As more colleges cut part-time instructors’ work hours ahead of a federal mandate that will require employers to provide employees with more health-insurance benefits, faculty unions and advocacy groups increasingly are fighting back.
In one of the latest examples, a union for part-time faculty members at a Michigan college has filed an unfair-labor-practice complaint alleging that administrators violated a collective-bargaining agreement by unilaterally reducing the number of hours that part-time instructors can teach.
Elsewhere, faculty groups are holding protests and rallies to call attention to the poor working conditions of adjunct faculty members.
The efforts are part of a broader push for more openness between administrators and adjuncts as the terms of their employment are set, said Craig Smith, director of the higher-education division of the American Federation of Teachers. Part-time faculty members need to be included in labor conversations, he said.
The health-insurance requirement, part of the new Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, is one of the factors driving those conversations. Under the new law, which takes effect in January 2014, employees of large companies who work 30 hours or more a week must receive health benefits from their employers.
Before the law takes effect, some colleges have begun limiting adjuncts and other part-time employees to no more than 29 hours a week.
The Michigan Case
The labor complaint in Michigan was filed with the state’s Employment Relations Commission on Monday by the part-time instructors’ union at Kalamazoo Valley Community College, the KVCC Federation of Teachers, after it received word that, beginning in the fall, part-time faculty members would be limited to nine “contact” hours a semester.
Contact hours are a measure of the time instructors spend face to face with students, and vary from course to course. Adjuncts’ work weeks are now calculated by credit hours, and the maximum per semester is 11, according to Catherine E. Barnard, a part-time instructor of psychology at Kalamazoo Valley who is co-president of the KVCC Federation, an affiliate of AFT Michigan.
The complaint accuses the college of violating Michigan’s Public Employment Relations Act, which states that “wages, hours, and other terms and conditions of employment are subject to collective bargaining.” The union tried to bargain with the college, Ms. Barnard said, but administrators would not rescind the switch to a new maximum based on contact hours.
The change will reduce the number of courses instructors in some disciplines can teach, Ms. Barnard said, forcing them to take a pay cut.
“I teach psychology, and my contact hours are exactly three per three-credit-hour class,” Ms. Barnard said. “But in the sciences or in art, in addition to lecture time, they have four to five hours of contact in labs.”
According to an April 16 memo sent by a senior administrator to department chairs, the number of contact hours for a course will be calculated by its “strategy.” For example, an introductory-level biology course has a “4-3-3" strategy. Adding the last two digits, for lecture and lab time, determines the number of contact hours—in this case, six.
If instructors are restricted to nine contact hours, Ms. Barnard said, they would be able to teach only one class of that kind.
“This is going to affect a third of our members financially,” she said, noting that adjuncts are paid by the credit hour. The union represents about 300 part-time faculty members, she said.
As of Wednesday afternoon, the Michigan Employment Relations Commission had not yet received the union’s complaint, an official with the agency said. When it does, the next step will be to evaluate the complaint and determine a response.
Lynn Morison, a staff lawyer with the state Bureau of Employment Relations, said complaints are reviewed by the director of the commission and an administrative-law judge to determine whether an unfair labor practice has been committed. If it has, a hearing is scheduled, though “about a third of charges are settled before.”
The KVCC Federation hopes that the complaint will encourage the college’s administration to negotiate, Ms. Barnard said, but so far the union has not received any word from college officials.
On Tuesday, the day after the complaint was filed, about 45 union members attempted to deliver a poster-size copy of the complaint to the college’s president, Marilyn J. Schlack, but she was unavailable. The group left the large photocopy with her secretary.
“The only response I received was when the president contacted public safety and they found me and told me I wasn’t allowed to protest,” Ms. Barnard said, laughing.
Michael Collins, the institution’s vice president for college and student relations, could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.
National Efforts
The complaint filed by the Kalamazoo Valley union is among the first of its kind, according Mr. Smith, of the American Federation of Teachers. Though it’s likely other unions are considering such action, the national organization has not heard of any other part-time faculty unions’ filing a formal complaint, he said.
“We have been doing a lot of presentations and training and talking with locals about different strategies,” Mr. Smith said. “The primary strategy is to deal with this at the bargaining table.”
John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy for the American Association of University Professors, said most unionized groups work with the administration internally. Employees who are not represented by a union must organize in different ways. Part-timers have called attention to the behavior of university officials by engaging the community through meetings and demonstrations, he said.
One example, he said, is the Ohio Part-Time Faculty Association, which on Tuesday held a “Rally for Equity” on the University of Akron’s campus in response to a reduction in part-time employees’ work hours there, he said. Demonstrators were encouraged to attend the event, to wear a scarlet “A” for “adjunct,” and to broadcast the event through social-media sites.
Both the AAUP and the AFT said they would support the actions of any local chapters, but they are not providing any blanket recommendations, as every situation is different.
“Right now,” Mr. Curtis said, “we’re collecting examples and looking for ways to act further.”