In what was perhaps just an uncontrollable spasm of holiday cheer, the Federation team left Friday's negotiating session feeling guardedly optimistic.
The District expressed its tentative acceptance of several Federation proposals, among them that the Educational Reimbursement Program for faculty and their families be re-established; that counselors, librarians, physician assistants, faculty coordinators, registered nurses and nurse practitioners receive a pay increase, for duties defined in the contract's Appendix D-3, from Rate II ($47.43 per hour) to Rate I ($63.25 per hour); and that the 30-year anniversary increment become a standard 30-year step increase.
In this season of Ho-Ho-Ho it was nice to hear something other than the District's usual No-No-No.
But we won't be Scrooged again. We can't let a few minor District concessions blind us to the existence at El Camino of a pervasive culture of stinginess, an institutionalized attitude of miserliness toward faculty and, by extension, toward the students we serve. It's a culture carefully constructed over the past two decades by our previous president, and while many of us felt that our new president would help usher in a kinder, gentler ECC era, we have seen no evidence so far to support our hopes.
So we need to talk.
Not to the District's negotiating team – we've spent five long Friday afternoons talking with them, with no resolution in sight – but with you, the Federation membership.
We need to talk about a strategy going forward, about a unified approach that will send the District, the Board of Trustees, and President Maloney the clear message that in an improving economy, at an institution sitting on a 34-million-dollar budget surplus, we deserve a raise commensurate with our worth, a raise commensurate with the 10% salary increase over three years won recently by the Cerritos College faculty, or the 10.5% won by the faculty of Long Beach City College, or the 14% won by the faculty of the Los Angeles Community College District.
So we hope you can join us at one of our two Federation meetings this week. Both will be held in the Alondra Room, the first at 1:00 Tuesday, the second at 5:00 Wednesday. Bring your questions, ideas, and sense of fairness. And bring your suggestions for ways in which faculty can take a more active role in challenging the campus culture of penny-pinching pettiness.
Your representatives on the Federation team have been hearing your suggestions for months now – the proposed refusal to add students above cap, the proposed sickouts, slowdowns and SLOdowns – and though as negotiators we are prevented by labor law from advocating for such actions at this stage of the process, we of course have no control over the unofficial suggestions of individual members.
God (not to mention labor law) forbid that we negotiators should ever in any way encourage such radical work actions. It's true, of course, that we share your sense of insult and outrage at the District's paltry salary offer. It's equally true that a united, activist faculty would have great leverage at a time when the District is desperate to recover all those FTES lost because of ECC's previous lack of winter session and its current catastrophic lack of student parking (situations caused directly by administration decisions, not by faculty). But the Federation Board would never – I repeat: never!!! – suggest such radical measures in violation of established labor law.
Legal disclaimer aside, we're quite fond of all Americans' constitutional right to freedom of speech. So please feel free to attend a meeting, and to share your suggestions and strategies just as freely as you'd like.