The Union's Position

  By Charles Loiacono     

Sotto Voce

         By inserting a provision in the NCCFT contract, the administration hoped to limit, indeed deny, certain rights enjoyed by AFA members. They sought to transfer those rights to agents of the administration, namely area deans. I know that sounds nuts, so maybe I should back up and explain a few things.

         The AFA is a union composed of both part-time and full-time faculty. Specifically, 305 members of the full-time faculty (57%) teach adjunct classes and are in the AFA bargaining unit. Those 305 individuals enjoy all the rights enjoyed by other members of the AFA. Indeed, full-timers have become some of our most loyal members. Many of them have served as department representatives and executive board members. Some have been in the forefront defending adjunct rights. The very idea that they could be treated differently from other members was preposterous in its conception.

Now, back to the attempt to do the preposterous.        

            Fran Hilliard, president of the NCCFT, had spoken to me several times about the pressure the administration was exerting in their attempt to have the NCCFT contract deny members of that union a right they had under the AFA contract. I assured her that the administration was bluffing. They knew that sirens would go off at such a jurisdictional violation. That’s why when it became apparent that such a provision was to be inserted into the NCCFT contract, something smelled fishy. What I realized was that the administration knew that the

 

  

AFA would certainly file an action and win. But, they would appeal, and under Section 5519A of the CPLR they would be granted an automated stay. That simply means that they would continue the violation until all appeals were exhausted. In the meantime, 305 full-timers would be denied their rights under the AFA contract.

         I didn’t wait to figure out why the administration wanted to shaft those full-timers.  They were AFA members and this encroachment had to be stopped before the legislature ratified the contract. After several conversations with Fran Hilliard, I contacted Sean Fanelli, NCC president, and made it clear that I viewed this as a serious encroachment on AFA jurisdiction and that I would do everything in my power to stop ratification, unless that ill-conceived provision was deleted from the contract.

         Here, I must give credit to the college president. It took only 15 minutes from our first conversation to our second for him to agree that the provision would be stricken from the Memorandum of Agreement. Here in an official letter signed by both Fanelli and Hilliard is the agreement to withdraw the provision:

         “1. Section E-Full Time Teaching Day Adjunct shall be deleted in its entirety from the MOA and all subsequent sections shall be re-lettered accordingly.

2. All other sections of the MOA executed on December 21, 2005 shall remain unaltered by this agreement.”

         Thus ended an episode that promised to be a Donnybrook that we would have long remembered.