How many CCCS workers advocate for the 4,600+ adjunct faculty? ZERO!

 Mark DuCharme of the FRCC English Department poses with a pie chart showing how less than 12% of CCCS annual revenues go to the 4,600+ adjunct faculty who teach 75% of all the courses the CCCS offers. Half the CCCS workforce is this adjunct faculty, and they are paid poverty-level wages. Consequently, the community colleges are losing the great teachers that have long been the hallmark of the colleges.                                

                            

               

Few Colorado taxpayers, students and hard-working, devoted, adjunct faculty members are aware that there is not one person among the hundreds of six-figure-earning administrators in the Colorado Community College System (CCCS) charged with advocating for paying adjunct faculty a living wage. In fact, recent, historic events prove that part of the work of CCCS administrators is to

argue against living wages for half the workforce in the CCCS; its army of 4,600+ adjunct faculty who teach the lion’s share of the 29,000+ courses this system offers.

                Let’s start at the top. Who advocates for higher wages for CCCS top executives? CCCS President Nancy McCallin earns three times ($300K) the salary of Gov. John Hickenlooper ($90K). Each of the CCCS Presidents ($130K-$180K) earns far more than does the state’s governor. The dozens of CCCS Vice Presidents ($120K+) earn far more than does the state’s governor. Each of the scores of CCCS Deans ($80-$90K)  earn  nearly the same salary as Gov. Hickenlooper. Advocating on their behalf is the state Department of Higher Education, headed by Colorado’s Lt. Governor. (The state’s Lt. Governor, with a salary of $68K, earns less than the average CCCS program director ($80K).  

Furthermore, the state pays the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC) annual membership dues of $69K per year. Part of the AACC mission is to coach college executives on how to negotiate higher salaries for themselves. The AACC is a national lobbying juggernaut. The CCCS is paying AACC dues partly to make sure Colorado taxpayers are paying higher wages to all CCCS executives.

                Next in line, we have the full-time faculty minority of approximately 1,200 full-time faculty. They average fewer than 100 full-time faculty at work in each of the 13 CCCS colleges. Most of them are granted “release time” from teaching to serve as supervisors to the ocean of adjuncts who keep the lights on by teaching classes at all hours, even weekends, year-round. Advocating for higher wages and benefits for them are the scores of CCCS HR department personnel. Their go-to (and usually only) source of information is the other national, administration-focused organization, the gigantic and well-funded CUPA-HR (College and University Professional Association for Human Resources). CCCS HR also taps the CCCS budget, if needed, to hire consultants such as Sibson Consulting  to conduct surveys to help them press for higher wages for full-time faculty, as they did a few years ago. The stats and surveys Sibson supplied the CCCS HR provided the numbers that justified the CCCS giving the full-time faculty a recent 20.3% pay raise.

                What about the CCCS HR? Don’t they advocate for adjunct faculty? Sadly, no. In fact, in the first hearing for the equal-pay-for-equal-work bill (HB 14-1154), the CCCS HR, represented by Aurora CC HR executive Cynthia Hesse, advocated fiercely against equal-pay-for-equal-work for adjunct faculty. She argued that to do so would require hiring more HR staff to keep track of all the paperwork. The CCCS HR administrators are the first ones to argue for the status quo, because they act as the right hand of CCCS administration. It’s a sad comment that, were the CCCS to have fewer adjunct faculty, each earning a higher wage and teaching more classes (as HB14-1154 proposed), the ostensibly sophisticated and software-savvy CCCS HR department would consider keeping track of them daunting. Sadder still is that the CCCS pays an HR professional to argue to that effect before legislative bodies. Since that time, the CCCS has hired approximately 1,000 more adjuncts, each of whom earns peanuts for their work, and no one hears any complaints from CCCS HR.

                What about the classified staff at work in the CCCS? Who advocates for their wages and benefits? That would be Colorado WINS, a special SEIU-related union blessed by the Colorado governor. Through WINS, the state gives raises to the workers keeping the lawns mowed, the copiers running, and the trash emptied. They also get those workers drastically reduced health-care benefits, such as a recent reduction of 66%. Colorado WINS is barred from advocating for adjunct faculty in the CCCS, by legislative design.

                What about the role of the Vice President for Executive Leadership Training and Development,  Linda Bowman, someone among top CCCS leadership for the entire state? Wouldn’t part of that job description include advocating that the CCCS needs a stable faculty who is earning equal pay for equal work? Again, no. CCCS VP Linda Bowman testified against equal-pay-for-equal work for adjunct faculty in the Senate hearing for SB 15-094 last year. She repeated the tired meme of how the CCCS needs flexibility, and how seniority must not play a role in faculty decisions. Seniority plays a powerful role, however, in administration salary decisions and full-time faculty decisions, as evidenced by the numerous CCCS surveys and salary comparisons listed above. For adjuncts across the state who have been putting their hearts and souls into teaching community college students for years, whenever they hear six-figure-earning administrators whose own careers have profited mightily by seniority invoke the need for “flexibility,” it is widely recognized as code for protected practices of wage theft and age discrimination visited upon adjunct faculty.

                What about the CCCS governing board, the State Board of Community Colleges and Occupational Education? We strike out with this group, as well. The SBCCOE has determined that the faculty majority is so inconsequential that its members are considered part of the “public” and thus are allowed only five minutes per month to say anything at all during the SBCCOE monthly meetings. The SBCCOE only meets ten months out of the year, leaving half the CCCS workforce less than one hour total, annually, to be heard. Knowing that is the case, even so, during the first hearing for HB14-1154, SBCCOE Chair Russ Meyer told lawmakers that any issues involving adjunct faculty could be handled by the system through its shared governance procedures. Most CCCS adjuncts have never even heard of shared governance, and those that do report that it seems to be something for full-time faculty only. The SBCCOE itself models for Colorado its definition of shared governance: very little sharing and an abundance of governance.

                What about CCCS lobbyists at work in the state Capitol? Don’t they routinely argue for higher wages for CCCS adjunct faculty? Again, sadly, they do not. In fact, in the past two years, the CCCS has paid its lobbyists, the Capstone Group and JLH Public Affairs $132K to make sure both of the  equal-pay-for-equal-work bills that might have benefited CCCS faculty (HB 14-1154 and SB 15-094) were defeated. (The details of those invoices are available through the Colorado Secretary of State's office.)

                There is NOT ONE person in the CCCS whose job it is to advocate for a living wage and better working conditions for adjunct faculty. In fact, as the details above describe, there are literally hundreds of people in the CCCS and under contract to CCCS administration who are paid to argue against paying any CCCS adjuncts equal pay for equal work. This design needs to change. Student success depends on a stable faculty able to focus on how best to teach and inspire learners.

                It is only the prestigious American Associationof University Professors (AAUP) that has taken up the charge of advocating for CCCS adjunct faculty. With the help of the AAUP, we have also formed relationships with numerous members of the Colorado House and Senate who have been championing community college students by insisting to know why the CCCS cannot pay 75% of their teachers equal pay for equal work. The alarming situation in Colorado has the attention of the executives within the AAUP, the Colorado legislature, and the higher education community nationally. It is because of the firepower the AAUP has brought to the issue that membership in the metro area has grown, and more chapters of the AAUP are forming on still more CCCS campuses.  The AAUP has led the charge for more than a century for faculty rights, academic freedom and shared governance, and brings that experience to bear on all the sad details listed above.

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Ice Cream Anti-Socials and Unstrategic Plans

           We know now that the CCCS paid its lobbyists $132K, and persuaded the North Metro Chamber of Commerce and the Aurora Chamber of Commerce to pay their lobbyists to defeat our equal-pay-for-equal-work legislation in 2014 (HB 14-1154) and 2015 (SB 15-094). In this way, the CCCS threw its faculty majority of nearly 5,000 hardworking, devoted teachers under the bus, after having told us our only recourse for a pay raise was to work with the state legislature.

          
                CCCS administration dressed some windows with its Adjunct Task Force. The hastily assembled group, comprised of administrators and a few adjuncts that administrators handpicked to "represent" adjuncts, met in secret, published no agendas and no minutes. Last year, at the end of several months of its secret meetings, it published a list of recommendations, foremost among them a 28% pay raise for adjuncts and a few other measures calling for inclusion and consideration. 

          The CCCS governing board un-recommended the pay raise on the spurious claim that the system is broke (with a quarter billion dollars in reserves) but made much hay at the Capitol about the inclusion and the consideration. What we learned from CCCS administration, their pet legislators and their lobbyists is that adjuncts are supposed to feed their children and pay rent with inclusion and consideration; either that or go out and get some other jobs to make ends meet. Yet even inclusion and consideration are non-starters for CCCS administration.

          The expensively produced Adjunct Task Force Recommendations remain meaningless eight months after their adoption. Case in point, nearly 1,000 adjuncts were effectively dissuaded from participating in the so-called "strategic planning" sessions at FRCC, as adjuncts were not paid to attend the hours-long confabs. Now, the FRCC is hosting an Ice Cream Social to "all employees" to celebrate their Strategic Plan. Adjuncts who might go to it will not be paid to attend the celebration, either, although all other employees who will be there will be eating ice cream at the taxpayer's expense, partly celebrating how they found a way to keep half the employees from providing input to their so-called strategic plan in the first place. Thus, FRCC has made its celebration an Ice Cream Anti-Social, and their Plan, Unstrategic.

How much did the CCCS administration pay its lobbyists to help defeat our legislative efforts this year and last year (Senate Bill 15-094 and House Bill 14-1154)?  What was the CCCS rationale for giving its 1,246 full-time faculty a 20.3% pay increase at the same time it fought to keep paying its 4,667 adjunct faculty poverty-level wages? Why are adjuncts having their course loads cut and being told that enrollment is down, when it is up by more than 18,000 students? Why are adjuncts being told the CCCS is experiencing "budget shortfalls" when the CCCS has more than a quarter billion dollars in reserve and puts aside $20 million each year it does not spend? Read what new research reveals about the CCCS here:
The 2015 CCCS Adjunct Index

Some background on its creation:
Think Outside the Box and Publish an Index

Adjunct Survival Workshop slated for FRCC Westminster campus

Colorado’s Community College System (CCCS) continues to pay 75% of its faculty (the so-called “adjuncts”) poverty-level wages. To help these hard-working teachers make ends meet, the Front Range Community College chapter of the American Association of University Professors is hosting the first-ever Adjunct Survival Workshop. The event will take place on Friday, Sept. 18, 2015, 2:30 – 5:30 p.m., Room C0403, on the FRCC Westminster campus, 3645 W. 112^th Ave. The event is open to all CCCS faculty. State and county officials will be on hand to explain to adjunct faculty how to access food stamps, subsidized housing, Medicaid, inexpensive dental care, utility bill discounts, and other taxpayer-supported programs. Officials from the state’s Public Employee Retirement Association (PERA) will demonstrate for adjunct faculty how to calculate what they will receive in retirement from their years of service in the CCCS.

Because PERA benefits are linked to salary levels during years of service to the state of Colorado, it has been estimated that the many CCCS adjunct faculty who have taught full-time teaching course loads for years will receive between $300 and $400 per month in retirement. At that income level, many CCCS adjunct faculty who have served Colorado’s economically disadvantaged youth will themselves become economically disadvantaged adults qualifying for taxpayer-supported programs for decades throughout retirement. Most alarming is how many devoted teachers working in Colorado’s wealthy Community College System already qualify for such assistance even while working for the most financially secure system of higher education in the state.

The top-heavy, well-paid CCCS administration (2,009+) outnumbers its full-time faculty (1,246), while the largest group of community college workers is the part-time or “adjunct” faculty (3,924), according to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS), the national clearinghouse of higher-education reporting. Furthermore, the Feb. 2015  CCCS Financial Statements and Compliance Audit reveals the CCCS net position at the end of June, 2014, was $617,915,276 million. This represents an increase of more than $30 million in three years, as the 2012 Basic Financial Statements and Compliance Audit reported CCCS net position at the end of June, 2011 was $586,996,147 million.

 “The CCCS is taking in $20 million more per year than it spends,” explained Howard Bunsis, chair of the AAUP Collective Bargaining Congress, during his presentation at the July Mini-Institute sponsored by metro-area AAUP chapters of the CCCS. “That should be going to you, the teachers, instead of going into their reserves,” he said. “The mission of your college system is instruction. That money isn’t going to instruction, so that’s wrong,” he explained. “When they tell you they can’t afford to pay you even double what they are paying you now, they are lying,” he added. “Why does the CCCS need to have even more than $100 million in reserves?” he said. Bunsis is one of the nation’s foremost experts in analyzing higher education finance. He earned his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago, his J.D. at Fordham Law School, and teaches accounting at Eastern Michigan University.

Although the mission of the system is to use those funds to provide instruction, as Bunsis pointed out in his July 2015 report, "The Legal and Financial Landscape for Community College Faculty in Colorado",  just 14% of CCCS revenue goes to the instructors teaching 60-85% of all courses its 13 colleges offer.

Bunsis explained that CCCS administrators employ fear tactics in spurious statements to adjunct faculty about budget shortfalls and declining enrollments, but data refute the statements. For example, very few CCCS adjunct faculty, many of whom work two or three jobs to make ends meet, understand that the CCCS  takes in $20 million more  than it spends annually, and has accumulated more than a quarter billion dollars in reserves . The tired phrase adjuncts hear, that “enrollment is down,” provokes the question: Down from what? Student enrollment has risen dramatically from to 144,783 in 2011  to 163,000 in 2015, according to CCCS statistics, even while, semester-to-semester, there have been small fluctuations. The system continues to bring in so much money, for example, that it recently gave its  full-time teachers a 20% pay increase (approximately $1,000/per course), plus a cost-of-living pay increase, while giving its part-time faculty a pay increase gesture (approximately $240/per course), and no cost-of-living increase. The part-time faculty, who rarely are allowed to move into the decreasing number of full-time positions, continue to earn poverty-level wages, even with the tiny pay increase. Meanwhile, the CCCS building boom continues apace; the system has added scores of new programs and pays thousands to lobbyists to fight equal-pay legislation that adjunct faculty bring forward. The wage inequality is so severe that in the Denver metro area, for example, the few hundred full-time faculty are earning, on average, $6,800 including benefits to teach a course while their adjunct counterparts teaching that same course are earning, on average, $2,500 with no benefits. The CCCS Board on Feb. 11, 2015, determined that, in spite of its fantastic financial picture and its ability to put $20 million each year into reserves, it cares so little about the financial difficulties facing adjunct faculty that it un-recommended its own Adjunct Task Force Recommendation to give to its impoverished adjunct faculty the 28% pay increase the Task Force determined was needed. To add insult to injury, to skirt Affordable Care Act compliance, many of the 13 CCCS colleges are cutting adjunct-faculty course loads to force the adjuncts out of the teaching profession altogether. This is leaving many of Colorado’s most economically disadvantaged students without the stellar teaching that has long been the hallmark of Colorado’s community colleges.

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What are your ideas for National Adjunct Walkout Day, Wed., Feb.25?

     As you are likely already aware, the first-ever National Adjunct Walkout Day will take place on Wed., Feb. 25. (NAWD).
   Thousands of adjunct labor activists across the country have been mobilizing for the event since it was proposed last fall. It is not sponsored by any particular group, but the avalanche of discussion about it on social media underscores the appeal of the event.
     Labor laws differ from state to state, of course. Here in Colorado,  because of the extremely precarious employment of 75% of the CCCS' working faculty (adjuncts), actually walking out could cost instructors our jobs. Therefore, we caution our colleagues to consider other ways to bring visibility to the problem.
     We are witnessing the destruction of the profession of teaching in community colleges, even while the value of our teaching has the nation's attention with President Obama's recent call for two years of free community college coursework. 
      What the public does not know is that K12 teachers are protected by powerful unions, while contingents teaching in research universities have a tenure-track system that offers some protections and better wages. Colorado's community college teachers -- those teaching Colorado's most disadvantaged students -- have neither unions nor the tenure track system. We have no job protections whatsoever and earn poverty-level wages. CCCS lobbyists and college presidents claim they "are only paying he going rate" for community college teachers, while never revealing that this "going rate" is a price-fixing scheme developed by their own lobbying groups such as the AACC and CUPA-HR. In the CCCS, for example, adjuncts teaching transfer-level courses earn a quarter of what their counterparts teaching the same courses earn at the four-year schools. 
      What CCCS students do not realize is that only a fraction of their tuition and CCCS revenues are used for instruction. Most is going to handsome salaries for administrators and the building of offices for more administratrators, fitness centers, parking lots, and coffee bars.
      We may not be able to walk out due to Colorado law prohibiting that type of demonstration by our category of worker. However, what are your ideas for speaking out and making the issue known? Share them on the National Adjunct Walkout Day Facebook page:
NAWD 

Senate Bill calls for an end to adjunctification in the Colorado Community College System

     
Jan., 2015:

        Wonderful news! 

         Senator John Kefalas is sponsoring a bill in the 2015 Session of the Colorado General Assembly that calls for an end to adjunctifiation in the Colorado Community College System! Details of the bill will be discussed at the Snowflake Summit Jan. 14. All members of the Colorado Conference of the AAUP are invited to attend this members-only event. 

2015 AAUP Snowflake Summit

Who is protected by the recent NLRB decision on the use of faculty email?

  Aaron Nisenson, Senior Counsel for the AAUP,

  explained what the recent NLRB decision might

 mean for community college faculty.

        When the five-member National Labor Relations Board announced on Dec. 11 its ruling that significantly expanded the rights of employees to use their employer’s email system for union organizing and other activities, community college teachers were cautiously optimistic. Might the ruling mean we can similarly use faculty email at our public-sector institutions? The short answer is no, according to AAUP Senior Counsel Aaron Nisenson.

        The ruling expands the rights of private sector faculty members to use email for union organizing, explained Aaron Nisenson, AAUP Senior Counsel. In his longer answer, he cautioned community college teachers of all stripes to understand the rules vary widely state to state, and college to college.

        “Folks see a headline and they want to run with it,” said Nisenson. “How it works in each state in the public sector is different and that requires organizers to research the laws in their own states and at their own schools,” he added.

        Even so, he explained, the ruling may yet influence public-sector protocols. “The fact that the NLRB recognizes the appropriate way to communicate in the private sector should inform policy in the public sector, or at least we hope it will,” he said.

            The 2014 NLRB ruling in Purple Communications, Inc., overturns the NLRB’s 2007 ruling in the Register Guard case. The latter allowed companies to ban workers from using email for non-business-related  interactions, including union-related communications. While the new ruling is a major step forward, Nisenson enumerated its limitations:

         “First, since the decision was issued by the National Labor Relations Board, under the statute protecting private sector employees, it only applies to private sector employees. Second, the Board only addressed employee use of work email, and did not extend the protection to cover use by non-employees. Third, the protected use was limited to non-work time, and absent discrimination against the union it does not give the employees right to use the work email during work time. Fourth, the employer may in certain limited circumstances prohibit or limit the use of work email on non-work time. Finally, this ruling will likely be appealed and could be overturned by the Courts.” 

        Nevertheless, the decision recognizes the reality that email is one of the primary ways in which faculty speak to each other in the modern world, said Nisenson. “The ability to use email to communicate is essential to faculty, particularly contingent faculty, who are often dispersed and may not be able to speak directly to each other regularly,” he said.

        The five-member NLRB comprises five presidential appointees, who serve in terms that stagger. Most are labor-law professionals.

        Nisenson brings more than two decades of experience in nonprofit and labor and employment representation to the AAUP’s legal department, including extensive experience representing unions and individuals before the National Labor Relations Board, before state and local labor relations authorities, and in collective bargaining negotiations and arbitrations. Prior to joining the AAUP, Nisenson was the in-house general counsel for the International Union of Police Associations; an attorney with the law firm of Zwerdling, Paul, Leibig, Kahn, Thompson, and Wolly; and a partner at Henrichsen Siegel, PLLC. He has provided training in continuing legal education to attorneys on constitutional and employment law for the Bar Association of the District of Columbia, the AFL-CIO Lawyers’ Conference, and the International Union of Police Associations Lawyers’ Conference.

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