UC’s Problem: Regardless of status, ALL Unit 18 faculty members are in inherently precarious roles.

Unit 18 lecturers teach 30-40% of credit hours at UC, but the majority of lecturers doing this teaching must reapply for their jobs multiple times before being recognized as permanent employees. The pervasive mindset among leadership, from department chairs to chancellors to the regents, is that lecturers are temporary and disposable.

Even having continuing or senior status is no guarantee of stability–it’s far from the security enjoyed by tenured colleagues, who aren’t at risk of being pushed out or having sections cut in favor of visiting professors, professors of teaching, and grad students. At the end of the day, most of the problems in our current contract stem from the simple fact that our jobs are not secure.

• Only 18% of Unit 18 teaching faculty are considered full-time employees and only 23% have continuing appointments;
• 56.6% of teaching faculty are very part-time, meaning they don’t have access to healthcare and benefits;
• When budget cuts are made, they impact teaching faculty first: over 200 teaching faculty saw their appointments reduced or their jobs eliminated entirely in 2025.
• Currently, pre-6 lecturers must complete multiple reappointment processes before reaching continuing status, which creates significant uncertainty about a lecturers’ pathway to continuing status.
• In many cases, UC management does not follow its own rules. Departments fail to meet deadlines for merit and excellence reviews and the outcomes of those reviews are not grievable under our current contract (Contract Articles 7bF1, 7cE3, & 7dC1)
• Unit 18 teaching faculty can lose their jobs for many reasons, defined as “lack of work,” “programmatic need/change,” and “budget considerations” in our current contract. UC can also easily replace us with graduate students, senate faculty, post docs, and non-represented teaching positions. (Articles 7A & 17).

Our Solutions: An End to Precarity

Your Unit 18 Bargaining Team is committed to fighting to end precarity for all teaching faculty. Our initial proposals for the new contract include:

• Open-Ended Appointments
  • All faculty will be considered permanent employees from day one of hiring. 
  • No more reapplications, no more opportunities to get rid of lecturers on their way to continuing status, sparing departments additional administrative burden.
  • Job security similar to that our tenure-track colleagues enjoy. (Articles 7a, 7b) 
• Clear, consistent, standards for establishing continuing status
  • Clear and workable pathways to the senior continuing position.  (Articles 7a, 7b, 7c, 7d)
  • Tangible benefits for moving along the lecturer career path, both financial and non-financial. (Articles 7c, 7d)
• Close the layoff loophole
  • New options to avoid laying off employees in times of budgetary crisis. (Article 17)
  • Extending critical Layoff/Reductions in Time protections to pre-6 lecturers.
  • Once a lecturer is hired, the only way they can be separated from the position is through layoff, discipline, dismissal, or medical separation.
  • Replacement by senate faculty, grad students, and post-docs will no longer be a reason for layoff.
• Expanded Instructional Support in terms of teaching assistants and readers for Unit 18 teaching faculty (Article 8)