A riddle: When is an hour not an hour?
Answer: When it is a teaching hour.
Normally, the hourly rate paid to workers is a fairly simple concept. For each hour worked, a certain amount of money is paid. However, for some reason, the colleges pay contract instructors by something called a “teaching hour.” It turns out that not all hours are created equal.
A “teaching hour” occurs for each hour that a contract instructor is physically in the classroom with students. However, to teach a course, there are many hours required outside the classroom, including the time required to plan the course, prepare lessons, prepare assignments and tests, print materials, evaluate assignments and tests, meet with students, respond to student emails, and much more. This time is mysteriously not counted in the “teaching hour.”
To demonstrate, let’s say that a contract instructor receives $60 per teaching hour. This sounds like a good deal. However, even if there are two extra hours required for each teaching hour, the actual hourly rate decreases to $20 per hour. If $20 per hour seems reasonable, consider that contract instructors usually arrive early (often 20 to 30 minutes before class to ensure they are not late) and may remain after for student questions. In addition, in many cases, there is travel time between classes, often at different campuses or colleges. Once this is all factored in, the actual hourly rate approaches minimum wage.
Why would the College Council want to talk about a “teaching hour” rather than talk about the actual hourly rate? Why not just indicate the total amount that will be paid to the contract instructor? In the example above, they would receive $60 * 42 hours = $2,520. But this wouldn’t be as compelling. One can quickly do the math and realize that if someone teaches four courses per term, this translates to $10,080 per term or $30,240 annually assuming teaching takes place in all three terms. Not quite as impressive compared to seeing a teaching hour pay grid with a maximum teaching hour rate of over $150 per (teaching) hour, is it?
And according to a recent Statistics Canada study, the average starting salary of a college graduate is considerably higher than the compensation received by the typical contract instructor. Given many contract instructors have Master’s degrees and extensive industry experience, this just doesn’t seem right.
Imagine if a doctor was only paid for doing surgery or a lawyer was only paid when meeting face-to-face with clients. This doesn’t make sense.
After thinking about this, I have a proposal. If the College Council considers the “teaching hour” to be an effective measure of compensation, why not extend this approach to college management? It would work as follows: College management compensation would be based on “managing hours”. A “managing hour” would only be time where the manager is physically with someone from their team (either faculty or support staff). All of their other work (planning, emails, communication with their managers, etc.) would not be included. After all, isn’t this what a manager does: manage?
Now let’s think of the savings that could result if college management was compensated using “managing hours”. For the purpose of this example, let’s assume the following:
An average “managing hour rate” of $100 per hour.
Managers would be allotted 15 hours per week to meet and interact with their employees. Remember that other activities such as meeting with other managers and planning would not be directly compensated.
This would result in compensation of $1,500 per week or $78,000 annually. Compare this to the average salary of $133,000 as reported by an online salary survey. This results in an annual savings of $55,000 per manager. Perhaps this system should be put in place for 80% of managers while the other 20% would be considered “full time” and continue to earn their higher salary.
This example demonstrates the deep inequity in the current practice of using “teaching hours” to compensate contract faculty.
-submitted by a faculty member