Negotiations update & Season’s Greetings

Happy Holidays!

We wish all our members, their families, and friends a joyous and well-deserved break and a Happy New Year!

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Negotiations Update

SLO’s: SLO’s have been removed from the faculty evaluation process! This victory was made possible by our lawsuit settlement. Faculty still need to do SLO’s to compile data for our college but individual faculty members will not be evaluated by SLO’s anymore.

Academic Calendar: At our December 20 bargaining session, we came to an agreement on a DRAFT 2018/19 academic calendar. Independent Flex is August 16 and the last day of classes is December 20. The big change is switching Flex Day from March 5 to February 5, which is Lunar New Year.

The District needs to examine more data before agreeing to no instruction/faculty work for the entire week of Thanksgiving, but is amenable to discussing this option for the 2019/20 academic calendar.

Voluntary Transfers: An agreement was reached on voluntary transfers which would permit tenured faculty to request first consideration for transfer to a vacant full-time position outside their home department. The District will work out an online process so current faculty won’t need to resubmit application documents already on file.

Workload: Current contract language calls for faculty to have a reasonable share of the workload for college responsibilities. We rejected the District’s proposal for requiring faculty to perform 5 hours of professional responsibilities and to be required to hold 5 office hours. We recognize workload is often not shared equitably and we expressed a shared interest in addressing this issue.

Preferred Names:The District rejected our preferred name proposal, yet reports they are working on procedures to implement this practice. They claim there is already State law requiring this and therefore do not want contract language requiring them to do so. Dianna Gonzales will send us the legal language. Either way, we will continue to advocate for both faculty and students to be called by their preferred name.

Categorical Employees: Sick leave for Categorical Employees will be merged with other faculty employees so they will not lose sick leave at the end of their grants.

Class Size: We eliminated reference to TV courses but affirmed that existing class size limits apply to their online or distance version.

Growing the College: We advocated for new class sections to be opened to increase enrollment and to avoid overcrowded classes. This will be critical in reaching the goal of 32,000 FTES.

FLEX Day – Upcoming Negotiations Topics: Next semester the focus of our Negotiations will shift more to salaries and benefits. Join us for our FLEX Day workshop to discuss the next phase of our contract campaign.

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• Open negotiations will continue next semester on Wednesdays 1:00-5:00 in MUB 238. All faculty are invited. Before attending, please review our open negotiations guidelines.
• The gains we’ve made in our contract campaign, our fight against the ACCJC, and victory with Free City were made possible by collectively pooling our resources, including our union dues. The hundreds of faculty who have chosen to re-commit to our Union this semester by signing our new membership form — with its loud, proud commitment to “stick with our union” for a full calendar year —  have put us in a powerful position for our latest round of negotiations. If you have not done so this school year, please sign a new AFT 2121 membership form.

(Left) AFT members (L-R: Kathe Burick, Marco Mojica, Malaika Finkelstein, Allan Fisher, Wynd Kaufmyn, & Alison Datz) standing in solidarity with UESF last October during their contract campaign.

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