Sign On to the Faculty Association Statement Regarding Possible Strike by UAW 2865, UAW 5810 and SRY-UAW

Please consider signing on to the Faculty Association Statement Regarding Possible Strike by UAW 2865, UAW 5810 and SRY-UAW:

Graduate students, postdocs, and other academic student employees are essential to the teaching and research mission of the University of California, especially as undergraduate enrollments rise. Given the escalating costs of living in California, 48,000 people in the UC system represented by three unions–UAW 2865, UAW 5810, and SRU-UAW–are coordinating their fight for living wages, affordable UC housing, greater support for working parents, sustainable transit benefits, equity for international scholars, and other improvements that would strengthen teaching and research across the University of California. A full list of their demands is available at fairucnow.org.

Negotiations for new contracts with the University of California have not been going well. The UAW has filed more than twenty Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) charges against the University of California, such as failing to respond to requests for basic information and unilaterally making changes to working conditions. The California Public Employee Relations Board (PERB) has issued complaints against the university in at least three of those ULPs.

Now, all three unions that represent teaching assistants, tutors, readers, student researchers, postdocs, and academic researchers are voting on whether to strike in response to these ULPs. A strike authorization vote is taking place between October 26 and November 2; if approved, the UAW may call an open-ended strike to begin as soon as November 14.

The Council of UC Faculty Associations calls on the University of California to cease its unlawful behavior, resume good faith negotiations, and settle fair contracts with the unions. We support fair wages and working conditions for academic workers and hope a strike can be avoided. If not, we encourage all Senate faculty to support our fellow academic workers. We remind you of the power of Senate faculty solidarity last year in the UC-AFT lecturers union’s successful campaign for a substantive new contract that inspired academic workers around the country.

Sign on here to show your support for the union efforts and to urge President Drake to settle fair contracts immediately to avoid a devastating strike.

Should UCOP fail to engage in negotiations, The Council of UC Faculty Associations will offer guidelines on faculty rights in the event of a union-sanctioned strike along the lines of those we provided in the face of a potential UC-AFT strike in fall 2021. While the negotiations are ongoing, and before voting concludes, the UAW says faculty can support the student workers in the following ways:

Contact University leadership (Chancellor, UCOP, etc.) and demand that they bargain in good faith (template letter available here)
Donate to the hardship fund: https://givebutter.com/uc-uaw
Discuss with undergraduate students the critical role that academic workers play in the everyday functions of the university

Other suggestions for supportive actions can be found here.

Learn More About Your AFT Benefits

The AAUP’s recent affiliation with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) means that together, they now represent more US higher education workers than any other union. The affiliation also means that in addition to being an AAUP member, UCLA-FA members that choose to add AAUP membership are now AFT members as well, with access to a number of new resources and benefits, including counseling, traveling, educational, and insurance programs.

The AAUP will be hosting a webinar on October 18 at 4 pm ET/1 pm PT where staff from the AFT membership team will walk members through the benefit program. Register here.

AFT member cards are being sent out this fall to home addresses. If you do not have a home address on file, you’ll be asked to supply it in the coming weeks. If you have a question about your AFT membership, please email aftplus@aft.org.

To read more about the affiliation, visit our website. We hope you can attend the webinar!

2022 Bulletin of the American Association of University Professors

The AAUP’s annual Bulletin collects in one place the reports, policy statements, and official AAUP business materials of an academic year—in this case, 2021–22. Most of these documents have already been published on the AAUP website or in Academe, and the parenthetical dates after their titles refer to date of original publication. This year’s Bulletin features a special report on governance, academic freedom, and institutional racism in the UNC system; two academic freedom and tenure investigative reports; a statement on legislative threats to academic freedom; and findings from the 2021–22 Faculty Compensation Survey and the 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices.

Find out where you stand as a professor in academia. Read the Bulletin!

Preventing Teaching Faculty from becoming Second Class Citizens

An article in today’s Academe Blog by Kris Boudreau and Mark Richman discusses research from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Becky Supiano about how creating a “teaching track” of faculty can elevate instruction and instruction focussed faculty, but also risks “cementing their second-class citizenship.” The article examines a new tenure track for teaching faculty program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. “The tenure track institutionalizes the university’s respect for [teaching faculty] well beyond providing a set of formal academic titles and adds the critical component of guaranteed academic freedom that is difficult to secure with anything less than tenure… By extending, supporting, and protecting exemplary teaching throughout the institution, it finally places teaching faculty and traditional tenured and tenure-track faculty on equally solid footing.”

Education Gag Orders Attack Academic Freedom

Academe Blog has posted an article by Jennifer Ruth that describes how red state anti-Critical Race Theory laws are both an impingement of freedom of speech — and so will be challenged on First Amendment grounds — but also are direct attacks on academic freedom. “Despite all its old Cold War fear mongering and all its talk of freedom, the Republican Party now harbors a sizable contingent of politicians who are increasingly willing to use authoritarian tactics to get what they want. The legislative bills banning so-called divisive concepts are the biggest assault on academic freedom this country has ever faced.”

Covid-19 Accelerated the Erosion of Academic Governance

The Chronicle of Higher Education has coverage of a recent AAUP report about the surge in unilateral decision-making by governing boards and administrations during the Covid-19 era. The full AAUP report is available online and states: “The COVID-19 pandemic has presented the most serious challenges to academic governance in the last fifty years.” And that faculty were forced to choose between participating “in ad hoc governance processes they knew to be flawed in the hope of shaping their outcomes or refusing on principle to participate at all, thereby allowing administrators and board members to move forward without them.”

Report from the National AAUP Convention

Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA, of which UCLA-FA is the UCLA chapter) President Constance Penley attended the historic National AAUP convention on June 16-18 in Arlington, VA, as the CUCFA delegate, which meant that she had an opportunity to vote on the proposed alliance between the AAUP and the AFT (AFL-CIO) and to fill six open AAUP Council seats. Read her report from the Convention at the CUCFA website.

New 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices

Tenure practices vary among institutions, however systematic studies of these practices are rare. The 2022 AAUP Survey of Tenure Practices is the first survey of its kind since 2004. It “offers a snapshot of prevailing tenure practices and policies at four-year institutions with tenure systems. Among the findings, the survey found that tenure is highly prevalent throughout US higher education, with 87 percent of four-year institutions that have a Carnegie Classification of bachelor’s, master’s, or doctoral institution reporting having a tenure system.” Available online.

AAUP Amicus with NLRB re: Collective Bargaining Unit of Faculty and Staff

AAUP’s summary: “The AAUP’s brief explains that, under the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), where the union’s proposed unit is given deference: (1) bargaining units that include faculty and staff employed at institutions of higher education are not categorically barred, provided that faculty members are given a mechanism to express their desires on the issue; (2) AAUP policy statements concerning academic freedom and shared governance do not preclude faculty members from deciding to be included in a unit with staff; and (3) the exclusion of tenured and tenure-track faculty from a proposed bargaining unit comprised of contingent faculty and staff does not imply that tenure-line faculty are not employees entitled to the full protections of the NLRA.” Details are online.

AAUP / AFT Affiliation Agreement

The AAUP and AFT have drafted a new affiliation agreement that will be voted on at the June AAUP meeting. Some details:

“Under the terms of this affiliation agreement, all AAUP members, by virtue of their membership in the AAUP, will also be members of the AFT/AFL-CIO… AAUP members and AAUP chapters will have access to AFT support and services, including specific AFT member benefits… This affiliation will not result in an increase in national AAUP dues and, for current AAUP members, AFT per capita will be covered as part of the AAUP dues… The national AAUP and its chapters will remain autonomous organizations with full control over their own finances, policies, programs, and staff. The national AAUP will continue to be governed by the AAUP Council; will continue to have its own committees; and will have complete autonomy over the Redbook, our policies and statements on behalf of the profession, investigations, censure, and sanction.”

This is what AAUP told CUCFA would be the effect of the affiliation to CUCFA/AAUP partner members:

“Assuming the proposed affiliation goes through at AAUP’s Biennial Meeting this June, CUCFA members will not see any appreciable change to their memberships. They will still be AAUP members, with all the rights and benefits conferred under that status and the CUCFA agreement. Their dues rate will continue to be the AAUP dues rate. They will, by virtue of being AAUP members, also become AFT members, with all the rights, privileges, etc., that go with that status. For AAUP advocacy and at-large members, which is the status that the UC members have in AAUP, their main interface remains the AAUP and their interaction with support and services will still be through the AAUP staff and leadership. They do have as “value added” access to AFT member benefits (discounts on mortgages, car purchases, etc.). But they are not required to pay any extra dues to AFT or any AFT subsidiary.”

More details (an overview of the agreement, a frequently asked questions document, and the agreement itself) are available to AAUP members on the AAUP website (member login required) at https://www.aaup.org/member-information-aaupaft-affiliation