• We secured a contract extension with a 4% salary increase (details below)
• Your Table Team continued to push UC to accept open, accessible, and affordable Zoom bargaining
• Lecturers from UC Santa Barbara testified to the excellence and importance of their work, preparing the ground for our upcoming proposals on workload and compensation
• UC-AFT and UCOP made progress toward tentative agreements on previously proposed changes to the contract

This Bargaining Update is a follow-up to our previous update about the two-day bargaining session that took place at UC Santa Barbara on July 15-16. In that email, we shared exciting news that our Table Team won a 4% salary increase in exchange for a one-year contract extension. Please note: that 4% increase will begin on August 1 and should show up in your September paycheck, so contact your campus rep if you don’t see it there. Your Table Team was hard at work on July 15-16, so we’ve offered a longer update here.

The Fight for Open Zoom Bargaining

On the first day of bargaining at UCSB, the UC-AFT Table Team and reps from UCOP returned to the question of ground rules and zoom bargaining once again. Having initially proposed a cap of around 475 participants and observers on Zoom, UCOP offered a revised proposal to reduce the cap to 25, then another revision to 100. This time around they budged slightly, offering a cap of 125 people in the Zoom room, which would include UCOP’s team, our Table Team, and observers from across all UC campuses. UCOP clarified their reasons for restricting observers: “We don’t think it’s a spectator sport … the notion that a lot of people would be watching who don’t have involvement … that concerns us.” We held steady, insisting again that bargaining with a public institution should be a public process, and concluding that an observer cap of 475 would allow Unit-18 lecturers and other stakeholders from across all campuses to attend Zoom bargaining and witness bargaining firsthand. UCOP did not agree, so bargaining will remain in-person for now and we will continue to push for open Zoom bargaining.

Our Testimony to UCOP

In the two days of July bargaining, UC-AFT members delivered powerful testimony to UCOP that underscored the stakes of our fight for faculty equity. 

Emiko Saldívar, Continuing Lecturer in Anthropology who has worked at UCSB for 18 years, testified to the outsized role that lecturers play in departments due to our high workloads, noting the disconnect between our importance to our students on the one hand and a lack of support from the UC on the other. In the upcoming year, UCSB’s Anthropology department will teach 985 students. Emiko alone will teach roughly 560 of them — more than half the department’s students — across 9 of its 18 courses. At the end of the day, Emiko reflected, our workloads don’t enable us to connect with students to a degree that we’re capable of, and that they deserve. Nor do our salaries reflect the work we do. “I’m basically the face of the department. I get paid half of what my colleagues do.”

Additionally, Emiko spoke to the ways that Unit-18 Lecturers are penalized for going above and beyond, telling of a time that she won a grant for her students to travel and do research with Indigenous populations, necessitating time away from teaching on campus. Emiko took a workload and pay cut so she could voluntarily do scholarly work that greatly enhanced the academic mission of UCSB, which the Dean of Social Sciences lauded as an example for the future of the university. Despite her research being given such praise, the university did not restore Emiko’s appointment and salary to 100% after the project was completed, effectively punishing her for her dedication to her students. Emiko’s takeaway: “This is how we endure. We get no respect, we don’t get paid for research, but our teaching has to be of research-quality. We need less workload so we can actually prepare and be there for our students.”

Emiko’s sentiments were echoed in testimony from Sarah Holmes, who teaches Dance History and Appreciation, a General Education course that introduces nearly 500 students to dance as a way of understanding history, culture, identity, politics, creativity, and ultimately, what it means to be human. Sarah came to UCSB after earning three graduate degrees and building a career as an educator, artist, researcher, and curriculum developer, and completely redesigned the course. But her salary is more than $20,000 below living wage estimates for Santa Barbara County, requiring her to work three additional jobs on top of managing her chronic illness. “Imagine what I could contribute if my professional energy could be devoted entirely to UCSB,” she said to the UCOP reps. “Imagine the students I could mentor. The grants I could write. The research I could expand. The new courses I could develop. The partnerships I could build. The service I could provide to my department and university. Instead, much of that energy is spent simply trying to make ends meet. That is not only a loss for me. It is a loss for my students. It is a loss for this institution.”

We know that too many Unit 18 faculty live and work under the trying conditions that Emiko and Sarah described. Improving workload and compensation are key bargaining pillars that UC-AFT members voted for, which continue to guide our proposals and negotiations with UC. Sarah captured our demands perfectly in her testimony:

“We are not asking for luxury. We are asking for dignity. We are asking for stability. We are asking for compensation that allows us to live in the communities where we teach. We are asking for careers that allow us to devote our full professional lives to our students instead of dividing our attention among multiple jobs simply to survive. Every day, I ask my students to imagine a better future. Today, I am asking the University of California to imagine one for the educators who dedicate their lives to creating theirs.”

What UCOP Proposed to UC-AFT

UCOP presented several proposals to UC-AFT over the course of the two-day session. Our Table Team also sought to clarify language on their previous proposals, including Article 7 – Appointments – and pushed back against “Presumptive Resignation” language that UCOP proposed in Article 18. We raised concerns that the contract language would enable UC to sever any U18 faculty member who was absent and unresponsive for 7 days under the assumption that they had resigned.

UCOP first offered their counter proposal on Article 14 – Holidays. UC-AFT’s Table Team had previously passed a proposal that would add a provision to the article giving U18 faculty the flexibility to make reasonable schedule adjustments or alternative arrangements to observe religious, cultural, spiritual, or community holidays or observances not included in the University holiday calendar. Our proposal is modeled on concepts in the contracts for Academic Researchers, Post-Docs and Librarians, but adjusted to accommodate the nature of Unit 18 appointments. The changes we’re proposing are designed to ensure that teaching faculty can observe holidays of their choosing without loss of pay, adverse employment consequences, or unnecessary workload increases.  

UCOP countered with a proposal that accepts our concept, with slightly different language. Their proposed language would allow unit 18 faculty members to request time off to observe religious holidays and states that such requests would be granted unless doing so would “create an undue hardship” to the university. Your Table Team will review the counter proposal more closely but it seems like a step in the right direction towards an agreement on the article! 

The next proposal offered by UCOP was on Article 25 – Union Rights. This article is quite technical, but crucial to establishing UC-AFT’s right of access to campus facilities and personnel information, among other things. UCOP’s proposal includes minor technical updates to language in this article, including a clarification about appropriate avenues for alleging violations of our contract. While our grievance process is outlined in a separate article (Article 32), those changes raised some concerns, prompting Table Team members to ask important clarifying questions about whether their proposed changes might conflict with the grievance process and the PERB process, thereby delaying resolution. For these reasons, your Table Team will plan to offer a counter-proposal. 

Finally, UCOP offered proposed changes to Article 42 – Online Instruction, an article that has become increasingly important to our working conditions since our last contract fight. In bargaining surveys and previous negotiation sessions, UC-AFT members have made it clear that when it comes to online education, we prioritize protecting our rights to determine what’s right for our classrooms and to protect the quality of education. This is true when it comes to any use of technology in our classrooms, which is why we’ve offered our proposal for a new technology article (read more about it here). UCOP claimed their proposal offers minor clarifications, rather than substantive changes, but our Table Team was not so sure. We will be reviewing their proposal in detail and will likely be offering a substantial counter proposal.

After presenting their proposals, UCOP asked some questions about our Article 7 proposals related to the differences between appointments and reappointments and after a short caucus, the two-day session was complete.

Next Session: August at UC Merced???

As described above, our UC-AFT Table Team is fighting hard to establish ground rules for Zoom bargaining that maximize member participation. But we were not able to reach an agreement with UCOP. In the meantime, we are working with UC to finalize dates for in-person bargaining in August and September. Our next bargaining session will likely take place in August at UC Merced. Stay tuned for more details as soon as we have them!