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A faction of dissident professors and instructors has claimed a first-round victory in its effort to decertify Southwestern College's faculty union.
Professor of Business and Information Systems Frank Paiano said a group that calls itself the Freedom Fighters has collected enough signatures from faculty to force two votes in the fall. Paiano said the California Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) would oversee a ballot that would give faculty the choice to dissolve the Southwestern College Education Association (SCEA) and discontinue the "fair share" clause that requires faculty to pay union fees.
He said five SWC professors, including SCEA President Janet Mazzarella, confronted him in front of the 400 building while he was collecting signatures for the decertification petition.
"They were trying to assassinate me," he said. "I call it the five minute hate. You ever read '1984'? It really upset me. I was useless for the rest of the day. I wasn't able to do anything else."
No complaint was filed as of press time.
Union executives denied harassing Paiano. Mazzarella said two union executives confronted him not for soliciting signatures but because he was speaking badly about the union's executive team.
"They can do what they want," Mazzarella said. "But now they're making it personal. We walked up to him and said we didn't appreciate that you're insulting your colleagues."
Fusako Yokotobi, vice president of SWC Human Resources, settled an earlier squabble between the two groups over whether Freedom Fighters could solicit professors for their signatures using faculty mail boxes or by approaching them on campus.
In the March 28 e-mail to Paiano, she cited a California government code stating that the Freedom Fighters have the right to solicit employees at SWC and the right to "use institutional bulletin boards, mailboxes, and other means of communication."
"Please be advised," she said in the e-mail, "that harassment of district employees or disruption of district activities will not be permitted at any time."
SWC Professor of English Phil Lopez said that it was Paiano who was being erratic and behaving inappropriately. The Freedom Fighters, if anyone, are the ones guilty of harassment, Lopez said, citing two examples of when Freedom Fighters pushed social boundaries while collecting signatures.
The Freedom Fighters are trying to dissolve the SCEA, which is affiliated with the California Teachers Association. In March the Freedom Fighters filed a petition to call a vote for independent representation with PERB. The petition was supported by what Paiano said he thought was 30 percent of the college's faculty, but he said he was wrong.
SWC's Human Resources represntatives had told the Freedom Fighters that there were 970 faculty members working for the college, Paiano said. But when PERB asked the college for a list of faculty, the HR list had grown to 1,091 names, making the Freedom Fighters short by 31 signatures.
PERB notified the Freedom Fighters of this shortage April 27 and gave the dissident group 10 days to gather more signatures. While Paiano was scrambling for signatures, he said, the incident with Mazzarella occurred.
Paiano said Freedom Fighters were able to add almost 50 signatures to their list in just two days and sent the signatures back to PERB May 7. Three days later PERB notified Paiano that the Freedom Fighters had attained enough signatures and a vote to decertify the union and to rescind fair share would take place sometime in fall 2007.
"Let's hope for a positive, constructive and informative campaign by both sides," Paiano said. "I got involved in this because of what CTA did to our adjunct instructors. I collected over 280 signatures because I felt that they were getting a really raw deal from CTA."
Paiano said that he had given the president of the union the opportunity to avoid this vote.
"I told Janet Mazzeralla that if CTA lowered dues for adjuncts from $20 to 5 that I wouldn't collect a single signature," said Paiano. "She declined immediately."
Five days before the vote was called by PERB, Mazzarella rebutted a Freedom Fighter e-mail.
"The statements that were sent out in the IFA (Freedom Fighters) global e-mail are so misguided that we felt compelled to set the record straight," wrote Mazzarella.
The Freedom Fighter e-mail accused the CTA of being a primarily K-12 union disinterested in community colleges and lambasted the CTA for its mandatory union dues, known as fair share. It told readers that an independent union could build a war chest just as strong as the CTA, and build it up with less expensive dues.
Mazzarella said that every educational organization in the country, to her knowledge, has fair share dues and that an independent union could not create a war chest comparable to the CTA.
"The cost to fight the firing of one tenured faculty member is approximately $250,000 to 300,000," said Mazzarella. "CTA spent nearly a million on three faculty members here at SWC. It will take a local independent organization years to build a war chest that big."
In the e-mail Mazzarella said that the members of the current faculty negotiation team, executive committee and recent officers agreed not to take part in an independent union.
"Who is going to run the new union?" she said.
Mazzarell compared SWC to Grossmont/Cuyamaca, one of California's 12 community college districts with independent unions. Grossmont/Cuyamaca ranked worst on a number of important measures.
"This is one of the reasons Grossmont's part-time faculty just left the IFA (independent union) and joined the ranks of (the CTA)," she said.
Joan Stroh, a Freedom Fighter, said Mazzarella is comparing SWC to Grossmont, which is the only independent union that has lower faculty salaries than SWC. The other 11 community college districts that have independent unions all have higher salaries than SWC, she said.
"She keeps harping on Grossmont," said Stroh.
In an e-mail to SWC faculty Lopez said the SCEA offered Freedom Fighters a vote on mandatory dues.
"We told Frank Paiano that if the IFA (Freedom Fighters) would agree to be bound by this vote we would open the contract ratification election to all faculty members," Lopez wrote. "Paiano said 'no.'"
The movement for an independent union spearheaded by the Freedom Fighters is not as strong as it seems, said Lopez.
"They have sort of created this tempest in a tea pot, which is way out of proportion to the number of people they represent," said Lopez. "In reality what we have is a very small number of people, six or eight, who don't want to pay fair share union dues."
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