SMC Board Slashes Jobs

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

Sept. 16 -- Amidst jeers, Bronx cheers, name-calling and whistle blowing, the Santa Monica College Board of Trustees unanimously voted Monday night to lay off 18 non-teaching employees, saving the school $842,000 and allowing it to pass a balanced budget for 2003-04.

But after hours of passionate testimony from more than 100 workers, faculty members and students who overflowed the meeting rooms after a noisy street rally, the board gave the union representing the workers a final chance to return to the bargaining table.

In a last-minute compromise, officials offered to save the jobs in exchange for a work-share program where the entire classified staff takes a 10 percent cut in work hours and pay. The clock runs out on the deal in 20 days, at which point the college would recall the 30-day pink-slip notices.

Union officials told The Lookout after the meeting that “our members would never approve it.”

“It’s painful, it is a very painful thing that nobody wants to do,” said Trustee Carole Currey of the layoffs. “This is the time for people to realize that we have a budget and it is something we have to deal with.”

Monday's move caps a round of layoffs that will save the college -- which is hard-hit by state budget cuts -- $4 million, officials said. Earlier this year, the board slashed more than 50 part-time and full-time positions, including eight full-time faculty members, and accepted the early retirement of another 27 workers.

Eliminating the 17 classified positions -- filled by 16 full-time and two part-time employees who include carpenters, secretaries, gardeners and computer technicians, some of whom have worked at SMC for nearly 20 years -- was the lesser of two evils, when compared to cutting more classes, said President Dr. Piedad F. Robertson.

When classes are axed, “to me you are cutting at the heart of what a college is," Robertson said. "We cannot do that to our students anymore. We have to draw the line now.”

“Our hands are tied,” Vice-Chair Margaret Quinones said of the compromise.

The union had already rejected the deal in earlier negotiations because college officials refused to guarantee that in exchange for the pay cuts -- which would save the school $1.6 million, according to the union -- no classified worker would be laid off for at least 6-months.

College officials said the concession would be irresponsible because it would hamstring their ability to react in an uncertain political climate where more budget cuts can come down from Sacramento at any time.

“There is not one of us who would vote for the layoffs,” instead of the work-share program, said Quinones. “Except we can’t say ‘no layoffs’” are guaranteed as part of the deal. “I can’t do anything different. That is the process and that is the truth.”

“I want to plead with everyone that this is your big window of opportunity,” Quinones added.

But the assembled protesters -- who earlier in the evening thrust picket signs skyward and blew SMC emergency whistles, drawing a cacophony of honks and screams of support from passing motorists -- repeatedly rejected the board’s assertion that it had no choice. At times they drowned out board members’ explanations with shouts of “liar, liar, liar.”

“The layoffs are not a necessity. You don’t have to do this. You are choosing to do this,” said Tom Carter, the college’s event technician and former president of the SMC chapter of the California School Employees Association (CSEA).

Others agreed, saying the budget crisis is being blown out of proportion by college administrators to justify union busting.

“You don’t have to do this. All the hysteria that went on during the summer and fall turned out to be false,” said Lantz Simpson, the president of the college’s faculty association, referring to the $15 million shortfall college officials projected before a budget was hammered out in Sacramento.

“Seven leaders of the union are on the cutting list," Simpson said. "This is an attack on the union.”

Beginning in February, the college has grappled with the anticipated shortfall by eliminating 33 part-time counselors, eight academic administrators (six of whom retained teaching positions), eight full-time faculty members, three classified managers and five classified employees, while 13 faculty members and 14 classified employees took early retirement.

The college also reduced class offerings in the Fall by 26 percent, made a 30 percent across-the-board reduction in discretionary funds (for supplies) and didn’t rehire 235 part-time employees.

Students complained that while all the decisions are being made in their name, college administrators have excluded them from the decision-making process.

“Basically,” before the state released the budget numbers, “we were trying to play chess without knowing what the chess board looked like,” said Chason Smith, the president of the associated students. “Now that we know what the board looks like, we aren’t invited to play.”

“You do not have to decide tonight, you could wait and let us (the students) help you find a better way,” Smith to the board.

But college administrators said waiting is not the answer.

“If we delay, a larger number of people will have to be laid off,” said Tom Donner, SMC’s executive vice president of business and administration. The longer the college keeps workers on the payroll, Donner explained, the less money they would save.

Surrounded by disgruntled workers, Union President Phil Hendricks, who was nearly arrested in the boardroom for being too rowdy, told The Lookout after the meeting that the chances of the union agreeing to the deal, which would save the jobs only for the moment, is close to “impossible.”

“The union would never take to their members a proposal that said, ‘They’re going to lay you off anyway, but now we’re going to give them money and they may still lay you off,’” Hendricks said.