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Arbitrator requires university to restore seniority rights and pay back wages

Larthia Dunham thought he was receiving merit evaluations, perhaps headed for a raise, until he realized he was being targeted for
termination. A lecturer in the Social Welfare Department at UCLA, Dunham was cited in December 2008 for failure to try to improve his writing skills and for bad evaluations from some students.

With emotions roiling, he sat down during the holiday season that year and wrote 60 letters to colleagues asking for support. “Blessfully” (Dunham is a religious man), he received 50 responses.

He dug out a document — the UC Memorandum of Understanding with Non-Senate Faculty — the contract between lecturers in UC-AFT and the university, that he had kept for years unexamined in his desk. “I teach students all the time,” Dunham chuckled, “know the policies that govern you.”

He met with Maria Elena Cortez, then the UC-AFT field representative at UCLA, and they went through an administration memo alleging Dunham’s shortcomings. Cortez urged him to document “everything they’re saying you didn’t do.”

Then Dunham and his wife Senait, who is a doctoral candidate at UC Santa Barbara, went to Houston for the holidays. His mother’s house had no Internet connection, so Dunham remembers driving along the interstate and turning into truck stops to access the Internet.

It was, temporarily, for naught. UCLA terminated him, effective July 31, 2009. Afterward, he put in for retirement. In May 2010, he started a part-time job as a therapist.

During his absence from UCLA, he spurned an administration offer of monetary settlement after being terminated. Following advice from his children, “I was going to fight all the way,” said Dunham, who is 55 years old with six children and another one on the way. “I never felt in my heart that I was going to lose because I felt that I was right.”

In describing his principled stand that resulted in the restoration of his job, Dunham paraphrased Martin Luther King. “‘If you don’t stand for something, you’ll fall for anything.’ They were trying to say, ‘shoo shoo.’”

Rather than be shooed, Dunham stood his ground and was vindicated by an arbitrator’s January 16 decision that reinstated him as a field liaison with teaching responsibilities in the Department of Social Welfare. Arbitrator Kenneth Perea ordered the university to pay retroactive wages and restore Dunham’s seniority rights and other contractual benefits from his 2009 termination until his reinstatement in January 2011.

The win for Dunham was a victory for all lecturers, also known as non-Senate faculty, because “it reinforced the thoroughness of due process in the current contract of non-Senate faculty,” with the University of California, said Cortez, now executive director of the University Council-AFT. “The contract protects people, especially in the long term, against arbitrary personnel actions by department managers.”

The arbitrator’s decision said the administration was holding merit hearings for Dunham and did not inform him of the termination threat. The impartial arbitrator concluded “an essential element of procedural due process … on the grounds of academic performance has not been adhered to.”

Interviewed in mid-February, Dunham was back at work, preparing to teach a second-year class, “Community Organization and Advocacy.” He is not yet supervising student field internships, which is part of the job he has successfully performed since 1995, but he might transition into some oversight as the spring quarter gets rolling.

Dunham is comfortable being back. In telling the story of his job restoration to department colleagues who wondered where he had gone, Dunham expresses his appreciation for the union. “The union works,” says Dunham. “They definitely fight for you.”  

— By Lance Howland, CFT Reporter

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