Leaders of the adjunct-faculty union at Columbia College Chicago are heralding a new labor agreement as formally bringing to an end years of adversarial relations with its administration.
A statement jointly issued by the administration and Diana Vallera, president of the Part-Time Faculty Association, says a tentative contract agreement reached last week “marks a significant moment in the life of the college as we all recommit to moving forward together.”
Ms. Vallera said on Tuesday that she expected the proposed four-year contract to be overwhelmingly approved by her union’s members in a ratification vote set to begin this month.
She said she was similarly confident that her union soon would be able to settle various grievances and unfair-labor-practice complaints against the college’s administration.
The labor accord at the private Chicago college follows three and a half years of tough negotiations punctuated by intervention on the union’s behalf by the National Labor Relations Board.
In March the board ruled that the college had violated labor laws by refusing to bargain with the union and by retaliating against Ms. Vallera, a photography instructor, for her union activities.
It ordered the college to compensate some part-time instructors for wages lost when their workloads were reduced without their union’s consent, and it said the college owed Ms. Vallera earnings lost when the college refused to assign her more than one class to teach last fall.
Last year the board similarly found the college to have violated federal labor-relations law in its dealings with the adjunct union, which is affiliated with the National Education Association.
‘A Radical Shift’
In an interview, Ms. Vallera attributed the recent improvement in her union’s relationship with the administration to “a radical shift” in the latter’s approach to labor under Kwang-Wu Kim, who took over as the college’s president last month.
Although Mr. Kim’s predecessor, Warrick L. Carter, was credited with increasing the college’s enrollment and expanding its campus, his dealings with the adjunct union often were adversarial. Mr. Kim, by contrast, “really focused on our shared interests,” Ms. Vallera said.
The proposed new contract would greatly expand part-time faculty members’ rights to class assignments based on seniority, providing that those who have taught more than 51 credit hours there have first dibs on a second class assignment each semester, and those with more than 200 credit hours will be assigned a third class.
If necessary to fulfill such a contractual obligation, the college would reassign classes taught by adjuncts with less than 33 credit hours of teaching experience, as well as classes taught by graduate students who are not teaching as part of their curriculum and full-time administrators or staff members who are not teaching as part of their jobs.
The new contract also would provide adjuncts with a 3-percent retroactive pay raise for the 2012-13 academic year, and would ensure them seats on committees dealing with the college’s governance.
