Part-Time Educators Seek to End Disparity in Salary

College instructor Sam Russo is one of the state’s roads scholars, but he would rather not be.

A philosophy professor at three community colleges, he spends more time on the freeway than he does in class.

Campus hopping has become a way of life for him and thousands of other part-time instructors who cobble together a full-time job class by class.

Even then, the “freeway fliers” and their part-time cohorts who teach on a single campus earn about half of what full-time faculty members make.

Although the state set aside $57 million this year to lessen the disparity, part-timers complain that the amount is too low and that districts are using only a portion of their allotments for their intended purpose.

The 45,000 part-time instructors who teach at California’s 108 community colleges are developing a proposal to ensure that those part-timers who are paid the least in comparison to their full-time co-workers receive the lion’s share of the money.

“I once made the fatal mistake of calculating how much I make for each hour I spend on class and getting between classes,” Russo said. “It came out to about 11 bucks. That’s not what you think about when you think of a college professor.”

Gov. Gray Davis approved the $57 million without clear directions on how it should be spent. The Los Angeles Community College District is close to signing an agreement with the faculty union that would pay full-time teachers’ overtime from the part-timers’ $5-million allotment. District officials say full-time faculty who take on extra classes are just as entitled to the money.

Part-time counselors and librarians, who union negotiators say do not have to spend time preparing classes or grading papers, also are upset that they will receive a smaller portion of the $5 million.

Further complicating matters is the wide range of practitioners who are considered part-time instructors. Some are business professionals who might teach one weekend course on office accounting. Others have extensive classroom experience, hold doctorates and may also teach at a university campus. The person believed to be the most senior faculty member in the Los Angeles district has been part time for more than 30 years.

Almost 70% of part-time instructors are professional educators carrying two or more courses each semester, according to a state auditor’s report.

Dispute Has Helped Union Efforts

Debates over the funds have emboldened union movements at colleges in Cerritos, Santa Clarita, the Victor Valley in San Bernardino County and Kern County.

In California, the average full-time community college faculty member earns about $45,000--while part-timers earn about $20,000, most of them receiving no health or retirement benefits.

“From the faculty perspective, this is a system that is predicated on overusing and abusing a labor pool,” said Jonathan Lightman, president of the Faculty Assn. of the California Community Colleges.

The U.S. Department of Education released a study in October showing that 43% of college and university faculty in the United States are part-time employees. The California average is about the same.

The equivalent of 3,200 full-time positions were created in the state’s community colleges from 1994 to 1999, according to the California Bureau of State Audits, and about 95% of those jobs were filled with part-time faculty.

Russo said he has been stringing jobs together since 1987, at one time teaching 10 classes on five campuses in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

“It’s easy to see why I’d rather have one full-time position,” said Russo, who teaches at El Camino College in Torrance, Long Beach City College and Cypress College. “It is unfair that I have to have the same qualifications and teach my classes the same way as a full-time instructor, but I can’t get the same pay.”

In 1997, the year Russo shuttled among five campuses, he earned about $31,000, little more than half the average salary of a full-time El Camino faculty member, he said.

Larry Kushner, a civil rights professor at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley, has been teaching part time since 1974. He said that he is satisfied with his salary of less than $30,000 a year, but that it is unfair for part-timers to be paid hourly wages only for their time in class and not for the hours they spend preparing, grading and advising students.

In the Los Angeles district, full-time teachers earn an average of $66,000. A part-time instructor teaching the maximum five classes could earn only $53,000. But on average they are paid about $30,000 for a full-time workload.

“I spend as much time working outside of class as inside,” Kushner said. “It’s a real problem for people who have to depend on this to make a living.”

The Los Angeles district is considering paying out its portion of the state money as a one-time bonus at the end of the semester. Carl Friedlander, president of the union that represents Los Angeles instructors, said the extra money may be cut from future, tighter state budgets.

Ideally, he said, the district would stop compensating contract employees on an hourly basis and pay them a set fee per class. That idea drew fire from part-time counselors who attended an information meeting last week because they do not teach classes and would receive a smaller cut from the allotment.

Non-Teaching Faculty May Get Smaller Cut

Elizabeth Strother, a counselor at Pierce and Rio Hondo College in Whittier, said: “We hate to fight over it when we’re all underpaid, but it’s going to drive a wedge between the teaching and the nonteaching faculty.”

The Los Angeles district, which added about $2 million to its budget to raise part-time pay before the state infusion, has led the way in equalizing compensation.

Some districts, such as the one-campus Santa Monica Community College District, have added benefit plans that offer at least a portion of the insurance and retirement options to part-time faculty. A statewide plan begun this year will reimburse part-time faculty for some of their health insurance costs.

Officials estimate that it would cost $150 million to $250 million to close the gap in California. Under its original pay-equity proposal, the state would step up its contribution to $225 million by 2003, but next year’s increase has already been rejected by the Finance Department.