In the summer of 2022, Federation Grievance Chair John Baranski filed a grievance against Nursing Director for a contract violation related to a PT faculty job announcement. In the course of investigating that case, the Federation discovered that VP of HR added a dual enrollment requirement to the PT Nursing job announcement. That “duty” to teach at a local high school in the dual enrollment program had not been negotiated as a job requirement (see Appendix A in our contract).

The Federation filed a grievance with the goal of removing this unnegotiated job duty. Through that process, we agreed to move the issue to the bargaining table because we were in negotiations. During negotiations, we rejected the District’s proposals to add dual enrollment, among other new duties, to our job description. We thought the issue was settled.

But in January 2023, the District added three distinct job duties to many of the FT job announcements: Dual enrollment, online teaching, and building relationships with industry and other external organizations such as K-12 districts. Some of those duties also appeared on PT job announcements. The added job duties had a number of problems. One, they violated California labor law. Two, for both managers and faculty, the job announcements could cause confusion about job duties and even worse might be used by managers to coerce faculty to do these extra duties. A dean might say, “Well, teaching at a high school is in the job announcement, I want you to teach at Inglewood High School in the morning and Torrance High School after lunch.” What would a faculty member do?

In February, the Federation filed a formal complaint with the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), which is the state agency in charge of labor relations and labor law enforcement. The Federation’s case was strong: we had evidence that the District failed to negotiate those extra job duties and yet continued to add those duties to job announcements. We had evidence that we tried to resolve the matter with the District before filing the PERB complaint, thus showing a good faith effort to work with the administration even though it proved fruitless. When we filed the complaint, PERB found merit in the Federation’s case and scheduled a hearing in June 2024.

A few days before the hearing, the District’s lawyer reached out to the Federation, offering a settlement. It took several days of back and forth phone calls and proposals, in part because the District tried to keep what it was attempting to do in the first place, but we came to an enforceable settlement that clearly rebuffed the district’s attempt to muddy the waters of our job duties.

A few things about this case. One, the Federation discovered this violation while working on a unrelated grievance. If you see (read) something, say something. Two, the District had many chances throughout the process to resolve the issue, but instead they fought the issue all the way up to the day of the hearing, at considerable cost to the District. Three, faculty were either unaware of the job duties or in a few cases tried to remove unsuccessfully the added job duties.