UC-AFT Statewide Officer Candidate Statements 2020-2021

University Council Statewide Officer Candidates, 2020-2021

To University Council - AFT
February 20, 2020

Nominations for statewide officer elections closed on February 20. Nominations have been made for all offices.  All nominees were informed of their nomination and of the February 20 deadline to accept their nomination and announce their candidacy. All candidates are listed below. Candidate statements will be posted here as soon as they are submitted by the candidates. Click the name of the candidate to read their statement, or scroll down for all statements.

Candidates for office:

           President:

                   Mia McIver, Incumbent

           Vice President for Organization:

                    Daniel Schoorl, incumbent
                    Josh Brahinsky

           Vice President for Legislation:

                    John Rundin, incumbent

          Vice President for Grievances:

                   none   

          Secretary Treasurer:

                      Miki Goral, incumbent
 

Statewide Council officer elections will be conducted at our Council meeting on Zoom on March 21. UC-AFT constitution and bylaws are available from the UC-AFT website for information about duties and responsibilities for each office.  http://www.ucaft.org/content/constitution-and-bylaws

Please send all questions about the elections process to the Nominations Committee Chair, Kendra K. Levine at: kendra.k.levine@gmail.com

In Unity,

Kendra K. Levine, Nominations Committee Chair
Mitchell Brown
Megan Strom

Candidate Statements

Mia McIver, President, Incumbent
Friends, Colleagues, Comrades,

As I stand once again for election in our union, I’m reflecting on the past, looking ahead to the future, and taking joy in our present moment.

Since you first elected me, we have worked hand in hand to make our union a force for positive change. We have weathered the challenge of Janus v. AFSCME and emerged stronger than ever. Together, we have improved the lives of individual librarians and faculty through collective bargaining, not by merely advocating for them, but by activating members to assert pride in their work and to insist that it be recognized and rewarded. In the past several years, I have prioritized:

· A revitalized culture of organizing and direct action

· Expanded leadership opportunities for members and activists

· A more assertive grievance and arbitration strategy to effectively enforce our contracts

· Relationship building with fellow UC union leaders, UC Regents, and CA legislators

· Staff well-being despite Janus-imposed budget cuts

· Budgets that fund our priorities and keep us strong

Whether I’m greeting new faculty after class to ask them to join our union, in an Executive Board meeting, lobbying in Sacramento, on a staff call, or in a bargaining session, I am working for you and with you.

This year in particular, I’ve kept my promise to win open bargaining for Unit 18 faculty. This is just one way I’m leading our union into the next era of democratic labor organizing: by making sure that all rank and file members have direct access to our bargaining sessions. This was a deeply held priority, and it’s already paid off with dramatic surges of interest in our bargaining campaign. Faculty and librarians from across the state have been energized by the empowerment of seeing and hearing their own power, eloquence, and dignity in the bargaining room.

We’re presently in an extraordinary moment of activism, when our fellow workers are showing how to bring long-needed change to our university. We have the opportunity to join them in standing up for what we believe in: a strong University that serves the public good, of which teaching and librarianship are the very heart. I ask for your support to continue this work for another year.

Daniel Schoorl, V.P. for Organizing, Incumbent
I am excited to accept the nomination to continue as our VP for Organizing.

These past years, it has been inspiring to see our union respond to challenges of organizing during a time of ongoing attacks on public sector unions. Since the Fall term of 2019 we have pursued an outreach model centered on membership drives at campuses. The planning and continuation of this model, to sign up non-members and to engage with our membership around the unit 18 teaching faculty contract campaign, will continue to strengthen our union and I’m excited to continue this work.

With unit 18 out of contract we must continue to focus on organizing our members and find ways to expand our capacity, by bringing in as many allies and supporters as possible, to make it absolutely clear to the University that we will not back down. We may not be the largest or the loudest union in the UC but we are just as committed to holding the University accountable. I truly believe that our efforts to make the UC a more just, fair, and answerable institution is just the beginning of what we can achieve.

My record of service and leadership over the past year has included the following:

Throughout the state:

• Supporting teaching faculty member negotiators and organizers in bargaining sessions
• Organizing and leading our second annual leadership conference 2019 (UC Irvine, October 2019)
• Working with our Executive Director, staff, and CFT organizers to plan recruitment drives at Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Merced, Santa Barbara and UCLA
• Participated in drives, signed up non-members and had conversations with members, at Berkeley, Merced, Irvine, Santa Barbara, and UCLA
• Amplifying the unit 18 contract campaign via social media posts and user engagement
• Serving as a liaison between the unit 18 contract Escalation Committee and the Communications Committee
• Worked with our VP of Legislation in drafting our Presidential endorsement process and survey
• Attended California Labor Federation SoCal Organizing meetings to report on the unit 18 contract campaign

In Los Angeles:

• Continuing to develop and strengthen our UCLA librarian organizing committee
• Continuing to develop and strengthen our union coalition at UCLA
• Joining AFSCME 3299, UFCW, and others on picket lines and rallies during their union sanctioned strikes and actions
• Serving as a local 1990 delegate to the Los Angeles Federation of Labor; attending monthly delegates meetings and participating in multiple strike       sanction calls
• Organizing to secure the professional development funding for affiliated librarians that has been jeopardized by a UCLA Library policy change
• Addressing the Regents Special Committee about our issues and concerns for the UC Presidential Search process

Moving forward I plan to continue on working tirelessly and collaboratively to strengthen our union and fight for improvements in our working conditions and in higher public education. I’m committed to working towards a credible strike threat and strike readiness by strengthening our internal unit 18 campaign structures and by continuing to build alliances with the broader labor community.

I will commit myself to working vigorously to strengthening our organizing to engage members, increase membership, and defend both units. It would be an honor to continue to serve as Vice-President for Organizing and I humbly ask for your support.

Josh Brahinsky, V.P. for Organizing
I like and appreciate Daniel.

I do think our leadership could better reflect our members: electing a pre6 lecturer who is a freeway flyer (working at 4 universities in the past 2 years) on a small campus, and not UCLA (3 of 5 Eboard members are currently from UCLA). These experiences ought to be central to our leadership as they are to our campaigns. While I am pre 6, I have lectured since 2012, so this is quite familiar to me. But more importantly, I love to do this work and I can do it well. Here is why:

My union experience has led me to value both meticulous systematic organizing and high intensity escalation. From 1992-2001 I worked as an organizer for an unusual AFSCME local at Harvard University. We were librarians, lab techs and clerical workers. We did not strike and said that up front. We spoke in sweet quiet terms about our love for our work, and we organized incessantly. We carefully rated the support of every one of the 3,600 members every spring. When our local called, nearly every member would come out, our membership numbers were always in the mid 90s. We would start with 1,000 and then as the campaign escalated up to 6,000 people would crowd Harvard Square – this was a 3,600 person local! It was fine grained, person to person organizing and deep community support built on a message of kindness, care and integrity. We won fantastic contracts. I also regularly travelled the country to help organize strikes and new unions in all sorts of shops – hospitals, prisons, universities. I came to find difficult organizing situations somewhat inspiring.

By contrast, when on the bargaining team for UAW 2865, the UC wide TA local from 2011-2014, we chose not to settle without a strike. After two successful strikes, management settled under threat of a third strike during finals week. In the process, I also led a UCSC grievance strike threat which resulted in a $250,000 settlement the day before we were scheduled to strike.

In other words, I appreciate and have experience working with union power and rhetoric of multiple forms – both sweet and strong. I also know university unions. I have worked with two librarian locals and two lecturer locals. I know the librarians and lecturers of UC-AFT especially well as I was staff for the Santa Cruz local from 2014-2016 during which UCSC membership grew roughly 15% and our activist crew doubled in size.

In the last year, I helped lead our Escalation Team towards coordinated actions across campuses and deeper participation for our members. We need to build a credible strike threat for the lecturer's contract fight and staff don’t have the capacity for that escalation. I asked members of the eboard about funding strike organizers, but we also need a lecturer with strike experience to lead this. I would so enjoy you all giving me the opportunity to put more of my life into supporting us towards a higher level of on the ground organizing for both librarians and lecturers.

V.P. for Grievances  
Vacant.  Due to candidate withdraw, we will conduct a vacancy election for this position prior to the begining of the next term on July 1.

John Rundin, V.P. for Legislation

I seek your support to continue to serve as the UC-AFT’s Vice-President of Legislation. I hope to continue to forge ties with legislators, other politicians, and our political allies to support our union.

I have a long record of union activity. At my previous place of employment from 1998 to 2004, the University of Texas at San Antonio, I was the president of the union that represented faculty there. At the University of California, I joined the union immediately on being hired as a lecturer in 2005, and regularly attended meetings. Once I passed my six-year review I became the UC Davis local membership officer. Shortly thereafter, I was elected president of the UC Davis local, a position I have passed on to our current local president, Katie Rodger. In my time at UC Davis, I have devoted myself to organizing. Over the last seven years, I have recruited many tens of members, perhaps over a hundred. I continue to do the work of getting new members to sign up today.

In my first year of being UC-AFT Vice-President for Legislation, with the help of the CFT lobbying team, we managed to get two things out of the legislature: floor recognition for our union in the Assembly and a joint resolution in our honor. Those actions have opened the door to new efforts because they raised our profile in Sacramento. I testified numerous times for our allies' legislation, including AFSCME's important ACA 14, which sought to eliminate outsourcing of jobs to non-union workers, and the UAW's SB 698, which subjects UC to wage-theft laws that other employers must follow. I have participated in Union Coalition efforts that successfully kept the Regents from raising employee contributions to the retirement fund. In addition, I helped create and implement a successful effort to see if our union wanted to endorse a presidential candidate before the March 3, 2020, California primary

The connections I have made at the CFT, at the Legislature, and with our union coalition partners have paved the way for our first piece of legislation in the California legislature in a long time, AB 3036, a bill to prevent the University from unilaterally moving job titles out of our union into the Academic Senate.

I am happy to contribute to the ongoing work of managing the union as a State Board member. We must revise our by-laws to reflect our democratic aspirations, while, at the same time, respecting our various constituencies including librarians and the campus locals.
 

Miki Goral, Secretary Treasurer 

I am running for re-election as UC-AFT Secretary Treasurer. I have had the honor of serving UC-AFT in various capacities since 1983, when I first joined the Unit 17 (Librarians) bargaining team as the record-keeper, later becoming the Chief Negotiator. I have led the Unit 17 negotiating teams from 1984 to 2007.

In 1984, I was elected Secretary of UC-AFT, an office I held until 1986, when I became Treasurer. In 1999, a re-structuring of the Council combined the duties of Secretary and Treasurer into one position, which I have held since then. During my tenure as a Council officer, I have worked with a number of officeholders and Executive Directors and can provide a context of continuity for the work of the organization. I have kept the union on a strong financial footing and carefully monitor the finds we receive from our dues-paying members.

While most of the union’s work is focused on representing our members and enforcing the contracts we have negotiated, we must not forget that UC-AFT is part of the larger union movement in the United States. I serve as a vice-president of the California Federation of Teachers, representing the interests of UC-AFT and university academic employees, along with UC-AFT President Mia McIver, in that body.

The Secretary-Treasurer’s duties are set out in the By-Laws: namely to record and disseminate minutes of Council meetings and to be responsible for all monies received and paid out by UC-AFT. I have developed and streamlined procedures to fulfill the duties of the job efficiently and accurately. I have striven to monitor the union’s finances and ensure that our funds are used wisely for the benefit of our members.