Less than one year after Florida’s sweeping anti-union law fully took effect, all eight adjunct faculty unions at public colleges and universities in Florida have officially been decertified, according to state records, affecting roughly 8,400 adjunct professors altogether.
The new law, described by critics as “union busting,” was over a decade in the making, and has already caused tens of thousands of public employees to lose their union representation and union contracts. The adjunct faculty unions, all represented by the faculty arm of the Service Employees International Union, were formally decertified in late July.
“We knew the decertification was coming,” Teresa Greene, a longtime adjunct professor for Valencia College and early supporter of the union, told Orlando Weekly over text. “What can we say?”
Greene, a former professor in the psychology department, was a veteran educator at Valencia who rolled with the punches for years. In April, however, she admitted to Orlando Weekly she was on her way out. Greene, a short, lithe woman in her late 70s, had worked as adjunct faculty — a precarious, technically part-time position — at Valencia College since 2006. She recently moved to Maryland to be closer to her family.
For her, it was time to go. Greene plans on helping out with the grandkids up north, but she’s also considering taking up a remote teaching position for a Maryland college, where the political landscape is less hostile and, as Greene emphasized, “where there’s a union.”
Adjunct faculty at Valencia College in Orlando, including Greene, voted to unionize with the Florida Public Services Union in 2021. Greene and her colleague Bonnie Osgood were early leaders in the campaign to organize adjuncts, after struggling to make headway with the administration directly.
This major — and to some, unexpected — victory for the union came after a years-long battle with the college administration, which aggressively opposed their unionization campaign.
Former union staff who assisted adjuncts' organizing drive told Orlando Weekly that Valencia had put up a uniquely difficult fight, demonstrating more resistance than they’d seen in any prior adjunct organizing campaign in Florida.
Adjunct faculty make up a majority of the total faculty at Valencia College, and were galvanized by issues such as low wages, a lack of job security, and a general sense of disrespect from their employer. Despite being highly educated, some earned just a couple of thousand dollars per course, if that, affecting not only their financial stability but also their ability to give their full attention to students.
A 2022 survey from the American Federation of Teachers found that more than a quarter of adjuncts they surveyed reported earning less than $26,500 annually, often cobbling together multiple courses at one or more institutions.
Greene asserted, however, “It’s not all about us, and getting paid and so on,” three years after their victory. “It really is about, you know, making Valencia a better place for us as well as the students.”
The college administration, however, remained resistant to the union after their victory, denying the union's call during contract talks for benefits like sick leave, compensation for courses that are abruptly canceled before the start of the semester, and office space (a luxury that adjuncts are not afforded).
The college, and their expensive labor relations lawyers, dug their heels in and agreed only to a meager 4 percent raise for adjuncts in a contract negotiated last year— a pittance not even high enough to keep up with inflation.
“They’re just biding their time,” Greene told Orlando Weekly in April. “Until, you know, we [the union] are no more. And I think that's basically their game plan.”
The bill, in part, created a 60 percent threshold for the number of dues-paying members that public sector unions have to maintain to remain certified, or essentially valid, in the state’s eyes. At the same time, the bill also made it harder for them to reach that threshold, by banning the practice of paying dues through a paycheck deduction — the most convenient way for members to do so.
Under Florida’s “right to work” policy, enabled through pressure applied by Southern racists during the Jim Crow era, workers cannot be forced to pay union dues, anyway, even if their job is covered by — and thus receives the benefits of — union representation.
Senate Bill 256 was first brought to the state Legislature over a decade ago in 2011, modeled after policy templates drawn up by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council. But it failed to pass. Then, in 2023, the bill was championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies in the state Legislature, and praised by anti-union think tanks and “union avoidance” experts following its passage.
Ultimately, the new law posed a challenge for adjuncts at Valencia and other unionized institutions, where membership numbers were very low. As of April 23, just 19 out of 1,449 adjunct faculty at Valencia — or 1.3 percent — paid union dues, according to union membership information obtained by Orlando Weekly through a records request.
At other unionized colleges and universities, adjunct union membership ranged from below 1 percent at Miami-Dade College — which employs over 3,000 adjunct faculty — to 21 percent at Broward College, which has an adjunct workforce one-fifth the size.
Priscilla LaPuente, an adjunct professor at Valencia who teaches international relations and politics, had noted a lack of energy among adjuncts after the election — faculty who were fatigued and often isolated from one another due to the remote nature of the job. She attributed low union membership in part to that, as well as the recent ban on payroll dues deduction, among other factors.
“It's hard to connect face to face,” said LaPuente, who's been teaching at Valencia for about five years, mostly online.
Many adjuncts, including herself, are also working one or more other jobs for additional income or for benefits like healthcare. Brian Gibbons, a former organizer for SEIU who worked on the adjunct organizing campaigns, told Orlando Weekly he felt the “biggest challenge” in organizing at the time was just “the material reality of the workers' situation.”
“They were not guaranteed a job past the next four months, and their pay was so horrible that their situations were consistently interrupted and consistently fluctuated,” said Gibbons, who today works as a civil rights attorney for CAIR (and emphasizes that his comments reflect his own personal beliefs, not that of his employer).
Greene, who sat with LaPuente on the union's worker-led bargaining committee, also pointed to the college’s demoralizing treatment of adjuncts — a problem she said has done little to inspire a sense of camaraderie, amid faculty turnover and overall fatigue.
Some of the older faculty like herself, who receive income through Social Security and have access to Medicare for health insurance, can “afford to be there,” she said of the college, which boasts itself as an “affordable” option for its predominately Hispanic and Black student population. “Whereas, [with] some of the younger ones, they come and go, because they get discouraged.”
The fact that their union had such low membership — devastatingly below the 60 percent threshold now required — placed them at risk for state intervention. And the ramifications of that are now coming to light.
Altogether, over 80 public sector unions in Florida have been dissolved as a result of the new law so far, leaving over 63,000 public sector workers without union representation, and with union contracts their employers are no longer legally obligated to honor.
Under the new law, the dissolution of low-membership unions isn’t automatic. Unions that report below 60 percent membership can petition the state for a union election to recertify within 30 days of reporting membership numbers to the state, so long as they can gather signed cards from at least 30 percent of workers in support.
Dozens of unions across the state have already done so, including unions representing K-12 teachers and full-time higher-ed faculty and graduate assistants. “We have not and we do not intend on losing any local unions in the Florida Education Association,” Andrew Spar, president of the FEA — a statewide teachers union — told In These Times earlier this year.
But at Valencia, and in the case of all other adjunct unions, this did not happen, thereby leading to decertification. Staff for their union, affiliated with SEIU, did not respond to Orlando Weekly’s request for comment on the decertifications. LaPuente, one of the adjuncts, said she hasn't heard from the union in recent days either.
So far, SEIU has filed petitions to recertify two dozen other unions they represent in the state — including unions representing city of Orlando employees, and even three unions of non-instructional employees at Hillsborough Community College, according to records.
All so far are still waiting for election dates. Until then, workers are left in limbo as they await their unions’ fate. Of the elections that have already occurred for other unions, workers in all so far have voted to keep their union intact, with only one exception.
“I think that's the truly devastating part of the law, is that it puts every union, every union serving public employees in the state, into a fight for survival, instead of trying to fight to grow and build the movement,” said Gibbons, the former union organizer.
“Under those conditions, the best they can hope for is to survive.”
Not everyone's been forced into survival mode. Police and firefighter unions, as in other states with similar policies on the books, were notably exempted from the new regulations, and have lobbied the state for other changes to make their members’ lives easier. Public safety unions are reliable supporters of the GOP, and thus often earn their political favor.
Some other non-exempted unions have sued the state over this exemption, arguing it’s discriminatory. But attempts to block the law through the courts have so far been unsuccessful.
All eight of the adjunct unions — at Valencia College, St. Petersburg College, Hillsborough Community College, the University of South Florida, Broward College, Miami-Dade College, Seminole State College and Lake-Sumter State College — were represented by Faculty Forward, a higher education arm of the SEIU that represents tens of thousands of faculty across the country.
At St. Pete College, where adjuncts unionized in 2019, adjunct faculty won guarantees such as a course cancellation fee that offers compensation for the planning time that adjuncts invested ahead of the semester in courses that end up being canceled — a policy the college initially resisted.
They also won the right to academic freedom in their work — something that the Florida GOP has threatened through new laws that undermine faculty and teachers’ ability to teach freely about issues such as racism without fear of repercussion.
At Broward College, adjuncts also won class cancellation fees and secured a policy for fixed assignments, ensuring adjuncts have a guaranteed amount of work, thus increasing job stability and security.
All of these things, without a contractual guarantee from the colleges, however, are now gone, or otherwise unenforceable. A spokesperson for St. Pete College told Orlando Weekly a few days after initial publication of this story that the college “anticipates no change in the wages or other terms and conditions of employment,” while confirming that the adjuncts' union contract is now considered “null and void.” A spokesperson for Broward College similarly, if vaguely, shared that at this time, “everything is status quo.”
“We have no plans to alter any of the terms related to our adjunct faculty,” they added.
At Valencia College, Greene feels that adjunct faculty are paid differently — and valued differently — compared to full-time faculty.
“Valencia is an excellent educational institution, but it's on the backs of the adjuncts,” added Osgood, Greene’s former colleague at Valencia.
Osgood, another longtime adjunct at Valencia, says their pay is comparable to your average retail job.
“You’re being taught by adjuncts who are getting the same thing a child makes working at Target,” Osgood told Orlando Weekly over coffee in April. “We make $15 an hour. That’s our average.”
Unlike full-time or tenured faculty, adjuncts aren’t paid for tasks done strictly outside of class time, like answering emails from students, grading student work, or even writing letters of recommendation for the ambitious ones who come to them for support.
For professors who genuinely care about their students’ success, Greene said it’s uncomfortable to have to ponder whether to write such a letter on their off time, to politely decline, or even try to explain the situation to the student. Most students, she said, don't even know their professors are part-time instructors. Back before they unionized, some students, once made aware of their plight, even rallied alongside them in support.
The Valencia administration, however, remained combative with the union ever after their victorious election. This was disappointing to adjuncts like Greene, but not altogether surprising for an administration that: enlisted the services of “union avoidance” lawyers paid upward of $250 an hour during the initial organizing drive; created an entire anti-union webpage on the college website; and fed outgoing college president Sandy Shugart an anti-union speech to read over video, presumably produced and funded by public money.
“Too often, the presence of a union creates adversarial ‘us’ versus ‘them’ relationships with all parties involved,” Shugart shared. “This election isn't about us,” he continued, “It’s about them.”
Shugart, like other anti-union employers, remained adamant about painting the union as a third party during adjuncts' organizing drive. According to the Orlando Business Journal, Valencia was paying Shugart an annual salary of over $350,000 by the time he left.
In protest of the college's efforts to stall their organzing, adjuncts even led a car caravan to the homes of Shugart and another college administrator back in 2020, with an aim of “empowering the workers and allowing them to build solidarity.” That’s how state officials later described it, anyway, in an unfair labor practice complaint the college later filed against the union over the display.
The state’s Public Employees Relations Commission (led by DeSantis appointees) ultimately sided with the college (also governed by DeSantis appointees), forcing the union to post a sort of “shame on us” notice the next year.
The road after was tough. It took a year and a half for the two parties to hammer out an initial contract, offering a paltry raise that adjuncts nonetheless accepted, with disappointment.
“Four percent may sound like a lot, but it's not much pay when you consider inflation,” said Greene.
The figure was significantly below the union’s initial, ambitious demand of a 19.5 percent raise, which was soundly rejected by the college, in addition to other proposals from the union, including greater job security, guaranteed access to college facilities (such as an office), guaranteed class minimums and language on academic freedom.
“The first contract was, you know, spelling out a lot of the basics,” Greene admitted. “After that, when we did try to include other more substantive things, and in this last year, especially, it was just all, ‘No, no, no, no’ — literally, that's the way the meeting went,” Greene recalled.
Their last bargaining session with the college in April was similarly disappointing, as the administration refused to budge on an insulting offer of a 1.5 percent pay increase— after the union had pitched 6 percent. “We just ended the farce by walking away, not dignifying their offer with our acceptance,” Greene recalled. “They and the state were just waiting things out.”
For LaPuente, a graduate of Valencia, learning about the college's treatment of adjuncts as an instructor was a shock. “I think, if I would have known how my college professors were were being treated, how much they were being paid, you know, what they were being offered and not offered, I would have been really concerned,” she shared, her voice breaking as she spoke to Orlando Weekly over the phone.
LaPuente today also has a full-time job in hospitality, but teaching at Valencia was an aspiration. “I went to teacher training after my Master's [degree] so that I could get into Valencia,” she said. “And to see that they make it so hard for educators to have a dignified life. ... You're having a lot of people who are leaving the state or leaving the profession.”
Greene, for her part, told Orlando Weekly in April that she and Osgood were too old to launch another organizing drive and were ready to hand over the baton, so to speak. “We're both in our 70s and we’re leaving,” said Greene. “So we're not going to do it again.”
A new organizing drive by adjuncts, she believes, would need the same kind of “grassroots” energy they had when they first organized years ago. LaPuente, who plans to continue teaching at Valencia, agreed. “If the people want it enough, and they work hard enough, absolutely it's possible,” she said.
Osgood, a fiery blonde with kind eyes, said she sees what she and other adjuncts had built, and have now lost, as “Phase 1” for adjunct professors.
They laid the infrastructure, she says, “for the next effort.”
Are you an adjunct professor affected by the state's decertification of adjunct unions? Contact reporter McKenna Schueler to share your thoughts.
This post has been updated to include comment from St. Petersburg College.
Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | or sign up for our RSS Feed
The new law, described by critics as “union busting,” was over a decade in the making, and has already caused tens of thousands of public employees to lose their union representation and union contracts. The adjunct faculty unions, all represented by the faculty arm of the Service Employees International Union, were formally decertified in late July.
“We knew the decertification was coming,” Teresa Greene, a longtime adjunct professor for Valencia College and early supporter of the union, told Orlando Weekly over text. “What can we say?”
Greene, a former professor in the psychology department, was a veteran educator at Valencia who rolled with the punches for years. In April, however, she admitted to Orlando Weekly she was on her way out. Greene, a short, lithe woman in her late 70s, had worked as adjunct faculty — a precarious, technically part-time position — at Valencia College since 2006. She recently moved to Maryland to be closer to her family.
Courtesy of Teresa Greene
Teresa Greene, a former Valencia College professor, who taught at the college for nearly 20 years before moving on.
For her, it was time to go. Greene plans on helping out with the grandkids up north, but she’s also considering taking up a remote teaching position for a Maryland college, where the political landscape is less hostile and, as Greene emphasized, “where there’s a union.”
Adjunct faculty at Valencia College in Orlando, including Greene, voted to unionize with the Florida Public Services Union in 2021. Greene and her colleague Bonnie Osgood were early leaders in the campaign to organize adjuncts, after struggling to make headway with the administration directly.
This major — and to some, unexpected — victory for the union came after a years-long battle with the college administration, which aggressively opposed their unionization campaign.
Former union staff who assisted adjuncts' organizing drive told Orlando Weekly that Valencia had put up a uniquely difficult fight, demonstrating more resistance than they’d seen in any prior adjunct organizing campaign in Florida.
Adjunct faculty make up a majority of the total faculty at Valencia College, and were galvanized by issues such as low wages, a lack of job security, and a general sense of disrespect from their employer. Despite being highly educated, some earned just a couple of thousand dollars per course, if that, affecting not only their financial stability but also their ability to give their full attention to students.
A 2022 survey from the American Federation of Teachers found that more than a quarter of adjuncts they surveyed reported earning less than $26,500 annually, often cobbling together multiple courses at one or more institutions.
Greene asserted, however, “It’s not all about us, and getting paid and so on,” three years after their victory. “It really is about, you know, making Valencia a better place for us as well as the students.”
The college administration, however, remained resistant to the union after their victory, denying the union's call during contract talks for benefits like sick leave, compensation for courses that are abruptly canceled before the start of the semester, and office space (a luxury that adjuncts are not afforded).
The college, and their expensive labor relations lawyers, dug their heels in and agreed only to a meager 4 percent raise for adjuncts in a contract negotiated last year— a pittance not even high enough to keep up with inflation.
“They’re just biding their time,” Greene told Orlando Weekly in April. “Until, you know, we [the union] are no more. And I think that's basically their game plan.”
A dagger to Florida’s labor movement
Last year, Greene’s union — and Florida’s labor movement broadly — saw its most crushing attack in decades. Senate Bill 256, described by its critics as union busting, plain and simple, was a Republican-backed dagger to Florida’s labor movement, disguised as a union reform bill.The bill, in part, created a 60 percent threshold for the number of dues-paying members that public sector unions have to maintain to remain certified, or essentially valid, in the state’s eyes. At the same time, the bill also made it harder for them to reach that threshold, by banning the practice of paying dues through a paycheck deduction — the most convenient way for members to do so.
Under Florida’s “right to work” policy, enabled through pressure applied by Southern racists during the Jim Crow era, workers cannot be forced to pay union dues, anyway, even if their job is covered by — and thus receives the benefits of — union representation.
Senate Bill 256 was first brought to the state Legislature over a decade ago in 2011, modeled after policy templates drawn up by the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council. But it failed to pass. Then, in 2023, the bill was championed by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis and his allies in the state Legislature, and praised by anti-union think tanks and “union avoidance” experts following its passage.
Ultimately, the new law posed a challenge for adjuncts at Valencia and other unionized institutions, where membership numbers were very low. As of April 23, just 19 out of 1,449 adjunct faculty at Valencia — or 1.3 percent — paid union dues, according to union membership information obtained by Orlando Weekly through a records request.
At other unionized colleges and universities, adjunct union membership ranged from below 1 percent at Miami-Dade College — which employs over 3,000 adjunct faculty — to 21 percent at Broward College, which has an adjunct workforce one-fifth the size.
Priscilla LaPuente, an adjunct professor at Valencia who teaches international relations and politics, had noted a lack of energy among adjuncts after the election — faculty who were fatigued and often isolated from one another due to the remote nature of the job. She attributed low union membership in part to that, as well as the recent ban on payroll dues deduction, among other factors.
“It's hard to connect face to face,” said LaPuente, who's been teaching at Valencia for about five years, mostly online.
Many adjuncts, including herself, are also working one or more other jobs for additional income or for benefits like healthcare. Brian Gibbons, a former organizer for SEIU who worked on the adjunct organizing campaigns, told Orlando Weekly he felt the “biggest challenge” in organizing at the time was just “the material reality of the workers' situation.”
“They were not guaranteed a job past the next four months, and their pay was so horrible that their situations were consistently interrupted and consistently fluctuated,” said Gibbons, who today works as a civil rights attorney for CAIR (and emphasizes that his comments reflect his own personal beliefs, not that of his employer).
Greene, who sat with LaPuente on the union's worker-led bargaining committee, also pointed to the college’s demoralizing treatment of adjuncts — a problem she said has done little to inspire a sense of camaraderie, amid faculty turnover and overall fatigue.
Some of the older faculty like herself, who receive income through Social Security and have access to Medicare for health insurance, can “afford to be there,” she said of the college, which boasts itself as an “affordable” option for its predominately Hispanic and Black student population. “Whereas, [with] some of the younger ones, they come and go, because they get discouraged.”
The fact that their union had such low membership — devastatingly below the 60 percent threshold now required — placed them at risk for state intervention. And the ramifications of that are now coming to light.
Altogether, over 80 public sector unions in Florida have been dissolved as a result of the new law so far, leaving over 63,000 public sector workers without union representation, and with union contracts their employers are no longer legally obligated to honor.
Under the new law, the dissolution of low-membership unions isn’t automatic. Unions that report below 60 percent membership can petition the state for a union election to recertify within 30 days of reporting membership numbers to the state, so long as they can gather signed cards from at least 30 percent of workers in support.
Dozens of unions across the state have already done so, including unions representing K-12 teachers and full-time higher-ed faculty and graduate assistants. “We have not and we do not intend on losing any local unions in the Florida Education Association,” Andrew Spar, president of the FEA — a statewide teachers union — told In These Times earlier this year.
But at Valencia, and in the case of all other adjunct unions, this did not happen, thereby leading to decertification. Staff for their union, affiliated with SEIU, did not respond to Orlando Weekly’s request for comment on the decertifications. LaPuente, one of the adjuncts, said she hasn't heard from the union in recent days either.
So far, SEIU has filed petitions to recertify two dozen other unions they represent in the state — including unions representing city of Orlando employees, and even three unions of non-instructional employees at Hillsborough Community College, according to records.
All so far are still waiting for election dates. Until then, workers are left in limbo as they await their unions’ fate. Of the elections that have already occurred for other unions, workers in all so far have voted to keep their union intact, with only one exception.
“I think that's the truly devastating part of the law, is that it puts every union, every union serving public employees in the state, into a fight for survival, instead of trying to fight to grow and build the movement,” said Gibbons, the former union organizer.
“Under those conditions, the best they can hope for is to survive.”
Not everyone's been forced into survival mode. Police and firefighter unions, as in other states with similar policies on the books, were notably exempted from the new regulations, and have lobbied the state for other changes to make their members’ lives easier. Public safety unions are reliable supporters of the GOP, and thus often earn their political favor.
Some other non-exempted unions have sued the state over this exemption, arguing it’s discriminatory. But attempts to block the law through the courts have so far been unsuccessful.
The end of 'Phase One'
With this latest blow to Florida’s labor movement, an inspiring wave of organizing that took off among adjunct faculty nearly 10 years ago in 2016 has crashed into the rocks, leaving professors who started off with too little to lose with even less.All eight of the adjunct unions — at Valencia College, St. Petersburg College, Hillsborough Community College, the University of South Florida, Broward College, Miami-Dade College, Seminole State College and Lake-Sumter State College — were represented by Faculty Forward, a higher education arm of the SEIU that represents tens of thousands of faculty across the country.
At St. Pete College, where adjuncts unionized in 2019, adjunct faculty won guarantees such as a course cancellation fee that offers compensation for the planning time that adjuncts invested ahead of the semester in courses that end up being canceled — a policy the college initially resisted.
They also won the right to academic freedom in their work — something that the Florida GOP has threatened through new laws that undermine faculty and teachers’ ability to teach freely about issues such as racism without fear of repercussion.
At Broward College, adjuncts also won class cancellation fees and secured a policy for fixed assignments, ensuring adjuncts have a guaranteed amount of work, thus increasing job stability and security.
All of these things, without a contractual guarantee from the colleges, however, are now gone, or otherwise unenforceable. A spokesperson for St. Pete College told Orlando Weekly a few days after initial publication of this story that the college “anticipates no change in the wages or other terms and conditions of employment,” while confirming that the adjuncts' union contract is now considered “null and void.” A spokesperson for Broward College similarly, if vaguely, shared that at this time, “everything is status quo.”
“We have no plans to alter any of the terms related to our adjunct faculty,” they added.
At Valencia College, Greene feels that adjunct faculty are paid differently — and valued differently — compared to full-time faculty.
“Valencia is an excellent educational institution, but it's on the backs of the adjuncts,” added Osgood, Greene’s former colleague at Valencia.
Osgood, another longtime adjunct at Valencia, says their pay is comparable to your average retail job.
“You’re being taught by adjuncts who are getting the same thing a child makes working at Target,” Osgood told Orlando Weekly over coffee in April. “We make $15 an hour. That’s our average.”
Unlike full-time or tenured faculty, adjuncts aren’t paid for tasks done strictly outside of class time, like answering emails from students, grading student work, or even writing letters of recommendation for the ambitious ones who come to them for support.
For professors who genuinely care about their students’ success, Greene said it’s uncomfortable to have to ponder whether to write such a letter on their off time, to politely decline, or even try to explain the situation to the student. Most students, she said, don't even know their professors are part-time instructors. Back before they unionized, some students, once made aware of their plight, even rallied alongside them in support.
The Valencia administration, however, remained combative with the union ever after their victorious election. This was disappointing to adjuncts like Greene, but not altogether surprising for an administration that: enlisted the services of “union avoidance” lawyers paid upward of $250 an hour during the initial organizing drive; created an entire anti-union webpage on the college website; and fed outgoing college president Sandy Shugart an anti-union speech to read over video, presumably produced and funded by public money.
“Too often, the presence of a union creates adversarial ‘us’ versus ‘them’ relationships with all parties involved,” Shugart shared. “This election isn't about us,” he continued, “It’s about them.”
Shugart, like other anti-union employers, remained adamant about painting the union as a third party during adjuncts' organizing drive. According to the Orlando Business Journal, Valencia was paying Shugart an annual salary of over $350,000 by the time he left.
In protest of the college's efforts to stall their organzing, adjuncts even led a car caravan to the homes of Shugart and another college administrator back in 2020, with an aim of “empowering the workers and allowing them to build solidarity.” That’s how state officials later described it, anyway, in an unfair labor practice complaint the college later filed against the union over the display.
The state’s Public Employees Relations Commission (led by DeSantis appointees) ultimately sided with the college (also governed by DeSantis appointees), forcing the union to post a sort of “shame on us” notice the next year.
SEIU-Faculty Forward via Twitter
Valencia College students, faculty, and allies participate in a car caravan to show solidarity with the adjuncts union. July 20, 2020.
The road after was tough. It took a year and a half for the two parties to hammer out an initial contract, offering a paltry raise that adjuncts nonetheless accepted, with disappointment.
“Four percent may sound like a lot, but it's not much pay when you consider inflation,” said Greene.
The figure was significantly below the union’s initial, ambitious demand of a 19.5 percent raise, which was soundly rejected by the college, in addition to other proposals from the union, including greater job security, guaranteed access to college facilities (such as an office), guaranteed class minimums and language on academic freedom.
“The first contract was, you know, spelling out a lot of the basics,” Greene admitted. “After that, when we did try to include other more substantive things, and in this last year, especially, it was just all, ‘No, no, no, no’ — literally, that's the way the meeting went,” Greene recalled.
Their last bargaining session with the college in April was similarly disappointing, as the administration refused to budge on an insulting offer of a 1.5 percent pay increase— after the union had pitched 6 percent. “We just ended the farce by walking away, not dignifying their offer with our acceptance,” Greene recalled. “They and the state were just waiting things out.”
For LaPuente, a graduate of Valencia, learning about the college's treatment of adjuncts as an instructor was a shock. “I think, if I would have known how my college professors were were being treated, how much they were being paid, you know, what they were being offered and not offered, I would have been really concerned,” she shared, her voice breaking as she spoke to Orlando Weekly over the phone.
LaPuente today also has a full-time job in hospitality, but teaching at Valencia was an aspiration. “I went to teacher training after my Master's [degree] so that I could get into Valencia,” she said. “And to see that they make it so hard for educators to have a dignified life. ... You're having a lot of people who are leaving the state or leaving the profession.”
Greene, for her part, told Orlando Weekly in April that she and Osgood were too old to launch another organizing drive and were ready to hand over the baton, so to speak. “We're both in our 70s and we’re leaving,” said Greene. “So we're not going to do it again.”
A new organizing drive by adjuncts, she believes, would need the same kind of “grassroots” energy they had when they first organized years ago. LaPuente, who plans to continue teaching at Valencia, agreed. “If the people want it enough, and they work hard enough, absolutely it's possible,” she said.
Osgood, a fiery blonde with kind eyes, said she sees what she and other adjuncts had built, and have now lost, as “Phase 1” for adjunct professors.
They laid the infrastructure, she says, “for the next effort.”
Are you an adjunct professor affected by the state's decertification of adjunct unions? Contact reporter McKenna Schueler to share your thoughts.
This post has been updated to include comment from St. Petersburg College.
Subscribe to Orlando Weekly newsletters.
Follow us: Apple News | Google News | NewsBreak | Reddit | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter | or sign up for our RSS Feed
