San Diego Adjunct Faculty Association Established to Promote Equitable Rights for Adjunct Faculty in San Diego County Community Colleges.
What do you do when you’ve had enough and you just can’t take being ignored and exploited anymore? You get organized! That is exactly what a group of PT faculty in San Diego did in August of 2014. They met and first created a listserv for SD PTers, SDAdjunct. The founder of that initial group was former Sierra College PTer, Scott Douglas; famous for having driven his car up onto the Capitol steps during a CPFA Rally back in 2000! It soon became clear that in order to make real concrete improvements to the working conditions of the thousands of adjunct faculty working in the five districts and eight colleges located in San Diego County, a physical organization was needed.
After 6 months of constitutional meetings to hammer out the Bylaws and mission statement, the San Diego Adjunct Faculty Association, SDAFA, was born!
Bylaws and an elected Board of Directors, including representatives from each of the eight San Diego County Community Colleges: Cuyamaca College, Grossmont College, MiraCosta College, Palomar College, San Diego City College, San Diego Mesa College, San Diego Miramar College, and Southwestern College, as well as representation from non-credit and Continuing Education programs.
Each of these Districts has its own union, either CFT/AFT or CCA/CTA. The degree to which adjunct faculty are included in the unions range from excellent at MiraCosta, an adjunct only union, to minimal; where adjunct dues or Fair Share Fees are collected, buit no real communication or actual representation of PT faculty interests takes place. The mission of SDAFA is to organize adjunct faculty to make certain that thousands of PTers are not left out of the conversation. While adjuncts are the majority of the faculty at each college, they are often not members and are left out of elections for union officers and rarely participate in the process of contract ratification. The combination of limited adjunct involvement and minimal concern by the union leadership, makes adjunct faculty prime candidates for being at the bottom of the list of priorities…after everyone and everything else!
It is SDAFA’s goal to promote union membership and participation to all adjuncts faculty. The isolation of many adjuncts is also detrimental to our own well-being. If one PTer is mistreated, it is often overlooked. However, if all of the adjuncts who suffer from the same problem are sharing their ideas and energies, a solution can be proposed and hopefully the attention necessary to make concrete changes will be brought to bear.
