Critics Say Unions Stifle L.A.’s 2-Year Colleges

The Los Angeles Community College District, under fire from several public agencies for its management practices, is home to $100,000-a-year teachers and $80,000-a-year campus police officers.

Such salaries, while not typical, are made possible by the extraordinary power of the unions representing most of the 5,900 district employees, from gardeners to academic deans, officials say.

A major problem, said a former college president, is that the closeness of the unions to the trustees puts management in a weak bargaining position. The faculty union is the leading source of campaign money for the system’s seven-member Board of Trustees, five of whom were elected with substantial union backing.

“Collective bargaining assumes an adversarial situation,” said Lowell Erickson, a former president of Mission and Valley colleges who wrote his doctoral dissertation about the district.

“What we’ve got here is a Board of Trustees that is not as beholden to the citizenry as it is to a special interest that has proved they can deliver votes.”

Faculty union President Carl Friedlander said his group is not in control of the district and not to blame for its fiscal crisis, which is the result of years of a bloated central bureaucracy and dysfunctional management.

Although the district points with pride to its work force, critics--including former chancellors, college presidents, administrators and a few teachers--say the dominance of unions over the years has led to an imbalance of power that plays a role in the district’s dysfunction.

The same conclusion was drawn by Arthur Young & Co. in a 1985-1986 audit done for the Los Angeles County Grand Jury.

“Of what little management prerogatives remained in light of state legislation . . . management appears to have permitted the transfer of most of them to the faculty union,” the report said. “Both the district’s management and the faculty union appear to be more concerned about the contract than about the overall educational program.”

Today, 12 years after the grand jury audit, the combination of strong unions and weak management protects employees at almost all costs. Contracting out for services to save money--or make it--is not allowed.

Other districts bring chain restaurants or Starbucks franchises onto campuses for a share of the profits. In the Los Angeles district, the colleges feature all-union-employee cafeterias, many of which lose money.

Similarly, narrow job classifications in union contracts prevent campuses from transferring, say, a cafeteria cashier to work the register in the bookstore, officials said. Terminating an unproductive employee is a daunting task.

Ernest Moreno, president of East Los Angeles College, said trying to fire someone is his toughest challenge as an administrator. His sentiment is shared by Pierce College Vice President Carmelita Thomas, who said an attempt to dismiss an employee caught by campus police stealing from a vending machine was rejected by the board for lack of evidence.

Pierce President E. Bing Inocencio said simply: “We have too many employees.”

Althea Baker, a trustee since 1989, agreed with some of the criticism: “Every time we sit down to negotiate as a board we’ve given more than we needed to give at that particular time, and it adds up. We’re in the business of education, not in the business of labor.”

Sometimes, she acknowledged, it looks like the other way around.

Overtime Is an Issue

Union power is far from the district’s only problem. The grand jury audit also blasted the district headquarters’ multilayered, “inefficient” bureaucracy.

And critics also note a constant turnover of administrators, which has resulted in instability and a lack of institutional memory. In state educational circles, the Los Angeles chancellor’s post is viewed as “an impossible job,” said state Community College Chancellor Tom Nussbaum.

District deans and assistant deans, who typically earn less than the department heads they supervise, joined the Teamsters a few years ago to seek parity, a measure of their desperation, said West Los Angeles College history teacher Virginia F. Mulrooney.

“Most administrators in this district who are any good have their applications in elsewhere,” said Mulrooney, who has served as faculty union president and head of district personnel.

Yet few dispute the clout that the unions carry, especially the 3,000-member chapter of the American Federation of Teachers College Guild, which extracted from the Board of Trustees the “best contract in the state,” according to a district official. Reluctant to anger the union, which includes 1,339 full-time faculty, the official spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Friedlander said that until the most recent contract, teachers earned far less than the state average. Now, he said, they are just in the middle of the pack.

Nussbaum said the issue is not the contract’s base salaries, which are average for the state, but that such a large raise was approved despite the lack of money to pay for it.

Because salaries and benefits account for 85% of the operating budget, they are the heart of the district’s finances.

Under the current three-year pact, district Vice Chancellor Bonnie James said the average teacher’s raise for 1996 through 1999, including merit and cost-of-living increases, will be about 21%, but some veterans will get as much as 30%.

Base pay ranges from about $34,310 for a new, inexperienced teacher to $67,780 for senior faculty. This salary is for a 30-hour workweek, 15 hours spent teaching five three-unit classes, and five office hours, with no research or publishing requirement. Teachers also receive 25 combined holiday and vacation days during the nine-month school year.

Aside from English teachers, who have a lighter, 12-unit schedule, and some lab instructors, the teaching load in Los Angeles is comparable to many districts across the state. But benefits found in the fine print sweeten the L.A. teachers’ deal considerably, officials said.

A teacher elected to be a department chair, for example, can eliminate some of his or her five required courses while also getting additional pay for the chairmanship. Then if the teacher decides to teach the course after all, he or she will be paid still more at an hourly rate.

In the last fiscal year, 563 teachers earned at least $70,000, according to salary records provided to The Times under the Public Records Act. A total of 173 teachers earned $80,000 or more, while 42 earned at least $90,000. Seven faculty members earned $100,000 or more, a higher salary than most of the college presidents.

Friedlander said teaching extra classes is necessitated by insufficient base pay. “It’s like having a second and third job,” he said.

But Henry Cobos, a veteran faculty member at East Los Angeles College, said bluntly: “The teachers are paid too damn much.”

District Wants More Control

Also of concern to officials are provisions in the most recent contract that put the police union, which has 82 members, in charge of deployment and scheduling, including overtime--an extraordinary concession, said Donald Phelps, chancellor from 1988 to 1993.

“Name a police department [union] in this country that sets its own schedule,” said Phelps, who heads the Graduate School of Education at the University of Texas.

Police overtime cost the district $1.5 million in the fiscal year that ended June 30, officials said.

Individual police officers earned as much as $41,000 in overtime last year and $42,000 in the prior year, roughly doubling their base pay, according to official records.

Over two years, 20 officers worked 1,000 or more hours of overtime, while 66 officers earned more than $25,000 a year in added pay. At the high end, several officers earned more than $70,000 overtime pay in two years, with the highest-paid officer taking home $80,000 above his base salary.

Among those earning overtime was American Federation of Teachers Police Guild President Albert Reddick Jr., who under the contract is freed from regular police duty to do union business 60% of the time. Reddick drew $68,000 in extra pay for overtime over two years, according to district records.

The overtime could have cost less had the union assigned some of it to part-time officers moonlighting from other police agencies, officials said. Reddick acknowledged that the union wants to get rid of the part-timers and is freezing them out, but said the district is to blame for the overtime because it refuses to fill open positions.

The district now is trying to regain control of scheduling. “If you’re not making assignments and not in charge of how many officers are there at one time, it’s hard to control overtime,” Chancellor James Heinselman said. “[Control] should not have been given up.”

Reddick said: “We are never going to agree to turn assignments over to the district.”

Students Complain About Cutbacks

About 50,000 students who live in the district vote “no” with their feet.

That’s how many students attend classes at neighboring community colleges such as Santa Monica, Ventura, Pasadena, Moorpark, El Camino and Glendale, said faculty union leader John McDowell. In return, only 10,000 students who live in ZIP Codes in other districts attend Los Angeles schools.

Reasons to bypass a Los Angeles campus for another range from reputation and services to comfort and cosmetics, officials and students say. Better-kept campuseswith air-conditioned classrooms, clean bathrooms--even teachers with paper for handouts--would be an improvement over what students say they find at L.A. district campuses.

A student at Pierce College in Woodland Hills said some of her teachers have no paper because of a spending freeze on supplies.

They improvise by offering extra credit to students who make runs to photocopying shops.

At East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park--a campus considered the most successful in the district because of growing enrollment and a small budget surplus--a group of students recounted tales of termites marching from classroom vents and falling ceiling tiles.

“My calculus teacher had a tile fall on his head last year,’ said Deborah Valladolid, 26.

At Harbor College, falling ceiling tiles were so common that Heinselman, the former president, ordered them all removed. But the district lacked the $160,000 needed to replace them.

Meanwhile, cuts in class offerings have totaled about 25% over the last few years as campuses responded to the mandate to stay within budgets.

Officials say that the cuts will increase efficiency.

Some students complain that the moves have made it difficult to complete sequences of courses required for degrees or vocational certificates.

District officials argue that despite the system’s travails, its students succeed and prosper.

That was evident at a Valley College lunch in May for students in its honors program.

The featured speaker, Michael Jones, recalled that he was a drug-using street person when he arrived at Valley to take a few classes. Sociology professor Tom Yacovone saw his promise, got him enrolled in the program and now four years later, Jones was about to graduate from UC Santa Cruz.

Yet while some students succeed, the district’s problems shortchange many others, critics say.

“Community colleges are the last frontier in public education geared to address the grievances of academic scholastic neglect,” said Phyllis Norwood, president of the Academic Senate at Los Angeles Southwest College.

But the district is failing on that count and many others, said state Sen. Richard Polanco (D-Los Angeles), a longtime critic.

“You have a huge ship here that has no rudder,” he said. “It’s responsive to everyone’s needs except the students’.”

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The Decision Makers

The seven members of the Los Angeles Community College Board of Trustees:

Elizabeth Garfield, 46, president of the board. An attorney specializing in representing unions and employee benefits plans, Garfield is a graduate of the University of Michigan Law School and Stanford University. Last spring, Garfield led a coup to unseat then-board President Althea Baker for alleged resistance to change. She received $74,685 from the teachers union in her two board campaigns.

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Gloria Romero, 43, vice president of the board. Romero holds a doctorate in psychology from the University of California and teaches psychology at Cal State Los Angeles. In 1995, she became the first Latina elected to the board--winning without faculty union backing. She did receive $4,000 in campaign donations from the district’s office workers union. Having won a state Assembly primary race in June with the backing of the college teachers union, Romero is expected to move to the Legislature November.

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Althea R. Baker, 48. An attorney, mediator and juvenile court referee, Baker--who has a master’s degree in clinical psychology from Pepperdine University--was a longtime employee of the district, working as a teacher and counselor. In 1985, she was chief negotiator for the faculty union and won a seat on the board in 1989. The faculty union contributed a total of $114,323 to her last two campaigns.

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Kelly G. Candaele, 44. First elected in 1997, Candaele came to the board with a background in teaching and labor. With a master’s degree in counseling and psychology from Cal State Chico, Candaele has taught community college. An expert in labor relations, Candaele was policy director for the L.A. County Federation of Labor. He is also a writer and documentary filmmaker. The union gave Candaele a total of $72,409 in 1996 and 1997.

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David Lopez-Lee, 55. A three-time president of the board of trustees, Lopez-Lee holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Cal State Los Angeles and a doctorate from UCLA. Lopez-Lee is a professor of public administration at USC, where he has also been an administrator. In 1995, the faculty union donated $30,420 to Lopez-Lee.

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Georgia Mercer, 56. Mercer was appointed by the board in June to fill out the term of the late Kenneth Washington, a controversial move because African Americans wanted another black appointed. Mercer, the only San Fernando Valley resident on the board, graduated from Cal State Los Angeles and the UCLA Anderson School of Management executive program. She lost a Los Angeles City Council race last year. The teachers union gave Mercer $500 for that contest.

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Julia L. Wu, 60. A native of China, Wu has master’s degrees in library science from Immaculate Heart College and in education from Cal State Los Angeles. She was an English teacher at Los Angeles City College and a regional librarian for the county. Wu recently completed a term on the California Community Colleges Board of Governors. She received $30,310 from the faculty union for that contest.

Compiled by Nancy Hill-Holtzman. Sources: Los Angeles Community College District, state campaign records.