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Unit 17 Bargaining Update #1 May 24 2016

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Our bargaining team, met with UCOP Labor Relations and representatives from across the UC system on Tuesday, May 24.  Chief Negotiator Axel Borg opened with a discussion of our 3 C’s for addressing librarian salaries and professional development funding:

Competitiveness: we need to have salaries that are competitive with our colleagues in the California community colleges and state universities;  

Consistency: we want to ensure that all librarians have consistent professional development funding;

Compression: we want to avoid salary compression at the top of our range.

Both sides discussed the 3 C’s at length, and it was a cordial and informative conversation.  We then presented our proposed language for Article 3 of our MOU, Professional Activities and Development.  We proposed that all represented librarians should receive $2000 per year for professional development.  We discussed the importance of ongoing development and professional travel for librarians, and presented a case study of a recent conference travel budget, which showed that current professional development funding levels are inadequate.

After both groups took a break for lunch, we re-convened by presenting our proposed language for Article 13 - Salary.  Our proposal includes a 5% increase across all points, uniform percentage increases of 2.7% between each point, and the addition of four points to the top of the scale.  We followed with a comparison of UC librarian salaries to those in the CSU system, which showed shocking disparities between compensation, even given the higher level of expectations for UC librarians.  Once we put this into the context of increases in our cost of living, we painted a clear picture for UCOP that our salaries must be increased.

The UCOP team now has our proposals, and we expect to receive a response during our next bargaining session, which is scheduled for July 6.  In the interim, your bargaining team will continue to gather data and evidence to support our requests for better salaries and professional development funding.

Finally, we would like to thank everyone on the bargaining team for their hard work and dedication during re-opener bargaining.  Our team included librarians from all campuses except for San Francisco and Merced, many of whom were new to the bargaining process.  This represents a significant increase in union activism across our system, and is a great way to show UCOP that we are a united front!

Respectfully submitted,

Carla Arbagey