ESPAÑOLA, New Mexico—With a unanimous vote of their membership, faculty members of the Northern Federation of Educational Employees – AFT Local 4935 at Northern New Mexico College (NNMC) ratified a new collective bargaining agreement over the Labor Day weekend. The contract features what the union says are meaningful improvements to the working conditions of adjunct and full-time faculty.
Building on hard-fought wage gains won last summer, union educators at NNMC advanced to tackle deeper issues with the precarious structure of adjunct employment in this recent round of negotiations.
Sustained member-to-member organizing has been critical over the last few years to build the sway necessary to have the administration seriously negotiate. Starting with a few adjunct faculty approaching their local to revitalize member engagement, the step-by-step revival has built out a vibrant faculty union where previously adjuncts were scarcely involved.
From using grievances around pay structure to foster wider conversation among faculty, holding regular adjunct information sessions, and applying political pressure on college president Hector Balderas, activist faculty advanced to a membership blitz after securing historic 10% wage gains last summer, quadrupling adjunct faculty union membership.
Leveraging these prior wins and massively expanded membership allowed for even greater advances in this year’s negotiations. Full-time faculty, for example, have won a 17% increase in “overload” pay for overburdened course loads over the last two years’ negotiations.
Another major win was the elimination of the university’s “proportional scaling” of wages to enrollment, which penalized educators’ portions of their total credit-hour earnings for courses that didn’t meet an enrollment threshold of ten students. This system meant that a class with eight, six or four students enrolled resulted in a twenty, or forty, or sixty percent pay cut, respectively. With a student body of less than 1,300, such cuts are not conjecture but constants.
Educators also struck their contract’s reliance on a 2018 salary study that tied wages significantly below national averages. The American Association of University Professors recently reported that part-time faculty wages have been squeezed down 3.9% from pre-pandemic averages, while total state per-pupil appropriations have decreased 2.9%.
While public sector adjunct faculty earnings nationwide average a meager $3,776 per standard course selection, some faculty at NNMC are earning approximately 70% of this average per course, even after last summer’s gains.
Former VP of Finance Denise Montoya, who was previously issued cease-and-desist orders for anti-worker interference at Highland College in New Mexico, kicked off last year’s wage negotiations by joking that adjuncts had better come to terms quickly, since they were “itching… to take [their] trips to the Bahamas.”
With a 68% Latino, 9% indigenous student body at the College, this profound disparity in educator pay reflects a pervasive structure of racism in the region.
The struggle to remove (and prevent reinstallation) of a statue of Spanish conquistador Juan de Oñate located near the campus has been marred by two shootings, one in 2020 by a failed pro-Trump candidate for local office and another in 2023 in which a Hopi and Akimel O’odham activist, Jacob Johns, was wounded in what he called “a continuation of colonial violence.”
Failed to notify
When the September 2023 shooting occurred, College administrators failed to notify adjunct faculty (and only adjunct faculty) of the active shooter situation near campus, endangering their lives and symbolizing their neglect for these educators. In this year’s negotiations, NFEE members successfully insisted on strengthening health and safety language to prevent similar offenses.
While the recent departure of certain union-busting administrators, like Montoya, helped secure a more favorable negotiating environment, educators say taking a militant stance and fostering solidarity is what landed the wins.
“We went in there without an us-versus-them mindset and therefore, we secured a win for everyone at the college—most of all for the workers and the students,” Kelvin Rodriguez, an adjunct in the Math Department and bargaining committee member, told People’s World.
Beyond the substance of the contract, the educators also secured an additional full CBA negotiation for next year, opening up space for additional gains and notably increasing the tempo of activity of their union.
Educators say that while their new agreement raises standards in meaningful ways, challenges remain, including resolving outstanding grievances regarding failure to issue accurate pay, and reprisals against union and non-union educators alike, with administrators attempting to intimidate adjuncts into working without any written terms of employment or even falsifying terms.
Across industries, employers are pushing new “flexible” employment terms, subcontracting, temporary, and “gig” (or piece) work, while the government aggressively rolls back what scant protections remain around workplace discrimination, health and safety regulations, and workers’ right to organize. How workers in precarious employment relations fight back will be decisive in carving out the field of struggle for all workers — and adjuncts are one clear case study.
“What we were facing was a microcosm of what is happening in our country and possibly even the world and so we had to express the truth and validity of something so basic—we had to prove our place in society and how worthy we were of being compensated as educators. We had to prove it,” Rodriguez said.
By rallying both permanent and adjunct faculty around shared goals, the union was able to strike at the heart of the discriminatory “two-tier” model.
“How do these categories divide us? How do they normalize treating certain workers as disposable and anterior?” reflected Aspen Ballas, a philosophy and religious studies professor at NNMC, in a statement to People’s World. “Those that created the language may not even realize how divisive, humiliating, and consequential the language is, but nevertheless, that ignorance is rooted in systematized degradation.”
Ballas views their union’s recent victory as a meaningful foundation for further struggle.
“Ultimately, these wins are huge because adjuncts’ constraints have been ignored for so long. These wins don’t mark a completion. The wins are merely the scaffolding for bigger and better work to be done.”
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