A Message from Mike Allen, Chair of Guild Task Force on Adjunct Parity, 2022 

Overview 

Parity refers to how adjunct (“part-timers”) and contract (“full-timers”) faculty are compensated – how their pay schedules look (both the ones for Fall/Spring, and the ones for Winter/Summer), how they are initially placed on them, and what their responsibilities are for that compensation.

Because contract faculty have professional responsibilities beyond those directly related to their teaching, GCC agrees with the Guild that pay for adjunct faculty will be deemed to be at parity when their pay is 87.5% of what contract faculty make per scheduled hour (class hours and office hours). Currently, most adjunct faculty at GCC are paid well below this 87.5% level.

When adjunct faculty do opt to engage in this sort of work beyond that directly related to their teaching, they can apply for extra “ancillary” pay in addition to the money from their normal pay schedules.

History 

Prior to the founding of the Glendale College Guild faculty labor union in 1972, adjunct faculty were almost-exclusively hired to work in a nearly separate “Evening College” here at GCC. Adjunct faculty and their concerns were mostly “out of sight, out of mind” as far as the rest of the college was concerned.

In 1976 the Rodda Act was passed in California, which allowed a single union to exclusively represent faculty in a state community college district, and the Guild was voted in for that role in 1979. The Guild struck its first contract with the District in January 1980.

Adjunct faculty were incorporated into this formal bargaining unit, and thus began a long-term improvement in their treatment and compensation.  For example, in the 1980’s the Guild began to negotiate annual raises for adjunct faculty that were often 1 percentage point larger than the raise negotiated for contract faculty, and this was the first step on a pathway to compensation parity.

In the 1990’s, the California budget first included a dedicated “parity fund” that could only go towards improving parity further. The Guild initially applied the additional dollars only to compensation for adjunct instructional work and not to other kinds of work by adjunct faculty.

Later in the 1990’s, the California budget also included a fund to partially reimburse districts for their expenditures to subsidize adjunct faculty buying health insurance through their employer, and the Guild negotiated just such a subsidy with GCC. This was particularly important at the time since coverage through the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare”) wouldn’t become available until 2011.

The Guild later also negotiated a local pot of money from which adjunct faculty can seek funding for work done at the college which is “ancillary” to their regular assignment.

In the 2000’s, California budgets start to include a dedicated fund to partially reimburse districts for their pay to adjunct instructors to hold office hours... pay for a limited number of office hours per week is negotiated for adjunct instructors by the Guild but at a lower-than-normal rate per hour.

In the 2010’s, pay for adjunct instructors in Summer and Winter terms is raised to fully match the pay of contract instructors. Also, the number of paid office hours during Fall & Spring for adjunct instructors was negotiated to no longer be limited, but rather the same number per unit of load as for full-timers (e.g., an adjunct instructor teaching 60% of the load for a full-timer in their subject would hold and be paid for 3 office hours per week, which is 60% of a full-timers 5 office hours per week). Also, the lower pay rate for office hours (as well as for regular work by non-instructional adjuncts) was raised to match the adjunct instructor’s normal hourly pay rate.

Future

In 2022, California’s budget includes a massive increase in funding to reimburse community college districts if they choose to offer much richer health benefits to their adjunct instructors. GCC and the Guild have negotiated a preliminary agreement that they would be interested in this option if the state funding actually does completely cover the increased expense. As of early 2023, we are waiting to see if that’s true.  Additionally, the Guild is recommending restructuring the adjunct faculty pay chart to match the same “step and column” layout of the contract faculty pay chart, and that the rules for initial placement on the pay charts also be identical. This would facilitate the calculation for pay parity at each location on the charts, to see how far each location is from the 87.5% long-term goal.