The TKO of Washington State House Bill 5802
by Brooke Pielli
Bill 5802 should have been on the fast track to passage and signing.
Fifteen state senators and the American Federation of Teachers sponsored it. According to Keith Hoeller, Washington’s 7,900 part-time faculty would certainly have benefited. Hoeller, is the co-founder of the Washington State Part-Time Faculty Association, and a member of the American Association of University Professors. He was the recipient of the 2002 Thomas S. Szasz Award for Outstanding Contributions to the Cause of Civil Liberties. He was also awarded the Georgina Smith Award for recognition as a person who has provided exceptional leadership in advancing academic collective bargaining and thus improving the profession in general.
This is in recognition of his work to achieve “equal pay for equal work between part-time faculty and full-time faculty.” Hoeller points out that “during that four-year period (1999-2004), all thirty of Washington’s colleges raised salaries for full-time faculty an average of $3,560. Only thirteen of the state’s colleges showed annual salary increases for part-time professors, with the average increase being just $191.00.”
Despite the evident disparities between salary increases given to the state’s full- and part-time faculty, the Bill’s support, and obvious merits, Bill SB5802 died in committee. SB5802 read:
“In the 2005-2007 biennial appropriations act and thereafter, the legislature shall appropriate sufficient funds for allocation to the community and technical colleges for the colleges to implement and maintain pay equity for part-time faculty as described in the final recommendations of the best practices task force.”
The words “pay equity,” killed any chance SB5802 had of passing.
Wendy Radar-Konolfski is an American Federation of Teachers Lobbyist for Washington State. She says: “Pay equity is the pro rata concept of pay proportionate to what you do, that is, equal pay for equal work. Pay parity comes from a survey in the 1980s by the Washington State Board of Community and Technical Colleges that determined that part-timers performed 76 percent of the duties that full-timers did, taking into account, for example, full-timers’ attendance at meetings, etc…. Pay parity, therefore, refers to a percentage of teaching time once used to indicate the difference between part-time and full-time instructors. Pro rata, I believe, is what is found in the newer Bill, SB5304, proposed by Senators Jacobsen, Poulsen, and Kline. The AFT has been working for a few years on the issue of pay equity, and supported SB5802.”
What do these semantics mean, practically, for part-time college professors at the 34 community and technical colleges in Washington State’s 30 college districts? In order to understand how part-time instructors’ salaries would be impacted by any proposed pay equity legislation, one needs to understand Washington’s community and technical college system.
The 2004-2005 Enrollments and Student Demographics report of the Community and Technical Colleges reveals that Washington’s 34 colleges enrolled 455,673 students, or 60 percent of those graduating high school who went on to college. And exactly how many part-timers are teaching those students?
Using data supplied by the State of Washington Board for Community and Technical Colleges for 1999-2004, Keith Hoeller computed that “the thirty college districts in the State of Washington had a total of 3,697 full-time faculty and 7,912 part-time faculty.”
Carla Naccarato-Sinclair, President of the Association for Higher Education, puts the District-wide situation in perspective: “39 percent of classes taught in the Washington Community and Technical Colleges system offered during 2004-05, were taught by part-time instructors.”
[Editor’s note: These were courses offered at state-supported as opposed to private colleges in the State of Washington.]
“May” Becomes “Shall”
After the death of SB5802, three of the sponsors of that proposed bill–Senators Jacobsen, Poulsen, and Kline, introduced a modified version. The main difference between the two bills, “is that 5304 says ‘shall provide automatic incremental funding’ versus SB5802’s ‘may provide,’” explains Senator Ken Jacobsen, one of the bills’ sponsors.
SB5304 made no mention of pay parity or equity. Its focus was on pay increments, what the Bill states as a system of compensation that “recognizes experience, education, and continuing professional development.”
The following language was incorporated into SB5304:
(1) The community and technical college boards of trustees shall use the collective bargaining process to develop local agreements for the awarding of part-time faculty increments using the principles in this subsection.
(a) Part-time faculty salary increments shall be equitable and comparable to full-time salary schedules.”
“These are public colleges, state funded,” says Jacobsen. “The K-12 system is where Community Colleges came from. Everyone wants to keep costs down, benefits low, and it is such a temptation to say they [part-time faculty] have to teach for a certain number of years or so many hours in order to get the salary increment. But then you risk them being laid off as they near that time limit. Even when we do something, the community colleges find some excuse. There’s a lot of [financial] stress in public agencies, but it doesn’t justify this unwillingness to increase salaries.”
By statute, teachers in Washington’s Community and Technical Colleges are called instructors and, while in the liberal arts instructors are required to have Masters degree, in the professional/technical divisions, an Associate of Arts degree is acceptable. Neither liberal arts nor professional/technical programs require instructors to have Ph.D.s. Since part-time and adjunct faculty in the State of Washington can carry teaching loads equal to those of full-time instructors, pay parity and incremental increases would recognize that their teaching loads can be as weighty as their credentials.
In an essay he published in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Keith Hoeller writes that the unions at the community and technical colleges in the State of Washington have negotiated yearly raises for full-time faculty, [but that] 21 of the unions have not bargained for increments for part-timers. Some might believe that the failure of the Legislature to pass SB 5802 resulted from a perceived threat by full-time professors to their own pay scale. The late Sandra Schroeder, then President of the American Federation of Teachers in the State of Washington disagreed: “I personally do not know of any full-time faculty member who does not want to see parity in benefits and pay,” Schroeder was quoted as saying.
As for SB 5802’s failure to pass, Lobbyist, Wendy Rader-Konolfski, can offer no answer as to why it failed.
“The AFT was working on this for a few years, as were the other unions. Funding was obtained for salary increments, and there was support in the House and the Senate. The Senate put in $2.4 million in funding, and the House put in $1 million. But it just didn’t pass.”
In an effort to pass some sort of legislation to raise part-time faculty pay, Substitute Senate Bill 5802 was proposed:
“It is the goal of the legislature in the 2005-07, 2007-09, and 2009-11 fiscal biennia, to provide sufficient funding within available funds to the community and technical colleges for the colleges to implement and maintain one hundred percent pro rata pay for part-time faculty.”
In the Beginning
Perhaps surprisingly, the roots of the current drive for legislated part-time faculty pay equity in Washington State are located in Sacramento, California. Pamela Dillon wrote this about the push for equity pay in California for the Adjunct Advocate:
“In its 1998 report, ‘Marching Toward Equity,’ the American Federation of Teachers documented that part-time college faculty accounted for 42.6 percent of the total number of college faculty in America.
Furthermore, 72 percent of part-timers were paid less than $3,000 per course, and a typical part-timer teaching four courses per semester received an annual salary of $20,000.
“That same report indicated that in California 31,000 community college adjunct faculty represented two-thirds of all faculty in the state, taught 40 percent of classes, but only earned 42 percent of what their full-time counterparts did.
“Thanks to that report, and grass-roots pressure from part-time advocates and the California Federation of Teachers, Governor Gray Davis…set aside $57 million for adjunct teacher salary increases in the 2001-2002 state budget.
Each of the 72 community college districts received a portion of those funds, and district union officials [negotiated] the allocation of that money.”
That last sentence hides an ugly footnote in the California equity pay success story. Between 2001 and 2003, the taxpayers of California ponied up $114 million dollars to be deposited into the state’s Part-Time Faculty Equity Fund.
In a story written in May of 2004, Adjunct Advocate reported that between $17 million and $31 million dollars in equity pay had gone to the state’s full-time faculty working overload courses. At CFT locals across California, union leaders arranged for part-time equity funds to be applied to their full-time faculty overload salary scales.
In 1996, around the same time that the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) was conducting research for its “Marching Toward Equity” report, the Washington State Legislature, at the urging of the Washington Federation of Teachers (WFT), directed the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges to conduct a best practices audit on compensation practices and working conditions for part-faculty. The Board’s resulting ten-year plan was supposed to have improved salaries, benefits, and working conditions. By 2006, a level of pay equity for part-time faculty should have been reached. Unlike in California, where the CFT had to rely on politicians to redress pay inequity, the Board’s plan should have saved the WFT the time and expense of having to work through elected officials.
When 2006 dawned, and there still wasn’t pay equity between full-time and part-time faculty, Senators Kohl-Welles, Delvin, Shin, Spanel, Carrell, Fairly, Keiser, Roach, Jacobsen, Poulsen, Kline, Pridemore, McAuliffe, Weinstein, Eide, Berkey, Rasmussen, and Rockefeller proposed House Bill S5802.
Senator Jerome Delvin, a supporter of S5802, has served ten years in the State House of Representatives and is in his second year of the Senate term. He is a former police officer.
“Some of the part-timers in the community and technical colleges are Ph.D.s and some are not,” says Senator Delvin. “The Community Colleges have a tenure-track for the full-time faculty which is all budget driven. Salaries are met from money allocated by the State and given to the State Board of Education for the Community Colleges.
“The amount of money allocated isn’t always the same each session. The part-timers, some of whom teach at several colleges, have felt under appreciated. It has been an issue, that I know of, for twelve years. While no one testified against us, one or two votes where the Bill was defeated clearly showed it was a budget issue. Our Bill never got to the third reading in the House. And students at the community colleges are paying the same no matter if their instructor is a full-timer or a part-timer. There is a need for this (pay equity).”
A reading is when a proposed Bill is read into the record at the State Legislature. Readings originated in the early days of the nation when illiteracy was more common. Proposed Bills were read aloud so that their content could be made known to everyone. A Bill can have a number of readings as changes are made to the original document. SB5802 was read for the first time on February 7, 2005 before being referred to Committee. It went through several readings along with a substitute Bill (SSB5802) sponsored, this time by the Senate Committee on Labor, Commerce, Research and Development.
The main difference between the original Bill 5802 and Substitute Bill 5802 is section (5). In the original Bill this section reads: “the legislature shall appropriate sufficient funds for allocation to the community and technical colleges for the colleges to implement and maintain pay equity for part-time faculty as described in the final recommendations of the best practices task force.”
In SSB5802 the goal is “to provide sufficient funding within available funds to the community and technical colleges for the colleges to implement and maintain one hundred per cent pro rata for part-time faculty” with salary schedules subject to collective bargaining.
A second Bill, Senate Bill 5304, was read January 2005 by its supporters, Senators Jacobsen, Poulsen, and Kline. S5304 contains a specific funding mechanism of legislative appropriation to provide community and technical college faculty salary increment awards. The Bill was first read in January 2005. It proposed achieving its intention by calling for the college boards of trustees to award faculty salary increments based on local agreements. The collective bargaining process was to be employed to develop these local agreements.
S5304 further stipulated that when a part-time faculty member is first hired his or her prior teaching experience be counted in placing him or her at the appropriate increment step. This means that the part-time instructor’s previous workload would be matched up with a specific increment step to determine starting salary.
Under S5304, which deals with increments and not pay equity, colleges are encouraged, though not mandated, to allot increments in a manner so as to decrease the disparity between part-time and full-time faculty pay. The Bill states that its intent is for State appropriations to be adjusted to an amount where these increments can be met.
State of Washington colleges are directed to have their part-time salary increment scales in place within one year of the effective date of that section or they will be in non-compliance. Salary increments are to be awarded part-time faculty retroactive to the beginning of the fall quarter 2005.
S5304 further stipulates that in no instance may part-time faculty increments contribute to an increase in the disparity between part-time and full-time salaries.
This last provision is in response to the situation in California, which also lacks pay parity, where Governor Gray Davis had $57 million set aside for adjunct teacher’s salaries in the 2001-2002 state budget. What resulted were efforts by at least one teachers’ union to siphon some of those funds to full-time, tenure-track instructors on the basis of teaching overload or overtime, (technically seen as part-time work). This would fail to narrow the gap in disparity between full-time tenured and part-time salaries.
Ten years after the original SB5802 was proposed, and one year after SB5304 was proposed, part-time and adjunct professors still do not have pay parity or pay equity.
The legislative situation to create pay parity became even more complicated when the Association of Higher Education union supported House Bill H2595. This legislation gives “increments pay at .8 percent of base faculty salaries each year to the community and technical colleges for both full-time and part-time instructors.” Second substitute Bill 2595 was ultimately passed by a vote of 96 to 2.
Terry Knudsen, a part-time faculty Associate with a degree from Gonzaga University in Fiction Writing and Composition, a Masters in Fine Arts from Eastern Washington University, and a Masters of Initial Teaching from Gonzaga, has had the experience of teaching on a 12 weeks (at a time) contract as opposed to the one year contract tenure-track instructors have.
“I was raised in Philadelphia with all the history about freedom and democracy surrounding me. I came to Spokane sensing that I would be treated fairly. And at first, I was. This was from 1988 to 2005. Most of my classes were filled with students who were unable to read or write. Mostly developmental classes below 100. From 1988 to 1991 I taught fifteen classes a year, a full-time load.”
Despite this, Knudsen was a part-time instructor and paid at that 1988 to 1991 rate, with no benefits.
“The pay is so bad most people don’t want to stay,” says Knudsen.
Whether Washington State’s part-timers have the political clout to get a pay parity or pay equity law passed remains to be seen. There are those part-time faculty in Washington who fear that, should legislation similar to that in California be signed into law, the state’s education unions will allow money meant for part-time faculty equity pay to go to full-time faculty teaching overload. In the end, Washington’s part-timers would be entitled to equity pay, but actually receive only a portion of the funds allocated by the legislature.
Co-Founder with Keith Hoeller of the Washington State Part-Time Faculty Association, Knudsen believes the issue is one of equality.
“In the Washington State Community Colleges, there are about 25 percent full-time instructors and 75 percent part-time instructors. In addition, we (the part-time instructors) teach about 50 percent of the classes. We need pay parity….”
