• We passed our proposal on 7b to address the persistent challenges lecturers face around reappointment;
• UCOP passed a suite of status quo proposals on job security (7a-d, 10, 22, 31) that do not address the critical issues we have raised; 
• UCI teaching faculty gave powerful testimony about the mass layoffs on their campus.

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 teaching faculty are now anxiously awaiting reappointment letters they fear may never come. The session began with TT member Alison Lipman asking the UCOP for their responses regarding the mass layoffs at UC Merced, UC Berkeley, and UCLA raised in previous sessions. UC offered a written statement with vague sentiments such as “we listened” and “the campus is facing financial pressures and needs to make difficult decisions,” but ultimately claimed that these urgent and widespread layoffs are  not part of the statewide collective bargaining process. 

As with previous sessions, members of the UCI chapter offered brave and compelling testimonies about the layoffs on their campus and how they impact lecturers and their students. Aysel Atamdede, a lecturer in the UCI Composition Department, spoke about the particular vulnerabilities of pre-6 faculty amidst budgetary crises. Aysel had received a layoff notice last summer, just minutes before the June 1st deadline, only to receive a follow-up email eight days later rescinding it. She has lived in a state of limbo ever since, not knowing whether she’ll have a job in the year to come. Her comments were echoed by Robert Wood, who shared in his statement (read by Ben Garceau) how hopeful he was to receive a full-time appointment from UCI after years of teaching at multiple campuses, only to then be laid off again, so late in the academic year that he did not have time to find another job.

Laura Klein, who has taught French at UCI for 11 years, emphasized the particular plight of language instructors, who are facing layoffs across the state. Programs in Japanese, Korean, Academic English, Russian, Chinese, French, Italian, Persian, and Arabic have all been cut on campuses across the state, despite consistent enrollments. At UCI, the Chancellor has suggested these programs might be consolidated and replaced with online instruction. As Klein described: “Learning a language online is akin to swimming outside water: theoretically possible. In practice, impossible… Failing to properly fund language instruction compromises [UCI’s] fundamental educational mission.” Klein and her colleagues at UCI are now part of a statewide effort to understand the crisis facing language instructors.

If you are a language instructor facing similar cuts on your campus please let us know by completing this survey.

Additional statements were offered by Sharareh Frouzesh and Brook Haley, who both teach in the UCI Humanities Core, emphasizing teaching faculty’s urgent need for real job security.

What UCOP Passed to UC-AFT

After a lunch break, the representatives from UCOP rolled out a suite of proposals on job security, including articles 7a, 7b, 7c, and 7d, as well as Article 10, 22, and 31. Their presentation emphasized that their proposals simply aimed to “streamline” and “consolidate” current contract language to make it easier for administrators to implement our rights. There were some promising parts of UCOP’s proposals: for example, they proposed that the permanent augmentation policy used for Pre-Continuing Unit 18 Faculty be extended to Continuing Unit 18 Faculty, which would standardize how temporary augmentations become permanent. But even that proposal would do little to address the major concerns that Unit 18 Faculty face. UC-AFT members have made it abundantly clear at previous bargaining sessions that the current contract is failing lecturers and leaving us in crisis-level precarity. UCOP responded with a 90-minute, hyper-technical presentation whose main substance was that they had made few meaningful changes and mostly rearranged the same broken contract language. Given the morning’s powerful testimonials about the crisis lecturers are facing amidst budget cuts at UCI, their status quo proposals seemed painfully non-responsive.

Your UC-AFT Table Team will review the language in these proposals. But there were a few indications that UCOP’s revisions might make the very issues that teaching faculty have been raising worse. For example:

• In our previous contract (2016-2020), notice for academic year appointments was required by June 1 (for both quarter and semester campuses) and notice for quarter/semester based appointments was required 30 days in advance.
• In our current contract, we had two major wins on appointment notice timing: moving up the timeline for notice of academic year appointments (to May 1 for semester campuses and June 1 for quarter campuses), and for notice of quarter/semester based appointments to 60 days.
• UCOP’s proposal would move the notice date back to July 1 for academic-year appointees on all campuses, and reduce notice to term-based appointees to 30 days.

What UCOP is proposing would not only undo our wins from the last round of bargaining, but reduce all academic-year appointees’ notice by one month on quarter campuses and two months on semester campuses from the long-time previous standard of June 1. Their proposals would similarly extend the timeline from the review processes for Continuing Appointments, and eliminate deadlines for notification of reductions in time and layoffs. In their presentation, UCOP’s representatives claimed they needed the additional time because they are understaffed and under-resourced, but their proposals threaten to put all lecturers in the state of limbo that Aysel described and create even more uncertainty around reappointments.  

What We Passed to UCOP

At the end of the afternoon session, the UC-AFT Table Team passed our proposal on Article 7b – Letters of Appointment and Assignment, which complements our previous proposal on 7a. Our proposal aims to address the persistent issues lecturers face around reappointment, including late letters, last minute adjustments, and other issues that make it difficult for us to plan for the coming academic year. 

The 7b proposal 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. It also adds new clarity around IWC (Instructional Workload Credit) evaluations for courses, which is how our FTE percentages are calculated, and around how and when teaching faculty with academic year appointments (who are paid for 9 months of service over 12 months) get paid. It will require consultation and advanced notice for substitutions and/or additions to our assigned duties, and additional transparency around departmental workload policies. We are also proposing to move up the deadline for reappointment letters to April 1 for semester campuses and May 1 for quarter campuses and to introduce a financial penalty for every day that letters are delayed to ensure those deadlines are met. 

While UCOP offers proposals that protect the status quo, UC-AFT is fighting to expand our rights and address the immense challenges and uncertainty that UC teaching faculty face right now. 

Next Session: June 4th at UCSC

At the end of the session, your bargaining team briefly addressed UCOP’s regressive proposal on ground rules proposal. Their proposal (passed to UC-AFT at our May 7 session) includes strict limits on Zoom bargaining, which would limit zoom access to 40 participants and enable UC to control and monitor all Zoom sessions. When asked when we might be able to bargain on Zoom again, they quickly wrapped the bargaining session without a definitive answer. 

UCOP’s lack of response of Zoom bargaining makes it all the more important that we show up to support the table team in-person. Our next session will be in-person at UC Santa Cruz on June 4th – can you join us? RSVP here.