Key Takeaways:
- It was a BIG day: we proposed transformational language on Article 7a, which would protect our jobs, close loopholes, and create real job security
- The session was chock-full of emotional testimony from UC-AFT faculty and students about the cruelty of precarity, with hundreds in the zoom room
- Meanwhile, UC attempted to drag us back to the beginning of negotiations with a regressive proposal on ground rules.
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 notices. These lecturers had already been through a tough fight to win union recognition in the first place: having been denied access to healthcare and union salary scales for years, they filed Unfair Labor Practice charges that forced UCB to pay over $400,000 in unpaid back wages. UCB administration has now announced it will be shutting the 43 year-old program down, leaving hundreds of students without the support they need. “We explore the perspectives of others with more openness and intimacy than anywhere else on campus,” said FPF faculty Devin Leigh in his testimony. With his baby daughter in his lap, Leigh shared how his students have struggled with feelings of inadequacy, along with housing and food insecurity. “By closing FPF,” Leigh said, “UCB is closing one of the few spaces we have to intervene in people’s lives at meaningful moments.” His sentiments were echoed by fellow FPF lecturers Amy Lee, Sharon Coleman, Arunima Paul, and Ken Worthy, who added that after 12 years of teaching in the program, he still struggles to maintain consistent access to health insurance, library services, and even campus email. “It’s hard to be fully present for suffering students,” Worthy shared, “but I do it because they’re worth it.”
These sentiments were echoed by FPF students, who also packed the zoom room. Gabby, Brissias, Annaka, and Omar each shared that they would not have survived at UCB without the support they received from FPF teaching faculty. Most are first generation college students, living far from home, who relied on the academic and emotional support of their teachers to adjust to life on campus and find a sense of community and belonging. Others shared that the FPF program was what drew them to UCB in the first place, and alumni of the program noted that letters of recommendation from FPF lecturers helped them start their careers. “The way that Berkeley is treating their lecturers tells students, and the world, that Berkeley doesn’t care about education,” UCB student Gabby Wong asserted at the end of her testimony. “Students want smaller class sizes. Students want smaller sections. But most of all, students want lecturers’ livelihoods restored.”
The emotional testimony underscored what is at stake in our fight for real job security. They demonstrated that our work is not confined to the classroom, and that we provide our students far more than our academic expertise. Like FPF faculty, many of us teach core curriculum, smaller classes, and first-year writing classes that students rely on, providing crucial mentorship and support to our university’s most underserved and historically marginalized students. While we treasure the opportunity for substantive interaction and individualized learning, these courses are often the first victims of budget cuts. At the beginning of the session colleagues from UC Merced issued a forceful reminder to the UCOP’s representatives of the mass layoffs on their campus, where 25% of lecturers, including 40% of the writing program’s instructors, have been laid off since our last contract was signed in 2021. When pressed for a response at the last bargaining session, UCOP reps said they would “follow up” by the next session.
“What I want to say is, it’s personal, to all of us.”
After the students finished, several UC-AFT members spoke to the issues our proposals are designed to solve. Table Team member Alison Lipman, a Continuing Lecturer in Ecology at UCLA, shared her gut-wrenching experience of being recruited to develop field work courses in biodiversity in collaboration with Indigenous communities in Southern California, only to see those courses cut 15 years later. Even though Alison and her teaching partner won grant funding, spearheaded innovative ecological restoration projects on campus, and helped to build climate vulnerability assessment systems for the entire UC, they are being squeezed out of the department they’ve dedicated their lives to for no reason other than that they’re lecturers.
The combination of betrayal, sadness, and pride that Alison expressed echoed through the comments of other UC-AFT Teaching Faculty. Audrey Harris of the Dept. of Chicano and Central American Studies at UCLA, who brings local writers and prison educators into her classrooms, worries that she will be laid off as she approaches her excellence review for Continuing Status. Amanda Reiterman, who has taught in a half dozen different programs at UCSC because of the interdisciplinary nature of her research, doubts that she will ever achieve Continuing Status because those services credits don’t transfer across departments. Darlene Lee, who has trained hundreds of K-12 educators during her 18 years in the Education Department at UCLA, shared that social justice pedagogy and off-campus programs she has developed have repeatedly been cancelled for political reasons. Darlene captured what many of us feel: “My work has been treated as an interchangeable part in the machinery of the UC.”
What We Passed to UC: Article 7 and Job Protections
As evidenced by the moving testimony of UC-AFT members, the UC has gone out of its way to find and exploit loopholes in the job security protections we fought so hard to win in 2021. Sometimes in the name of austerity, sometimes as a thinly veiled attempt to discipline Unit 18 Faculty by generalizing precarity, UC has made clear it prefers to see us as expendable labor. In the afternoon session, our Table Team presented the first piece of their solution to the problem: a transformational new proposal on Article 7a, which covers academic appointments.
Our 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 would 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.
As Table Team member Alison Lipman said, article 7a is the heart of our contract and winning strong academic appointment language would mean good, secure jobs for all teaching faculty. “I hope we can remember May 7th as a date that changes all of our lives and the university for the better. Our goals are to save jobs and save education. We’re proud of our work. I hope that UC can see the real benefits this can bring to the UC.”
This 7a Proposal is just the first of several articles related to job security, including Articles 7b, 7c, 7d, 22 and 31. You can read the 7a proposal here.
What would real job security mean for you, your family, and your students? Share your story at https://airtable.com/appcIR9RfXG5jmNDI/pagOEg7LsMtO9RQm4/form
What UCOP Passed to UC-AFT
After our Table Team’s stellar presentation, the UCOP representatives passed proposals of their own. The first involved Article 14 – Holidays, including changing the name of the March holiday to “Farmworkers’ Day” in accordance with new state guidelines. Unfortunately, UCOP’s second proposal flew in the face of everything that had been so powerful about the rest of the session. UCOP passed a regressive proposal on ground rules that would strictly limit access to our zoom bargaining sessions, give UCOP control over the venues in which we bargain (both online and in-person), and introduce new layers of surveillance. Asserting that access to our bargaining sessions should be limited to “individuals… impacted by the article being negotiated,” they suggested that our contract negotiations were not of “public” concern. We disagree: as teaching faculty of one of the largest public universities in the country, our contract negotiations should be as participatory, inclusive, and accessible as possible, not only for our members but for students and community members as well. The UCOP’s proposals are non-starters and our Table Team will counter.
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