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A two-day strike by University of California lecturers was called off early Wednesday morning after the union and university system reached a tentative agreement on a contract that establishes rehiring rights, expands eligibility for paid family leave, and raises pay an average of 30 percent over five years.
About 6,000 lecturers at all nine UC campuses were slated to participate in the strike over two days, said Mia McIver, the president of the union that represents non-tenured and non-tenure-track faculty members and librarians, and a lecturer in the University of California at Los Angeles’s writing program. McIver said the strike would have disrupted roughly 12,000 classes taught by lecturers, not including those taught by the 800-plus tenured and tenure-track faculty who had canceled their courses in solidarity with the union. The University Council-American Federation of Teachers represents about 6,500 lecturers and 350 librarians, according to its website.
The lecturers had gone 20 months without a contract. In that time, the union filed seven unfair-labor-practice charges, with the two most recent charges filed over the past month — first, that the university had refused to negotiate a paid family-leave policy, and second, that it had refused to participate in confidential mediation.
In a statement on November 13, the union called out the university’s “pattern of bad faith” in contract negotiations. The university has denied the union’s allegations of unfair-labor practices.
On Wednesday morning, the university and the union announced in a joint statement that they had reached a resolution to four of the charges previously filed by the union. The statement does not specify which ones.
“This agreement reflects the university’s good-faith bargaining effort over the past two-and-a-half years of negotiations,” Nadine Fishel, the university’s chief negotiator, said in the statement. “We look forward to continuing to support our instructors and students at our world-class university.”
According to the joint statement, the tentative agreement provides “groundbreaking” job-stability protections, including written reviews and a preference for consideration before new hires; increased salary minimums and annual salary increases for each year of the contract; and clearer workload standards.
McIver said job security was a key achievement for UC lecturers.
“About a quarter of our members got churned out of the UC system every year because the way the … system used to work was that people were employed on short-term, part-time, temporary contracts,” she said. “There was no obligation to renew or rehire or even consider for renewal. And there was no obligation to even communicate with contingent teaching faculty about the status of their employment. Would they have a job next year or not? People were kept in the dark.”
Tobias Higbie, the chair of UCLA’s labor-studies department and associate director of UCLA’s Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, said the job-security guarantees mark a “turn away from the gig-economy model of higher education.”
Higbie said the UC contract is somewhat unusual in its graduated contract system, where the first contract is a one-year contract, the next contract is a two-year contract, and the third contract is a three-year contract, leading to a review for a continuing appointment.
“I’m very relieved that the strike has been averted,” Higbie said. “I’m hopeful that we can get back to the work of teaching the people of California.”
Union members are expected to vote on the agreement this week.
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