SMC Faculty Pickets to Hit Streets

By Ann K. Williams
Staff Writer

April 21 -- Hoping to jump-start stalled salary negotiations, Santa Monica College faculty voted Thursday to hold daily protests which will culminate in a confrontation between teachers and the Board of Trustees early next month.

Faculty will kick off a round of demonstrations with a mid-day rally next Tuesday on the main campus. The teachers will then march to Pico Boulevard, where they plan to picket most days until they present their demands to the College Board on May 8.

More than 100 teachers approved the plan, said Mitra Moassessi, Chief Negotiator for the Santa Monica College Faculty Association.

“They are all ready to move,” Moassessi said. “They’re tired. They’ve been doing this too long.”

SMC faculty has been working without a contract since August 2004. The teachers are holding out for a 2 percent raise retroactive to January 2005, in addition to a 3.5 percent raise retroactive to January, 2006, union officials said.

They note that administrators got a 2 percent raise in 2005.

Management has offered faculty a 3.5 percent raise retroactive to February 2006, but won’t give ground on the teachers’ demands for a 2 percent raise, college officials said.

“Even if everything (Moassessi) says is 100 percent accurate, we don’t have the money to pay for it,” said Robert Sammis, the College’s vice president of planning and development, who has been overseeing the negotiations while new President Chui L. Tsang gets to know the lay of the land.

College officials maintain that faculty already got a 2 percent raise in 2002, and that a 2 percent raise for staff and administrators in 2005 evened the score.

But faculty negotiators don’t see it that way.

“This argument is unreasonable,” Moassessi said. “How far do you want to go back?”

In negotiations for 1998-1999 and again in 1999-2000, faculty got zero percent, she said. But in 1999, administrators got a 4 percent raise. And the teachers didn’t even have a contract in 2002 when they got their 2 percent raise, Moassessi added.

“It took two and a half years negotiating before they got a contract,” she said, “and they had to go through picketing and mediation.”

Moassessi is skeptical of management’s argument that the 2 percent raise for administrators in 2005 was just a case of catching up with the teachers’ pay hike.

“This argument has never been presented at the negotiating table,” she said, “only to the papers.”

Sammis recalled that it had come up at the negotiating table “some time ago,” but wants to keep the focus on conciliation.

“We have a contract to work out and that takes mutual agreement,” he said.

He’d like to see faculty and management work together on a budget plan that will contain costs, especially “runaway costs in the benefits areas.”

“I look forward to meeting with Mitra and her team,” he said, adding that the next negotiating session is scheduled a few days after the next board meeting.