Professors still working under expired pact’s terms
SMC — The faculty at Santa Monica College this week overwhelmingly rejected administrators’ latest salary proposal, tossing out more than a year and half of contract negotiations.
The faculty voted 393-25 on Tuesday to reject the proposal.
Meanwhile, SMC administrators contend their offer would have equaled the raises given to all other district employees over the past few years.
SMC has been slowly recovering from years of severe budget shortfalls.
The contract negotiations began before August of 2004, when the faculty’s last agreement expired. College faculty have been living under the terms of that old agreement, signed in 2002, ever since.
The salary proposal would have included no raise for faculty for the 2004-05 academic year. SMC faculty would have received a 3.5 percent raise for the 2005-06 academic year, starting Feb. 13.
Faculty negotiators, however, contend that raise would not have equaled the raises other college employees have recently received. Over the summer, SMC’s board of trustees granted college administrators and classified employees a 2-percent raise retroactive from Jan. 1, 2005, which faculty weren’t offered.
Administrators and classified employees also received the 3.5-percent raise that faculty were offered.
However, SMC interim president Tom Donner said that 2-percent raise which administrators and classified employees received for 2005 was intended to equalize a previous raise which had been given to faculty.
“It really comes down to whether you acknowledge that 2 percent or not,” Donner said. “The faculty has received that 2-percent increase, but do they acknowledge it? Well, it’s on their pay-checks.”
Lantz Simpson, president of SMC faculty association, said that 2-percent raise, however, was awarded to faculty members as the result of a lawsuit they won from the 1990s.
Simpson said the litigation proved the 2-percent “so-called” raise was money SMC already owed faculty. Because of that, it wasn’t fair SMC administrators treat that money as an additional concession, he said.
“That’s money they already owed us,” Simpson said. “But the college has taken a position it’s a raise.”
Simpson said the faculty negotiators and administrators will have a chance to reconvene and come to a better agreement in three weeks.
By then, SMC will have likely named a new college president, who may play a large role in the negotiations.
“The new president will be going through a transition period during which he or she will choose how he or she wants to run the administrative staff,” Donner said.
Donner said he will likely serve as the deputy superintendent of the district — a position he’s held in the past. He’ll also likely assist the new president get familiar with the position.
Meanwhile, Simpson said he is looking forward to resolving the labor dispute with either Donner or the new college president.
He said his group is more concerned with the fairness of the agreement than the person who helps them make it.
“We’re ready to settle a fair contract at any time, before or after a new president comes on board,” Simpson said. “If not, we look forward to working with the new president.”
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on December 2, 2005. Read the original PDF.