The Bargaining team presented all but our remuneration proposals to the College on May 7 and May 10, 2021. Each member of the team presented one or more proposal. While we cannot discuss the details of proposals at this time, they included protection of eligibility for members who lost sections due to remote instruction and a reduction in enrollment during the pandemic and compensation for expenses associated with teaching remotely. The College will begin giving its response to our proposals on May 24, 2021. We expect to bargain throughout much of the summer.
Cheryl made this opening statement on May 7, 2021:
I believe I am the only member of the either bargaining team that has ever been involved in negotiating a CODAA contract. This provides a unique opportunity for productive and cordial bargaining discussions, relatively free of pre-conceived notions. CODAA is committed to bargaining in good faith and treating everyone with respect.
The values listed in the College’s mission statement are: Integrity Honesty, Respect, Responsibility, and Equity. I am optimistic we will all keep these values in mind as well as remembering that we all work at College of DuPage to best educate and support our students.
Adjuncts teach more than 60% of the courses at College of DuPage which means students are more likely to be taught by an adjunct instructor than a full-time faculty member. And of all the adjuncts teaching, more than 700 are CODAA members.
Adjunct working conditions are students learning conditions. When adjunct instructors can only spend five minutes with a struggling student after class or feel overwhelmed by a request for a letter of recommendation because they are working two, three, or even four jobs just to make ends meet, students are negatively impacted.
Many years ago, adjunct instructors were in the minority at Colleges and Universities. Many of these adjuncts were spouses who did not need to work full time or retired professionals wishing to share their knowledge. While some adjuncts at College of DuPage still fall into these categories, many do not. A 2014 congressional report found that 89 percent of adjuncts surveyed worked at more than one college; 27 percent worked at three schools; and 13 percent taught at four or more.
It is time for Colleges and Universities to discard their antiquated notions of adjunct instructors and the antiquated standards for compensation and support. It is apparent that the use of adjuncts to teach the majority of courses, particularly at Community Colleges, is not going away. Only by recognizing the value and importance of these professionals – all of whom at College of DuPage are required to hold the same credential as their full-time counterparts – will students’ best interests be served.
In 2019, when negotiations with the FT faculty were at an impasse, the College offered CODAA an incredible compensation and benefits package if we would agree to cover full-time courses in the event of a strike. None of our proposals now come even close to requesting what was offered then. However, they are much smaller, but significant steps in a move toward equity – a value listed in the College’s mission statement – with the salary and benefits provided to full-time faculty.
Many Colleges site cost-saving and keeping tuition low as arguments for under-compensating adjunct faculty. However, studies by the American Institutes for Research show that many schools that reduced spending by using part-time labor increased expenditures on administration.
After the College moved to remote instruction in March of 2020, CODAA began advocating on behalf of its members for additional support and compensation to offset the many hours of additional work required by this shift. Our requests were modest and modeled after what every other Community College in the Collar counties (and even some outside the Collar counties) was providing their adjuncts. Yet all our requests were denied. A reason commonly cited was that “we would be bargaining soon and the College felt these were issues best brought up in regular contract negotiations.” CODAA expects the College will keep this in mind as it reviews our proposals.
The College requested that we present all our proposals at once, with the exception of salary compensation. Our concern in doing this is that, without the contextual narrative and research behind each proposal, the College’s first reaction may be to view the totality of our proposals as unreasonable. We are asking, therefore, that you reserve judgement until we have had time to present and discuss each proposal individually.