California Adjuncts Sue for “Uncompensated Work”

A group of part-time faculty from colleges in California have filed at least five lawsuits against the California Community Colleges Board of Governors and a third of the state’s community college districts, The Sacramento Bee reported Wednesday. The plaintiffs allege that the colleges failed to compensate them for work done outside “classroom hours,” including preparing for lectures, traveling to different campuses, grading and communicating with students throughout the week.

The wave of lawsuits—which seeks to recover “the pay owed to” the plaintiffs for “their considerable uncompensated work”—follows an $18 million settlement that part-time faculty members reached with the Long Beach Community College District earlier this year over similar allegations.

According to data from the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office, more than two-thirds of the system’s 60,000 academic employees were temporary or part-time. While adjuncts may teach up to 67 percent of a full-time faculty member’s assignment—and are similarly evaluated on their job performance—they work on short-term contracts and are paid lower hourly wages compared to the salaries and benefits tenured and tenure-track faculty receive. 

For example, hourly wages for a part-time faculty member in the Shasta-Tehama-Trinity Joint Community College District ranged from $67 to $85 during the 2025–26 school year, according to the Bee; a part-time instructor teaching three three-unit classes would bring home between $600 and $765 a week. Meanwhile, weekly pay for a full professor who teaches 15 units in the same district ranged from $1,814 to $3,909. 

Those pay disparities mirror national trends, which have led adjunct faculty at colleges across the country to unionize over the past decade and demand higher wages.     

“People like me, we’re only hired for one semester, we’re let go and then we’re hired again the next semester,” said John Martin, one of the plaintiffs and chair of the California Part-Time Faculty Association. “Between each semester, we’re eligible to apply for unemployment insurance. Most community colleges don’t give us health care or office hours [compensation]. So in other words: We’re doing almost the same amount of work as full-timers and yet we get a fraction of what they get.”

While the Chancellor’s Office did not comment on the litigation, the Board of Governors has tried to get the lawsuit dismissed, arguing that it’s not the employer of adjuncts—the local college’s Board of Trustees is. According to the Bee, the Santa Clarita Community College District has already negotiated a settlement, whereas others have denied the allegations and asked the court for relief.