UC STALLS NEGOTIATIONS WITH BAD FAITH BARGAINING
In February CUE-UC contract negotiations were suspended for more than 6
weeks at UC chief negotiator Sharon Hayden's request during a medical
leave. During our first meeting following the UC-requested delay, April
12 - 14, management negotiators reneged on many previous bargaining
agreements. Specifically, UC negotiators retreated from principles which we
had agreed to months ago in the grievance and arbitration articles, which
are critical to enforcing every other article in the CUE-UC contract. They
also backed out of an agreement we made on performance evaluations.
CUE and UC have been bargaining since August, 1998. For the last seven
months we have been using an innovative fast-track framework proposed by
CUE to accelerate stalled bargaining to a fair settlement. The framework
is based on both sides accepting the best employment standards already
negotiated by UC with other unions. Significant progress appeared to have
been made since UC accepted CUE's proposal. In an eleventh hour attempt to
reverse this progress, UC suddenly announced its intention to back away
from several articles negotiated to agreement under this framework. In
order to prevent UC from retreating from other already agreed-upon
articles, the CUE bargaining team demanded that UC's chief negotiator
initial all agreements she still intends to honor.
As a result of UC's bad faith bargaining CUE filed an Unfair Labor
Practice charge with the state's Public Employment Relations Board. We
hope to be able to get UC back on track toward settling a fair contract
and to put an end to their regressive bargaining tactics.
At the very end of the last day of bargaining, after most of management's team
and a few members of the CUE team had left, UC presented a proposal on the
October 1999 wage increase. CUE is currently reviewing it. CUE'S current
wage proposal calls for UC to restore over several years the 9.3% loss in
real wages suffered by UC Clericals since 1993. The CUE proposal includes
paying clericals COLAs of 6% and 5%, respectively, for academic years
1999-00 and 2000-01.
We meet again with UC on May 3, 4, 5, 2000, in Oakland.
CUE's Bargaining Team:
- Christine Benoit (Riverside)
- Debbie Ceder (Santa Barbara)
- Mark Covington (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)
- Jennifer Goodheart (Santa Cruz)
- LeAnn Herigstad (Davis)
- Alyce Herrera (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)
- Lyn Kelly (Los Angeles)
- Robin Luczak (San Diego)
- Joanne Murray (Santa Barbara)
- Cynthia Norman (Irvine)
- Margy Wilkinson (Berkeley)
- Mark Blum (Chief Negotiator)
