Green River faculty, administration reach contract agreement

After more than two years of negotiations, the Green River College administration and faculty have agreed on a faculty contract.

United Faculty, the college’s faculty union, voted 115 to 17 to ratify the contract on Feb. 2, and the Board of Trustees unanimously approved the agreement at a special board meeting on Feb. 4.

“We are pleased to have a new contract in place with our faculty,” Green River President Eileen Ely said in a press release. “It has been a long process, and I congratulate both sides in coming to an agreement on this contract.”

The previous contract expired in June 2014 but remained in effect during negotiations.

Jaeney Hoene, United Faculty president, said while the new contract does offer some improvements, faculty members think it could have gone further.

“It is not that there weren’t gains,” she said. “There were some gains, but they tended to be in areas that weren’t necessarily going to cost the college money.”

The changes to the contract will cost the college about $960,000 a year.

The new contract gives a small pay increase to all faculty members, but Hoene said it is not in line with the cost of living.

“At the very least, we need to not have salaries going backward in terms of the value of the dollar,” she said.

Full-time faculty receive a 1-percent raise while adjunct, or part-time, faculty get a 2.7-percent bump. The increases are in addition to a 3-percent cost-of-living increase state employees received this year and another 1.2 percent next year.

Salary increases weren’t included in the last contract negotiations in 2006, Hoene said. Faculty have received cost of living increases from the state.

Full-time faculty agreed to give a larger pay increase to adjuncts because their salaries are further behind industry standards, she said.

“As much as full-time faculty would have liked a bigger increase, we felt from a justice point of view adjunct faculty needed it more,” Hoene said.

Adjunct faculty will receive one personal day each quarter, as well as professional development days, a benefit not previously afforded to them, Hoene said.

Much of the negotiating was devoted to addressing salaries, Hoene said, which took away from looking into other issues.

“Where the negotiations got the most contentious and most frustrating was over money issues,” she said.

Hoene said she would have liked to review procedures, such as the tenure process, which have not been updated for many years.

“I think there were lost opportunities to dive into some areas so they (the administration) know that they aren’t working well,” she said. “I hope we can get to them some time in the future. I think there are ways we could be improving those practices. I think those dialogues can be healthy ones.”

Faculty members have repeatedly addressed the board with concerns of low morale and lack of communication from the board and administration. Board members have said they were unable to discuss the issues with faculty because of ongoing contract negotiations.

With negotiations done, faculty and administrators hope to improve relations between the parties.

“With the contract settled, we can now move forward to heal the college and the rift between faculty and administration,” Ely said in a statement. “It has been a long journey, and there is still work to be done, but this is the first step to moving forward together.”

Hoene said she would like to see board members engage with faculty and have more of a presence on campus by visiting classes and Instructional Council meetings.

“We are very eager to communicate and have more open communication with them,” Hoene said. “We ought to be able to sit down and talk to each other and get somewhere. We are not so different that we can’t sit down and talk about our differences.”

Contract highlights

Other changes to the contract include:

• Funding faculty increments. Increments are earned annually based on years at the college, but are generally paid only if allowed by the legislature. During the last legislative session, the legislature agreed to fund increments, but did not provide funding to to backfill the increases. Green River College will fund the increases using local resources, retroactive to fall 2015.

• Allowing faculty to divide their salary into 24 pay periods, to ensure equal payments throughout the year.

• Implementing national surveys, including the Community College Survey of Student Engagement.

• Extending emeritus benefits to retired faculty, including lifetime use of a greenriver.edu email address and a personalized brick in Kennelly Commons on the main campus in Auburn.