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: Transforming our Appointments (Articles 7a-d)

UC-AFT members voted nearly unanimously that establishing security of employment must be a central pillar of our new contract campaign. There are several articles in our contract related to job security, including articles 22 and 31, which outline the Merit Review and Promotion process. Our table team has also put forward proposals on those articles that will strengthen our career pathways – you can read about them here [LINK]. They have also put forward proposals that aim to address the persistent issues lecturers face around reappointment, including:

Article 7a: NSF Appointments (current article here)

Our 7a proposal would restructure our positions as open-ended appointments with permanent budget lines. It would eliminate the painful reappointment process, meaning employment would continue from the date of hire unless the faculty member chooses to leave or is separated for a specific, contractually-defined reason (i.e. layoff, medical separation, etc.). And it would ensure teaching faculty have full due-process rights to challenge that separation. Other provisions of the new proposal would:

• ensure that more Unit 18 faculty members’ work, such as teaching on multiple campuses or for several departments, will count towards continuing status; 
• create new protections against courses that Unit 18 Faculty design from being reassigned to senate faculty, graduate students, or other job titles; 
• require UC to offer augmentations to existing Unit 18 faculty rather than new hires, and to consider Unit 18 faculty for ALL the work they are qualified for,  
• empower our members to reach the appointment percentages they want and need;
• close the many layoff loopholes UC has exploited to remove experienced teachers or avoid increasing their appointment percentages to reflect actual academic need;
• protect against reductions in time.

Article 7b – Process for Initial Continuing Appointment (current article here)

Our proposal on 7b complements 7a by addressing the persistent problems we face around late letters and course assignments. It includes a new concept – Letters of Assignment – which would clearly indicate what you’re teaching, your full-time equivalent (FTE) percentage, and your base salary. The proposal will also:

• Add new clarity around IWC (Instructional Workload Credit) evaluations for courses, which is how our FTE percentages are calculated, and departmental workload policies;
• Require clearer notification about how and when teaching faculty with academic year appointments (who are paid for 9 months of service over 12 months) get paid;
• Require consultation and advanced notice for substitutions and/or additions to our assigned duties;
• Move up the deadline for appointment and assignment letters to April 1 for semester campuses and May 1 for quarter campuses;
• Introduce a new financial payment for every day that letters are delayed.