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Bargaining Update #16 November 17-18 Oakland & Berkeley

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This week we met in Oakland on Tuesday and Berkeley's Clark Kerr campus on Wednesday. 

The highlight for me was the wonderful protest in front of a Berkeley administration building, I’m not great at counting crowds, but I estimate over 100 people, and Lecturers from Berkeley, Davis, Merced, and Santa Cruz (along with the bargaining representatives from Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, Irvine, and Riverside, so eight of the nine UC campuses represented). It was a great event.

Thursday morning, we saw a presentation on the changes to benefits as a result of the ACA. First, when someone is first hired (or reappointed), if he or she is eligible for benefits, he or she is eligible until Dec. 31st. Of which year, you ask? Well, everyone eligible for benefits this Fall is eligible until Dec 31, 2016 (as long as he or she is on pay status). In future years, everyone will have to have a 43.75% appointment (over the whole year) to remain eligible. There are other technical details we need to sort through, but this should be good for us.
We presented proposals on Article 6—Acacemic Appointments, the 7s, 8—Instructional Support, 9—Professional Concerns, 11—Benefits, 17—Layoff, and 21—Salary. The UC accepted our Article 8 proposal, and an earlier proposal on Article 25—Union Rights, and agreed to keep current contract language in Article 30—Discipline and Dismissal. So we TA’d those items.

The UC also presented Article 12—Leaves (finally). There is one very good improvement: All NSF  (any appointment percentage, pre-continuing or continuing, and both annual and term-by-term appointments) will get 6 weeks paid pregnancy disability leave. That is a huge gain.

Despite that, we aren’t done with leaves yet. Some forms of leaves in the Academic Personnel Manual haven’t been brought into the contract, and we need to figure out what’s going on there.
Nothing really was accomplished, except that we’re getting a better understanding of the UC’s parameters. We explained how important Social Security is to us. The UC said it won’t happen. We explained that part-time Lecturers at Stanford, and part time fast-food workers, and everyone else in America gets Social Security, and they still said no. Basically, if we get Social Security, others will want it, and the UC, along with the CSU system and other public agencies, saves a lot of money be making no Social Security contributions for it’s part-time and short-term employees.

We’re meeting again the 3rd and 4th of December, and the UC plans to present every outstanding article in one bunch. We’ll see.

Ben Harder
Chief Negotiator