The purpose of a report such as this, one required by the Federation’s constitution, is to review the accomplishments of the year concluding and assess the challenges of the year upcoming. I have delivered many such reports over the years, and virtually every one has focused the interplay of fiscal and political challenges facing the College and Federation – and the need for political activism to address them. Never has the need for political activism, both internal and external to the Federation and the College, been greater than it is today.
40% of HFCC Teachers New to the College
Internal to the College, the Federation faces two major challenges. The first concerns the integration of 80 recently hired Federation members into the Union. 24% of HFCC’s full-time faculty, over 50 teachers, have come to the College in the last three years; 40%, 80 teachers, in the last five years. This influx of new faculty did not come to the College automatically as the result of two early retirement incentives. These new teachers are at the College because the Union fought very hard to replace all of the faculty who opted for those retirement incentives. Replacing full-time faculty was not the first or even the second inclination of a College Administration and Board of Trustees, facing declining State revenue and a nationwide trend of replacing full-time with adjunct faculty. Very prolonged and tough negotiations and significant contract concessions were necessary to secure the career opportunities these 80 recently hired HFCC faculty now enjoy.
Because of these retirement incentives, the Federation and College have lost a host of activists in recent years – faculty who assumed committee and leadership roles in both organizations. Compounding this problem for Local 1650 is that several Federation activists moved into administrative posts over the last several years. Given the numbers of recent retirees, newly hired faculty will, of necessity, have to contribute to the governance of this Union and College, far earlier in their careers than did many of their predecessors.
Each year the Local 1650 Executive Board meets with faculty new to the College and stresses the importance of participating in the governance structure of the Union and College. It is both gratifying and reassuring that once again in 2005, 90% of Federation members contributed to the Union’s political action fund. Local 1650 is presently seeking volunteers to serve on its Political/Legislative, Health Care, Technical, and Solidarity Committees. We also hope that members will participate in the Union’s monthly membership meetings. 80 new faculty have been encouraged to do so in the last five years, 120 faculty over the course of many years. At today’s meeting, we number 35. A teacher union built on democratic principles – and a College upon a tradition of shared governance – require the active participation of a larger number of faculty.
HFCC’s New President and Cabinet
The second challenge internal to the College is, of course, the filling of five of the college’s six executive offices. With the retirement of President Mazzara and virtually his entire cabinet, 2006 will bring profound changes to the College’s internal political landscape. Dr. Mazzara concluded a 34 year career at HFCC, having served 15 years as President. Each of his outgoing cabinet officers had long careers at the College as well. The College has lost a disturbing degree of institutional history at the executive level and a cadre of administrators attuned to HFCC’s unique culture and political context.
The College’s next president will need to learn quickly of the extraordinary role that faculty play in the governance of this institution and of the prominent role the Federation of Teachers plays in championing the fiscal viability of the College and its political standing at all levels of government. The new President will need to grasp the diversity and political complexities of Dearborn and the other communities HFCC serves as well the nature of the College’s tenuous finances, its small local tax base, declining State revenues, and its fiscal vulnerability relative to enrollment and retention trends. Most certainly, HFCC’s next president will need to master the complex political landscape of a K-14 Public School System. How well and how quickly our next president acclimates to HFCC’s cultural, fiscal, and political realities will influence our professional lives and livelihoods for years to come.
The next president will also play a major role in hiring two instructional vice-presidents, a vice-president of Student Services, and the College’s Human Resource Director. Virtually every College function – save those of the College Controller – will soon be under the oversight of new cabinet officers. Local 1650 and the College Senate will quickly have to establish positive, working relationships with a new President, and very soon thereafter with four new cabinet officers, for the challenges from forces external to the College – both fiscal and political – will be most pressing in 2006.
Michigan’s Economy and College Revenues
On the State level, Michigan’s economy remains depressed. Because of tax cuts during the Engler Administration and a recession from which Michigan has yet to recover, State revenues are severely limited. Despite $4 billion in budget cuts under Governor Granholm, the State’s budget continues to struggle with a “structural deficit.” As a consequence, community colleges took a 3% cut in State funding over the last three years. The State has recently restored much of these funds, but that only means that we operate today at 2002 State funding levels. Such cuts in State funding impact HFCC’s budget far more severely than those of most colleges, which enjoy large, county-wide local tax bases. In order to balance the College budget and preserve full-time staffing lines, Local 1650 voluntarily froze wages in the first year of our current contract and later voluntarily re-opened that contract to postpone faculty hirings and reduce starting salaries. Those actions were largely responsible for balancing the College budget then and now – and they kept full-time faculty lines from plummeting to 160 positions. In fact, by Winter 2007, HFCC full-time faculty lines will number 205. While painful, the recent contract concessions at HFCC are but a minor reflection of what is happening in the private sector.
Concessions and Losses in the Private Sector
What was once unthinkable is now commonplace in the private sector. Ford Motor and General Motors are desperately attempting to stave off bankruptcy. Massive lay-offs, wage cuts, and health care concessions are daily newspaper headlines. The once inviolable compact between employers and their retirees has been widely shattered, with pensions and retiree health care coverage cut or terminated – and not simply by financially strapped employers but by quite profitable employers as well. Downsizing, outsourcing, off-shoring are routine, and not simply in the manufacturing sector. Such is increasingly the case in communications, banking, and even professions such as engineering and the law. Given this “culture of cuts” and the technology readily available, the teaching profession is not immune from downsizing, outsourcing, and even off-shoring.
Events in private sector employment have impacted public sector employees in the past – and they are doing so today. Bargaining rights, wages, health care coverage, pension benefits, and retiree health care for public sector employees, particularly educators, improved dramatically with the rise of organized labor and, in Michigan, particularly with the rise and the support of the UAW. With private sector unions in precipitous decline, the prospects for public sector employees are also deteriorating.
Private Sector Decline and the Community College
How is all of this private sector upheaval playing out for community college teachers in Michigan? Last year in the Michigan Legislature, we contended with the following Republican Party agenda and will do so yet again in 2006:
1. HB 5314 would exclude new community college employees from the State Retirement System (MPSERS), a defined benefit system providing health care coverage, and force them into a defined contribution system absent health care coverage.
2. HB 4947 (SB 635) would change MPSERS from a defined benefit to a defined contribution system for all new educational employees and severely diminish current retiree health care, with a graded health insurance premium, requiring 30 years of service to achieve 90% premium coverage.
3. The Hay Group Report proposes several models for statewide health insurance coverage for all current community college and K-12 school employees. A statewide plan would most certainly mean diminished health care benefits for HFCC faculty.
Federal Cuts
At the federal level, the “culture of cuts” has produced the following Republican Party proposals:
1. The privatization of Social Security, converting it, in part, to a defined contribution rather than defined benefit system. With private pension systems disappearing and public pension systems under assault, the fate of Social Security has become all the more critical.
2. $58 billion in cuts to federal student aid and other social services to offset a ballooning budget deficit, caused in large part by the Bush Administration’s $1.7 trillion in tax cuts benefiting the very wealthiest of Americans. If made permanent, as proposed by President Bush, the cost of these tax cuts with interest will add up to $2.1 trillion by 2015 and $7.2 trillion by 2025. The $236 billion federal budget surplus at the conclusion of the Clinton Administration is now a $400 billion budget deficit. The $5.6 trillion federal debt at the end of the Clinton administration now stands at $8.1 trillion.
3. Revisions in the Reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, to cut student loan funds, cut Perkins funding, and incorporate provisions from David Horowitz’s “Academic Bill of Rights,” calling for the federal monitoring of college course content and hiring practices to increase the numbers of “conservative” faculty.
4. Drastic shifts in Medicare funding to the States, further burdening strained State budgets.
With its avowed agenda of “starving the beast” of government by
cutting State and federal revenues and a complementary strategy of driving
huge federal deficits, the Republican Party controls all branches of the
federal government and all but the executive branch of our State
government. In 2006, Michigan’s Governor, entire State House, entire State
Senate, Attorney General, and two Supreme Court seats will be on the
ballot. In addition, the K-16 Coalition’s proposal to guarantee annual
cost-of-living adjustments to school and college funding may also be on the
ballot. At the federal level, the entire House of Representatives and 33
Senate seats will be on the ballot. This year, as in every year, the fate
of our professional lives and our livelihoods will be determined by the
priorities or ideologies elected officials bring to office.
Why Buy Union-made?
Our professional lives and livelihoods are also determined by the private economic choices we make. As American workers in the private sector lose opportunities for middle class incomes, health care coverage, and secure pensions, so too will employees in the public sector. The incomes and professional standing of America’s teachers rose with the rise of America’s unionized workforce. The decline of that unionized workforce in numbers and in political influence is impacting public education and educators as well.
The purchasing decisions we make, much like the political decisions we make, have their effect. If our purchases support foreign manufacturers paying third-world wages or our purchases support foreign manufacturers whose health-care costs are subsidized at the national level, while health care in America is not, we are contributing to the decline of America’s working middle class. Millions of American workers, who achieved middle class standing directly or indirectly because of the union movement, are now losing that middle class economic standing.
As the private sector American middle class declines, so too will the public sector American middle class. Elected and aspiring public officials will not continue to support wages, health insurance benefits, and pensions for public sector employees, including those in public education, which are no longer common in the private sector. In fact, this scenario is already playing itself out in the assaults on our pension system – and it will no doubt surface in terms of wages and health care coverage when we return to the bargaining table in early 2007.
The purchasing decisions we privately make can contribute, as can poor public policy, to an economic “race to the bottom.” The fate of autoworkers, airline workers, communication workers, and others – the fate of the America’s working middle class – impacts our own professional and economic aspirations. There are strong economic and social reasons to support those workers, those unions, and those companies struggling to maintain the employer-employee compact that produced America’s working middle class. There are particularly strong reasons to do so for those of us benefiting directly and indirectly from being employed in Ford Motor’s hometown.
We enjoy a good contract and professional empowerment at HFCC. These do not exist in a vacuum. Good wages, health benefits, and secure pensions are not achieved – and are not maintained – absent political action or absent a commitment to the economic well being of all American workers.
John McDonald
January 23, 2006
Henry Ford Community College
Federation of Teachers
5101 Evergreen Road
Dearborn, MI 48128-1495
jmcdon@hfcc.net