Topic: Workplace Rights

Will you be eligible for unemployment this summer?

By Grace Chee

At the end of each semester or academic term, full-time faculty go on break, while adjunct faculty become unemployed or underemployed — still working and making less than $600 per week — until the next semester or term starts.

During these periods, you may be eligible to receive unemployment insurance benefits of up to $450 a week, for up to 26 weeks per year in California.

Article educational technology

Three tips to avoid digital grief at work
Guardian of campus computer network offers advice

Greg Whaling isn’t the tech geek down the hall that everyone calls when the wifi goes south. Instead, the Data Communications Specialist is a guardian of a college computer network, protecting it against attacks by hackers and misuse by those on campus.

His duties at Pierce College in the San Fernando Valley include monitoring calls, emails, internet traffic, and surveillance video from the employer’s information systems. If it happens on campus, Whaling likely knows about it.

Article part-time faculty

Paying for time but not for space: The need for a “room of one’s own” on campus

FIRST PERSON | Linda Sneed

We all know that our work takes place not just during scheduled class meetings, in classrooms on college campuses. We work in many times and places: early in the morning, through mealtimes, and late at night; in our cars, on public transportation, on our phones and personal computers, at home, in coffee shops, in public libraries.

California Teacher temp abuse

Union works to squelch temporary positions that last for years
CFT-sponsored AB 1066 will close loophole in Education Code

It’s a little after 9 and morning drive time is easing on San Diego freeways. Disc Jockey Gary Beck is in the broadcast booth at jazz station KSDS, doing what he has loved since the 1960s: spinning records.

Beck and afternoon DJ Ron Dhanifu have more than 80 years on-air between them. When KSDS — a nonprofit FM station based at San Diego City College — holds its twice-yearly pledge drives, the two DJs bring in the majority of donations.

Article part-time faculty reemployment rights

Rehire rights: Long-time instructor describes pain of losing assignment
Outpouring of faculty and student support

What happens when your employer disregards your contractually negotiated rehire rights? Part-time instructors at Oakland’s Laney College recently found out. One of them is Cynthia Mahabir, a sociology instructor and Part-Time Representative on the executive board of the Peralta Federation of Teachers.

California Teacher EpiPens school nurses

New law asks staff to perform more medical procedures
School employees “volunteer” to medicate students in danger

Senate Bill 1266, introduced by Republican Senator Bob Huff (Diamond Bar), and signed by Gov. Brown on September 16, requires public schools to stock emergency epinephrine auto injectors, known as EpiPens, on campus. This is an expansion of the law that said schools could stock the devices for students with a severe allergy to make it a mandate that all schools have the device on hand.

Article unemployment benefits

Staff seek fair unemployment compensation
Bill to bring equity stalled in Legislature

Linnette Robinson has worked with special needs students at Berkeley High School for four years, after two years in the district’s elementary and junior high schools.

Yet every winter and summer, Robinson and tens of thousands of other classified employees across California scrape by during involuntary “vacations” the best they can. Because while other workers receive unemployment benefits during seasonal breaks, school staff do not.

California Teacher unemployment benefits Lobby Days

Staff seek equal access to unemployment benefits
Employees struggle to make ends meet when the paycheck stops during school breaks

Linnette Robinson has worked with special needs students at Berkeley High School for four years. Every winter and summer, Robinson, who has worked stints at other elementary and middle schools, tightens her belt and scrapes by during school breaks the best she can. “Most of us won’t see a paycheck from mid-June to the end of September,” she said.

Article part-time faculty unemployment benefits

When do you qualify for unemployment benefits?

If you are teaching summer school, you may qualify for unemployment benefits in the periods before or after summer session. If you do not have a summer or fall teaching assignment, or another job, you may be entitled to unemployment benefits.

This results from a 1989 legal challenge brought by the CFT in the landmark case Cervisi v. California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board.

California Teacher labor art

Photographer brings the art of class struggle to wide audience
Previously censored works of San Diego professor Fred Lonidier in Whitney Biennial

Fred Lonidier’s artwork depicting the lives and struggles of maquiladora workers was banished from the Autonomous University of Baja California in 2005. This month artwork telling the story of that censorship will go up on the walls of New York’s prestigious Whitney Museum of American Art as part of its renowned Biennial exhibition.

Article

New Know Your Rights booklet available!

The Council of Classified Employees has produced a valuable new booklet. Know Your Rights: A guide to workplace laws for classified employees and paraprofessionals in California is a comprehensive analysis of the California Education Code as it relates to support staff in California public schools and colleges.

The booklet includes topics such as:

Article

Negotiating the new Diastat law
Puts employees in position of performing medical procedures

The passage of SB 161 last year allows administration of a prescription dose of valium by a non-medical K-12 school employee volunteer to students with seizure disorders. CFT opposed this legislation because we believed it placed school employees in the position of performing tasks better performed by medical professionals. Nonetheless, it is now law.

California Teacher social media

Who’s spying on you? Protecting your privacy in the age of servers and social media – 6 Maxims for your digital work life

Protecting your privacy in the age of servers and social media
By Robert J. Bezemek And David Conway

Almost everyone uses social media. Whether it’s emailing, surfing the web, sending text messages, tweeting or tumblr, we are treating social media as an extension of our personal conversations with family, friends and co-workers. And we do it from every imaginable location — public transit, automobiles, restaurants, parks, sidewalks, the office, and throughout the campuses where we work.

California Teacher Elections 2012 Prop 32

No on Prop. 32: Don’t let billionaires take away our voice

California voters appear poised to reject a November ballot measure that would ban political contributions by payroll deduction, according to a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll. Forty-four percent of those surveyed said they opposed Proposition 32, which would eliminate the main fundraising tool of unions. Just 36 percent said they supported the measure.

California Teacher teacher evaluation

Legislature fails to pass meaningful teacher evaluation bill
Opponents don’t care about validity of test scores, only scapegoating teachers

How could a bill that would have improved the teacher evaluation process die in the California Legislature? Assembly Bill 5, “A Best Practices Teacher Evaluation System,” fell victim to faulty assumptions and reasoning that defies logic. And our schools are poorer for it.