“People don’t want to teach [at Cerritos College] unless they can’t find a job some place else.” That, according to American Federation of Teachers representative, Linda Cushing, is how part time instructors in the Southern California area feel.

Cushing, who has been on campus trying to recruit instructors, both part time and full time to form a teacher’s union at this, the only California community college campus to not have any union representation whatsoever, says, for the most part, ‘there is no comparison between the pay here for [part-time faculty] and that of the surrounding district.”

There have been a growing number of instructors, both part time and full time, who have been joining the union movement Cerritos College over the course of the semester.

If someone were to have asked Cushing a couple of months ago, she would have said the AFT was half way to its goal of gaining enough faculty support to get the unionization process going. Now she would say she is two-thirds of the way there.

To get this process going, 50 percent plus one of the campus faculty members must be on board.

Besides pay, some of the other issues the AFT feels needs to be addressed are:

o Health benefits for part-time faculty; they currently have none.

o Seniority/rehiring rights for part-time faculty who have been teaching at Cerritos for a number of years. There are some instructors who have been teaching at Cerritos for 10, 15, 20 years and more, yet every semester face the uncertainty of not knowing if they will be asked back to teach the following semester.

o A fair way to resolve disagreements. Under current conditions part-time faculty have no say in these matters.

As someone who used to be a part time art instructor at Cerritos, Cushing speaks from personal experience.

She says, “I taught here two or three years ago. I took a class on and I didn’t ask how much the pay was because somebody had been asking me for a long time to teach in their department, and it was a last minute thing, and I said sure.

“When I got my first pay check here . . . I looked at it, and I said, ‘there’s a mistake,’ and I went back to the office and they said, ‘well no, that’s the pay here.'”

Part-time instructors make about one-third of what many full-time faculty members make. Many people feel, for the same work, they should be paid the same amount of money.

Right now, when the class period ends, part-time teachers stop getting paid. Whereas full-time instructors, who make an annual salary continue to get paid.

And the students also feel the effects of this.

Many parttimers aren’t able to hold office hours, and the ones who are, are doing it on their own time.

While fulltimers are getting paid for grading papers, preparing lesson plans and meeting with students during office hours, part-timers are basically donating their time for the same activities.

To make up the pay, many part-time instructors become what Cushing refers to as freeway flyers.

“How do the students benefit from that,” she says. When you’ve got somebody that’s running from school to school to school because they’re not being paid adequately at any one of those colleges, and students don’t get a chance to see them.

“If they do hold office hours, they’re holding it on they’re own penny, and at a certain point either people just break down and say, I can’t do this anymore, or they start teaching cheap. The things that you believe that you should be doing as a part-time faculty member and that brought you into the profession because you wanted to be a good teacher . . . you stop doing.

“You stop having essay tests, you start giving objective tests, you stop doing preparation outside the classroom . . . because it takes too much time because you’re not paid for any of that time.”

The issue of unionization is very touchy on campus. Many faculty members feel that if word gets out that they are involved in the process they might not be asked to teach the following semester.

But the support is growing.

Lisa Engelbrcht, a part-time instructor who has been at Cerritos College for four years says she sees it. She says a lot of full-time instructors are “really pushing unionization,” and have asked her if she is going to join them.