By Rick Baum
Under the two-tier system in higher education (that has continued for more than 40 years), the pay packages per class taught of two equally qualified and experienced faculty remain extremely unequal. The key difference is that the much higher compensated faculty member works full-time and is likely to have tenure, and the other is a part-time/contingent job-insecure worker whose pay is low enough to qualify this person for public assistance.
Work by the California Federation of Teachers’ One-Tier Task Force, and support from organizations such as the Governing Board of the Faculty Association for California Community Colleges, has focused on ending this two-tier system. However, a main result has been an abundance of nice-sounding words calling for the end of this unfair and unjust system, but little to no progress has been made.
On a local level, where “the rubber meets the road” and contracts are negotiated, there has been practically no movement anywhere in the country towards achieving a system based on equality in which equally qualified and experienced faculty are compensated the same for doing similar work. Many will express support for social justice and ending the injustice of two-tier contracts, but those in power in unions continuously fail to live up to and seriously act upon such principles.
To address this condition, for many years, I have tried to get my own local union, AFT 2121, that represents both full-time and part-time faculty at City College of San Francisco (CCSF), to bring about movement towards equality for part-time faculty. Recently, I crafted an equal pay resolution (that does not address unequal benefits) to be presented before the California Federation of Teachers (CFT) at their March 2025 convention that calls on all local unions to put forth a demand in negotiations calling for equal pay for equal work for equally qualified and experienced faculty. After my local leadership rejected submitting it to the convention, I rewrote it so that it called for demanding equal pay when negotiating our next contract. Were the resolution passed and seriously acted upon, the conditions of part-time faculty could begin moving towards achieving a one-tier system with CCSF showing it can be done.
What would change were we to have had a contract guaranteeing equal pay for school year 2024-25? Both a newly hired full-time teacher and an equally qualified and experienced newly hired part-time teacher would start at the same position on the pay table (that is based on their education and experience). If placed on column F+15 and step 1, they would both be paid $7,698 for teaching a three-unit class. However, under the current contract, the part-time teacher is paid over a thousand dollars less, $6,621, which is 86% of the pay/class of the full-timer. In fact, a part-timer with a similar pay table placement after their 9th year of teaching in 2024-25 would still be making less per/class ($7,652) than the pay level of the newly hired, possibly totally inexperienced, full-timer. At the same time, the full-timer in their 9th year would be making $10,096/three-unit class, over $2,400 more, and the pro-rata pay of the part-timer would come to under 76%.
The rationale provided for the lower pay for part-time teachers is that full-time faculty are expected to do committee and other non-teaching work beyond teaching classes. The large inequality in benefits more than makes up for full-time faculty having to do extra work. Many full-time faculty do little work beyond teaching, while some part-timers do this non-teaching work for free. Those who do more work in the classroom for their students do not receive extra pay. Full-time faculty move more quickly up the pay scale for the time they have worked in the district than part-time faculty, every year compared to every two years, resulting in the pro-rata rates declining after just one year and, generally, all subsequent years. That is why, in the above example, nine years of teaching is necessary before the part-time teacher is paid almost as much as a newly hired full-time faculty member with a similar initial pay scale placement. To add insult to injury, part-time counselors and librarians, deservedly, are paid at 100% pro-rata, though this rate also generally declines over time due to their slower step movement up the pay scale.
I have been working at CCSF for over 25 years, where part-timers who can keep their job are among the highest paid in the country, but still lag far behind the pay and benefits per class taught of what full-time faculty make. In the fall of 2024, my pay for the one three-unit class I taught was $9,972 with none of the benefits a full-timer receives that include paid sabbaticals, life and disability insurance, and medical benefits even after one retires. Had I been on the same pay scale as a full-timer who started at the same time as myself and who had the same qualifications and experience and moved up a step each term, my pay for the class would have been $13,394—more than $3,400 greater. Additionally, with higher pay, the employer would have been making a larger contribution towards my retirement, resulting in much more money when I retire. My pay per class taught compared to the full-timer is less than 75%, well below our supposed 86% pro-rata rate of pay, and that does not take into account the value of the benefits the full-time faculty member receives.
In an effort to address this unfair pay disparity, I tried to get my union local, AFT 2121, to introduce an Equal Pay Resolution at the CFT Convention, which they declined to do. I then tried to get my local to put forward a similar resolution to only its own members, which they did, but then put up so many obstacles that ultimately, the membership has not had an opportunity to vote on it.
Outcome of My Effort
So far, I have failed to get my resolution passed even though it is a call for adherence to a basic principle of social justice and democracy—equal pay for equal work. And those who have prevented me from succeeding have been not just full-time union officers but other part-timers.
Certainly, the best method for having success is to organize people who agree with a set of goals and fight for them as opposed to trying to achieve such goals on one’s own. If part-timers are organized, achieving the goals should be easier to do since part-timers are a sizable majority of the faculty at most colleges.
Part of my effort was to reach out to some part-timers, but only one stepped forward. Others may have failed to do so because they fear making waves puts their job or prospects for a full-time job at risk, find meetings to be at inconvenient times, and/or because they feel any effort is a waste of time. Were more part-timers to participate and pass the equal pay resolution, there could be greater insistence that its goal would be prioritized and realized in contract negotiations.
The rest of this article covers my experiences trying to get my union to adopt my equal pay resolution. This narrative is divided into four chronological parts. This discussion will hopefully help prepare others to be successful at overcoming similar obstacles put forward by union leaders who claim to be opposed to two-tier contracts while not acting upon this opposition. At the very end, you can read the most recent version of my resolution, and a second resolution crafted by my union leaders referred to in the article.
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About the Author
Rick Baum has been a part-time instructor teaching Political Science at City College of San Francisco for over twenty years. Since the early 1980s, he taught in eleven other colleges in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has published articles that can be found online at Counterpunch, Monthly Review, and New Politics.