Unit 18 Contract Negotiations Near Conclusion

After a marathon session on Friday, 17th August, the UC-AFT and the University have a tentative agreement on most of the contract re-openers. The one remaining issue concerns the teachers in UCLA’s SEEDS school, a demonstration school for children on the Westwood Campus.

Because the negotiations are not officially completed, I cannot provide details about the settlement at this time. However, I can say that we have notable achievements in salary and workload. First, we are guaranteed general salary range adjustments that equal or exceed those of Senate Faculty over the next three years. The minimum salary for lecturers will exceed $40,000, and all those who have taught seven years or more will see one-time adjustments to their salaries, based on length of service and salary level. Finally, the steps on are salary scale will be evened out and regularized, so that we will get 5% for single two-step merit increases.

In workload, we have helped the worst off in the system directly by reducing the number of writing or language courses that lecturers on the quarter system teach, lowering the number to eight. We have also eliminated the “second section discount” on courses when one lecturer teaches two sections of the same course. While this will not directly help all lecturers, we also have established processes to adjust the credit given to courses that are more labor-intensive and to give credit to NSF for work that they do that is currently unrecognized. These processes are designed to happen quickly, so this academic year we should see policy changes that ease our workload burdens.

We anticipate the bargaining coming to a full conclusion by the 29th of August, and we will make a formal announcement about the tentative agreement at that time. The bargaining team members are planning to visit each campus in early to late September to meet the membership in preparation for contract ratification before October 4th.