Unit 18 Retiree Health Care Tentative Agreement Reached--Ballot Instructions

Union members in the Unit 18 bargaining unit will now have an opportunity to vote on the ratification of a recent tentative agreement with UC concerning retiree health.  Voting instructions will be e-mailed to union members on or shortly after July 3. If it is after July 3 and you haven't received voting instructions, please contact your local's field representative. 

 Follow this link to the electronic voting booth.

In our last round of Unit 18 negotiations, the UC-AFT had bargained an "opener" allowing us to renegotiate changes to retiree health provisions if any other union received a better plan than the one we had bargained. A number of our sister unions received a better retiree health plan than we had bargained and the UC-AFT has been bargaining a new set of arrangements concerning retiree health. The UC-AFT has come to a tentative agreement with the University administration over retiree health care. The agreement includes three parts:

1)  Removal of the requirement that a person’s age plus years of service must add up to 50 or more in order to stay in the old retiree health plan. Anyone who was pension eligible in June 2013 will now be in the old retiree health plan.

2) As is the case in our earlier agreement with respect to the pension, Unit 18 members who had Continuing Appointments on October 31, 2013 will be grandfathered into the old retiree health plan unless they have a subsequent break in service of more than one year and a day.

3) Because we discovered that there is great confusion and possibly inequities in the application of the rule that establishes benefits for our members, we also agreed to hold a series of meetings, no later than this fall, to clarify the 750-hour rule for becoming eligible for health, pension, and retiree health benefits as well as whether campuses are appropriately applying the 750-hour rule.

Here are copies of the actual side letters that we bargained:   Retiree Health Eligibility          750 Hour Rule   

This agreement now needs to be ratified by UC-AFT lecturers and other union members in Unit 18. If you are not currently a union member, you may join the union by completing a membership form and submitting it to the field representative or other union officer on your campus.  

The negotiating team and the bargaining committee unanimously recommend ratification of the agreement. We must note that because it is summer, we had less than a quorum of the bargaining committee voting on this.   If you have questions about the tentative agreement, you can email Mike Rotkin at mrotkin@ucaft.org or call Mike at: 831-345-8469.

Thanks,

Your Negotiating Team:

Bob Samuels
Ben Harder
Jon Lang
Mike Rotkin