UC - AFT NEWS

• UC-AFT Officer Candidate statements
• UCB Extension English Language Program to close
• Lecturers Bargaining archives
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• Spring, 2004 UC-AFT Perspective (1 MB pdf)
• Roddy and Klar meet with Dynes

For the past three days, the administration of the University of California has been learning something new about the people who work for the institution. The lesson has been delivered via an instructional strategy previously unused by the lecturers who teach about half the undergraduate classes in the UC system. It's called "going on strike."

The first salvo was fired last May in Davis. There, UC lecturers more or less spontaneously staged an unfair labor practice walkout protesting the trend by administrators in the language and writing programs to ignore the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) language governing lecturer hiring and retention. The MOU says that if a lecturer teaches and receives good evaluations for six years, the university will present him or her with the closest thing to job security a lecturer can get: a three year contract.

Instead, the administration, increasingly treating its overstocked academic workforce as casual labor, has been firing six-year lecturers regardless of performance, in order to hire cheaper contingent academics fresh out of the nation's overproductive PhD programs. At Davis and elsewhere in the system, this treatment has spawned a number of grievances and unfair labor practice charges by UC-AFT. The last straw was the firing of a lecturer who had received a major campus teaching award at UC Davis. The resulting two day unfair labor practice strike, causing the cancellation of dozens of classes, was the first ever by UC lecturers.

Now Berkeley lecturers have joined their colleagues in making California labor history, holding a surprisingly successful one-day action during the first week of classes. And if the 88% strike authorization vote by lecturers system-wide last week is any indication, they will not be the last of their brothers and sisters to utilize this powerful pedagogical method.The Strike
At nine o'clock a.m., the cheery picket line at the Telegraph and Bancroft entrance to campus included ten lecturers, a couple dozen clerical workers (whose union had been on strike for two days already), and supporters from the student body and other campus unions. It also included Kevin Roddy, UC-AFT president, down from Davis for the occasion. "What we're doing here is demonstrating to the administration that it's time for lecturers to be taken seriously," he said. Roddy, a veteran of more than two decades teaching at Davis, declared that "The beginning of the end of ignoring the bargaining process and unfair labor practices is today."

A spot check of Wheeler and Dwinelle halls, near the south end of campus, revealed many empty classrooms and lots of hastily scribbled notes on the doors notifying students that class had been cancelled. Some had been scratched the day before by faculty honoring the clerical workers' picket lines.

Pickets walked and chanted at all the main gates of campus. Most of the strikers belonged to the unaffiliated Coalition of University Employees (CUE), with two thousand heroic members out. The preponderance of CUE signs was leavened with AFT placards wielded by lecturers and others from AGSE (the graduate student union affiliated with the Auto Workers) and other supporters. Despite their smaller numbers, the AFT presence was critical, since the strike sanction from the Alameda Central Labor Council that turned union delivery drivers around belonged to AFT.

A steady stream of electronic media swung by, filing stories throughout the day which were generally favorable to the strikers. The big rallies on campus at noon and in downtown Oakland in front of the UC President's office drew reporters from both sides of the Bay. They also drew thousands of strikers and their supporters.

The campus rally featured a parade of current and former Berkeley mayors, union leaders, a message of support from state senator Dion Aroner (who called UC "the worst public employer in the state"), Green Party candidate for governor Peter Camejo ("I invited Gray Davis to come but he said he was counting his money; then I called Bill Simon but he was filling in a deposition"), striking clerical workers, lecturers and a campus nurse (the California Nurses Association, in an act of audacious solidarity, went out on a sympathy strike). The raucous crowd of several thousand cheered, sang, played call and response with the speakers ("Who is really the university?" "WE ARE!!!"), and booed every mention of the administration.
Some of the crowd returned to perfunctory picket lines after the rally. But well over a thousand headed west for the BART station, and thence to downtown Oakland, six miles south, for the main action of the afternoon. When I arrived, the crowd was setting up shop on the sidewalks outside the offices of the UC President. On the UCOP side, banners unfurled proclaiming "UC Workers on Strike," "UC Lecturers on Strike," "Berkeley Grad Students Support UC Unions," and "Students in Solidarity with Our Lecturers," among the various union pennants. Across the street, giant puppets and a woman dressed as Athena entertained the growing throngs. Soon both sides of Franklin Street were completely filled with demonstrators. A small, remarkably good-natured contingent of Oakland's finest kept the crowd on the sidewalks most of the time.

Joining clerical and lecturer speakers here were bigger labor leaders. Alameda County Central Labor Council leader Judy Goff ("One hundred and twenty five thousand working families in the East Bay stand with you!") and California AFL-CIO head Art Pulaski ("Two million workers in this state say that UC has to treat you right!") signified the intent of the broader California labor movement to back up the UC unions. Margy Wilkinson, chief negotiator statewide for the feisty CUE, nailed the main accomplishment of the strike, lauding the campus unions' workers for having figured out how to act together. Sociology lecturer Jim Stockinger spoke of the new hope the strike had brought to people who hadn't known their own power before.

Michael-David Sasson, another CUE leader, was the last to speak. When he had finished, someone fed "We are Family" into the sound system. As the beat boomed across the urban space, it was as if a plug had been pulled at last, and in an instant-over the ineffective protest of the cop in charge-the street was awash with dancing strikers. I found myself bouncing in the middle of a large group of line dancing clerical workers as a lecturer next to me tried but failed to get an officer to dance with her. The DJ moved on, appropriately, to Aretha's "Respect." A thousand throats rasped out the letters one at a time, jabbing their fingers up at the UC administration offices in time to the music. No one on the street doubted that they heard it.

When the second song was over, Sasson (following a conversation with a police officer) picked up the mike again and gently urged the crowd to let it go for the day. With smiles on their faces, the people who are the university glided peacefully back over the curbs, set their picket signs carefully staves-up on the pavement, and made their way to BART. Cars moved again. The next day the strikers would be back at work. But as Michael David had pointed out in his speech, neither they nor the university would be the same. Elsewhere in the State
Berkeley begins fall classes several weeks before the other campuses in the system due to its peculiar status as the only semester-based facility. Having voted resoundingly for job actions, and encouraged by the initial success in Berkeley, lecturers at the other campuses are forming strike committees and organizing themselves for action when the quarter begins in late September.

Mike Rotkin is a vice-president of the UC-AFT and member of the statewide bargaining team. He has been a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz for twenty nine years in Community Studies. He has also simultaneously served as a city council member and mayor of Santa Cruz.

Rotkin alternately felt angered and exasperated during more than two years of mostly fruitless negotiations. "They sent people to the table without authority to sign off on any matter of importance. We'd think we'd gotten somewhere, only to have them return next time as if our last conversation never happened." As a result the union has charged the administration with bad faith bargaining at the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB). On August 22, PERB found enough merit in the charge to issue a complaint against the administration. And then came the strike.

"This is a breakthrough," Rotkin says. "For too long the administration has counted on silence and inaction from the lecturers. That's over. Berkeley showed them that if they don't learn how to do the right thing, and fast, they're going to be seeing a whole lot of Berkeleys real soon."
The administration's arrogance hasn't escaped the attention of other important statewide players. The day before Berkeley lecturers emptied out their classrooms, forty three members of the California legislature signed a letter and sent it to the UC Regents and UC President Richard Atkinson, threatening to intervene in negotiations if the administration doesn't get its act together.

The scales are slowly tipping away from UC administration's business as usual. Its PR strategy during the strike--to insist that the strikes were illegal, and ignore the responsibility of its own unfair labor practices--failed miserably to convince anyone. The combination of direct action, legal pressure from PERB, and legislative intervention has shifted momentum to the side of the unions. For the people who are the university, the dancing may begin again soon.

--by Fred Glass