Librarian Bargaining Update #3

Librarian Bargaining Update July 15, 2011

Mike Rotkin, Chief Negotiator, Unit 17 UC-AFT

The two teams met in Oakland at the Office of the UC President (UCOP) this past Friday. It was a relatively brief meeting in which we clarified some questions and asked for additional information in response to the Information Request that the UC-AFT filed about two weeks ago.

In brief, what the information we requested shows is that:

1)   ULs do have some discretionary funds that they choose to spend on things other than salaries for members of Unit 17 (What they do spend it on includes some professional development funding for management folks out of the unit, but also other general Library needs).

2)   While we have not had sufficient time to fully analyze the data we got, it appears that a disproportionate number of non-represented management Librarians have received accelerations with respect to merit decisions. These have taken the form of both accelerations in time and in the number of steps awarded. In a number of cases on four different campuses, management folks have moved four steps over four years when normal progress would have required 12 years for those merit steps. In one case, a management person got a three-step merit increase after two years, when they were on a three-year merit review cycle.

Whether or not the accelerated merits are disproportionately awarded to non-unit members, it certainly demonstrates a tendency to find work-arounds to respond to the relatively low salary scale that puts UC pay far behind CSU and the community colleges in UC campus communities. In addition, virtually all management employees in the UC libraries now receive stipends to supplement their salaries – and these were awarded despite the objections of both the UC-AFT and LAUC, both of whom argued that it would be better to simply improve the salaries on the normal scale as a way of addressing compensation concerns.

Although nobody said so this past Friday, there continues to be a disingenuous rhetorical insistence that UC is not having problems with recruitment and retention when the actions taken by the ULs, including the proposal last year to create a new salary system, provide more than enough evidence that there are such problems and that they are of serious concern to the ULs and AULs in the system. The negative impacts on Librarian workload (both inside and outside of Unit 17), the quality of services provided to faculty, students, and the general public, and on the morale of UC librarians is palpable.

3)   We did ask the UC Administration at the table to fill in some of the missing data in their response to our last info request.

4)   We continue to be concerned about the withholding of payment of awarded merits in Unit 17, which impacts about 1/3 of the unit. We have fully explored the legal ramifications of this and, unfortunately, it appears that UC does have a right to do this under the provisions of our current MOU. We will be working to remove the provision that allows this in future bargaining before settling this contract.

5)   We set up Thursday, September 1, as our next bargaining date. We are now entering the next phase of the bargaining process. We all know that this is not a great time to bargaining with UC over salaries. The Administration continues to demonstrate that there is plenty of money for things they want to prioritize. On Thursday, at the Regents meeting, in addition to raising student fees one more time (9+%), the Regents once again showered compensation increases on a number of people at the top of the UC system and throughout the medical centers. The total cost of meeting a reasonable compensation package for UC Librarians (when UC is facing serious market competition from CSU and community college libraries) is actually not that much money given that there are so few members of Unit 17 (especially after all of the recent separations) and while there is general agreement that libraries and the Librarians that run them should be at the very center of UC’s mission, it will almost certainly take some more direct action on the part of Librarians to bring some pressure on the ULs to take our demands seriously.

 At the Statewide UC-AFT Council meeting this coming weekend in L.A. we will be planning a number of actions to bring more public attention to the compensation crisis being faced by UC Librarians. Within the next couple of weeks, there will be extensive email discussions and a conference call for the Librarian Bargaining Committee, which has two representatives from each UC campus, to plan the details of this media and member activist campaign. The campaign will certainly involve UC Librarians taking respectful but forceful actions to demonstrate that all is not well in the UC libraries – beginning with planned contacts with the ULs by the Librarians on their campuses to express serious outrage at the decision to withhold the merit increases that should have been paid beginning July 1^st of this year. (Just to be clear, UL contacts are not something being proposed by the UC-AFT, but something already underway on several UC campuses).

So keep your eyes open for more information about the planned media campaign and what you and your colleagues can do on your campus to help bring our concerns to the ULs direct attention. Without such a campaign, it is all too obvious that the ULs would like to believe that Unit 17 Librarians are at least complacent about if not satisfied with the status quo. It is their hope that the general economic conditions in California (and the country) and the punishment of not awarding merit increases will be sufficient to make UC Librarians just give up and accept the continuing lack of response that the unit has suffered over the past decade. We have informal information that UC would be prepared to deliver some pay increases under the right conditions and we intend to give the ULs increased incentives to deliver the money that we know is there for Unit 17 Librarians. 

 Now UC-AFT Members can respond with comments to bargaining updates

As part of our effort to keep our membership involved in contract negotiations, we now allow members to post comments to content on our website, including bargaining updates.  This feature is open only to union members.  A very simple login procedure will ask you to create a username and password.  The username must include your first and last name so we can verify your union membership.

This link will take you directly to the registration page where you can quickly create a new account.

https://ucaft.org/user/register?destination=comment%2Freply%2F289%23comment-form

Once your membership has been verified, your account will be activated and you will be able to post comments on the UC-AFT website.  Please use this forum to engage your colleagues and share your ideas about our ongoing salary negotiations.  We look forward to your feedback and the dialogue.