Washington State Union Asks Adjunct VP to Resign For Defending Adjunct Interests

The vice president for the Olympic College Association of Higher Education asked the OC AHE secretary to step down from his position for acting inconsistent with the union’s stance.
Union VP for OC Chip Barker sent an e-mail to union Secretary for OC Jack Longmate February 4, 2011 requesting his resignation after Longmate testified in Olympia against House Bill 1631 the day prior; a bill the union is in support of.

"To me the real issue is: do members of the union have the right to act inconsistent with the political agenda of the bargaining unit," said Barker.

The bill, along with Senate Bill 5507, which Longmate also testified against in a public hearing in the Senate Committee on Higher Education & Workforce Development Feb. 11, would provide "consistent and predictable funding of academic employee salary increases," known as increments. Academic employees are defined by the bill as any part-time or full-time members of faculty, with the exception of administrators.

Longmate, a part-time – also known as adjunct– English professor since 1992, said he disagrees with the bill because it doesn’t specifically give adjunct faculty – who are paid approximately 60 percent of what a full-time professor is paid to teach a class – a system for the increments to be paid.

"There’s one thing to have increment monies, and one thing to have an increment schedule," said Longmate.

Currently, community college faculty have an increment system in their contracts, but are the only state workers as a whole for whom the money to pay those raises is not guaranteed by the state, and 21 of the 34 colleges in Washington state have no increment system for their adjuncts.

Longmate said, the unfairness was, if an increment system weren’t put into place a first-year adjunct professor would make the same as a professor with a Ph.D. who had been there for twenty years.

"In terms of adjuncts, you can’t blame them for wanting a bird in the hand instead of two in the bush," said Longmate. "They’d like the increment money right now as salary improvement."

Longmate also spoke out on the bill regarding course overloads for full-time faculty. A course overload is when a professor teaches more than the full-time load of three courses. The overload courses are paid at an adjunct rate, or approximately $3,000 per course.

Longmate said, when a full-time faculty member teaches a course overload on an adjunct contract, they are "double dipping" into state increment funds, thus increasing the pay disparity between full-time and part-time workers.

Longmate’s testimony at the Feb. 11 hearing was not on behalf of the OC AHE union, but the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association, co-founded by Keith Hoeller, who also testified against SB 5507 on the same day. Hoeller has been an advocator of part-time faculty rights for much of the past two decades.

"You can pass this bill and think that you’re doing something good for the faculty," said Hoeller at the Feb. 11 hearing. "Or you can work with us to make this a fair bill for all the adjuncts."

Sen. Derek Kilmer, who sponsored the bill, said he wants what is best for both adjunct and full-time faculty.
"There is nothing worse than not being paid what you know you’re worth," said Kilmer at the Feb. 11 public hearing.

According to Section 1 of SB 5507, the willingness of employees to grow professionally, and the system’s ability to recruit and retain employees would improve with an established increment system.

"We want to make sure that we’re able to recruit great faculty and to retain great faculty," said Kilmer, "and that we’re paying them like the professionals that they are. And I think under the current approach we’re really challenging that."

Longmate has refused to step down from his position, despite Barker’s request for a vote of No Confidence at the next AHE Representative Council meeting.