Sent to ALL faculty 12/15/2021

Dear fellow faculty,

We write this statement as your rank-and-file colleagues across all three colleges in the district. As we prepare to enter salary negotiations, we are organizing for an open and transparent negotiations process. A collective push led by us, rank-and-file academic workers, will get us the thriving wage we deserve. A thriving wage is a priority for all of us, and the way we win the raises we deserve is through open negotiations, a strategy that succeeds at the bargaining table. This was affirmed by our AFT 1789 Executive Board in October, when it passed a resolution presented by rank-and-file demanding that the Seattle Colleges District open future salary and MOU negotiations to all faculty affected by the contract and MOUs.

As the cost of living skyrockets in our region, too many of our rank-and-file are struggling to meet basic needs like housing, transportation, food, and healthcare. We can’t afford to wait! In previous rounds of negotiation, our district failed to address wage increases, forcing us to start yet another academic year without the salaries we deserve. The current full-time faculty base salary in our district is $68,542, far below what a worker needs to comfortably rent a one-bedroom apartment in Seattle. Part-time faculty face additional precarity and financial insecurity, exacerbated by the district’s clumsy rollout of ctcLink, which hurt enrollment and caused both full- and part-time faculty to lose classes and income.

When the rank-and-file is organized and strong, our union is strong. Our power is rooted in collective solidarity from our shared conditions of exploitation. Open negotiations creates a transparent process for us, rank-and-file academic workers, to bear witness to the district’s tactics, and gives us the leverage to 1) fight for the thriving wage we deserve and 2) democratize our union and our colleges. We demand a negotiations process that includes:

• Opening all salary and MOU negotiations to all rank-and-file workers and select community members

• Removing barriers to accessing negotiations meetings

• Ongoing rank-and-file-led training in tactics to support attendance at negotiations meetings

• Assigned notetakers and reporters from the rank-and-file

• A dedicated rank-and-file-led online space to display notes and reports on each negotiations meeting similar to the one used by UAW4121

• Coordination with our union’s negotiations team

• Coordination with the media

• Coordination of swag and posters

• Coordination of communication among the rank-and-file through phone, email, and other channels

We rank-and-file academic workers offer the most direct support to students’ learning. Our colleges would not function without us. We must organize and push for open negotiations and the transformation of our district to reflect the value we and other student-facing workers create. This will take unity and discipline from all of us. We were energized to see high levels of attendance and enthusiasm at last Friday’s rank-and-file-led meeting and are excited to plan next steps in our open salary negotiations process. Join us for our next organizing meeting on Friday January 14th, 3-5 pm. What better way to kick off MLK Day weekend and honor Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of economic and racial justice than building power and solidarity as rank-and-file workers!

• Save the date! Friday January 14th, 3-5 pm via Zoom. We’ll send out additional details at the start of Winter quarter.

Enjoy the break! We look forward to organizing together and celebrating our wins in 2022!

In solidarity,

Your rank-and-file comrades

This is the original Rank and File position paper written in March of 2020 and signed by 190 faculty members

Position statement

We want to open this statement by saying we stand in solidarity with all workers on the front lines of the COVID-19 pandemic, many of whom are our students. Healthcare workers, food producers, grocery store workers, delivery drivers, and so many others put themselves on the line so that we can continue to have our basic necessities. What their tireless work and risk reveal is that the COVID-19 pandemic is not just a public health crisis; it is a crisis of neoliberal, free-market capitalism. Throughout this pandemic, we have followed changes in the conditions of their labor, as well as their organizing efforts. Workers at Amazon, Whole Foods, Instacart, and our comrades incarcerated in the Monroe Correctional Complex have all shown that now is the time to envision something better and fight for it. We are inspired by their work and as we write this statement, we take our cue from their leadership.

We are a collective of politically independent, rank-and-file union members and educators at Seattle Central College. The statement we are presenting here is a revised version of a position paper we distributed to our colleagues shortly after we entered emergency remote instruction. We wrote this statement in response to the unprecedented change in the conditions to our labor. In March 2020, like many institutions of higher education nationwide, our campus went into emergency remote instruction in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Washington State. We found ourselves scrambling to transition our courses online without meaningful support from the college. However, although we had to drastically shift our curriculum and pedagogy with severely inadequate resources, one resource our faculty does have is union representation with AFT Local 1789. Shortly after the transition to emergency remote instruction, our union began drafting a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and a Statement of Commitment (SOC) with our administration (See Appendices 1 and 2 for the full MOU and SOC). While we agreed that these documents were an important step towards protecting us during a time of crisis, they also did not do enough to mitigate the threats of harm we were all facing under these conditions. We knew that the agreements in these two documents would be fruitless without diligent and organized rank-and-file workers. We would not only need to organize our faculty, but all academic workers at all levels of the college.

We wrote our position statement with the primary goal of politicizing and organizing our rank-and-file and to respond to the increased exploitation of our labor. Our own experience as organizers has taught us that:

• Holding administration accountable during these times of crisis requires a strong rank-and-file with internal, collective solidarity;

• Building solidarity among workers requires contextualizing and politicizing the pandemic in order to further worker’s rights and protections;

• We must develop solidarity across academic workers at all levels of our institutions in order to respond quickly and sharply to attempts to further erode our rights and protections. All workers at all levels of academia are vulnerable to increased exploitation during times of crisis. It is imperative that we stand together.

The MOU and SOC were developed to protect us from “harm.” However, if we look at the pandemic in its full context, it is clear that we, the faculty, have already been harmed. We, the rank-and-file academic workers, have increasingly borne the responsibility for the social problems faced by our students, as well as the austerity measures implemented by the federal and state governments. Since the 1990s, state spending on higher education has fallen from 15 percent of the overall state budgets to 9 percent. The COVID-19 pandemic has intensified that burden, and made visible the contradictions of trying to teach under fiscal starvation. The state has the money to support and protect us during this pandemic. The issue isn’t that the money isn’t there, but rather that wealthy elites like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Howard Schultz hoard the wealth through regressive taxation. Austerity and scarcity have created conditions in which faculty face precarious employment, and a part-time/full-time divide that pits us against one another.

But while all faculty, staff, and students have already been harmed by this pandemic, we are also differentially impacted. Faculty of color and women faculty, who have historically been excluded from higher education, face exponential barriers to their work in our institutions. And rather than seeing that harm reduced, we are being asked to do more with less, with little to no assurances by the administration. The agreements between our union and the administration clearly illustrate this: both documents place the burden of mitigating the conditions created by the pandemic on individual faculty rather than the administration. They offer vague protections after the fact, rather than expect the administration to create the conditions that would make our work sustainable. In our original position paper, we identified three overarching issues that we will outline in this article: worker protections, compensation and expenses, and institutional duties. It is our hope that this position paper can add to the organizing and dialogue taking place among academic workers at all levels of public higher education.

Just like so many workers nationally and internationally, the pandemic has left many of our colleagues without work. Without time to find another teaching job, many will have to rely on an overburdened unemployment system to meet their basic needs. For those of us who still have employment, the conditions of precarity have intensified. Furthermore, when our futures rely so much on student enrollment - in a time when public higher education is increasingly inaccessible - the threats to our livelihood in the future are high. The precarity of our labor does not only cause insecurity in our employment. It also creates a reliance on close relationships with administration. Although our campus does have a seniority process, administrators are able to leverage part-time precarity. They make it clear that if a part-time faculty member wants to be a “viable” member of the campus community, they must make themselves known to administrators through additional labor. At times, this can limit the capacity of part-time faculty to become active in the union or speak out about the exploitative conditions they are living. As we began reaching out to faculty to write this paper, we also realized that these conditions have created an environment of self-preservation. The divide between part-time and full-time faculty has alienated us from each other. Moreover, the environment of self-preservation creates the illusion that our exploitation is an individual issue rather than a systemic one. Both have proven challenging when trying to build labor solidarity among the rank-and-file.

Although our precarity has intensified, we understand that these conditions did not begin with the pandemic. Our working conditions parallel the struggles of academic workers - and really, all workers - across the country. Moreover, as faculty at a community college, our students are either the “essential” workers on the front lines, or workers left without income, health benefits, and mental health services during a global health crisis. As we saw our working conditions worsen, the agreements between our union and the administration did little to assuage our concerns. In the following sections, we will outline the conditions of our labor, historicize them, and politicize them. In doing so, we want to begin organizing for a public higher education that centers the material and intellectual needs of faculty and, most importantly, students. It is time for academic workers across the country to unite and fight not just for survival, but for a public higher education system freed from the weights of capitalism.

Worker Protections

Our exploitative working conditions are particularly stark in the age of COVID-19, but they are by no means new. The threats our faculty face to their livelihoods is happening within the context of an already-precarious labor structure. For the last several decades, higher education has seen an increase in the number of part-time faculty. While this has been great for the college’s bottom line, it has been detrimental to the quality of life for faculty, as well as the quality of education for our students. As Daniel Jacoby found in his study on the effects of part-time faculty employment rates, an increase in the ratio of part-time to full-time faculty has a negative impact on student graduation rates. Studies like this confirm what we already know: when academic workers suffer, students suffer. The increase in part-time to full-time ratio creates a class of highly skilled, precarious workers with very expensive degrees. We enter into our professions, then, with inadequate wages and a lot of debt. According to the AFT 1789 Faculty Employment Survey in 2019, 84 percent of our faculty work multiple jobs across the Greater Seattle area just to get by. Moreover, women and faculty of color disproportionately bear this burden. As the result of a long history of exclusion from academia, a privatized higher education system, and the feminization of teaching as “non-productive” labor, community college faculty are primarily women. We enter into this profession with no wealth, inadequate pay, and huge amounts of debt. What is more, many of us do this work in addition to our invisible reproductive labor, such as child care. And,as a direct result of racist policies and practices, these conditions are heightened for women of color. In building solidarity among academic workers across the country, it is imperative that we build labor solidarity that is both anti-racist and feminist.

When workers all over the country are experiencing job loss or increased exploitation, we call on the college to increase worker protections. The pandemic and the resulting job loss means that many of our faculty are at risk of losing not only their wages, but their benefits as well. In this time of crisis, it is imperative that we, the faculty, have the resources to keep ourselves safe and healthy. The agreements between our union and the administration did provide some basic protections. The agreements are an important attempt to protect our ability to care for ourselves and our loved ones. They can help us keep our health benefits, which is a crucial necessity during a global pandemic. They can also provide some, albeit limited, security during uncertain times. Finally, they seek a commitment from the college not to undermine our rights and academic freedom. We are living in a period where, all over the world, the realities of exploitation and oppression are intensified. While the agreements aim to address these realities, they need to go further.

Our primary issue with the agreements between our union and the administration is that they place the responsibility on us, the faculty, to protect ourselves from harm. There is no responsibility on part of the administration to create the conditions that would prevent harm in the first place. For example, faculty can keep health benefits during the pandemic by using their personal or sick leave. Not only is it possible that some faculty might not have personal or sick leave left, but the requirement speaks to a larger issue. 70 percent of our faculty are navigating the limitations of precarious employment. We struggled with precarious employment before the pandemic and are seeing those limitations intensify now. The issue, then, is bigger than whether or not we maintain our health benefits during the pandemic. The real heart of the issue is that we have so many faculty living with so little job security. The current crisis is revealing the myriad ways in which austerity in higher education has made it difficult to meet our basic needs. In this time of crisis, the administration is asking us to do more with less and, maybe, they will provide some protections when issues arise. We say that now is the time for the college to provide more for us, not less. We say that now is the time to organize and work towards a college that puts its faculty, staff, and students before the bottom line.

Compensation and Expenses

Higher education has also seen, over the past several decades, a decrease in funding from the federal and state governments. Washington State spent 15 percent less per student in 2018 compared to 2008, when adjusted for inflation, while tuition is 33 percent higher. This research also shows that funding cuts and higher tuition disproportionately impact students of color. This has made our work dependent on performance budgeting, FTEs, and corporate partnerships. Rather than measure our work on the success of teaching and learning, our work is measured through graduation rates and enrollment numbers. As a result, we, the faculty, have become increasingly responsible for the myriad of barriers students bring into the classroom due to devastating conditions of inequality; increase in tuition and decreasing financial aid, precarious jobs, housing and food insecurity, and an overburdened healthcare system that, at the best of times, provides inadequate care. We become responsible for enrollment and graduation numbers and, on top of it all, we literally foot the bill. We buy our own books, our own supplies (e.g., webcams, microphones, and other tech equipment), and we are expected to do professional development activities at our own expense, without guarantee of reimbursement. We are already underpaid. As recent numbers show, most of us would require a $23,000 pay increase to reach Seattle’s median income, or a roughly 40% pay increase to have salaries equivalent to our peer institutions; we should not also have to pay for the resources necessary to do our jobs. We were underpaid and overworked before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. These measures hint at the realities of our exploitation, but they do not go far enough to ensure that we don’t suffer even more than we already are. Again, that we have to ask for these assurances at all speaks to the larger issue of how austerity measures have impacted not only our ability to survive, but to thrive as educators. We want these assurances to be a starting point for us to come together as a faculty and push for a college that places faculty and, ultimately, student learning, first.

Institutional Duties

The pandemic has ruptured for many faculty the veil of a prestige economy, which depends on us seeing our work as prestigious and, thus, outside the exploitative machine of modern capitalism and austerity policies. The prestige economy that exists in higher education also reproduces a hierarchy among colleges and universities, placing community colleges and those who educate working class students at the bottom. What this elitist paradigm does is divide faculty and not allow us to organize and see each other as workers whose interests are not only similar, but interdependent. The pandemic has also brought decades-long austerity measures into full light as we try to meet the needs of a depleted healthcare system and other public institutions including higher education. As academic workers, we experience this depletion of resources more starkly in our non-instructional duties. While we witness an increase in administrative jobs in the last two decades, we the faculty are often asked to take an increasing role in administration. We sit on numerous committees, manage departments, and implement most of the programs that impact institutional culture and students’ daily experience at the college. In addition to teaching a full load of courses - with all that working with students everyday entails - we live with the increasing institutional pressures of top-down programs like Guided Pathways that add to the practice and culture of scarcity. What is more, the labor these duties require differentially impact faculty of color and women, who are often asked to work on these programs in order to ensure equity in the context of our long history of racism and sexism. Full-time faculty are asked to implement curricular “fixes” to problems we may or may not see as priorities to our work with students. Part-time faculty are often denied this work as funding for stipends are few and far between, or we are often asked to do the work for free. Also, stipend work does not equal the time and effort part-time faculty are asked to commit to and end up creating huge inequities in time and pay. Keeping engaged in intellectual work in the context of increasing institutional duties leaves little to no time to engage in critical dialogues about the state of higher education in the US and bring the critical voice of the community college faculty to the nation’s attention.

We the faculty have also experienced a shift through the modalities in which we are expected to teach our courses. Online teaching, together with other “cost-effective” measures, gained institutional popularity in the 1990s as part of a push for gutting public institutions. The development of online teaching has not only funneled public funds into private industry, it also undermines our labor power by creating conditions in which we, the faculty, work further away from our students and each other. Today, in light of the pandemic, we are being asked to teach all of our courses online and have been provided little to no pedagogical support for teaching online. Although many faculty have developed innovative ways of teaching online that work to overcome the inevitable alienation brought by the lack of physical proximity, we, the faculty, also understand that online teaching may remove us from our much needed relationship-building with our students and colleagues on campus. Online teaching further alienates part-time faculty, who are physically and symbolically removed from campus more than they already are. Furthermore, online education, while initially touted as a cost-saving measure in the 90s, is anything but. Online education actually costs more, and is a wealth generator for private corporations who manage the platforms. This form of public-private partnership gives our collective power away to private companies. And this is what we see as the real purpose behind the shift to online education: it is a neoliberal measure that undermines our labor power. It is very difficult to build collective solidarity as a faculty when our “campus” exists in cyberspace. We know from decades-long labor history, as well as our own experience as community organizers, that successful organizing happens on the ground and face-to-face. We know this, and the administration knows this as well.

These issues existed before the pandemic, and we have dealt with them for far too long. While the items in this MOU offer important assurances from the college, they still place the burden on individual faculty to make decisions that could have long-lasting impacts on our collective working conditions. We need an administration that will make decisions in our best interest and that don’t place the weight on our individual shoulders. When the college creates conditions in which we have to prioritize our individual survival, we don’t see the struggle of our fellow faculty. What our experience has taught us is that this institutional transformation won’t happen without a push from below. We are calling for organized, collective action so that we don’t see these conditions worsen and we continue to struggle for education for all accessible to all!

Call to Action

While our position statement was specific to our local’s MOU and SOC, we also know that academic workers across state and national lines are currently navigating similar conditions. It is our hope that in writing this statement, we can begin the long process of coalition building with academic workers across the country to confront the realities of neoliberal austerity in public higher education. We want to see an end to this long history of exploitation not only of academic workers, but all workers. The items presented in the MOU and SOC are not things we should ever have had to ask for. We should already have these things. A global pandemic should not have been the precursor to basic rights and protections. And while we support the agreements between our union and the administration, experience has taught us that without diligence, organization, and pressure from below, these agreements will be rendered toothless since they rely on the administration's “good intentions.” In other words, it will be administrators, not faculty, who will continue to make critical decisions about the nature of our work.

For this reason, this paper is more than a document to politicize the pandemic. It is a call to action! We hope that this will be a stepping stone towards a broader movement for workers’ rights and a radical transformation of our education system. Today, our solidarity is being tested and we, the faculty, need to stand together. A united front includes, but is not limited to, the following:

• A refusal to work beyond what is required in our collective bargaining agreement. In a time when we are being asked to do more with less, we cannot succumb to pressures to put in additional hours without appropriate compensation and protections.

• A refusal to overload our courses. This puts our colleagues at risk of having their sections cancelled.

• A commitment to report grievances to both the union, the administration, and each other.

• A commitment to work in solidarity with other unions, rank-and-file workers, and community members.

• A commitment to demand that our administration fight for new revenue streams for education statewide, both by demanding a head-tax in Seattle, as well as a statewide income tax.

• A commitment to organize. We must build a movement now that resists the intensification of austerity measures in light of the pandemic. Eventually, we will be able to congregate again. When we do, we must be ready to collectively fight for real change in our college, and in public education in its entirety. That work begins now.

• As a collective, we stand for:

  • Free tuition now!

  • Student loan forgiveness now!

  • Healthcare for all!

  • Free universal broadband internet!

  • Tax the rich!

We hope that this position paper sparks a critical dialogue amongst the rank-and-file of all unions. In a time when we are asked to look through the lens of scarcity and competition, we say it is time to dream big and work in solidarity towards a collective vision. We don’t want to simply survive the COVID-19 pandemic. We want to use this historic moment to work for the further liberation of our institutions, our labor, and the education of our students.

Academic workers unite!

With Revolutionary Love, Spirit, and Solidarity,

Labor coming together to fight for Black Lives!