AFT-District Negotiations: From Bad to Worse

Distorted District email

Wednesday afternoon District Chief Negotiator Mickey Branca sent a college-wide email in which the facts about contract negotiations were grossly distorted.

When directly asked if the District proposal would effectively leave part-time faculty in 2018 with salaries below those of 2007, Branca definitively answered, “Yes!” This while purporting that compensation is “our top priority.”

Increased hours for FT faculty (with no pay)!!

With the expectation of ever increasing workloads without parallel compensation, the District proposed yesterday to increase, for full-time faculty, the minimum required office hours from 2 hours to 5 hours.

Even more class cuts

The District recently proposed cutting the class offerings by 15%. However the ante has been raised and the District now proposes a 26% slashing of the course schedule over the next 6 years. This will be accompanied by a faculty reduction of 356 FTEF during the same period.The District claims these cuts of classes and faculty will have NO impact on student enrollment.

On September 30th, our Bargaining Team brought to the attention of the District that revenue of one-time monies from “mandated costs” was missing from the recent BOT-approved budget. Yesterday and without acknowledging that the $12.9 million could be used to support significant across-the-board raises, the District’s financial analysts simply reported that they “missed it”. Is this what they call “fiscal responsibility”?