UC-AFT Faculty Bargaining Update and FAQ

UC-AFT Faculty Bargaining Update and FAQ's
February 11, 2020

By Mia L. McIver, Ph.D.
Pre-Continuing Lecturer, UCLA Writing Programs
President, UC-AFT
Chief Negotiator, UC-AFT Faculty Bargaining Unit
mmciver@ucaft.org

Click the questions below to raise the response on the screen, or scroll down to read the full FAQ's. 

What are our goals for our next contract?
------
What are the main problems we’re trying to solve in collective bargaining that can’t be solved through other avenues?
------
What are our core bargaining priorities?
------
Why are we negotiating over so many issues?
------
How were our bargaining proposals developed?
------
Are our initial proposals ultimatums?
------
How does our bargaining team differ from UC admin’s?
------
Why hasn’t UC admin received our compensation proposal yet?
-------
In what areas have we made the most progress in negotiations?
-------
Why aren’t we closer to an agreement?
-------
How has going out of contract affected negotiations?
-------
Who is Peter Chester?
-------
Peter Chester wrote to UC-AFT faculty that “you deserve to vote” on UC’s offer. Why haven’t I been able to vote yet?
-------
Is it true that UC-AFT “would not agree to a reasonable extension” of the contract?
-------
Is it true that UC admin “has presented the union with a comprehensive proposal”?
-------
How does UC admin’s current salary offer compare to the raises other UC unions have won recently?
-------
Does UC admin’s current salary offer of 2% and 3% annual cost of living increases really “greatly increase the compensation for Unit 18 members”?
-------
UC admin says they are proposing to “increase the length of appointment cap.” What would that mean for me?
-------
UC admin says they are proposing “additional opportunities to blend or add term counts to achieve eligibility for continuing appointments.” Will that help me achieve a continuing appointment faster?
-------
Did UC-AFT walk away from bargaining when the contract expired? Did we reject UC admin’s offer?
-------
UC Berkeley Vice Provost Benjamin E. Hermalin sent a message to tenure-track faculty at UC Berkeley saying the following: “The Union wants to assign courses to lecturers based on seniority rather than skill and ability.” Is that an accurate representation of our proposals?
-------
Vice Provost Hermalin also stated that, “Hiring based solely on seniority is often contrary to Berkeley’s diversity and equity values because it disadvantages newer candidates who tend to be more representative of our students and the population of California.”
-------
Vice Provost Hermalin claims that, “While student evaluations are just one method used to evaluate teaching and should not be the sole method, they can provide insights into how an instructor is or isn’t effective. Furthermore, students are in a unique position to provide invaluable insights into the teaching and learning process and their voices should continue to be heard as part of the evaluation process. Therefore, the University does not agree with the Union's proposal to eliminate all student evaluations from the review process.”
-------
Did Peter Chester and Vice Provost Hermalin leave anything out of their summaries of UC admin’s proposals?
-------
How accurately and fairly is Vice Provost Hermalin’s summary of UC-AFT’s bargaining proposals?
-------
What are Peter Chester and UC Berkeley Vice Provost Hermalin trying to accomplish with their emails to UC-AFT members and Senate faculty?
-------
I’m a Senate faculty member. Why should I support UC lecturers?

What are our goals for our next contract?  Back to Top

For the UC to invest in its educational mission by providing stable, middle-class jobs for teaching faculty. For UC students to have full-time, well-resourced instructors who can focus on teaching and mentoring. For UC teaching faculty to have one job in which we can do what we love: supporting our students and encouraging their learning.

We’re calling on the UC, as the nation’s foremost public university system, to live up to its mission statement and set the nationwide standard for contingent faculty working conditions.

What are the main problems we’re trying to solve in collective bargaining that can’t be solved through other avenues? Back to Top

1) Temporary, part-time appointments that result in a 26% year-to-year turnover rate systemwide, rising to as high as 45% on individual campuses. More than 1600 lecturers lost their jobs systemwide between the 2017-2018 and 2018-2019 academic years (not including ultra-precarious summer session appointments). At UCLA alone, 700 lecturers who were teaching during 2018-2019 did not return in fall 2019.

2) Exploitation of unpaid service and professional development labor.

3) A median annual salary among UC lecturers of $19,900.

What are our core bargaining priorities? Back to Top

1) Making sure that faculty who are great teachers, as demonstrated through a clear, fair and consistent review and reappointment process, can keep teaching the UC students who rely on them,

2) A maximum course load that facilitates effective teaching and learning, clear and consistent systemwide workload standards, and compensation for service and professional development work that we currently do for free, and

3) Salaries that recognize and reward our training, credentialing, expertise, accomplishments, and dedication to our students, and reflect annual inflation along with the high cost of living in California.

Additional goals include: a career path to Senior Lecturer; more above-minimum merit increases for continuing appointees; earlier and timely appointment letters for pre-continuing appointees; more full-time and benefits-eligible appointments; minimum standards for classroom infrastructure; fair and equitable summer session pay; stronger academic freedom protections; integrating non-lecturer UC-AFT job titles, such as K-12 Instructor and Supervisor of Teaching Education, into our contract; adequate and appropriate space for meeting with students; more professional development funding; broader eligibility for health and retirement benefits (UC admin’s choice to exclude more than half of lecturers from Social Security; adequate paid parental leave for all new parents; academic leave (akin to a sabbatical) for scholarly and professional projects; a progressive discipline process with clear steps that protect academic freedom and due process; access to parking permits at rates that don’t create financial hardship; protecting against shifting in-person classes online; retaining current protections against sexual harassment and sexual violence; adequate release time for UC-AFT member stewards who help solve problems; and generally closing loopholes created by ambiguous or vague contract language.

Why are we negotiating over so many issues? Back to Top

The short answer is, that’s how collective bargaining usually works. Our bargaining team would be derelict if we knew of problems our members regularly face and didn’t commit to mitigating or alleviating them. While some of our members enjoy relatively good working conditions thanks to our union’s previous efforts (including going on strike in 2003 to win continuing appointments), many of us regularly endure poverty wages, disrespect, a lack of basic support and resources, and exclusion from campus life. We continue teaching despite this adversity because our students depend on us, we love working with them, and our efforts in the classroom are utterly rewarding. Outside the classroom, the current instability of pre-continuing appointments prevents us from focusing on our students the way we want to and causes profound uncertainty. Our current contract also contains many areas that are vague, ambiguous, or unenforceable. Collective bargaining gives us an opportunity to improve those provisions.

How were our bargaining proposals developed? Back to Top

In fall 2018, we circulated a pre-bargaining questionnaire to more than 100 UC-AFT faculty leaders and activists to collect open-ended information about the issues and problems on their campus that they wanted to see addressed in our next contract. Following that, we held town halls and listening sessions on every campus to collect perspectives from rank and file members. Using the input we received from those two channels, a five-member faculty team (including faculty with expertise in statistics) created a bargaining survey asking all members to provide input on their experiences, both positive and negative, and rank priorities. UC-AFT members completed more than 1,000 bargaining surveys in hard copy and online formats. The data from the surveys was used by our 38-member elected Contract Campaign Committee, with representatives from every campus, to formulate our initial bargaining demands, i.e., our starting positions that lay out an ideal vision for our work and our students’ education. Finally, our 15-member bargaining team, with representatives selected by members on their respective campuses, has worked to translate our members’ priorities into contract language.

Are our initial proposals ultimatums? Back to Top

No. We’re committed to negotiating until we reach an agreement with UC admin.

How does our bargaining team differ from UC admin’s? Back to Top

UC-AFT’s negotiators are teaching faculty from across the state who volunteer their time to represent their colleagues. Our team includes both pre-continuing and continuing appointees, both part-time and full-time faculty. We continue to teach as usual while we bargain.

In contrast, UC admin’s negotiators are executives and lawyers from labor relations and human resources departments. There are no faculty or teachers among UC admin’s negotiators. They’re paid as much as $170,000 per year to represent the UC in collective bargaining.

Why hasn’t UC admin received our compensation proposal yet? Back to Top

Raising salaries to squarely middle-class levels for pre-continuing faculty, ensuring annual adjustments that account for California’s high cost of living, and rewarding the merit of continuing faculty are among our highest priorities for the next contract. Salary is typically the last thing addressed in collective bargaining, after agreements have been reached on non-economic issues. We have intentionally and strategically focused on solving problems of precarity, part-time work, workload, unpaid work, and others prior to turning our attention to compensation. After all, lecturers who are purged from the ranks of teaching faculty never have the opportunity to benefit from annual cost of living increases. UC admin did not respond to most of our non-economic proposals until late January (mere days and, in some cases, hours before our contract expired) and has still not provided their initial proposals in at least four key areas (Leaves of Absence, Discipline and Dismissal, Grievance Procedure, Release Time.) We have seen, in UC admin’s recent offers to other UC unions, attempts to use salary to buy workers off their non-economic demands and to use wages as a wedge issue to divide and conquer union members. Fair compensation is one of the three main pillars of our bargaining campaign; addressing contingency, forced turnover, part-time appointments, and the exploitation of unpaid labor are equally urgent priorities.

In what areas have we made the most progress in negotiations? Back to Top

UC admin’s package proposal from January 31st included several elements that we had previously proposed. It adopts some of our concepts for more thorough, fair, and transparent performance reviews. It includes some important language about monthly gross salary and union representation in appointment letters. As we proposed, it adds an article to the contract defining the Senior Lecturer job title and outlining the process for promotion into it. As we proposed, it adds an article to the contract on safe and healthy workplaces, including policies for emergency campus closures. We’ll continue to negotiate over the wordsmithing of these articles to ensure that the final result accurately captures our mutual intent.

Our current Medical Separation article, which sets out how and when UC admin can terminate the employment of a faculty member whom they have deemed too disabled to work, dictates a staff process instead of a faculty process. After UC admin initially rejected our proposal, they responded to our persistence with a proposal for a process that is more appropriate for faculty, so we’ve drawn closer to middle ground.

We’ve reached a tentative agreement on Article 38--Severability, which sets out what happens when a part of our contract is invalidated by a new law or court decision (as happened with the Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court case, which nullified our contract provisions on fair share fees.) After we exchanged several proposals, UC accepted our concept of bargaining over replacement provisions, and we accepted their language that formalized the concept.

We’ve modified our initial proposals to come closer to UC admin’s positions in at least the following: Article 3--Academic Responsibility, Article 7a--Pre-Continuing Appointments, Article 8--Instructional Support, Article 10--Personnel and Review Files, Article 18--Resignation, Article 19--Reassignment, Article 22--Merit Review, Article 23--Summer Sessions, Article 33--Arbitration, and Article 36--Past Practice Not Covered by Agreement.

Why aren’t we closer to an agreement? Back to Top

The good news is that we’re getting closer. The contract expiration deadline on January 31st finally resulted in some movement by UC admin. As has become familiar from numerous past bargaining campaigns, UC admin stalls and delays until they experience pressure to act. Attrition is one of their main negotiating tactics, so we must not bargain against ourselves. As other UC unions can attest, we need firm resolution to reach our goals. Even on the day the contract expired, January 31, 2020, UC admin refused to join us at the bargaining table until 2 PM, despite our request to start bargaining in the morning as we usually do and as we had previously agreed.

Although we started bargaining in April 2019, as of mid-January 2020, UC admin had not responded to our proposals on at least 15 articles. It took them nearly 6 months to respond to our Article 7a proposal, passed in June 2019, on pre-continuing appointments. It took them 6 months to respond to our Article 24 proposal, passed in July 2019, on workload, with a counter-proposal that retained current contract language in nearly every area and rejected every single idea in our proposal. Even today, UC’s negotiators still have not provided their initial proposals in the areas of Discipline and Dismissal, Grievance Procedure, Release Time, and Leaves of Absence. The case of our Leaves of Absence article is particularly troubling. We presented our initial proposal to UC admin on July 18, 2019. It includes adequate paid parental leave for all new parents and academic leave (akin to sabbatical leave) for working on scholarly and professional projects. We have received no response for nearly 7 months.

Additionally, after more than 8 months, UC admin has not provided the data that employers are legally required to provide to unions so that both parties can negotiate over the same facts. UC Berkeley demanded more than $52,000 from UC-AFT to transmit data about the timing and success rates of Excellence and Merit Reviews. This outrageous demand is designed to obstruct bargaining. We have formulated proposals to the best of our ability given the missing data, are working around UC admin’s obstinacy where possible, and are revising proposals when we do receive data that changes our understanding of the issues.

Context is helpful here. During our last bargaining campaign in 2015, UC-AFT faculty bargained for 10 months while the contract was in effect, then worked with an expired contract for nearly two months before reaching a tentative agreement. Our UC-AFT librarians negotiated for five months prior to contract expiration, then continued bargaining out of contract for six months before finally winning a strong contract last year. Service and patient care workers in AFSCME 3299 bargained for nearly two and half years with an expired contract before recently winning one of the biggest ever victories for UC employees. Bargaining takes time because it is a process of seeking agreement on contentious issues. When UC admin is not presenting or responding to proposals, the process takes much longer than it should. And when a significant number of our members are working for poverty wages in perma-temp positions, we will stand firm on bottom lines to fix the most urgent problems.

How has going out of contract affected negotiations? Back to Top

Very positively. UC admin is responding to member activism by pledging to present some of their missing proposals and scheduling additional bargaining dates in the near future. Visible and vocal support of our goals is the best way to keep the pressure on and continue the momentum we have built so far.

Who is Peter Chester? Back to Top

Peter Chester is an executive at the UC Office of the President. He is the systemwide Director of Labor Relations. He has never once attended any of our bargaining sessions.

Peter Chester wrote to UC-AFT faculty that “you deserve to vote” on UC’s offer. Why haven’t I been able to vote yet? Back to Top

Your right to vote on our union contract is at the heart of our democratic union. Your UC-AFT membership entitles you to vote on contracts, elected officers, and union positions and policies. Thank you for being a member. (If you’re not yet a member, you can use a quick and easy sign-up form to join here. We welcome Senate faculty allies to join as non-voting affiliates.) After our elected bargaining team reaches a tentative agreement, all UC-AFT members will vote on whether or not to ratify the contract as a whole. Peter Chester’s message is misleading because there is no UC offer to vote on yet. We haven’t received UC admin’s initial proposals in several key areas, and, for several other articles, they provided their initial proposals mere hours before the contract expired, leaving no time for us to consider them, let alone discuss at the table or make counter-proposals. They also refused to answer our questions about their package proposal before the contract expired. Given these circumstances, there was no possibility of forwarding a tentative agreement to UC-AFT members for a vote by January 31st.

Is it true that UC-AFT “would not agree to a reasonable extension” of the contract? Back to Top

No. In a proposal that was unanimously ratified by our full Contract Campaign Committee in addition to our bargaining team, we offered to extend the contract for one month if UC admin would agree to move bargaining forward by bringing proposals—any proposal at all, even the tiniest little idea—on our core priorities of reappointment for pre-continuing faculty and compensation for unpaid service and professional development work. We also proposed that UC admin would finally honor what they agreed to in our prior contract and avoid a costly arbitration of our Unit 18 salary grievance by implementing the missing 2 1/3% raises for 2019 that we bargained for in our last contract but that UC admin has thus far failed to provide. UC admin rejected our offer to extend the contract.

Is it true that UC admin “has presented the union with a comprehensive proposal”? Back to Top

It depends on how you define “comprehensive.” At 2 PM on January 31st, the last day our contract was in effect, UC admin completed passing us a package of 33 articles, including new and revised proposals on 17 articles. The package omitted approximately 12 articles that we are actively negotiating. A package proposal is take-it-all-or-leave-it-all, and a rejection of any element of any proposal is a rejection of the entire package, including their salary offer. Because there are so many missing pieces, UC admin’s package proposal was not comprehensive enough for a tentative agreement. Even more importantly, it failed to address our core priorities of precarity, workload, and cost of living increases that keep up with inflation.

How does UC admin’s current salary offer compare to the raises other UC unions have won recently? Back to Top

It is much lower than raises won recently by UC’s academic researchers, grad students (some of whom are currently on strike over low wages), nurses, service and patient care workers, clerical workers, technical workers, research support professionals, and our very own UC-AFT librarians. It’s not unusual for an employer to make a lowball initial proposal on compensation in the expectation that the final agreement will be bargained up from their original position. In this context, when UC admin has put much more money on the table for other unions, it would be against our members’ best interests to settle for their below-standard initial compensation offer in the absence of other compelling advancements on non-economic issues.

Does UC admin’s current salary offer of 2% and 3% annual cost of living increases really “greatly increase the compensation for Unit 18 members”? Back to Top

It’s moving in the right direction, but it has to be understood in context. First, the Consumer Price Index for Berkeley, Los Angeles, Irvine, Riverside, and San Diego, where about 72% of our members teach, is rising at rates of around 3% to 4% per year. 2% raises do not keep up with inflation, even in Riverside. Under UC’s proposal, the real purchasing power of our wages would likely decrease over the next 5 years--an effective pay cut. In Los Angeles, Berkeley, and Riverside, home to more than half of our members, wages in all industries have been going up between 3.8% and 7% per year, while rents in Los Angeles and Irvine have been climbing 5.4% annually. UC admin’s offer pales in comparison to these trends.

Additionally, lifting the minimum pre-continuing salary is good, and is certainly one of our goals, but it doesn’t solve the problem of many pre-continuing faculty being appointed at artificially low percentages, such that they only receive a fraction of the full-time minimum salary and remain ineligible for health and retirement benefits.

UC admin says they are proposing to “increase the length of appointment cap.” What would that mean for me? Back to Top

Probably nothing. Current contract language states that the maximum length of an initial pre-continuing appointment is 2 years. UC’s proposal (which again, is contingent on our dropping a number of other demands) is to raise that maximum to 3 years. However, the vast majority of departments and programs currently appoint teaching faculty one term or one year at a time, and nothing in UC’s proposal would guarantee or even incentivize longer appointments. Additionally, under the current contract, only the initial appointment is capped at 2 years. Reappointments can already be for up to 3 years.

By contrast, we have proposed a standard 1-year/2-year/3-year appointment structure in the first six years, where each increasingly long reappointment is preceded by a reappointment review to ensure that competent faculty have the opportunity to keep applying their skills and abilities prior to an Excellence Review.

UC admin says they are proposing “additional opportunities to blend or add term counts to achieve eligibility for continuing appointments.” Will that help me achieve a continuing appointment faster? Back to Top

Probably not. We’re a little mystified by UC admin’s claim here. This is something we’re fighting for, but UC admin has rejected our proposals in this area and has never framed their written proposals in this way during our discussions at the bargaining table.

Current contract language provides for joint appointments such that lecturers “teaching in two (or more) departments at a campus can receive employment credit towards continuing review in the home department for work done in either or both.” We won this provision during our last round of bargaining. UC admin has proposed a minor technical edit to this paragraph, adding “programs, or units” to the word “departments,” clarifying what the rest of the contract already establishes in numerous other places: that the word “department” is to be interpreted to include administrative entities that employ lecturers but are not technically departments. The phrase “departments, programs, or units” is common throughout the contract, though not in this section. This is our best guess about what Peter Chester is referring to. It would lead to no real changes or improvements in the length of time it takes to achieve a continuing appointment.

Current contract language in this area leaves the decision to award joint appointments solely up to UC management, which to our knowledge has not approved a single joint appointment since this language has been in our contract. We have proposed that all lecturers who work in multiple departments would automatically accrue service credit from all teaching work, which would actually enable teaching faculty to be eligible for an Excellence Review sooner. UC admin has rejected our proposals thus far. We will continue fighting to make sure that all our work is recognized, accounted for, and rewarded, and to close loopholes that prevent pre-continuing lecturers from attaining continuing appointments or unnecessarily prolong the time required to get to an Excellence Review.

Did UC-AFT walk away from bargaining when the contract expired? Did we reject UC admin’s offer? Back to Top

No and no. Bargaining continues post-expiration. We expect to have additional bargaining dates scheduled by the end of February. We’re eager to return to the table, when we’ll resume negotiating over UC’s package proposal, which is still on the table.

UC Berkeley Vice Provost Benjamin E. Hermalin sent a message to tenure-track faculty at UC Berkeley saying the following: “The Union wants to assign courses to lecturers based on seniority rather than skill and ability.” Is that an accurate representation of our proposals? Back to Top

No. Our proposals are designed to:

A) ensure that the UC invests in highly skilled, talented, experienced, and expert teaching faculty at the point of initial hire. 

B) Provide for performance reviews prior to every reappointment to ensure fair and transparent rehiring of excellent scholar-teachers.

C) Establish clear criteria and procedures for those reviews to promote consistently high faculty standards.

D) Increase the currently low levels of professional development support available to teaching faculty so we can augment and hone our already-considerable skills and abilities over time.

E) Assign available classes to current faculty who have demonstrated effective teaching before new faculty are hired.

It’s important to understand that at every single community college in California, and every single California State University campus, part-time faculty and lecturers already have the right to continue teaching if they’re doing a good job. That’s what we’re fighting for. The UC has fallen far behind the other sectors of public higher education in California in employing a stable corps of teaching faculty.

Vice Provost Hermalin also stated that, “Hiring based solely on seniority is often contrary to Berkeley’s diversity and equity values because it disadvantages newer candidates who tend to be more representative of our students and the population of California.” Back to Top

This is an example of diversity and equity discourse gone very, very wrong. UC lecturers are majority women and far more likely to be women than tenure-track faculty at the UC. The part-time, low-wage, and benefits-ineligible appointments (in other words, gig work) that UC currently offers to lecturers discriminates against women faculty and functions as a glass ceiling, presenting major obstacles to academic achievement and advancement and depriving students of diverse mentors.

Many UC-AFT teaching faculty are first generation doctoral recipients, and lecturers are among the UC’s strongest supporters of first gen students. We are often the mentors with whom students most deeply connect, since our primary job is to focus on teaching instead of research. We’re often the faculty who welcome students most warmly when they first arrive on campus. Statistically, the lecturer who says “Welcome to college!” to a first gen student on the first day of the fall term will likely have been forced out of teaching at the UC by the time that student graduates.

It’s not clear why the contingent faculty who are already the most vulnerable must alone shoulder the burden of representation, which is indeed an important goal. Make no mistake, Vice Provost Hermalin’s statement is an argument against tenure, against job security, against academic freedom, dressed up in inclusive language and used as a weapon against faculty. It’s a dangerous argument that those who understand academia as an institution and profession of enlightenment should want no part of.

(Plus, we’ve proposed that hiring be based on merit, not solely on seniority. See above.)

Vice Provost Hermalin claims that, “While student evaluations are just one method used to evaluate teaching and should not be the sole method, they can provide insights into how an instructor is or isn’t effective. Furthermore, students are in a unique position to provide invaluable insights into the teaching and learning process and their voices should continue to be heard as part of the evaluation process. Therefore, the University does not agree with the Union's proposal to eliminate all student evaluations from the review process.” Back to Top

We couldn’t agree more that students provide invaluable insights into the teaching and learning process and that their voices should continue to be heard. Our proposal to reform the use of student evaluations retains all current forms of student feedback for department chairs, deans, and others with hiring authority to examine and respond to as necessary to address both positive and negative situations.

Highly regarded and overwhelming research has repeatedly shown that student evaluations of teaching fail to measure or reflect teaching effectiveness, and in some cases actually have an inverse relationship to great teaching (i.e., the best teachers get the worst evaluations). For structural reasons that have little to do with students as individuals, the research consensus is that student evaluations contain pervasive and pernicious sexism and racism that is not possible to statistically correct for.

Although our current contract prohibits it, quantitative student evaluations are de facto the only element considered in many reappointment, Excellence Review, and Merit Review decisions across the UC. Over many years, several rounds of bargaining, and multiple grievances, it has not been possible to prevent this contractually. The UC, as an institution that professes to have “diversity and equity values,” should act immediately to end the practice of cherry-picking inaccurate and biased comments as a pretext for purging highly skilled, dedicated, and diverse teaching faculty.

Currently, UC admin outsources the task of evaluating lecturers’ academic performance to students. It’s unfair to students and antithetical to ideals of faculty governance. We’ve proposed a comprehensive system of evidence-based best practices to shift the evaluation of teaching faculty toward a peer review model that upholds and enhances faculty governance instead of inappropriately delegating the responsibility for setting pedagogical standards and making personnel decisions to students.

UC students deserve to comment on instruction as learners, not as hiring managers. Their input should be formative, not summative, so that it can lead to truly responsive pedagogical improvement. We’ve proposed collecting feedback from students on experiences they’re well-equipped to comment on, such as course pacing, intelligibility of the instructor, experiences of inclusion, and interest level in the course material, while leaving abstract questions that are difficult for students to interpret and assessments of rigor and innovation to the experts: faculty. We brought in UC Berkeley’s own expert on student evaluations to give a presentation to UC admin’s negotiators about the fatal flaws in the current system and the research-based recommendations on which we based our proposals. A university that professes to have “diversity and equity values” should not continue to use assessment instruments that have been conclusively shown to perpetuate bias against women faculty and faculty of color.

Did Peter Chester and Vice Provost Hermalin leave anything out of their summaries of UC admin’s proposals? Back to Top

They neglected to mention that UC admin is seeking to reduce our current layoff protections, which for continuing appointees is one year, to as little 14 days for all continuing and pre-continuing lecturers. This is moving in the wrong direction. It would deepen the crisis of contingent faculty and utterly destabilize continuing appointments.

They also failed to say that the proposals they summarized have strings attached: they require us to drop our demands in nearly every other area of the contract.

How accurately and fairly is Vice Provost Hermalin’s summary of UC-AFT’s bargaining proposals? Back to Top

While it omits some important context, gets a few details wrong, and frames some issues differently than we would, it’s actually not far off the mark. It captures our vision of what reversing the tide of contingency and precarity would start to look like in American public higher education.

Seeing Vice Provost’s Hermalin’s summary makes us immensely proud, as UC faculty who love this university and are dedicated to making it the best, most hospitable, and most innovative system of public higher education in the nation. Our proposals will ensure that UC students get the education they deserve, route resources into classroom teaching in order to directly advance the UC’s educational mission, and immediately establish the UC as the nationwide leader in contingent faculty working conditions. The inclusion, integration, and enfranchisement of teaching faculty into the life of the UC will directly benefit the students we work with every single day by ensuring that their scholar-teachers are available, accessible, and able to focus on the most important priority: their education.

Still, it’s important to understand that Vice Provost Hermalin gets some things wrong and leaves out some important background.

A few examples, by no means exhaustive:

• “UC-AFT is seeking to add professional development and service responsibilities.”

  • Our proposals on compensation for service and professional development reflect the fact that the UC currently benefits from massive amounts of our unpaid labor in these areas. This is not about adding to or expanding our existing workload or scope of work. It’s about receiving compensation for important faculty work we’re currently doing voluntarily, that we no longer wish to do for free. This work must be acknowledged by the university; it’s time to end this exploitation.

• “All language in the current contract that states that Unit 18 members are not members of the Academic Senate would be deleted, including from the unit name (Non-Senate Faculty).”

  • Membership in the Academic Senate is determined by the Board of Regents, not by our contract. All matters related to the composition of our bargaining unit are under the jurisdiction of the Public Employment Relations Board. Plus, it’s disingenuous to imply that this is an area of disagreement, because UC admin has indicated that they’re open to changing the way teaching faculty are referred to in our contract. UC’s negotiators have conceded at the table that the term “non-Senate faculty” is not ideal. We’ve proposed “Unit 18 faculty” as a more precise label than “non-Senate faculty.” Using the label “non-Senate faculty” to refer to lecturers is confusing within and beyond the UC because there are many non-Senate job titles that are neither in the Academic Senate nor represented by our union. We regularly field inquiries from non-Senate faculty who think they’re in our union but actually are not. UC-AFT also includes many job titles in addition to “lecturer,” meaning the simple term “lecturer” is not as comprehensive as it ought to be. Plus, describing teaching faculty negatively in terms of what we’re excluded from does not convey the respect and dignity our work deserves.

• “Enrollment caps would be set in writing and foreign language courses.”

  • We’ve proposed that the UC follow the research-based recommendations of the Modern Language Association/Association of Departments of English and Association of Departments of Foreign Language for class enrollments that enhance student learning.

• “UC-AFT would delete the No Strikes article to permit strikes at any time.”

  • No strikes clauses and arbitration provisions typically go hand-in-hand in union contracts and are conventionally viewed as quid-pro-quos that maintain labor peace. In exchange for giving up their right to strike, a right enshrined in both federal and state law, workers obtain access to a neutral, third-party arbitrator who can conclusively resolve disputes. UC admin currently imposes profound restrictions on our ability to access arbitration and has made proposals to expand those restrictions. This is not consistent with a union contract that includes a no strikes commitment. Finally, the law does not permit strikes at any time, and nothing about our contract would or could change that. The conditions for a strike will remain the same as they are now, regardless of what our contract says.

• “An arbitrator would be allowed to adjudicate matters now considered subject to academic judgment and academic freedom.”

  • First, we’re seeking to strengthen language on academic freedom, not weaken it. UC’s negotiators have rejected our proposals. The true threat to academic freedom is UC admin’s use of the vague concept of “academic judgment” to purge teaching faculty who are inconvenient or whose salaries they deem too expensive. Our proposal would convene a neutral panel of peer academics during arbitration to adjudicate disputes related to judgments of qualifications, accomplishments, and academic performance. A non-faculty arbitrator would defer to and rely on the academic panel’s guidance for these aspects of the arbitrator’s decision. We believe this is more consistent with standards of peer review and academic freedom than appealing solely to non-faculty arbitrators. UC admin has thus far rejected those proposals.

• “Programs that Senate faculty are eligible for would also be made available to Unit 18 members.”

  • According to our current contract, Unit 18 faculty are eligible now for programs and benefits that are available to Senate faculty.

• “A private office would be provided for every Unit 18 member, regardless of appointment percentage, with space large enough for five chairs.”

  • Many teaching faculty are forced to meet with students in coffee shops, closets, copy and fax rooms, public computer labs, or even off campus. Others are crammed into small spaces with six or more colleagues, making conversations, reading, and writing impossible. These conditions signal to students that the university does not respect them or their instructors and is not taking their education seriously. Instead, our goal is that lecturer offices be appropriate for engaging students productively, protecting students’ FERPA rights, and enabling the contemplative work of developing courses, preparing to teach, and responding to student work. In our initial proposal, this is described as “a single-occupancy office on the main campus of at least 100 square feet and sufficient privacy for FERPA-protected conversations with students,” equipped with, among other basic necessities, “at least two chairs, with up to three additional chairs upon request by a Unit 18 faculty member.” We arrived at the space guidelines by studying existing campus policies and recommendations for teaching faculty office allocations.

Finally, while we are deeply committed to making the real changes that are required for teaching at the UC to be a dignified, respected, middle-class job, our initial proposals, just like UC admin’s, sometimes call for more far-reaching transformations than we anticipate gaining UC admin’s agreement on. We have not yet reached a point in most areas where we’ve exchanged multiple proposals. Our initial proposals are principled and ambitious and should inspire hope, inspiration, and courage, not fear.

What are Peter Chester and UC Berkeley Vice Provost Hermalin trying to accomplish with their emails to UC-AFT members and Senate faculty? Back to Top

They seem to be trying to introduce divisions among faculty and stoke fear among Senate faculty of their non-Senate colleagues. It is inappropriate for a senior executive, non-faculty administrator at the UC Office of the President, and a campus Vice Provost, who is responsible for the welfare of ALL faculty, to pit different groups of faculty against each other. The Berkeley Faculty Association has responded forcefully to Vice Provost Hermalin’s message.

I’m a Senate faculty member. Why should I support UC lecturers? Back to Top

It’s the right thing to do, first of all. We teach the same students, we belong to the same departments, and we share the same goals of keeping the UC a world-class university. We are colleagues. But if you’re interested in what’s in it for you, it’s simple. Contingency erodes tenure. The better the working conditions for contingent faculty, the less incentive there is for university administrators to siphon off ladder-rank appointments. We’re all in this together.