Dr. Carroll, Vice Chancellors Dowd, Surbrook, and Bulger,
There is much concern among part-time faculty over the email we received on Monday informing us that we will not be receiving our first pay warrant of the semester until March 10. Please see the emails below between myself and others and members of the AFT Guild Executive Board regarding this. I am wondering how this decision was made, if there is any way to reverse it and have us paid for our first 1/5th of the semester on February 10 as usual, and if the contract faculty or any other employees will also be on a one month delay in the pay warrant schedule because of the later start to the Spring 2020 semester. I am writing you now as AFT Guild President Jim Mahler and Guild Legal Council Danielle Short are out of the office until next week and AFT Vice President Ian Duckles was unable to get a satisfactory answer from Vice Chancellor Surbrook. This is a pressing issue as Unemployment Benefits will cease for part-time faculty on Feb 2 and many of us will be unable to pay our mortgages/rent and other bills without income for 6 weeks. Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.
Respectfully,
Carol Whaley, MFA
San Diego City College Drama Dept.Adjunct Officer, City College Academic Senate
Legislative Committee, Faculty Assn. of CA Community Colleges (FACCC)Director of Publications, California Part-time Faculty Assn. (CPFA)
Thanks Carol!
This is a great example of how spineless our Union leadership is, and how much we can get done despite them.
I sent the email above at 12:19 am on Wed, Jan 8. At 11 am that day, I received (along with Ian Duckles, Vice Chancellor of HR Surbrook, Jim Mahler, and many others who had been included in the original email chain regarding this matter that I started with Guild Exec Board members) an email from Chancellor Carrol thanking Duckles and Surbrook for resolving the matter and restoring our first payday of the semester to Feb 10. I can only assume that when Ian Duckles saw that I had escalated the matter to the Chancellor and key Vice Chancellors, he decided to try again with Surbrook and also got ahold of the unavailable Jim Mahler for authorization to sign a side-letter agreement to make this happen. Below is the original email from Ian stating that Surbrook had said there was no way we could be paid Feb 10 when he first contacted him.
tl;dr
Surbrook: PeopleSoft won’t allow it and HR is short-staffed because of the hiring freeze.
Duckles: It’s probably too late to do anything so we’ll try to talk it out for next time.
From: Ian Duckles
Sent: Tuesday, January 7, 2020 11:34 AM
To: Wendy Kinsinger; Jessica E. Thompson; Lou Ann Gibson; Berta Harris; Darrel Harrison; Kelly Mayhew; Geoffrey Johnson; Kevin Petti; Jim Miller; Tina Solorzano; Kristina Gomez; dshortaft@pm.me; Jim Mahler
Cc: Carol Whaley; Carlynne Allbee
Subject: RE: Communication regarding Spring 2020 semester pay
Carol and Carlynne,
I followed up with Will Surbrook about this issue. The CBA is pretty clear that this is the correct policy (Article VIII B/C 7.0). That is, unit pay occurs on the 10th of the month after the assignment starts. Since classes begin February 3, according to the CBA March 10 would be the first paycheck. There is perhaps a little wiggle room in the last sentence of the relevant section (see highlighted below), but the language is quite ambiguous and to file a grievance on this issue would take too long to resolve and would really only solve this problem for the future, something I think can be better accomplished through conversation and dialogue. In addition, Will argued that it wouldn’t be possible for payroll to do anything differently due to the constraints of PeopleSoft and the limited number of staff that could do this work (HR is under a hiring freeze too). While I don’t know enough to evaluate whether or not this is the case, it does seem like a reasonable argument. That being said, we need to push more on this since it really does create an enormous financial burden on adjunct faculty and those who depend on overload to make ends meet. At this point, until Jim gets involved, I am not entirely sure what avenues to pursue next. Jim and Danielle are back next week, at which point it may be too late to do anything about this issue (it may already be too late now), but I am open to any suggestions about how to proceed. My next step is to reach out to the Chancellor and appeal to her directly. I’m not sure how effective that would be, since Jim has a much stronger relationship with her than I do. The Board doesn’t meet until January 30, so that is probably too late as well, though it wouldn’t hurt to address them directly. Any other thoughts or suggestions about how to proceed?
Ian