UC-AFT Locals across the state held events and meetings to highlight the extension of the Unit 18 MOU. The contract was set to expire on June 1, but UC-AFT and the university agreed to extend it to October 31, 2015. UC Santa Cruz held a day-long informational picket with a mid-day Precarity Picnic. Here's some coverage of the events from the Daily Cal and AFT. Read on for the recent bargaining update.
The more things change, the more things stay the same.
The negotiating team has had two recent meetings with the UC: May 11 and 12 in San Diego, and May 28 and 29 in Oakland.
In the first meeting, UC’s Lead Negotiator, Athena Buenconsejo, shared that she would be leaving at the end of May. In the second meeting, we bargained with her team for the last time, and we learned to know the new Lead Negotiator, Nadine Fishel.
The Unit 18 MOU expires on June 1, 2015 and there are two really important things about this that all lecturers need to understand. First, in renegotiating the MOU, we have the opportunity to radically alter (stabilize) lecturer appointments, to improve benefits and pay, and to secure access to departmental and campus decision-making.
Present on Thursday, April 30: Annapurna Pandey, Santa Cruz; Jon Lang, Berkeley; a visitor from Davis, and I (Benjamin Harder, Riverside, Chief Negotiator)
The meeting was short again because the UC had to break at 4:00 PM for a conference call about a different union negotiation (we wish the campus doctors good luck with their own contract). To be fair, the their team offered to meet us again at 6:00 PM, but we decided against that.
Upon expiration of a union contract or MOU, the employer is legally obligated to maintain the status quo on items involving wages, hours, benefits such as health insurance or other working conditions until the parties negotiate an agreement or exhaust the statutory impasse procedures of mediation and fact finding. During this interim period, it is unlawful for the employer to impose any unilateral changes as to these conditions.
For the last ten years, UC-AFT has been engaged in an ongoing project of trying to force the university to put more money into undergraduate instruction. Part of this effort has revolved around budget transparency. After discovering that all tuition dollars and state funds were being redistributed by the Office of the President to the campuses in an unequal and hidden manner, we asked the state senate to request an audit of the university. This audit came out in 2011, and it verified many of our suspicions. The audit clearly stated that the campuses with the highest number of under-repr
