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Unit 18 Bargaining Update June 2, 2014

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On June 2nd, UC-AFT met with the university for the third time to negotiate over our retiree healthcare re-opener.  We made some progress.  UC announced that if we made a deal, unit 18 members hired before July 1, 2013 would be grandfathered into the old retiree healthcare system.  UC also said they would come up with a fix to the separation problems facing lecturers, which would be congruent with the fix we negotiated for the pension during our last round of bargaining.  Basically, Continuing Appointment lecturers who are currently in the old retiree healthcare system would remain in the old tier unless they had a separation of more than a year and a day. In other words, the University will not require our members to have service years and age add up to 50 as they had earlier required in order for our members to remain in the old and better retiree health program.

The university is also willing to meet and discuss our concerns over the application of the 750-hour rule. There appear to be very different methodologies for calculating service credit on each campus in the UC system and we are not clear yet whether the outcomes are different for different campuses and, even if there is no systematic abuse on various campuses, we still need to understand and get the University to make sure that the calculations are done correctly for all of our members. The UC team agreed that the union and our members should be able to independently check on the accuracy of the service credit being given to each member of our unit and that is not currently the case.

We are still trying to push the university to accept a later date for who is grandfathered into the old retiree healthcare system, and we also want a cap for any increases to retiree healthcare for 2015. It is not clear we will succeed in this effort, but it would be fair and we are going to keep trying to get those additional improvements to our MOU. We plan to meet again on June 23rd, and we hope to wrap things up then.  

Your Negotiating Team understands the limited nature of the current bargaining. This bargaining is only about how to implement a “me too” arrangement that the lecturers got in our last round of bargaining, which was triggered by other units getting a better arrangement for retiree health provisions than we had been able to bargain ourselves. We are all looking forward to successor bargaining in about 13 months when the entire contract (MOU) will be open for changes. As you all know, the key to that is the mobilization of our members that is currently underway. When we are more activated, as we were in 1999 to 2003, we were able to get the University to accept changes to our contract that they initially rejected and, unlike the current bargaining, it was not about “what the University is willing to give us,” but what we insisted they had to give us because it was just and necessary for our members to be able to provide the kind of education that UC students need and deserve. We hope you share our excitement about that upcoming process.

Your Unit 18 Negotiating Team:

Bob Samuels

Jon Lang

Ben Harder

Amy Hines