BARGAINING UPDATE
April 20, 2023
Takeaways:
Dear colleagues,
Thank you to everyone who showed up at the bargaining session yesterday to show the administration we are standing together in solidarity to demand a strong first contract.
- You showed up and showed the administration that we are united in demanding a strong contract!
- With that support and pressure, we achieved a very strong tentative agreement on Discipline and Discharge that will create powerful new protections for all of us as well as an agreement regarding maintenance and access to personnel files.
Dear colleagues,
Thank you to everyone who showed up at the bargaining session yesterday to show the administration we are standing together in solidarity to demand a strong first contract.
We met with the administration all day Monday and Tuesday. Yesterday we tentatively agreed to a very strong article on Discipline and Discharge that includes transformative “just cause” protections that ensure that no administrator can target us unfairly for discipline. While it is important to have procedures to sanction people who violate clear rules, threaten the safety of our campus, or demonstrably fail to do their jobs, it is equally important that we are all able to work without fear that an unfriendly administrator can jeopardize our jobs and livelihoods on a whim. Just cause requires that discipline be based on real evidence of misconduct, that it be proportional to the misconduct, and that it cannot be arbitrary or capricious. This tentative agreement also ensures strong protections during disciplinary investigations and hearings, including the right to have a union representative support you and advocate for you at all stages of the process. We are very proud of this agreement, which will be one of the strongest discipline articles in any contract we are familiar with.
This agreement is paired with a tentative agreement on “Personnel Files,” in which the administration has committed to maintaining our personnel records (which they are not required to by law) and to ensuring our reasonable access to those records. This is important to the discipline and grievance processes, since it ensures we’ll have access to real records if we ever find ourselves in disputes with the administration.
The administration also presented counterproposals on full-time non-tenure stream (FTNTS) appointments and renewals, shared governance, and academic freedom. The FTNTS appointments counterproposal made changes toward addressing a loophole in the new renewal protections we are working on. Their shared governance counterproposal adopted very strong language on “intramural speech” that we had originally proposed as part of academic freedom, which would ensure our right to ardently advocate for our views in matters of university governance. But we still have a lot to work through in the rest of this article. Finally, their academic freedom proposal made modest movement toward a deal but did get them back on track toward exchanging proposals and working toward agreement here. This is an area where we see plenty of common ground, and we hope the administration will respond promptly to the constructive counterproposal that we made later in the day.
We have seen time and again this year that we make the most progress at the table when large numbers of faculty take action together to show that they stand behind their bargaining committee!. Discipline and Discharge is our tenth tentative agreement, and the first that really locks in the sort of transformative change that the collective bargaining process can achieve.
Even though the semester is ending, we are not letting up. We’ll next meet the administration on May 9. We will continue bargaining through the summer, and we will continue to push the administration to present their proposals on economics.
In solidarity,
Your bargaining committee
Tyler Bickford (chair), Professor, English, Oakland
Nicholas Bircher, Part-time Professor, Nurse Anesthesia, Oakland
Lauren Collister, Faculty Librarian, ULS, Oakland
Anthony Fabio, Associate Professor, Epidemiology (Public Health), Oakland
Lech Harris (secretary), Part-time Instructor, English, Oakland
James Hill (archivist), Visiting Assistant Professor, History, Oakland
Haitao Liu, Professor, Chemistry, Oakland
Stephen Robar, Associate Professor, Political Science, Bradford
Sabrina Robinson, Part-time Instructor, Slavic, Oakland
Valerie Rossi (clerk), Teacher, Falk Laboratory School, Oakland
Evan Schneider, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy, Oakland
Paul Scott, Assistant Professor, Health and Community Systems (Nursing), Oakland
Jeffrey Shook, Professor, Social Work, Oakland
Stacey Triplette, Associate Professor, Spanish, Greensburg
Abagael West, Teaching Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences, Oakland
Links!
This agreement is paired with a tentative agreement on “Personnel Files,” in which the administration has committed to maintaining our personnel records (which they are not required to by law) and to ensuring our reasonable access to those records. This is important to the discipline and grievance processes, since it ensures we’ll have access to real records if we ever find ourselves in disputes with the administration.
The administration also presented counterproposals on full-time non-tenure stream (FTNTS) appointments and renewals, shared governance, and academic freedom. The FTNTS appointments counterproposal made changes toward addressing a loophole in the new renewal protections we are working on. Their shared governance counterproposal adopted very strong language on “intramural speech” that we had originally proposed as part of academic freedom, which would ensure our right to ardently advocate for our views in matters of university governance. But we still have a lot to work through in the rest of this article. Finally, their academic freedom proposal made modest movement toward a deal but did get them back on track toward exchanging proposals and working toward agreement here. This is an area where we see plenty of common ground, and we hope the administration will respond promptly to the constructive counterproposal that we made later in the day.
We have seen time and again this year that we make the most progress at the table when large numbers of faculty take action together to show that they stand behind their bargaining committee!. Discipline and Discharge is our tenth tentative agreement, and the first that really locks in the sort of transformative change that the collective bargaining process can achieve.
Even though the semester is ending, we are not letting up. We’ll next meet the administration on May 9. We will continue bargaining through the summer, and we will continue to push the administration to present their proposals on economics.
In solidarity,
Your bargaining committee
Tyler Bickford (chair), Professor, English, Oakland
Nicholas Bircher, Part-time Professor, Nurse Anesthesia, Oakland
Lauren Collister, Faculty Librarian, ULS, Oakland
Anthony Fabio, Associate Professor, Epidemiology (Public Health), Oakland
Lech Harris (secretary), Part-time Instructor, English, Oakland
James Hill (archivist), Visiting Assistant Professor, History, Oakland
Haitao Liu, Professor, Chemistry, Oakland
Stephen Robar, Associate Professor, Political Science, Bradford
Sabrina Robinson, Part-time Instructor, Slavic, Oakland
Valerie Rossi (clerk), Teacher, Falk Laboratory School, Oakland
Evan Schneider, Assistant Professor, Physics and Astronomy, Oakland
Paul Scott, Assistant Professor, Health and Community Systems (Nursing), Oakland
Jeffrey Shook, Professor, Social Work, Oakland
Stacey Triplette, Associate Professor, Spanish, Greensburg
Abagael West, Teaching Assistant Professor, Biological Sciences, Oakland
Links!
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