SMCCCD plans for returning to in-person work for the 2021-22 academic year were discussed at the May 12 Board of Trustees (BOT) meeting. Vice Chancellor Aaron McVean and others presented an Update on District Recovery of Operations Relating to Covid-19 and Policy Recommendations Relating to Vaccination Requirements for Employees and Students which called for:

• Summer 2021 instructional and student support programs continue to operate mainly in a remote and online modality
• Fall 2021 instruction to expand to include “Hard to Deliver Online” courses and student support services, programs, and business operations return on-campus with approval by the SMCCCD Emergency Operations Center (EOC). and that all employees working on site or accessing campus be required to be fully vaccinated by July 31, 2021.
• Beginning January 3, 2022, all District operations will operate face-to-face on the campuses and at the District Office. Employees will be expected to work on campus. and all employees and students will be required to demonstrate proof of vaccination against COVID-19.

AFT 1493 Executive Secretary Marianne Kaletzky spoke at the May 12 BOT meeting to present AFT’s position on faculty returning to in-person work. The AFT 1493 Executive Committee voted at the May 12 AFT membership meeting to call on the District and Board of Trustees to ensure that:

• no faculty members be required to begin working on campus against their will, before they feel it is safe, and that
• no faculty member be required to teach or work in a space that does not meet the requirements of public health authorities.

Additional faculty concerns about returning to in-person work were presented by Marianne as well as by a number of faculty who spoke at the May 12 BOT meeting during public comments:

• Many faculty members have expressed concerns about ventilation. Faculty know that many classrooms, offices and other spaces and small and have poor ventilation with inadequate air filtration systems.  Air quality information on faculty work spaces must be provided to faculty before they return to in-person work in these spaces.
• Clear guidelines must be provided about who is responsible for insuring compliance with Covid-related regulations.
• Campus health and safety committees must meet regularly and share district health and safety planning information and enable faculty and staff to bring forward concerns around these issues.

Click on the links below to watch public comments to the BOT by:

• Arielle Smith, CSM Academic Senate President & Counselor
• Katharine Harer, AFT 1493 Co-Vice President & Skyline College English Prof.
• Rosemary Bell, Skyline College History Prof.
• Jessica Truglio, Skyline Learning Disabilities Specialist
• Jenna French, Cañada Learning Disabilities Specialist

Also listen to Tina Acree, from AFSCME (facilities employees’ union,) commenting on labor’s lack of input and the lack of transparency in re-opening planning, and watch Annette Perot, CSEA Chapter 33 President, raising concerns of classified employees.

Our colleagues at AFT 2121, the City College of San Francisco faculty union, need support. They have been battling layoffs and course cuts that would decimate CCSF. City College faculty agreed to big sacrifices, including progressive salary reductions from 4% to 11% to prevent the layoffs of 163 full-time faculty and to prevent the loss of hundreds of classes taught by adjunct faculty.  They are fighting not only to save jobs, but also to preserve the institution that has given so many individuals pathways into new careers and new lives in the Bay Area.

Watch AFT 1493 Skyline Part-Timer Rep. Tim Rottenberg deliver a solidarity message to CCSF faculty from SMCCCD faculty at a CCSF support rally on Saturday, May 8 at S.F. Civic Center:

Please join CCSF faculty’s fight by taking the following two steps:

1. Write to San Francisco City Leaders and tell them you support finding short term and long term funding solutions to make sure CCSF can serve San Franciscans who rely on us. Rap and contact info here: https://tinyurl.com/pr24r8rk
2. If CCSF has had an impact on your life, your community, or the communities you work with, please share your 90-second CCSF success story here: https://hope.xyz/ccsf

For more details, read AFT 2121’s full email to the CCSF community below:

Dear CCSF Community,

AFT 2121 faculty have sacrificed and stood together to preserve classes, jobs, and programs. AFT 2121‘s bargaining team reached a tentative agreement with with City College administration early Saturday morning that saves CCSF from the threat of devastating cuts. The district has agreed to rescind the 163 pink slips issued to full-time CCSF faculty members and to preserve almost all part-time faculty assignments. This is an important victory for our students and our college–these cuts would have fundamentally undermined the historic role of CCSF in our city. There is no doubt that we would not have achieved this outcome without the pressure you helped us to collectively build. 

However, our bargaining team was able to reach this agreement with the district only by agreeing to big sacrifices, including progressive salary reductions from 4% to 11% for faculty already struggling to afford to live in the bay Area. We did this to buy time, so that City College can survive in the short term and with the expectation that we will all fight to ensure a long term solution that will bring revenue to the college. AFT 2121 members are voting on the agreement this weekend and will have a final decision before the Trustees meet tomorrow.

This agreement is a short-term solution that, if ratified, will be a testament to the commitment CCSF’s faculty has for its college. Now we need to see the same commitment from CCSF’s Trustees, administration, and from our political leaders on the local, state, and federal level. 

It is not enough to talk about the essential role of community colleges in addressing racial, gender, and class inequality. We need stable, long-term funding. For CCSF, the budget problem remains. There will continue to be a gap between what the state is willing to provide and the demand for classes and services what San Francisco’s residents need. And our work must continue to restore and protect programs already damaged by cuts and still at risk of further cuts in the Fall like ESL, Nursing, and Disabled Students Programs and Services. AFT 2121 is committed to working with political and community allies to find a real long-term solution to the chronic under-funding of City College and to our community college system more broadly.

The truth is we’re only getting started. This is a fight for accessible higher education, and that’s what our communities need now more than ever to find the skills, jobs, and hope needed to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Join this fight by taking the following two steps:

1. Write to San Francisco City Leaders and tell them you support finding short term and long term funding solutions to make sure CCSF can serve San Franciscans who rely on us. Rap and contact info here: https://tinyurl.com/pr24r8rk
2. Share your 90 second CCSF success story here: https://hope.xyz/ccsf

In solidarity,

TEAM AFT 2121

P.S. Definitely, check out on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram an amazing video made by Anjali Sundaram, Shella Cervantes, and Alexi Lacey–it’s promoting our Open Letter to the Trustees. Sharing this video is a great way to ensure Trustees get a new surge of emails in the lead up to their meeting tomorrow at 4pm. We need them to ratify this agreement and then start stepping up much more aggressively to fight for the CCSF San Francisco deserves!

Contract Highlights

SEE QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS ABOUT THE TENTATIVE AGREEMENT BETWEEN AFT AND SMCCD

At the April 14th AFT Membership Meeting, our union’s Executive Committee voted to recommend that members of our bargaining unit ratify the Tentative Agreement.

Many important areas of faculty working conditions were hammered out in this agreement, and we want to share some of the highlights with you. It was a difficult three-year process but reaped great rewards for faculty!

For starters, no “take-backs” of previous provisions and, for the first time, new contract language on Full-Time Faculty Workload, Discipline & Investigations, Binding Arbitration and Part-Time Parity, including an expanded salary schedule for adjunct instructional faculty. Thanks to all of you for your support and activism.  Without you, these victories wouldn’t have been possible.

Faculty Salary Increases

April 15, 2021

Dear faculty colleagues,

Just before Spring Break, we contacted you to announce that our union has reached a tentative agreement for a new contract with SMCCD. We are writing now to provide more details and to send a link to the text of the Tentative Agreement, where you can see all additions and revisions to the previous contract.

We have now finalized numbers on salary increases for 2019-2020 and 2020-2021. Here are the details:

• For 2019-2020:
  • All faculty will receive a raise of 3.44%.
• For 2020-2021:
  • All faculty will receive a raise of 5.68%.
  • Adjunct instructional faculty will receive an additional 4%.
• For 2021-2022:
  • All faculty will receive a raise to be determined once the San Mateo County property tax assessment for Fiscal Year 2020-2021 is known (after June 30.)
  • The District will put an additional $1.5 million on the adjunct instructional schedule, to continue progress towards the 85% parity goal.

If the contract is ratified, faculty will receive checks for retroactive pay for 2019-2020 and all months of 2020-2021 that they did not receive the new, increased amounts.

The tentative agreement includes a number of other significant wins. Among these are:

• A pilot program to quantify the service work of full-time faculty, set a clear expectation for the amount of service work full-timers can be asked to take on, and compensate full-time faculty who exceed the expectation, either through payment or banked units. Because instruction will still largely be remote for Fall 2021, AFT and the District have agreed that the two-year pilot will be in effect for Academic Years 2022-2023 and 2023-2024.
• An increase of $50 in the cap on the District’s contribution to monthly medical premiums for full-timers.
• 3 increases of $600 per semester to the medical reimbursement stipend available to all part-timers with an appointment of at least 40%. The part-time medical stipend will be $2105 per semester, effective January 1, 2020, $2705 per semester, effective January 1, 2021, and $3305 per semester, effective January 1, 2022.
• New lab rates that assign .8 FLC per hour to labs across arts, sciences, and PE/KAD.
• A set of protections for faculty members subject to investigations and discipline.
• A pilot program for binding arbitration, meaning that AFT will be able to bring grievances before a third-party arbitrator whose decision the District will be bound to comply with.
• A number of provisions affecting counselors, including a collaborative approach to determining appointment lengths and scheduling procedures, as well as additional “prof time” for appointment preparation and follow-up with students.
• Compensation for adjuncts to attend District Flex Days, regardless of whether they usually teach on the particular day of the week that Flex sessions are scheduled.
• An agreement to set the District’s parity goal at 85%, meaning that adjuncts should be paid at least 85% of what full-timers make for the same work.
  
• An ongoing commitment from the District that, until parity is achieved, SMCCD will allocate funds specifically to raises for adjunct instructors over and above the money it makes available for compensation improvements for all faculty.
• An agreement that the District will create a new salary schedule that gives adjunct instructors all 5 education-based columns and 25 experience-based steps available to full-timers, and will begin paying adjunct instructors on this schedule at the start of Academic Year 2022-2023.

This document shows all revisions and additions to the previous contract proposed by the new Tentative Agreement.

At the April 14 Membership Meeting, our union’s Executive Committee voted to recommend that members of our bargaining unit ratify the Tentative Agreement. We are planning to hold a Zoom forum for faculty to ask questions about the Tentative Agreement during the week of April 26th. The ratification vote will take place electronically during the week of May 3rd.

We are enormously grateful to all faculty for the solidarity and determination you have shown throughout these very long negotiations. These wins would not have been possible without your activism and commitment.

In solidarity,

The AFT 1493 Negotiating Team (Joaquín Rivera, Monica Malamud, and Marianne Kaletzky)