AFT members meet with administration over faculty pay shortages

On Wednesday, October 8, AFT reps and faculty met with Vice Chancellor Ron Gerhard and Kerry Wilhite, Associate Dean of CCSF payroll. Faculty told compelling stories about the anxiety and financial hardship created by the District’s faulty payroll system. We called on VC Gerhard to take more leadership in getting immediate payment to faculty who have been grossly underpaid, while working to solve the systemic issues involved.  Two other requests came out during the course of the meeting. One was to have administration send out and post an explanation of the confusing CALSTRS deductions on paychecks. The other was to have a payroll contact list so that people can see who they need to call to get their problems fixed.

AFT has identified hundreds of payroll errors over the last year, many inexplicable, including:

• Failures to pay some or all of a faculty members assignments; Incorrect pay grades (step/column) or pay rates;
• Underpayments and missing payment for part-time upgrades. Several employees are owed thousands going as far back as Fall 2012;
• Overpayments;
• Overdeductions of sick leave leading to cuts in pay;
• Paying at the sub rate for regular assignments;
• Paying at the noncredit rate for credit work;
• Paying at the non-instructional rate for a teaching assignment.

While acknowledging dysfunction in the payroll system, VC Gerhard and Associate Dean Wilhite were unable to identify why the problems are occurring or how they will be fixed. They did say that some of the problems are not in payroll, but occur when Office of Instruction or Human Resources gives incorrect information to payroll or does not communicate or set-up faculty assignments properly in Banner.  Also, they said that they’re still working to fill vacancies in Payroll so that we have the necessary trained staff. Ms. Wilhite also referred to the large backlog of CalSTRS reporting errors that she inherited, which continues to require diversion of staff time to work through.

VC Gerhard pledged to work to get faculty correctly paid and address the underlying systemic problems. He also promised to meet with our union and the District’s labor relations dean to straighten out some of the contractual interpretation issues around sick pay, temporary upgrades, etc. While administration’s explanations were less than satisfactory, the number of faculty who came to the meeting and talked about their experiences did seem to have an effect. Last night and this morning, we received a number of emails with updates about payroll issues, showing that administration is working more quickly to get people paid.

Given these problems, faculty need to “Check Your Check” to see if your pay and sick leave are correct. Go to our website and/or call the AFT office for help.

We encourage you to come to our AFT 2121 General Membership Meeting on Tuesday, October 21 from 3-5pm in MUB 140. We will be discussing our contract negotiations that are starting next semester, including developing contract language to help protect faculty from being victimized by District pay and sick leave errors in the future.