Having just barely adjusted to the reality shift brought on by the 2018 Janus vs. AFSCME Supreme Court decision, the MCCC is now tasked with another major reality shift. The deadly COVID-19 global pandemic, which has already caused untold suffering and, by the time this report is published, over 110,000 U.S. deaths, is a paradigm shift that is perhaps beyond our capacity to fully grasp at the moment.

Millions of workers have been furloughed or laid off. Hundreds of thousands of jobs may have been eliminated as businesses have been forced into permanent closure. Employment un-certainty is perhaps greater than it has ever been in this country. In the midst of this crisis, one that will likely continue for some time, what role do unions play? More specifically what is and should be the MCCC’s role?

The MCCC has been engaged in statewide impact bargaining with BHE Representatives since March 16, 2020. What complicated the early proceedings was the inconsistency and slowness with which federal and state officials dealt with the spread of COVID-19. In early March when SARS-CoV2, the virus that causes COVID-19, had been spreading freely in the community throughout the Commonwealth for weeks, the college presidents were busy creating plans to bring students back onto campus with the idea of a targeted quarantining of students based on which foreign country they travelled to for spring break.

Although there were already many peer-reviewed articles indicating direct person Although there were already many peer-reviewed articles indicating direct person to person spread, some college presidents brought students and staff back to campus during spring break in hopes that a one-time “deep cleanings” would suffice to stop the aerosolized virus caused by coughing sneezing or breathing from spreading.

It became clear from day 1 of impact bargaining, that looking out for the safety of our members would be paramount. The lag time in properly responding to the spread of COVID-19 was evident everywhere.

As late as mid-April, when Massachusetts had among the highest rates of COVID-19 in the country, and the United States was quickly becoming the leader in COVID-19 cases, the online questionnaires determining eligibility to be tested for COVID-19 still asked about recent travel on a cruise ship or to China or Italy. Every day’s delay in moving staff to working remotely was a significant increase in prob-ability of members of the college community getting COVID-19. Because of the MCCC’s right to impact bargain changes in working conditions, and the pressure we were able to put on management to address safety concerns quickly, professional staff were able to work remotely well ahead of Governor Baker’s semi-shut down advisory that probably came out one week too late.

Along with safety, the MCCC must do due diligence to make sure that management does not use the COVID-19 crisis as an opportunity to undermine our hard-won compensation structure, working conditions, and contractual rights. There is little true clarity about the financial future of the commonwealth and the colleges. Federal bills might yet come through to assist, and potential students who find themselves unemployed and who have become more comfortable with remote work may sign up for remote or online classes in higher numbers than anticipated.

In the months to come, things will no doubt remain uncertain and difficult. We do not know if a vaccine or effective treatment is around the corner or years off. Without a vaccine or treatment, we do not know if it will be possible to make things safe enough to even partially open up the college for students to return to the classrooms.

What is certain is that now, more than ever, the MCCC leadership needs to stay in touch with its members. Vice President Rosemarie Freeland and I have started a weekly ZOOM “office hour” so that interested individuals can interact directly with us and with each other to ask questions and to share concerns and strategies. If you would like to be no-tified about the office hour, email me at mailto: presmwong@mccc-union.org and ask to be added to the list.

Despite the uncertainty, there is one thing that is certain and will not be changing. The MCCC will persist. The union, with its host of dedicated leaders, field representatives, employed staff, and members will not let even a deadly global pandemic stop it.

In solidarity,
Margaret Wong ■

Welcome, everyone, to the start of a new academic year. The MCCC has lived through year one post-Janus and so far, things are holding steady. Yet now is not the time to become complacent. The threat to collective bargaining is as great as it has ever been.

Our hard-won benefits – health insurance, vacation accrual, sick time – are losing ground against the tide of wealth consolidation into fewer and fewer hands. The 2% raises given to us by the governor, despite the strongest economy in over a decade, doesn’t even cover the cost of living increases. Yet more is being demanded of us. Reassigned time that members have received for decades is suddenly eliminated. Consolidation and reorganization are leading to retrenchments. Every year, more full-time work is eliminated and replaced with unbenefited gig work. Do more with less we are told.

At my campus, the afternoon cookies and coffee, the tiny show of regard for the hours of meetings and heavy lifting of programs expected of us, has been eliminated. One of the elevators, the only one to the fourth floor where resides the only office in the building for adjunct faculty, doesn’t work. It hasn’t worked for weeks. All the drinking fountains are covered over with plastic wrap. No one know when or if the water will ever be safe again to drink. No one has a clue when the elevator will be working again. The college has no funding for “hospitality,” or, it seems, for basic operations and repairs.

As the governor and some in the legislature drag their feet or otherwise just don’t feel any sense of urgency to try to get our measly 2% raises funded, despite it being a year and a half overdue, others have decided that now is the time to add insult injury and try to cap our sick leave.

Meanwhile, Commissioner Carlos Santiago has come to recognize that something must be done about the steadily widening gap between those whose achievement have been going up steadily over the past two decades, even as for others the decline has been equally as steady. Because of the role the community colleges play in the education of students of color in the Commonwealth, it is the community colleges that must do the heavy lifting to close this gap.

Once again, we the educators in the community colleges are expected ad-dress the gross education inequities that decades of neglect has caused, even as the neglect continues — 500 days without a cost-of living raise, no potable water in our buildings and no way for some of us to get up to our offices. Now seems like a good time to remind everyone that the working conditions of educators are the learning conditions of students. It is not just the faculty and professional staff who are harmed in the push toward replacing full-time benefited work with underpaid, unbenefited work. Students are equally harmed.

Now, therefore, more than ever, is the time for organized labor to rise again and reclaim the potency of collective might. We have seen the power of collective action from West Virginia to Arizona, from California to Hong Kong. Just imagine what can be achieved if the 6500 dedicated faculty and professional staff
of the commonwealth’s 15 community colleges were mobilized and activated for our collective common good and the good of our students. Just imagine it…

In solidarity,
Margaret Wong

The union world has been on the move since my election to MCCC President a little over a year ago. Despite the Janus v. AFSCME Decision, support for unions has been steadily climbing. Far from the short-sighted anti-union perspective of Janus and his ilk prevailing, people are re-discovering that it is not good enough to just have a job. After all, what good is the creation of 1,000,000 more jobs, if those jobs demean employees and pay wages they can’t live on. Working conditions matter. Livable wages matter. Respect from one’s employer matters.

History has shown us that expecting employer altruism to improve salaries, working conditions and job security is a fool’s game. Collective bargaining is what gives us leverage to demand higher wages and improved working conditions. However, we cannot take for granted the existence of such leverage just because we are in a union. Unions are only as strong or weak as the people who belong to it. The strength of the MCCC lies in what I have come to think of as “the Donnie McGee factor.”

When I first started working in the Massachusetts Community College System almost two decades ago, I was lied to. I was advised by my Human Resources Representative not to join the State Employees Retirement System (SERS) because, he said, it was bankrupt, and I would never see my money again. So I got into the Optional Retirement Plan (ORP) with no inkling of how big a mistake that choice was. But Donnie McGee did know. She was hearing from people who told her how they were lied to; how they would never have enough in their ORP to retire. Something needed to be done. So Donnie went to work to get something done.

She was relentless at the statehouse. At MCCC events over the years, lawmakers presented with awards for their support of the MCCC, relayed stories of the countless ways in which she lobbied on behalf of others. When Section 60 passed to allow people in the ORP to buy into SERS, I watched Donnie step back again and again to allow others to take credit for the outcomes she single-handedly achieved because she didn’t care about credit. She cared about results and progress. She patiently and compassionately took on complaints and criticism from those who were displeased with the implementation of Section 60. She just kept working on their behalf no matter how they criticized her.

The question I have heard asked again and again is the following: “what can/will/has the union do/done for me such that I should pay dues?” Donnie asked, “what can I do to improve the lot of my union brothers and sisters.” Donnie’s is the right question. Therein lies the strength of unions. The MCCC would have no leverage at all if everyone sat back, expecting altruistic actions from others. The strength of the union does not lie in the exchange of dues for services. It lies in the Donnie McGee factor. We strengthen our union, when we improve the lives of those in the union. And that strength in turns gives us added leverage to further improve our working conditions.

So here is what I firmly understand now after almost one year of being the MCCC’s president: the question, “what union services do I get for the dues I pay?” is inherently anti-union. If the relationships between union members were merely transactional, a union does not really exist, and collective bargaining strength is undermined. The Donnie McGee factor has taught me the right question to ask, the question we should all be asking if we want to build greater union strength, is “what can I do to improve the lot of my union brothers and sisters?”

 

 

Community College As A Pathway to Lower Student Loan Debt

Student loan debt was on the mind of nearly everyone I chatted with the morning of March 21, 2019 (Higher Education Advocacy Day) at the Statehouse as I headed to the offices of my State Representatives to speak about the need for increased funding to public higher education. One student in her second year at UMass Amherst told me she was already carrying $20K in loans, and had just signed on to $15K more. Another student at Fitchburg State University was going to graduate in May with $35K in student loans. Even the Chief-of-Staff of my State Representative said her student load debt was such that her dream of going on to graduate school is all but at an end because she cannot incur any more debt.

Then at lunch I happened to sit at a table with two Journalism students from Cape Cod Community College. After we all listened to a speaker talk about her $60K student loan, one of the young woman said, “I’m so glad I’m going to a community college. I’m not going to have any debt when I graduate before I transfer to UMass.” Her friend concurred and said that she wondered why more people didn’t go to community college. She feels she has gotten an excellent education at CCCC and was ready to become an ambassador advocate for community colleges in the high schools to help others lower their student load burden

Completing a degree at one of the 15 community colleges before transferring to a state university or UMass was something I had brought up with the young man graduating from FSU as a way he could have cut his debt in half or even eliminated altogether because there was so much funding support for community college transfer students that is not available to those coming straight from high school. I thought he was going to say something in response like, “I didn’t really want to go to a community college.” Instead he said, “I never thought of doing that. No one ever told me it was a possibility.”

Amazingly, community college transfer is still a secret. In the world of ever-increasing student loan debt, it is a secret with not only economic, but moral and social justice, implications as well. Many of the Commonwealth’s young people can right now cut their debt in half or more if they begin their 4-year undergraduate degree in one of the community colleges of Massachusetts. They don’t have to wait for that day in the hopeful future, after they have incurred their debt, when legislation is passed to make public higher education debt free. To be sure, debt-free higher education is a worthy goal but, for now, it is still a pie-in-the-sky dream when measured against the nightmare of loan statements detailing a 20-year plan of loan repayment before one have even settled into one’s first post-college job.

So why has community college as a pathway to lower student debt been such a secret? Two reasons: ignorance and snobbery. Parents, counselors, even people within the community colleges themselves are unaware of the existence of high quality programs such as, to hear the students tell it, Journalism at CCCC. They are unaware of the agreements that exist between the Community Colleges and the public four-year universities that allow students to transfer seamlessly into the four-year institutions. And they are unaware of the myriad merit- and need-based funding opportunities that exist for community college students that are not available to students coming directly from high school.

Then there is the snobbery, which is constantly reinforced by the punchline politics of higher education: some public figure does not understand something? They must have gone to a community college. It is this superficial perception of cachet, or the lack thereof, that is at the heart of the college admissions bribery scandal that has shaken the world of higher education. Parents apparently will go to criminal lengths to have their children connected to a “prestigious” higher education institution

Things need to change now. Continuing to indulge our pretentious leanings while we burden young people with crushing debt is unsustainable. We need to persistently counter the jokes and erroneous narratives that contribute to the negative perception of our community colleges. High school counselors and parents need to be better educated about the transfer options and funding opportunities at our community colleges. For the sake of our future it is time to become truly proud of our community’s two-year public colleges

More Funding, Not More Miracles

The community that makes up the Commonwealth’s community colleges – staff, faculty, administrators, trustees, parents, family, friends, etc.– are a dedicated, resilient group of individuals who, under some of the most challenging of circumstances in the world of higher education, pull off miracles to help move students along the pathway of academic achievement and lifelong success. From the financial advisor, who spends hours assisting each student to navigate a sea of confusing forms and rules, to the instructor who writes multiple drafts of letters of recommendation to help a student win a competitive scholarship, to the college president who enriches the experience of the Student Trustee by involving them in advocating for pro-community college legislation before Congress, students can rest assured that their college’s community has their back.

We, the community of the Commonwealth’s community colleges, have taken, and will continue to take whatever comes at us because we genuinely care about our students and about their prospects for success in the future. We keep doing our best because, frankly, we are on a mission. None of us are in this for the money or other forms of tangible rewards. We want our students to succeed no matter the cost to us.

And herein lies the problem. More often than not, it is the hard-working miracle workers that get taken for granted. Because we get the job done despite funding cuts every year, decision makers find it easy to cut even more. This was the inherent flaw with the Vision Project, a brainchild of Richard Freeland, the former Commissioner of Higher Education. His plan was to adopt a series of metrics to show the public how effective and successful our public higher education intuitions were. He operated on the theory that once the public understood our success, they would be eager to in-crease funding. It did not work out that way. After we allowed ourselves to be measured in every way possible to show how effective we were, decision makers decided that our revenue stream was more than adequate, and so the pattern of yearly funding cuts continued. Meanwhile, the Vision experiment left us with a slew of unhelpful measures for student success, a significant increase in the number of part time un-benefitted employees, increases to our healthcare premiums and co-pays, And herein lies the problem. More often than not, it is the hard-working miracle workers that get taken for grant-ed. Because we get the job done despite funding cuts every year, decision makers find it easy to cut even more. This was the inherent flaw with the Vision Project, a brainchild of Richard Freeland, the former Commissioner of Higher Educa-tion. His plan was to adopt a series of metrics to show the public how effective and successful our public higher educa-tion intuitions were. He operated on the theory that once the public understood our success, they would be eager to in-crease funding. It did not work out that way. After we allowed ourselves to be measured in every way possible to show how effective we were, decision makers decided that our revenue stream was more than adequate, and so the pattern of yearly funding cuts continued. Meanwhile, the Vision experiment left us with a slew of unhelpful measures for student success, a significant increase in the number of part time un-benefitted employees, increases to our healthcare premiums and co-pays, pay raises that are less than inflation, and more stress all around.

Continuing to depend on and demand the unwavering efforts of the college community’s “miracle workers” is unsustainable. Funding support per student is more than 30 percent down from where it was two decades ago. No matter our energy, no matter our honest desire to support our students, we cannot keep this up. We need more funding.

Last month, Senator Joanne M. Comerford (Hampshire, Franklin, and Worcester) presented a bill to get more funding support for public higher education. SD.740, aka the “Cherish Act,” An Act Committing to Higher Education the Resources to Insure a Strong and Healthy Higher Education System, will take us back the funding levels from 2001. This is potentially a $500 million infusion into the Massachusetts public higher education system. If we, the whole community behind the Commonwealth’s community colleges, step up to work together, we can put our community colleges back on the pathway toward future success – for our students, yes, but also for ourselves, and for our communities.

In the weeks and months to come, when the call comes from our Strategic Action Leaders, asking us to make the phone calls, attend the rallies, and send the emails, we need to pick up the phone, go to the rally, and write that email. What we have done for our students, we now need to do for ourselves and for the future of our institutions. I have no doubt we will prevail. We are miracle workers, after all.

Yours,in solidarity,
Margaret Wong

Enrollment vs Funding

Declining enrollment. This is what is driving most of the administration’s decisions these days. I have been in the system long enough to have seen this movie before. When money is tight, what is available tends to be spent on three things: 1) hiring more administrators, 2) hiring expert consultants, and 3) adopting new technology. Interestingly, when enrollment is up, and revenue is flowing in hand over fist from all those student fees and tuition from DCE courses, the dollars are also spent on hiring more administrators and more consultants, and adding more technology.

As a result, our community colleges are choked with non-education-based administrators focused on generating the right optics and metrics to justify their hire, piles of unheeded reports from expert consultants, and expensive technology systems, many of which are outdated and obsolete and cannot talk to and often undermine each other. The colleges’ decades-long inability to get out of the cycle of spending money on this tripartite promise-land means money not spent on support for faculty and education professionals who work directly with students. In this newest round of declining enrollment, there is indication already that the colleges will once again be dedicating scarce resources to generating optics, metrics, and reports, and purchasing technology instead of where they should be going – to directly support teaching and learning.

Take for instance one resource-starved staple of teaching and learning: the office hour and faculty office space. Upwards of two-thirds of all courses at the community colleges are now taught under a contract that neither requires nor compensates instructors for holding office hours so that students can have reliable access to their professors outside of class. Even if instructors teaching under the DCE contract wanted to offer, voluntarily, office hours to better serve their students (as many do), they are usually provided with no office space in which to do so. Much has been written about this abysmal new status quo of dedicated adjunct professors holding office hours in hallways, stairwells, and parking lots. Less has been understood about how this failure to dedicate resources to teaching and learning makes our students feel about themselves.

My suggestion on how to address the issue of declining enrollment is this: re-focus the colleges’ resources on teaching and learning. Back fill the full-time positions of retirees with and hire more full-time faculty and professional staff. Make the learning environment such that students have a chance to develop rapport with all their classroom instructors, by, for example, providing office space and compensation to adjunct faculty to offer office hours, and getting the names of all instructors into the course schedule by the time students start registering for classes, so that student have a chance to take another course from an instructor with whom they have connected. Make sure that the students’ advisors, and other front-line education support professionals (reference librarians, financial aid officers, learning coordinators, etc.) have the suitable physical spaces and resources they need to fully serve the students who seek them out.

It is the focus on teaching and learning, and not the pretense that our students are our customers, that has the potential to draw students to our community colleges. If resources were focused primarily on supporting our direct interaction with students and not allocated as an afterthought, our community colleges might have a chance to stop serving as the punch line of jokes in poor taste about personal missteps. And fiscally responsible college-bound high school students might more seriously consider attending their community’s colleges for their general education requirements before they transfer to their more debt-generating choices.

Right now, the Massachusetts Teachers Association is gearing up to fight for increased funding for our public schools, including our public higher education institutions. In work-shops on this initiative, participants have been asked to imagine how they might want to spend this money. This is a good exercise. We need to be ready to advise on how we think the money should be spent. Otherwise, should more funding materialize, we will find ourselves with more misguided metrics, unhelpful reports from experts, and yet another piece of software that will once again fail to deliver student success as promised.

In solidarity,
Margaret Wong

Recognizing A Con Game

As the newly elected MCCC President, I would like to welcome you all to the 2018-19 academic year and to wish everyone a productive semester. As a matter of history, we are living in interesting times. In terms of the MCCC and public sector unions in general, these are uncertain times. Nevertheless, I believe we will persist and prevail.

27 days after I assumed the reins of this office, while I was in the air on my way to Minneapolis for the NEA Representative Assembly, the Janus vs. AFSCME decision hit. Once the plane landed and airplane mode was turned off, my phone buzzed and chirped non- stop – announcing emails, voice mails, text messages, as if impatient for me to address them all. Right. Now. I felt put on notice. The union world as we knew it, was at an end, and we would need to adapt or perish.

Within minutes of the decision, the anti-union forces were at the ready with their emails encouraging members to drop union membership. These mailings tried to take advantage of our members confusion about the Janus decision. They tried to peddle their “looking out for #1” ethos, and to appeal to members greed. They tried to get members to turn on one another and to turn against their union.

Except it didn’t really work. Union members, it turned out, were not that confused by Janus. They recognized a con game when they saw it. They recognized the value of unions, and they were not interested in only “looking out for #1.” Instead they had the backs of their union brothers and sisters and trusted that their union brothers and sisters had theirs as well.

In the short time that I have been MCCC president, I have seen examples of perseverance, determination, and courage as well as kindness and selflessness on the part of union leaders and members that have left me feeling immensely proud to be a union member and humbled to be one of the leaders.

There is of course the other viewpoint, borne of righteous anger and cynicism that, as a union, we have not gone far enough, have not tried hard enough, do not care enough. No doubt we can, and must, always do better. The acts of perseverance, determination, and courage that I witnessed must be multiplied ten- fold. The acts kindness and selflessness a hundredfold. There is a lot of work to be done. But I am up for it. I hope you are too.

I want to close this statement with a couple of notes of appreciation. First, to the three former MCCC presidents whom I ’ve known personally and on whose shoulders I now stand. Although their respective leadership style and vision for the union differed one from the other, Rick Doud, Joe LeBlanc, and Diana Yohe worked hard for and cared deeply about the union. It is this work ethic and earnestness that I aim to emulate. Secondly, to Phil Mahler who has devoted his entire professional life to the health and wellbeing of the MCCC, serving, in turn, as President, Vice president, and Treasurer. To the extent that our union makes it through these uncertain times, it will in large part be due to Phil’s capable stewardship. I am most grateful that Phil continues to serve the MCCC in his capacity as office manager.

In solidarity, Margaret Wong MCCC President

“When We Fight, We Win” – A Lesson from West Virginia

It’s no secret that our union has not been functioning effectively. It’s no secret that we will be hit hard by the Supreme Court’s Janus decision, which will rule that people no longer need to pay an agency fee but may nonetheless get most of the benefits of the union. It would be easy to predict disaster for our members and our union; West Virginia shows it may not work out that way.

A word on our own situation before considering the lessons of West Virginia. The MCCC will be hit harder by the Janus decision than any other part of the Massachusetts Teachers Association (MTA). Across the state there are more than 80,000 teachers and educators working in classrooms from kindergarten through high school – less than 500 of those people are paying agency fee, all the rest are members of the MTA and some local association. In the MCCC we represent less than ten percent as many people, but we have more than three times as many agency fee payers.

Among our full time employees, agency fee payers are rare – less than five percent of the total. We don’t show quite the level of solidarity found in K-12, but the great majority of people choose to join the union and become members. In our DCE unit it’s a very different story. There are lots and lots of agency fee payers. Many people do not choose to join the union.

There are many reasons that could be so: lower incomes, not sure they will be around for the long term, never been asked to join, and/or not so sure the union is committed to fighting for adjunct members, a reservation born out of our past history, including the history of the negotiations for our still-open DCE contract, now 690 Days ( 23 months) past its initial expiration date on May 31, 2016. That combination – lots of agency fee payers, a hostile Supreme Court decision, and employees uncertain about the union’s effectiveness and commitment – could end up as a recipe for disaster.

Or then again, maybe not. West Virginia is a right-to-freeload state; often misleadingly called “right to work.” It’s what will apply to public sector employees across the nation if the Supreme Court rules as expected in the Janus decision, coming in May or June. It means that by law, an employee can pay nothing to the union, but the person still gets the wages and benefits negotiated in the contract and the union has to represent the person if they have a grievance. Bizarre, right? It’s illegal to strike in West Virginia. They have a Republican governor (elected as a Democrat, then changed his party) and Republicans control both houses of the legislature. Teacher pay is 48th in the nation, and they haven’t had a raise in ten years. All of which, it’s pretty obvious, makes it “impossible” to go on strike

Except that West Virginia teachers, and support personnel, did go on strike. Statewide. Every single one of the 55 counties across the state. The people who organized and led that strike were mostly building reps and respected workers; very few of them were local leaders or statewide board members. They organized through Facebook. They took a series of escalating actions, beginning by wearing red on Fridays and, in a handful of counties, moving to one-day “Fed Up Friday” work actions. They began to talk about a statewide strike. Their union leadership urged them to have a rolling strike, five counties at a time. The members said “No,” that was too mild; they were all going out together, teachers and support workers. And they did.

A few days into the strike, the governor, the legislature, and union leaders cut a deal: a 5% pay increase for teachers, no raises for anyone else, no remedy for the health insurance issues (which outraged educators). The rank-and-file members were gathered on the steps of the state capitol as these negotiations went on. They received 15 minutes advance warning before the leaders and legislators came out to announce the deal, which enabled them to have a hurried discussion and prepare their response. When the leaders came out and proclaimed a deal, rank-and-file members burst into chants of “TURN IT DOWN.” Amazingly, across the state educators held meetings in any space they could find and, county by county, voted to turn down the deal and keep the strike going, insisting on a raise for all state employees, including the most vulnerable, not just for the full-time teachers. The strike went on for days, the health insurance issue was at least quasi-addressed, and all workers got the raise. No one talked of any punishments for strikers. Everyone – teachers, support workers, legislators, the governor, the media – understood this as near total victory for the strikers.

The lessons for us? Even when things look bleak – and conditions there were a lot more hostile than they are here – action is possible. Even when the statewide leadership is willing to cut an unfavorable deal, worker action can override that and say “hell no.” Even when an offer is made to buy out the most privileged workers, people can stand in solidarity and say “an injury to one is an injury to all,” with full-time teachers continuing the strike to support other state workers. Even when it’s illegal, you can mount a successful statewide strike. Even if the official union machinery won’t lead the action, rank-and-file leaders will do so.

If we want our agency fee paying adjuncts to join the union, the best way to get them to do so is to show them union strength and solidarity. If we – all of us – are fighting for equal pay for equal work, if we lead the battle for health insurance for adjunct faculty, if we show the strength to make real gains – if we do all that, we will be in position to persuade agency fee payers to become union members.

Union Solidarity – “An Injury to One Is An Injury to All”

Since the announcement of my election as MCCC President in March 2016 and before I even took office on June 1, 2016, I have been, and I remain, a polarizing figure in the MCCC, my every move distrusted, with the worst of motives ascribed to me. So let me be clear: I am not a candidate for re-election as president of the MCCC. It is my hope that fresh voices will be elected to give the MCCC a chance to start a new, and I offer a few thoughts on that.

At least three issues need to be addressed: (1) the level of venom directed at people trying to do what they think is best for the members, (2) the attempts to block new initiatives and involvement by new people, and (3) the information blockages that make it hard for people to know what is going on. Let me briefly address each of those points, and suggest in the broadest terms what I think is needed to move forward what the members deserve.

First, we need to address the tone inside the MCCC. When I proposed to Board members that we drive together to an MCCC meeting, one person, whom I had thought of as my friend, wrote to me (before I’d been on the job a month) that “I don’t want you in my car or anywhere close to me, ever.” A chapter president said he would call security if I attended a chapter meeting, explaining that “It is not a veiled threat, and it is meant to intimidate you.” Moving forward, MCCC leaders need to agree to provide space for alternative views and to learn how to disagree without being disagreeable.

Second, our aim should be to welcome those who want to engage with union activity. We need to find ways to incorporate people who do not already have years of experience. They bring new perspectives, networks, and energy. When a new generation wants to engage, and gets rebuffed or ill-treated, that sends the message that the existing MCCC leadership is a closed club. Too often, that is true: seven of our Directors are receiving the equivalent of a 3-credit Step 2 DCE course (currently valued at $3,423; e.g. $1,141 per credit x 3 credits) for one reason or another, and many have served for years and years. We should implement a term limit on MCCC board members – just as our parent organizations, the MTA and the NEA, have done.

Third, it is a crazy situation to elect a President and then tell her that she can’t communicate directly with the members (except once a month through this column). In the MCCC, and only in the MCCC, the President’s messages are to be sent to chapter presidents, who then decide whether or not to pass on the news to chapter members.

Leading the MCCC would be a huge challenge in the best of circumstances. Public education is under attack every-where, as are public sector unions. Community colleges are the poor step-children of the system, with lower pay, higher teaching loads, and fewer resources than the state universities or UMass. Full-time faculty are being replaced by adjuncts, who are paid and treated disgracefully. In our system, “Equal Pay for Equal Work” becomes a radical demand, when it should be the most basic starting point that all can accept. Our efforts to build a strong DCE bargaining team and campaign have repeatedly been thwarted.

The MCCC has more agency fee payers than all K-12 locals combined. In June, when the Supreme Court is expected to issue its Janus decision abolishing agency fee, the MCCC will lose more members than any segment of the MTA. Keeping our DCE members would be a huge challenge if MCCC leadership had the best will in the world, with a union that was working together, with a shared commitment to making adjunct issues a priority. I was elected in significant part to try to address adjunct issues; I have to confess that (so far) I have failed – and the MCCC has failed with me. It would be hard for anyone in the MCCC to argue, with a straight face, that we have made equal pay for adjuncts a priority for all our members.

My term ends on May 31; new officers will be seated in June. Whatever the out-come of statewide and local chapter elections, it is clear to me that if we continue in the old way, with rancor and pettiness, with efforts to keep all union positions within the hands of those who have been involved for years, with information flows blocked, with adjunct issues neglected – then we will have a rocky future. It’s time for the MCCC to turn over a new leaf, to bring in new leadership at every level, to open up the process, to set a new tone, and to address issues that for too long have been swept under the rug. If you are still reading, I urge you to get involved, to put yourself forward as a candidate, to elect new chapter leaders, new board members, and to think about new ways for the MCCC to operate. The MCCC can be a tremendous force for good; with your participation, it can realize its potential.