04/19/2015
We have reached a Tentative Agreement
Colleagues,
After a grueling 30 hours of negotiation facilitated by a mediator appointed by the Public Employee Relations Board, the Solano College Faculty Association and the Solano Community College District have reached a Tentative Agreement. This closes out the negotiations for the 2013-2015 session.
In the follow-up, we now immediately move on to reopening negotiations on the successor Contract. The Association has sunshined Salaries and the District has sunshined Salaries, Workload, Evaluation, and Medical Benefits.
But, I present the Tentative Agreement to you here for your consideration. To go into effect, if would have to be ratified by you and be approved by the Board of Trustees.
Before I discuss the details of the TA, I want to give the highest praise possible to the leadership of negotiation chair Sandy Rotenberg. These negotiations have been a bit rocky at times, and she handled them with grace and skill. And, it was always nice to have a librarian at the helm: "hmmm... where is that document?" followed by an immediate "Here it is!" or "I've forgotten what happened" followed by an immediate "here is the record." If you could see her, and her team in action - wow.
So, the Tentative Agreement is attached. We collected the ideas of non-monetary items that you all suggested in the survey that we sent out and proposed them to the District. The District in the end accepted many or most of them, but not all. Prominently missing in the TA is the Load Banking proposal, which we pushed and pushed - but it scared the District. We are still mystified by their opposition since it seems to benefit them as well as all faculty, but they just could not accept it this round. Based on the strong support for it in the faculty survey, the new negotiation team will continue to work on it.
In terms of non-monetary changes to the contract, the TA fixes a provision in sick leave, reduces office hours for full time faculty from 5 hours to 4 hours per week (with a pilot program to have one of the four hours as an online office hour), and a move toward a compressed calendar (shorter year).
We responded to a problem that we have encountered more and more frequently about new faculty feeling lost and we got the district to agree to a mentorship program.
We were trying to fix the double class size problem, and made some progress - again, this was a compromise.
We argued for every benefit that had been suggested for adjunct faculty and got the following included: compensation for serving on the Academic Senate and Curriculum committees (we argued for additional committees but this is what we could get), additional payment for office hours (it seemed more logical to have 9 hour in an 18 week semester - no one could figure out how to make the previous 5 hours work), a provision to explicitly notify when a full time position opens (this was in response to several problems in the past), and an explicit provision that adjunct faculty members would get paid (at Flex Cal rates) for the mandatory training sessions (this had been ambiguous in the past).
There is a golden handshake for faculty members who are retiring.
At some point it looked as if there would not be anything monetary coming our way. But the District met us half-way and there is:
A bonus for adjuncts who taught this year paid in a lump sum in August.
An addition of a column for full time faculty.
And additional row on the bottom of the full time and adjunct faculty salary schedules.
So, it's some progress. We jump right into negotiations to work again.
I have to say that none of this would have been possible without your hard work. They really felt pressure. Especially effective was the show of solidarity at the last Board meeting and a special thanks to the sign ninjas whose cleverness and diligence surprised me every day.
Here is the bottom line for me. The fact that we settled this TA does not remove the fact that the college has some serious problems to work on. We, as faculty, have united with the classified staff and with students to continue to put pressure on the administration to fix these problems. I often thought that the Board was dismissing our complaints about these problems as "oh, they are just unhappy about negotiations." No, we WERE unhappy that negotiations hadn't been going well AND we were unhappy that the college wasn't being run well. With the former removed now we can focus on the latter. We are looking for a slogan: Fix the school. Something like that. Let us know if you have a suggestion.
So, here is the Tentative Agreement for your consideration. Ratification requires a formal election.
My best wishes to you, and again, thanks to the former negotiation team and good luck to the new negotiation team.
Jim
Jim DeKloe
SCFA President
