Action Alert

Tell California’s elected leaders:
Invest in community colleges

California’s community colleges are critical to our students’ and our communities’ recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, without immediate action from Sacramento, most of our colleges are facing dire fiscal crises, threatening jobs and undermining our ability to meet the needs of our students and our communities.

Send a letter to California’s elected leaders: Time to invest in our community colleges!

Here is what we need our elected leaders in Sacramento to do:

1. Extend the hold harmless provision in the funding formula. The impact of COVID on our colleges’ finances has been severe. Time to extend the hold harmless provision by at least one year to avert immediate fiscal crisis, and to pause all faculty layoffs during the hold harmless period.
2. Expand the COLA and eliminate contingencies. Our community colleges should receive the same COLA as our K-12 schools, with no strings attached.
3. Eliminate all deferrals. Lingering deferrals create unnecessary pressure on our already underfunded districts. With structural deficits looming, now is the time to eliminate all deferrals.
4. End the wasteful expense of CalBright. We can no longer afford to waste any more of the state’s limited resources on this failed experiment. Time to shut CalBright down and invest these critical resources in our existing community college system.

Please take a moment to send a letter to our elected leaders in Sacramento, and urge them to fully invest in our community colleges.

AFT 1493ers in action

AFT 1493’s CAT team gathers to celebrate contract settlement and AFT 1493 contingent marches in San Francisco’s May Day parade

Members of CAT, AFT 1493’s Contract Action Team (all vaccinated!) got together at a park in South San Francisco to celebrate the tentative agreement of the faculty contract after more than two years of negotiations. Standing, from left to right: Marianne Kaletzky, Suji Venkataraman, Shaun Perisho, Bianca Rowden-Quince, Kolo Wamba, Eric Brenner, Tim Rottenberg and Evan Kaiser; seated, left to right: Katharine Harer, Rika Yonemura, Jessica Silver-Sharp and Monica Malamud.

A contingent of AFT 1493 activists from the CAT team marched with hundreds of other labor unionists from around the Bay Area in San Francisco’s May Day parade on May 1.  AFT 1493 marchers included  Tim Rottenberg, Rika Yonemura, Katharine Harer, Marianne Kaletzky, Evan Kaiser and Eric Brenner.

Defending faculty’s rights

Skyline President revises message on media policy after AFT points out
faculty’s right to speak to press without the approval of PIO

Skyline College President, Melissa Moreno, sent a message to the Skyline community on May 3 that corrected a previous message she had sent out on the subject of role of the Marketing, Communications, and Public Relations (MCPR) Department regarding faculty’s right to speak to the press. The earlier message, sent in March, repeated an inaccurate message sent out by the MCPR in 2014 which attempted to “protect” the college’s “brand and image” by restricting faculty comments to reporters and the media.

After that 2014 MCPR message, AFT asked its attorney, Robert Bezemek, to clarify faculty’s constitutional and statutory rights to respond directly to the media. Bezemek wrote an Advocate article on the subject at that time that explained that the MCPR 2014 message “coerces compliance, and discourages or ‘chills” faculty free speech rights. Following President Moreno’s March message on the media policy, AFT Skyline Chapter Co-Chair, Rika Yonemura, met with Dr. Moreno and shared the history and critique of Skyline’s overreaching policy.  AFT appreciates that Dr. Moreno promptly wrote her revised message acknowledging that her March message had “overstepped” and she cited the 2014 Bezemek article, recommending to faculty and staff that it is “worth a read.”

While pointing out the exceptional rare occasions, “as when someone has been engaged to speak on behalf of the college to express the college’s ‘official’ position,” Bezemek’s article concludes with the following statement:

Faculty, students and even Board members cannot be required nor can they be expected by their employer to obtain permission or approval of their words when they decide to talk to the media about their college. The Constitution demands this recognition by public colleges.  

Faculty ratify new three-year contract!
97% vote Yes!

In voting from Monday, May 3 through Thursday, May 6, District faculty overwhelmingly ratified the Tentative Agreement for a new multiyear contract.  371 members, or 40% of our 930-person bargaining unit, voted in the ratification election. Of these, 361 people (97%) voted YES to ratify the contract. Five people (1%) voted no, and five people (1%) abstained.

The Tentative Agreement will now be brought before the SMCCCD Board of Trustees next Wednesday, May 12, for their approval, and if approved by the Board, it will become the contract governing faculty working in the District from the beginning of July 2019 through the end of June 2022.

• VIEW NEW CONTRACT HIGHLIGHTS
• VIEW QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT THE NEW CONTRACT

Anti-Oppression Committee

All faculty, staff and students are invited to the Gender Oppression Listening Space:
A session to share experiences and build solidarity: Friday, May 14, 1 – 2:30 p.m.

by Rika Yonemura-Fabian, Skyline Chapter co-chair, AFT anti-oppression committee co-lead

Many female-identifying faculty and students experience gender aggression, discrimination and harassment in classrooms and in our interactions with our colleagues, administrators and peers. Yet it is often extremely challenging to bring justice to gender-based aggression. As a union representative, I have been in conversation with many female colleagues around their experiences of being intimidated, belittled, and marginalized because of their gender in everyday contexts of our work. I have also represented some faculty members in investigations of their complaints of gender discrimination.

When a complainant is a faculty member, the case goes to the District HR office. In the process, I have seen complainants face multiple obstacles, always, without an exception, of a similar nature: the complainant has to endure a long, time-consuming process of filing their complaints and documenting the incidents, all the while reliving the trauma of the incidents; the District office takes a long time to respond to the complaint, and the complainant self-doubts if she is making something up out of nothing and causing trouble for other people; the District refuses to take meaningful actions to intervene, and the complainant walks away with a sense of powerlessness; there is a constant fear of retaliation which a complainant has to endure, throughout the process. In some cases, the complainant herself was asked to justify and explain how the incident constituted gender harassment. To sum up, individual investigation processes can be very isolating, and in themselves, traumatizing. Although we try to do our best, support from union representatives won’t be able to entirely solve this very common symptom of victim-blaming perpetuated by the oppressive gendered system itself.

The AFT anti-oppression committee, a collective of faculty and students within AFT, wants to create a communal and supportive space for our female-identifying and non-binary colleagues and students to build a network of support. With this as our goal, we are organizing a Gender Oppression Listening Space: a session to share experiences and build solidarity on May 14th from 1pm – 2:30pm. The event is designed to serve as a container to provide safety and trust to talk about women’s and female-identifying people’s experiences, including gender aggressions and gender oppression on campus, and the everyday struggles of gendered labor patterns, including the burden from care work and emotional work that often falls on women. Facilitated by an AFT member and a student organizer, the space will connect faculty and students so that we can start building a network of mentorship.

All faculty, classified staff, and students are welcome to join. Register at this link. In this first event, we welcome male-identifying members to listen and learn about gendered experiences from other participants. If you have any questions, please direct it to Rika Yonemura at fabian@aft1493.org or Marianne Kaletzky at kaletzky@aft1493.org.