After two and a half contentious years, more than 400 part-time faculty at Victor Valley College in California are now represented by a union of their own choosing--the AFT. The AFT won 74 percent of the votes cast in an election supervised by the California Public Employment Relations Board.

"I saw three piles of ballots, one of them piling up really fast," said AFT national representative Linda Cushing, who was on hand for the June 8 ballot count in Sacramento. "It brought tears to my eyes." The final tally was 182 for Part-Time Faculty United/AFT, 41 for the California Teachers Association and 22 for no representative.

To get to the point of an election, the PTFU had to counter legal challenges from the district and from the CTA, which had declined to represent the unit until state parity funds for part-timers--who must be represented by a bargaining agent to receive the money--entered the picture. In March 2003, the California PERB ruled that the Victor Valley College administration violated state law by attempting to fold the Victor Valley PTFU-AFT into the existing full-time union, represented by the CTA.

A similar situation occurred last November at nearby College of the Canyons, where the part-time faculty also voted for AFT representation after the CTA affiliate initially declined to represent them.

Without their own representative organization, part-time faculty "were really concerned that they wouldn't have a vote in the matter," said Jack Robinson, president of the PTFU organizing committee.

For Christopher Turner, who teaches political science at Victor Valley and has been working on the organizing drive for over a year, the AFT "was the best organization for dealing with the issues that confronted us." In the 14 years he's been teaching, he added, nothing has been done for part-timers, "but now all that has changed." The part-time faculty members will be seeking raises and health benefits, clarification on the status of the parity funds, paid office hours and security and seniority provisions. [Barbara McKenna]

June 10, 2004