By Joshua Phelps
The Scene staff
Adjunct faculty members at St. Louis Community College have received two 3 percent raises since they voted to form a union in 2015, and now they’re asking for a third.
The college has agreed to another raise, but it’s only offering 2 percent, and the union wants 5 percent, saying it needs to make up for all the years that salaries remained flat.
“I have to teach at both St. Louis Community College and at (St. Louis University) in order to earn enough to make a living,” said Russell Tallant, an adjunct who has been teaching Spanish at Forest Park since 2013. “I’m working 65 hours a week just to make one salary.”
On April 25, adjunct Linda Stewart addressed the STLCC Board of Trustees at its monthly meeting. She argued that there is too much of a discrepancy between adjunct pay and the salaries of full-time faculty members.
“There are more adjuncts than any other group at the college,” said Stewart, an STLCC adjunct for 25 years who now teaches English on the Florissant Valley campus. “We are the people who students see. We influence them more than anybody else.”
STLCC Director of Human Resources Patricia Canada, the college’s bargaining representative, declined to discuss adjunct pay and other issues related to the Service Employees International Union Local 1, which represents adjuncts.
“The college is doing its part in terms of negotiations, and SEIU has reached out for us to come back to the table,” she said. “That is something our outside council is looking at.”
There are discrepancies in figures provided by STLCC and the union on number of adjuncts on its campuses, as well as pay rates. STLCC Communications Manager Nez Savala said the college employs 604 adjuncts (206 at Forest Park). Nick Desideri, SEIU communications director, said the college provided a list of 820 adjuncts in the bargaining unit (322 at Forest Park).
Savala released a chart that compared adjunct pay at two-year colleges in the Missouri Community College Association.
The chart shows that STLCC adjunct pay ranges from $675 to $1,114 per credit hour, depending on education and experience. That means someone teaching three, three-credit classes would earn $6,075 to $10,026 in a semester.
That compares to a range of $737 to $1,000 at Ozark Technical Community College in Springfield; $600 to $640 at East Central College in Union; $490 to $590 at Mineral Area College in Park Hills; and $450 to $525 at North Central Missouri College in Trenton.
Desideri said STLCC adjunct pay ranges from $655 to $1,082 per credit hour and that it isn’t enough to support a family in St. Louis.
Tallant said if he had known that adjunct pay was going to be so low and that he wouldn’t be able to get health insurance through his job, he probably wouldn’t have gone into education, but he has stayed at STLCC because he loves teaching.