UC’s Problem: Existing career pathways for skilled and experienced educators are unstable  UC teaching faculty believe that every UC student deserves access to high quality instruction, delivered by professional educators who value critical thinking, information literacy, and free inquiry. Our collective bargaining agreement outlines procedures for academic reviews and awards merit pay increases to those…

UC’s Problem: Upholding the Status Quo Even before the Trump administration issued its sweeping and unlawful orders barring DEI, our teaching faculty colleagues from marginalized backgrounds faced tremendous challenges on campus that undermined their rights at work. Now, as we confront unrelenting attacks on campus and beyond, we have seen campus administrators buckle under pressure,…

The Fight Before the Fight: A Win for Member Power The road to the best contract in higher ed is paved with a million small victories, many before we even reach the bargaining table. At UC Riverside, UC claimed the only bargaining rooms they could find were a 20-minute walk from main campus – in…

Your UC-AFT Table Team gathered in a packed conference room at UC Davis for another bargaining session on Thursday, Sept. 24. The biggest item on the agenda was workload (Article 24), with nearly a dozen UC-AFT members from UCD and UCB speaking about reductions in their appointments and the uncompensated labor they are regularly asked…

Amidst a scorching summer heat wave, UC-AFT members gathered at UCSD on August 27 for our third bargaining session of the summer. The agenda was jam-packed: We brought six article proposals to the table, focused on the issues UC-AFT members identified as top bargaining priorities, including:  Together, these proposals lay out the kind of UC…

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 the 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…

Our UC-AFT Unit 18 Table Team was joined by lecturer observers and supporters from UC Davis and UC Berkeley when we came together for another contract bargaining session at Bauer Wurster Hall on June 30 in Berkeley.  The Table Team had a very productive work session where we focused on technical aspects of the contract,…

Our UC-AFT Table Team kicked off its bargaining session at UCSC on June 4 by following up with UCOP about layoffs of language lecturers and UC’s threatened shift to online instruction through the Global Languages Network (GLN). When asked for a justification of the GLN, UCOP reps claimed that its purpose is to preserve language…

Your UC-AFT Unit 18 Table Team met for another negotiation session with UCOP on Thursday May 21. The session was held at UCI, where last summer, 48 lecturers in the School of Humanities received layoff notices – something like three quarters of lecturers in the division. Those layoffs have continued throughout the year and many…

Key Takeaways: The zoom room was packed with over 200 teaching faculty and students when our bargaining session with UC began on Thursday at 10am. The morning session consisted of moving testimony from our colleagues and students, including those from UC Berkeley’s FPF (Fall Program for First Semester), where 29 lecturers have recently received layoff…