The Sacramento Bee reported Wednesday<\/a>. The plaintiffs allege that the colleges failed to compensate them for work done outside \u201cclassroom hours,\u201d including preparing for lectures, traveling to different campuses, grading and communicating with students throughout the week.<\/p>\nThe wave of lawsuits\u2014which seeks to recover \u201cthe pay owed to\u201d the plaintiffs for \u201ctheir considerable uncompensated work\u201d\u2014follows an $18 million settlement that part-time faculty members reached with the Long Beach Community College District earlier this year over similar allegations.<\/p>\n
According to data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor\u2019s Office, more than two-thirds of the system\u2019s 60,000 academic employees were temporary or part-time. While adjuncts may teach up to 67\u00a0percent of a full-time faculty member\u2019s assignment\u2014and are similarly evaluated on their job performance\u2014they work on short-term contracts and are paid lower hourly wages compared to the salaries and benefits tenured and tenure-track faculty receive.\u00a0<\/p>\n
For example, hourly wages for a part-time faculty member in the Shasta-Tehama-Trinity Joint Community College District ranged from $67 to $85 during the 2025\u201326 school year, according to the Bee;\u00a0a part-time instructor teaching three three-unit classes would bring home between $600 and $765 a week. Meanwhile, weekly pay for a full professor who teaches 15 units in the same district ranged from $1,814 to $3,909.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Those pay disparities mirror national trends, which have led adjunct faculty at colleges across the country to unionize over the past decade and demand higher wages. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cPeople like me, we\u2019re only hired for one semester, we\u2019re let go and then we\u2019re hired again the next semester,\u201d said John Martin, one of the plaintiffs and chair of the California Part-Time Faculty Association. \u201cBetween each semester, we\u2019re eligible to apply for unemployment insurance. Most community colleges don\u2019t give us health care or office hours [compensation]. So in other words: We\u2019re doing almost the same amount of work as full-timers and yet we get a fraction of what they get.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the Chancellor\u2019s Office did not comment on the litigation, the Board of Governors has tried to get the lawsuit dismissed, arguing that it\u2019s not the employer of adjuncts\u2014the local college\u2019s Board of Trustees is. According to the Bee, the Santa Clarita Community College District has already negotiated a settlement, whereas others have denied the allegations and asked the court for relief.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The wave of lawsuits follows an $18 million settlement that part-time faculty members reached with the Long Beach…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":375780,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8,5676,15,584,8527,1286,100],"class_list":["post-375779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news","tag-career","tag-education","tag-events","tag-higher","tag-jobs","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=375779"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/375779\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/375780"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=375779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=375779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=375779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}