100 percent of equity pay funds received directly to associate faculty,” says Vice President of Business Services Becky Elam.
But a part-timer’s March 3, 2004 pay stub and college equity pay chart provided to the Adjunct Advocate show a total of $450.38 in equity pay disbursed, instead of the $663.00 indicated on the college’s equity pay chart. The adjunct, who spoke on condition of anonymity, alleges that other part-time faculty at the school have received only half the amount listed on the college’s equity pay chart. College officials did not respond to repeated requests for a comment.
FINDING OUT WHO RECEIVED EQUITY MONEY AND WHO DIDN’T
At colleges where equity pay funds were distributed, the lack of fiscal reporting concerning who received the funds means a definitive answer to the question of who got what cannot be accurately determined. In fact, college and union officials repeatedly refused to answer questions about whether full-time faculty received money from the part-time equity fund.
Mt. San Jacinto Faculty Association President, Roy B. Mason, would only comment to say that the college calculates full-time faculty overload pay on the part-time faculty pay scale. It is worth noting, however, that full-time faculty pay increased 6.4 percent more than did adjunct pay between 2000 and 2002, according to California Part-Time Faculty Association Legislative Analyst Chris Storer’s research. This increase may be an artifact of the way Mt. San Jacinto College distributes equity pay: as a bonus. A bonus would not, of course, appear on the college’s pay schedule.
Butte Community College Part-Time Faculty Association President Stacey Burks would also like to know how much of the equity pay has gone to the school’s full-time faculty.
“Mt. San Jacinto has been one of the most reluctant and difficult community college administrations to work with,” she says “They refuse to give us records.”
The situation is somewhat different, though just as confusing, at Citrus Community College District in Glendora.
“Citrus Community College District is receiving the Part-Time Faculty Compensation funds one year but using them the next…. Funds received from the 2002-[20]03 allocation will be used in the 2003-[20]04 fiscal year,” states its 2002-2003 expenditure report.
This policy conflicts with the Chancellor’s Office directive that a district may not shift its allocation to future fiscal years. Jean Malone, the college’s Vice President of Human Resources and the District’s Chief Negotiator, said she had received approval to shift the funds from year-to-year from the Chancellor’s Office. California Community College District Chancellor Marshall Drummond refused to comment.
Human Resources Director Sheri Wright isn’t sure why MiraCosta Community College District in Oceanside filed no expenditure report in 2001-2002, but she does know that the college withheld $378,083 of its $419,029 allocation that year because the administration was bargaining with part-time faculty.
Ms. Wright explained that MiraCosta distributes any equity pay during spring semester only. Part-time faculty who only teach in the Fall get nothing.
“We had to pick a semester and use it as the population to receive the money,” explains Wright.
Ironically, MiraCosta’s method of distribution penalizes adjuncts. In fact, John Abel and Exia Bauer, who teach at MiraCosta, allege that they have never received any equity fund money.
But MiraCosta’s method of distribution looks fine to adjunct Patty Anderson, who teaches part-time at both MiraCosta and Palomar Community College District. At Palomar, in San Marcos, she receives $21 less per hour than at MiraCosta, and no pay for mandatory office hours. Palomar filed blank expenditure reports for both years, and has yet to distribute any equity pay. The college is not alone in its failure to distribute the funds. As of March 3, 2003, 14 of the 72 districts hadn’t reported a distribution of any equity money, says California Part-Time Faculty Association Legislative Analyst Chris Storer.
“It [the equity money] is all being held hostage to negotiations by the administration,” says Palomar Faculty Federation Representative Frosty Miller, “in spite of the fact that it can be spent in no other way.”
Wilbur Cotton teaches music part-time at Compton College, where he served on the Academic Senate and as a contract negotiator. Cotton hasn’t received any equity pay, and he agrees with Frosty Miller that the equity pay money will sit in the District’s bank account until the college fashions a bargaining agreement with the faculty union. The tactic is legal, but iron-fisted.
“A Statement of Facts” from California’s Public Employees Relations Board in Sacramento reveals that North Orange Community College District in Cypress, likewise, used the negotiating tactic of withholding equity money until finalizing a bargaining agreement, but with a perverse twist. On August 20, 2001, the college and the AFT local representing adjuncts agreed to a 13.5 percent pay raise for part-time faculty. In the agreement, the college promised to negotiate payment of equity money. Later, when Co-Chief Negotiator Dennis Konshak broached the topic, he learned the money was gone. The college had used it to fund the 13.5 percent pay raise in violation of the negotiated agreement.
“The district absorbed all the money, and part-time faculty have received none of it,” says Konshak.
A GIANT BOONDOGGLE
“It’s another giant boondoggle,” Community College Association Director Dee Wood says of the way in which equity money has been distributed.
Lacy Barnes-Mileham, Acting Vice-President for Community Colleges in California’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors, calls the situation “sheer and utter confusion” and “a statistical nightmare.”
Officials in Dr. Drummond’s Chancellor’s Office have no plans to step in and oversee the distribution of the funds more rigorously in response to the ongoing problems and complaints. A 38 percent budget cut has hobbled the Chancellor’s Office, says Director of College Finance and Facilities Planning Fred Harris. However, in response to questions posed to Public Information Officer Cheryl Fong about missing audited equity pay expenditure reports, Executive Vice Chancellor Victoria Morrow promised scrutiny of all expenditure reports.
In the meantime, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to roll the equity fund money into the general appropriations to the districts. Steve Boilard, Executive Director of Higher Education for the Legislative Office in Sacramento, would support this change in the budget.
“If part-timers aren’t getting paid ‘enough’ then part-timers can exercise their right to apply to a different college or job that will offer them ‘enough,’” says Boilard. “I’m not naïve about this point. One doesn’t just bounce around jobs willy-nilly.”
Boilard raises an important question: to what degree should government intervene in a labor market? The state legislature already requires California’s community colleges to staff 75 percent of their credit hours with full-time faculty.
On the other side of the debate, Los Angeles College Faculty Guild President Carl Friedlander hopes to preserve equity pay as a line item in the budget. His AFT local, as well as others, has passed a resolution urging the legislature to hold firm. The argument for scaling back government intervention in a labor market doesn’t persuade Friedlander, who believes the same rationale undermines the minimum wage and other progressive legislation.
The trouble is that dividing California’s yearly $50+ million dollar equity pay pie has become a battle. On every front, the Equity Fund in California bleeds money. Full-time faculty sop up millions. Districts refuse to distribute the money, and use it as leverage in negotiations. And millions of dollars cannot be accounted for, despite Chancellor Office directives that distribution of the money be tracked through audited financial reporting.
“Can it get any worse?” asks California Part-Time Faculty Association Legislative Analyst Chris Storer.
Unfortunately, yes. Local community college district officials could continue to refuse to distribute funds, misappropriate and reallocate part-time faculty equity money. Local bargaining units might fracture over continued union-sanctioned diversion of part-time faculty equity funds to full-time faculty.
Legislatures in other states, such as Washington State, where union activists are lobbying hard for the implementation of a similar equity pay program, might look askance at events in California and silence talk of increasing wages for contingent workers. Government officials in California might decide that the abuses in the distribution of equity money more than justify the program’s abolition.
“Locally, we’re still trying to figure out whether or not we’ve gotten this money,” says Chuck Whitten, who teaches in the Santa Clarita Community College District, “…but I’d sure as hell like to know why my pay hasn’t gone up.”
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