Central Oregon Community College Faculty Forum
May 18, 2026
Media Contact: Rachel.Gumpert@OregonED.org
Labor Unrest at Central Oregon Community College Builds Again as Board and Administrators Stall Faculty Bargaining
Only one month after the first-ever strike of COCC was narrowly averted for classified staff, Administrators and Board seem to have learned no lesson
Failure of COCC Board and Administrators to expediently resolve faculty contract dispute flies in face of edict from COCC President, urging speedy resolution
Bend, OR - A new labor crisis is brewing at Central Oregon Community College just one month after delays from Administrators nearly sparked the first-ever strike of the college by classified staff.
Unionized faculty at COCC are the lowest paid in Oregon, and can no longer afford to live in the community they teach in.
COCC Administrators, the highest paid employees at COCC, recently gave themselves a whopping 19% raise package - but now just weeks after barely averting a strike crisis for classified staff are back to blocking progress in the negotiations over faculty wages and working conditions. Faculty at COCC are paid $10,000 less per year than the median starting wage for Oregon community college faculty, despite COCC having one of the largest stockpiles of cash reserves in the state. Out of whack wages for COCC faculty are actively threatening retention and recruitment for the dedicated educators whose contributions make the college a first-choice pick for students; and COCC Administrators and its Board of Directors are now further entrenching the inequity.
In a scheduled contract negotiation session last week, COCC Administrators apparently defied an edict from their President, Greg Pereira, publicly directing them to expediently resolve the labor dispute with faculty before term ends on June 12.
Recently, Administrators sought faculty union agreement on doubling the pace of negotiation sessions, which they received. Despite the ‘hurry-up-and-wait’, the more frequent scheduling of sessions has not resulted in an increase in speed from COCC in moving through the process.
Instead, in the negotiation session last week, Administrators refused to counter or provide any meaningful feedback on five new proposals faculty introduced in the session spanning their most important issues, including salaries and promotions. For the entirety of the session, COCC Administrators passed back only one single proposal themselves, which was a minimally edited version of an earlier proposal from a past session. Administrators brought only two proposals to the session before that, and none in the third most recent.
With the end of term just weeks away, faculty are airing their frustrations directly to the COCC Board of Directors. Faculty members shared heartfelt testimony to the Board on May 13, sharing the impact of uncompetitive wages for faculty at COCC on them, their families, and their students.
"We’re now in a crisis of deferred maintenance for faculty at COCC that has resulted in failed faculty searches, faculty leaving the college barely after they’ve begun, faculty burnout, and low morale, all because of our historic low wages and high workload,” said Professor Mindy Williams, lead of the faculty bargaining team. “And as we all know, deferred maintenance carries higher costs than addressing problems as they present themselves. We have proposed reasonable systemic changes throughout this bargaining process, and the college countering with more of the status quo just won’t cut it anymore."
The COCC Board of Directors passed a budget on May 13 that had nearly no mention of faculty or staff salaries as part of the budgeting decision. Nearly all conversation was focused on capital projects, despite Pres. Pereira publicly naming lack of affordability for housing costs for faculty and their ongoing labor dispute as a key issue for the college in recent weeks. Faculty are seeking major structural changes to COCC salary structures and promotion systems that will require significant allocation of funding; failure of Administrators to budget for this shows that they again are underestimating the unity and mobilization of their employees, as they did with classified staff.
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The Central Oregon Community College Faculty Forum represents 173 dedicated full time and adjunct faculty members at COCC. Stay in touch and get updates at: Facebook.com/COCCfacultyVoice and Instagram.com/COCCfacultyVoice.