Bargaining Report No. 2

2008: Bargaining Report #2: April 28-29, 2008, San Diego, California

The CUE Bargaining Team met on April 28th & 29th 2008 at UCSD with the UC team in the final preparation session for the upcoming negotiations for our successor contract. The current CUE-UC contract expires on September 30, 2008 and we hope to negotiate a new contract before it expires. The first day was a practice session using the IBB Process to set the Ground Rules for negotiations. Critical areas of the ground rules which required a great deal of discussion and deliberation was the inclusion of CUE members and visitors during the bargaining sessions in a structured way that compliments the overall goals of IBB. The second day continued the discussion and ended with the definition and outline of the structure for the inclusion of commentators and observers of the process.

Observers and commentators are welcome to attend the sessions at designated times and state wide and local board members and officers are encouraged to attend during the Post-Options (options evaluation) phase of the IBB negotiations process. Both teams took these draft ground rules to their consultative bodies, in the case of CUE the state wide executive board, for review and comments.

CUE's state wide executive board took the recommendation of the bargaining team and approved adoption of the IBB Ground Rules drafted.

On the second day, we continued the practice negotiation session by identifying the story and interests associated with Uniforms-Article 41 (Article 41). We will be sending out a very brief Survey to get input from our members on the issues of Uniforms and Dress Codes in the workplace. Your participation in the survey will be greatly appreciated because your feedback will continue to be an integral part of the ongoing negotiations!

After engaging in these preparation sessions, CUE and UC began negotiations on May 16 and May 19th in Oakland at the Kaiser Center, 300 Lakeside Drive, Oakland.

Future dates and location for bargaining that have been scheduled are June 4-6 (which will be rescheduled due to the AFSCME strike days) and June 26-27 at UCOP in Oakland (specific location still to be determined.)

CUE's Bargaining Team members in attendance at the sessions were:

Amatullah Alaji-Sabrie (Chief Negotiator, Berkeley)
Stephanie Dorton (Berkeley)
Susan Ervin (Los Angeles)
Alice Guillory (alternate bargainer, San Francisco)
Anytra Henderson (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)
Mary Higgins (San Francisco)
Dan Lewis (Davis)
Cynthia Norman (Irvine)
Khixaan Obioma-Sakhu (Santa Barbara)
Kim Rutherford (Santa Cruz)
Dorthea Stewart (San Diego)
Dianna Sahhar (alternate bargainer, Irvine)
Tom Williams (alternate bargainer, San Diego)