More than sixty AFT 2121 members attended our fourth bargaining session with the district on Tuesday, 4/6. Your continued presence is essential and powerful!
On Tuesday, our chief negotiator, Alayna Fredricks, pushed the district for more detailed information regarding their proposed budget for 2021-2022 and beyond. VC Al Amin was resistant throughout the budget discussions, making it very difficult to get clarity and/or establish baselines between the parties. In order to negotiate specific proposals, AFT expects the District to engage in earnest around budget shortfalls and potential revenue.
AFT2121 bargaining team member Diane Wallis questioned the administration on how the college can recover and increase enrollment (thus state funding) to their stated goal of 22,000 if they implement such drastic cuts and layoffs now. Team member Lijia Lumsden pointed out that deep cuts will scare off existing students and asked what the district’s plan is for maintaining our current enrollment. From the District’s responses to these important questions it was clear that there is no plan for protecting enrollment or recovering the 5,000 FTES that we stand to lose with the schedule that is currently being developed.
VC Tom Boegel agreed to give the team more information regarding the full time layoffs assumed in the FTEF budgets that are currently proposed after being questioned about which departments are reflected in these potential layoffs (he estimated the FTEF budgets reflect 52FT layoffs and >100PT layoffs). We expect to have more details by Friday and will continue to fight against all layoffs.
AFT2121 maintains that the administration is taking too drastic an approach now and is failing to explore ways to mitigate the damage to our college and our community. Continuously reducing the schedule and cutting faculty is not an option if we are to continue carrying out our mission and keep the community in our community college.
Our team emphasized that we must maximize every opportunity to use Federal funding to protect our institution. Additionally, AFT2121 is working at the local and state level to secure more long term funding, including this week’s hearing at City Hall. We must continue to exert pressure on local and state elected officials and our CCSF Board of Trustees to do the right thing.
Please join us at the:
And we’ll see you at our next bargaining session:
Friday, April 9, from 1:00 PM to 4:00PM. Please register here if you haven’t already.
In unity,
This was my very first experience in a bargaining session. I was intimidated at first. I’m still working through my budget bootcamp video. In fact I ended up learning a lot, enriching my bootcamp lessons with real life examples. I’m also a newbie at the whole negotiation process so it was fascinating to see how that works. I understood a lot more about the people and personalities behind those titles and names in administration we read infuriating emails from. I’m telling you, it’s eye-opening. I’m going to attend the next ones going forward for sure.
-Armen Hovhannes, AFT 2121 member
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