At Maine's largest community college campus, teaching an hour of electrical wiring, automotive repair or nursing clinicals does not count as a full hour of work under the faculty contract.
Instead, lab, shop and clinical hours at Southern Maine Community College count as 80% of a classroom hour, a provision faculty said devalues the hands-on instruction that makes up much of the community college's workforce training. After at least a year of failed efforts to change the provision, dozens of faculty members, state lawmakers and supporters picketed at the South Portland campus Monday, the first day of classes.
"By counting those hours as less, we're really undermining the importance of that hands-on education and the art that each of these professions involves," said Liz Chernard, a nursing instructor at the school. "Those hours aren't less important, that teaching isn't less valuable, and the faculty doing that work shouldn't be valued less either."
Christopher Teret, president of the faculty union, said the pay discrepancy impacts teachers in several fields, including electrical, plumbing, carpentry, automotive repair, as well as lab instructors for biological and physical sciences.
Teret himself gets paid less for his electrical lab hours than his classroom teaching. He told Maine Morning Star the union has tried several strategies to change the contract before resorting to Monday's picket.
"We tried with negotiations, we also had a petition that 75% of the faculty signed," he said. "They still wouldn't budge on it, so that's why we're here protesting today."
There is no national standard set for compensating lab and clinical hours, and the Maine Community College System did not respond to questions about why the pay is set lower for hands-on instruction. Other community colleges across the country have variable rates of pay for labs and shop hours, and some similarly pay less for that type of teaching.
"It's not like SMCC is the only place that's doing this… there are plenty of other colleges that have this 0.8 multiplier, but it's also true that there are a lot of systems that have done away with it," Teret told Maine Morning Star. "I think it's widely recognized that it's based on an outdated idea of how education works."
Northern Maine Community College is the only school in the system that currently pays teachers an equal amount for labs and classroom instruction, which is what Southern Maine faculty are asking for. The two campuses are vastly different in size, with Southern Maine's enrollment being almost 10 times that of the Presque Isle campus. However, Teret said the increase that Northern Maine faculty negotiated for would have cost the South Portland campus about $100,000, according to calculations from last year.
"To put it in context, $100,000 compared to the entire budget of SMCC, in our opinion, is not too much to ask," he said.
Southern Maine Community College President Kristen Miller told Maine Morning Star that over the past two years the college has presented proposals to the faculty union to address the pay discrepancy, which the union has not accepted.
But Teret said that proposal would not have changed teachers' overall salary (which is set, not calculated by the hour) so ultimately they would have increased the amount of hours faculty had to work per week to maintain their current pay.
"The salary doesn't change, and ultimately it leads to the same result, which is that people who are teaching in labs have to teach more hours to make the same amount of money," he added.
Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Troy Jackson, a longtime union member, joined community college staff at the picket. Like many others, he wore a red shirt that read: "Student success starts with supporting faculty."
"Whether you're teaching a future electrician how to wire a building, a nursing student how to care for a patient, or an automobile tutor how to diagnose an engine, that teaching doesn't become worth less because it happens with your hands," he told the crowd. "That work matters. It matters a lot to me."
Democratic gubernatorial nominee Hannah Pingree sent a letter in support of the faculty position to Miller, writing, "this work should be counted fully and that the faculty who provide it should be fairly recognized and rewarded for their work."
"Hands-on learning is central to the education our community colleges provide and to the workforce Maine needs," Pingree added.
SUPPORT: YOU MAKE OUR WORK POSSIBLE