Librarians Reach Tentative Agreement on Wages--Contract Extended to 2011

The Unit 17 negotiating team reached a tentative agreement with the University with terms that would extend the current contract for an additional year.  Here is a link to the text of the tentative agreement.  Please read on for a full description  by Unit 17 Chief Negotiator, Mike Rotkin, of the agreement and the process for continuing bargaining in 2011.  

Dear UC Unit 17 Librarians,

As you will all too painfully recall, when we started the current round of bargaining almost two years ago now, we had high hopes of achieving pay parity with CSU librarians, whose salaries UC librarians trailed by about 20%. Initially, we were very successful in fighting off an attempt by the University Administration to replace librarians' current professional status and salary scale, that involves defined ranks and steps and processes through LAUC for advancement, with a range system in which the Administration could decide on a case by case bases who they believe deserves pay increases. It was only because librarians, who were outraged at these administration proposals, organized on the campuses that we were able to defeat that proposal and accomplish a new workload agreement and a number of other important, non-salary improvements to the Unit 17 contract (MOU).

However, before we could resolve our differences over salary issues, the State budget crisis and the international economic meltdown hit. Although we continue to believe that, despite the State budget cuts and other problems, the UC system has plenty of money to fund decent librarian salaries, it has become increasingly difficult to persuade the public, and even many of our own members, that UC can afford to make the kind of salary increases for librarians that we know are long overdue. Put in a direct statement that I assume few of you will challenge:  this is not a good time to be bargaining salaries with UC.

Consequently, the Librarian Bargaining Committee, and the smaller Librarian Negotiating Team that comes out of that larger body, decided to see if there was some way to postpone bargaining for a year without completely losing some of the real headway we had made earlier in resolving librarian salary issues.  On Wednesday, December 16, in a mediation session, the UC-AFT Librarian Negotiating Team and the University's Library Negotiating Team came to a tentative agreement that we believe is in the long-term interests of the Librarians. The tentative agreement is not complex, but it does include a number of important provisions:

1) The current MOU will be extended an additional year until September 30, 2012.

2) Reopener bargaining on Salary for the 2011-12 academic year will begin by May 1, 2011. Until the conclusion of bargaining over salary, i.e. until the parties have an agreement or come to final impasse, the current MOU will remain in place and the University may not impose any new reductions in salary without the mutual agreement of the two parties. 
 

This means that we have agreed to continue the current salary scale.   Librarians will continue to receive merit increases as long as merit increases are provided to senate faculty. If the university provides a general range adjustment to senate faculty, librarians will receive the same increase.

Should the parties come to impasse in the reopener bargaining over salary for 2011-12 that will begin by may 1, 2011, the librarians are free to strike -- something librarians cannot do while the MOU is in effect. We did give up any claim to retroactive pay for the 2008-09 and 2009-10 academic years, but I think that none of us believe we ever would have seen that happen.

3) I will spare you the details here, but the agreement basically pushes forward by a year all of the other dates related to the reopening of bargaining for both the salary reopener and the bargaining over a new or successor agreement, e.g. when the parties must select which articles they want to bargain, etc.4) Perhaps most importantly, when salary bargaining recommences, the two parties agreeD that the work we have done in the current bargaining "shall frame the basis of salary negotiations going forward in reopener negotiations."

What this means in substance is that we will begin our reopener discussions over salary with the new salary scale that the University administration proposed last April -- a salary scale that deals with the current compaction problems in the existing scale (with its overlapping steps) by requiring 5% differences between steps that have a two-year review cycle and 7.5% differences for those steps at the upper end with a three-year review cycle.  The discussions will then, naturally focus on a simple but no doubt controversial issue: at what level will the first step of the new scale be set? That is precisely where we were at in the mediation process when it became clear that the two parties were not going to make any real progress in salary bargaining.

5. In addition, we agreed on an explicit right for both parties to "make proposals and introduce concepts including but not limited to the relationship of the award of Distinguished Status and advancement from Librarian Step V to Librarian Step VI." There was also agreement between the parties to "share information on current practices regarding this issue" in the interim.

6. Because there was concern that a number of small libraries that are not under the budget control of the University Librarians might be defunded in the current crisis and that long-term librarians might be laid off in those units and not have rehire rights in other libraries on their campuses, that a new severance option would be established for librarians with career status in these small units at UCB, UCD, UCI, UCLA, UCR, and UCSF. Individual librarians who meet this qualification would be allowed to decide for themselves whether to retain their current rehire and reemployment rights or to take the severance pay option in lieu of such rights. The severance pay would be one week of salary for each year worked with a maximum of ten weeks of base pay. Given the current budget problems being confronted on the campuses (whether we believe it was manufactured by UCOP or not) we feel we were fortunate to get this concession from the Administration as inadequate as it might be for the individuals impacted by such layoffs.

7. Last, but not least, we did get a modest increase in Professional Development Funds that support librarians' attendance at conferences and other professional activities. The current funding levels on each campus will be increased by 2% on January 1, 2010 and another 1% on July 1, 2010. While this is not a great deal of money, in conjunction with the increased availability of funds to each librarian on each of the campuses because there have been so many separations during the past year or so, it may make it possible for librarians to attend conferences that were previously beyond financial reach, i.e. more money available on each campus but divided among fewer librarians.

We will be putting the question of ratifying this tentative agreement before all members of Unit 17 sometime in January. It is important that all of our member librarians understand what the agreement includes and that they all vote to accept or reject it. We will be circulating copies of the tentative agreement through the UC-AFT website and emails to all Unit 17 librarians in the month of January before the ratification vote takes place. In addition, meetings will be held to discuss the tentative agreement. As always, this does open an opportunity to recruit fee payers in Unit 17 into the UC-AFT so they will be able to participate in the ratification vote.

As your Chief Negotiator, I have to say that I believe that the most important aspect of this agreement is that it will prevent the University Administration from reducing (imposing take aways on) librarian salaries for the next year or two.  Further, this tentative agreement sets a context for our next salary negotiations, when perhaps the economic climate will have improved, in a way that should lead to a more rational and fair salary scale then currently exists for librarians.
I certainly want to commend all of the members of the Unit 17 UC-AFT Negotiating Team, the larger Bargaining Committee which has set our bargaining parameters, and all of the librarians on the campuses who have begun to dramatically increase their involvement in the bargaining process and the organizing efforts on the campus that are so essential to success at the bargaining table, for all of their wonderful work during this process. We remain quite a distance from our initially modest goal of achieving parity with CSU professional librarians, but we are so much better prepared for future bargaining than we were when we started this process. When the economic climate improves, as it most certainly will, we will be in a much better position than we were a few years ago to effectively fight for the kinds of compensation and working conditions that UC librarians deserve.

Mike RotkinChief Negotiator Unit 17
UC-AFT