Last night, after more than eleven months working without a contract, AFT 2121’s bargaining team reached a Tentative Agreement with the District for a new faculty contract through June 2015.
This TA is exponentially stronger in preserving faculty working conditions and rights than what was on the table from management a year ago—or even a month ago. It is a testament to the hard work of many AFT 2121 members and supporters and many long hours at the table.
It is by no means a perfect contract. But it protects many key features of students’ learning conditions and our working conditions, and it leaves us all better off than we are right now.
Our TA, which has been unanimously recommended for ratification by the AFT 2121 Executive Board, will be voted on by faculty in the coming weeks; we’ll send out another blast with details on voting procedure shortly.
Here are the provisions of our new agreement:
- PAY: Restores 1.5% of the wage cut all faculty have suffered. That restoration is front-loaded—1% of it begins in January 2014. (The additional 0.5% restoration is effective January 2015 but will paid beginning April 2015.) Both the salary formula and our outstanding grievances over the District’s implementation of it will be dropped.
- PART-TIMERS’ RIGHTS: Part-time faculty rights, including seniority/re-employment rights, access to health care, and pro-rata pay, stay as they are.
- CLASS SIZE/CANCELLATIONS: Language on minimum class size and class cancellations stay as they are.
- RETIREE HEALTH CARE: In order to protect this important long-term benefit for full-time faculty, tenure review pay and prescription drug copay reimbursement are suspended until July 2016. That money will go instead to the San Francisco Retiree Health Care Trust Fund. Beginning in July 2016, current full-time faculty will pay 0.25% towards retiree health care (adding 0.25% each year, for a total of 1.0% in 2019). New full-time faculty hired on or after the ratification date will pay 2% right away. As is the case now, part-timers will not contribute into the retiree health care fund, and will not receive retiree health care benefits from the District.
- EXPIRATION: The new contract will expire 6/30/2015.
This TA reflects not only the hard work of our bargaining team, but also the work of AFT 2121’s member organizers and the contributions of many individual members toward getting a contract.
Well over 100 faculty have directly participated in caucus at negotiations in the last couple of months, and hundreds more have written letters supporting the team’s work and encouraging Special Trustee Agrella to restore the pay cuts. Last week, a delegation of highly impacted 2121 members met with the Special Trustee, bearing letters from more than 800 other City College faculty, to encourage him to respect faculty and reach a contract that restores as much of our pay as possible.
The movement reflected in this TA, while small, would not have been possible without these intense mobilization efforts.
Once the contract is ratified, we’ll need to continue this level of activity—and more—in support of City College. (Check out this recent progress towards saving our CCSF.)
All members are encouraged to attend Delegate Assembly on Tuesday, November 19 at 3 pm at the Chinatown campus, where we will be discussing the TA in detail. We encourage you to attend, to ask questions, and to voice your views. We’ll be announcing member information sessions on other campuses, too—contact us if you’re interested in setting one up on your campus/in your department, and look for a schedule of information sessions on the AFT 2121 website in the next few days.
Finally, if you have questions about the TA or the ratification process, please send them our way—the full text of the agreement and an FAQ document will be on the AFT 2121 website soon!
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