Washington Part-Time Faculty Association Opposes State Senate Bill Aimed At “Equity” for PTers
Washington Part-Time Faculty Association leader Keith Hoeller testified before the Washington State Legislature: “Though the bill repeatedly uses the words “equity and inclusion,” this bill will increase the inequities and exclusion under which the 8,000 part-time faculty labor in our thirty-four community colleges.”
Editor’s note: Keith Hoeller is the co-founder of the Washington Part-Time Faculty Association and the Editor of, Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System (Vanderbilt University Press, 2014). AdjunctNation profiled Dr. Hoeller here. He has been advocating for adjunct faculty in Washington State and nation-wide for almost two decades.
by Keith Hoeller
The Washington Part-Time Faculty Association, founded statewide in 1997, vigorously opposes SB 5194. Though the bill repeatedly uses the words “equity and inclusion,” this bill will increase the inequities and exclusion under which the 8,000 part-time faculty labor in our thirty-four community colleges.
Part-Timers Losing Jobs Since Pandemic. Since the faculty unions have failed to bargain any job security for these professors, who outnumber the full-timers by two to one, many part-timers have been losing their jobs since the pandemic started. Many have also had trouble collecting unemployment, as I point out in “Why Adjuncts Deserve Unemployment Compensation and How They Can Get It” https://cpfa.org/why-adjuncts-deserve-unemployment-compensation-and-how-they-can-get-it/
The Two-Tier System of Faculty Apartheid Called Tenurism. The colleges and the two unions (American Federation of Teachers [AFT] and Washington Education Association [WEA]) together have collectively bargained an inequitable two-tier faculty system that favors the full-time faculty in pay, raises, benefits and job security. I have described this apartheid-like system in my article, “Against Tenurism”: https://cpfa.org/tenurism/
The two-tiered system, enshrined in virtually every union contract in America, creates a system of privileged “haves” and unprivileged “have-nots,” whereby the tenure-track faculty form a minority, now less than 25% of all college professors, who rule over the majority of faculty who have little to no job security, low wages, few benefits, and virtually no way out of this academic ghetto. Worse, the have-nots, often called adjuncts or contingents, are often represented by the same unions who represent the tenured faculty who serve as their immediate supervisors.”
Part-Time Faculty Will Lose Their Jobs to Create More Full-Timers. Rather than treat the part-time professors equally, the faculty unions have repeatedly sought to hire more full-time faculty as in SB 5194. It is important to note that the unions have not been proposing to promote actual part-timers to full-timers. Rather, they have proposed creating more full-time positions by taking courses and income away from current part-timers to create these full-time positions. Since these new full-timers will have the right to teach overtime, between one and three part-timers will lose their jobs for every new full-time position created.
Part-Timers Do Not Have Their Own Unions in WA. What kind of unions want to get rid of their lowest paid part-time members to increase their higher paid full-time members? Unions run by and for full-time faculty, who often serve as the immediate supervisors of the part-timers. Part-time faculty are forbidden by two decades old Public Employment Relations Commission (PERC) decisions from having their own separate unions, despite the fact that by law bargaining units are supposed to be free of conflicts of interest and not have supervisors in their units.
Unions Losing Members Since Supreme Court’s Janus Decision. Prior to the 2018 Janus decision, most community colleges had contracts mandating “agency shops,” that is, faculty would either have to join the union and pay dues or else pay a similar “fee” to the union. At colleges that did not have agency shop contracts, 90% of the part-timers consistently refused to join their local unions. Since nearly all full-timers join the unions, creating more full-time positions will bring a financial windfall to the unions since the full-timers have higher salaries and therefore pay higher dues.
SB 5194 Does Not Support Equal Pay. While the bill uses the phrase “equal pay for equal work,” it contradicts this phrase in two ways. It ties part-time pay solely to “instruction,” as if those teaching are simply doing piecemeal work, and ignores the huge benefits that full-timers receive but part-timers do not, as well as the expenses that part-timers incur but full-timers do not. Part-timers can and do serve as mentors to students, but they are simply not paid for most of the work they do outside of class.
SB 5194 Does Not Support Equal Raises. When last calculated by the State Board for Community and Technical Colleges nearly a decade ago, it would cost the state more than $130 million to provide truly equal salaries for the part-timers. That is how much the colleges shortchange their part-timers each biennium. We believe that one of the main reasons for this disparity is simple: While the unions have bargained lucrative annual step raises called increments for their full-timers, two-thirds have failed to bargain any incremental raises for their part-timers. In other words, the full-timers have regularly received raises that part-timers do not. In the twenty college districts where the part-timers do not have any increment schedules, part-timers who have taught for decades receive the same pay as those just beginning to teach. You cannot provide equal pay without providing equal raises.
Part-timers are Not Earning Less Money Simply Because They Teach Part-Time. In fact, part-timers are paid on a much lower separate salary schedule from the full-timers. Moreover, union contracts prevent part-timers from teaching full-time, instead capping their workload significantly below full-time. Yet the same union contracts allow the full-timers to teach overloads (called “moonlighting”) far in excess of full-timers. The average part-timer who teaches half-time is averaging less than $20,000 a year, while the average full-timer gets an annual base salary of $60,000 with the option to earn tens of thousands more by teaching overtime.
Washington State’s Legislative Leaders Have Abandoned the Part-Time Faculty. From 1996-2009 every biennial budget addressed the issue of part-time pay disparity by specifying several million dollars “solely to increase part-time faculty pay and related benefits.” With the 2009 recession, the legislature stopped and has refused to continue to address the issue. Rather than spending nearly $200 million to hire more full-timers, as a similar failed bill proposed last session, this money should go to improving part-time faculty salaries. It is long past time for the legislature to recommit to improving part-time faculty pay, benefits, and working conditions.
SB 5194 is Prejudiced Against Part-Time Faculty. In order to get you to provide hundreds of millions of dollars for new full-time positions, the colleges and the unions have not hesitated to claim that the full-time faculty are superior in language similar to Section 2 of SB 5194: “The legislature also finds that a more full-time, stable, fairly compensated, and diverse community and technical college faculty is necessary to enhance student success and improve the mentoring available for a diverse student body.”
There is no evidence that full-timers “enhance student success” or “improve mentoring” more than part-timers do. Indeed, the scientific evidence is that professors who teach off the tenure-track are in fact better teachers, as I noted in my New York Times op-ed called “An Academic Divide,” where I wrote that a Northwestern University study “calls into question the myth that the two-track system in academe is an equal opportunity merit system. It is not; it is in fact a caste system with the tenured faculty occupying the upper caste and the off-track faculty serving as the ‘untouchables.’ This is not the first study to indicate that adjuncts and other “contingent faculty” are the best teachers.
There are two things that Washington state must do to improve its higher education system. (1) It must pass legislation mandating separate unions for part-time professors, and (2) It must abolish the discriminatory and prejudicial two-tier faculty system. We should not be producing highly educated students who face such massive discrimination should they decide to go into the noble profession of college teaching.
In “Do College Professors Deserve a Living Wage?” I wrote: “How can college professors teach equality and a respect for diversity when they refuse to practice it in their own ranks? Should the U.S. spend billions each year on a higher education system dedicated to offering better opportunities, jobs, and salaries for all of our citizens—except those who teach in the colleges and universities that make such opportunities possible?”
The Washington Part-Time Faculty Association urges you to VOTE NO on SB 5194 and asks you to tell your leaders to devote any financial resources to improving part-time faculty salaries this session.
