UCSC lecturers demand changes to the workplace amid system-wide movement
SANTA CRUZ >> UC Santa Cruz lecturers rallied on campus Wednesday and Thursday to publicly demand improvements to their employment conditions.
On a cool day, lecturers picketed at the entrance to the campus before they congregated with students at the Quarry Plaza for a rally and march through the redwood saturated campus. The protest was part of a UC system-wide movement.
Lecturers have three key demands: job security, compensation for work outside of standard lectures, such as working with students … and improved wages.
“Those are demands and desires that everyone has in their workforce,” Shavit Melamed, a third-year UCSC student said in solidarity with UC lecturers as she joined the march across campus. “We just wanted to show up as undergrads to show solidarity for a union that’s working hard to have better labor conditions.”
There are more than 6,000 lecturers across all 10 UC campuses, according to Josh Brahinsky the vice president of organizing for UC-AFT — a labor union that represents UC employees. Nearly 1,200 of those lecturers are at UC Santa Cruz and teach more than half of all undergraduate classes, he added.
While lecturers are a huge part of the day-to-day operations
on campus, many of them are underpaid and work part time at UCSC. Across the UC system, lecturers make an average of $71,068 a year, according to UC Spokesperson Ryan King.
At the Santa Cruz campuses, lecturers are compensated less. On average, UCSC lecturers make $57,000 a year as a baseline salary. With an area median income of $111,900 in
Santa Cruz County, according to the California Department of Housing and Community Development, the baseline salary for UCSC lecturers is considered low-income in Santa Cruz.
In fact, the salary is so low, it is just $1,050 a year short of being considered very-low-income by HCD standards. However, the buck doesn’t stop there. Since many of these lecturers are not fulltime employees of the university, their compensation is much lower.
“If you put it all together, our median is $20,000 because of the part time and because of the low wages together,” Brahinsky said. “Those things need to change. We have the same degrees as tenured faculty. Most of us have PhDs. We do the same work; we have the same credentials.”
In order to make ends meet, many lecturers at UC schools need to work several jobs. Brahinsky also teaches at Stanford and Berkeley on top of his duties at UCSC. He had a fourth job at San Jose State, but recently left the position.
It’s not just about the money, Brahinsky said. The key goal for UC lecturers is to gain job security. Not only do many of these lecturers work part time, but they usually have to reapply for their jobs at the end of each school year, or in some cases, the end of the quarter, he added.
Contracts for lecturers are often only one year long for their first six years at the university, according to a UCAFT leaflet. Roughly 2,000 lecturers are not rehired every year, which can be detrimental for instructors and students, Brahinsky added.
“Teachers are an essential part of education and education is an essential part of society. It’s pretty straight forward that if teachers aren’t happy, then they’re not providing us a good quality of education and we as students want that good quality of education,” Melamed said. “They want to be able to provide that as best they can and they need the resources to be able to do that.”
A lack of job security makes it difficult for lecturers to sign leases in the area. Additionally, it is difficult for instructors to make educational bonds with students as the odds are all the instructors students had their freshman year will be gone by their senior years, Brahinsky noted.
“It’s and awful way to
run a university, it’s an awful way to do education and it’s an awful way to create jobs,” he said.
Recently, the UC system has been attempting to work with UC-AFT to come to an agreement. While the two parties have been in an impasse over the last two years, the university extended a public offer to the labor union on Monday.
The offer would increase pay for lecturers by at least 3% for all and up to 8.2% for the lowest paid instructors. It also offered more employment stability for returning lecturers.
After their first year with the university, they would be offered a two-year contract. That contract would
have the potential to expand to three years after the third year of employment. After six years, UC lecturers typically have more job security.
Additionally, paid medical leave would no longer be exclusive to full time workers. The offer would expand the benefit to employees at two-thirds time, and add two more weeks of paid childbearing leave. Lastly, the university would work with employees to create a fairer assessment of their expected workload.
“It’s nowhere near close enough, but it’s a sign that the pickets matter,” Brahinsky said.
If UC-AFT and the UC system cannot come to an
agreement, lecturers are prepared to go on strike. The union authorized the possible strike by a 96% vote in July, according to Brahinsky.
However, UC-AFT hopes it does not have to come down to a strike. Lecturers would prefer to be in the classroom working with students.
“This would be a legal, union-sanction strike that would shut this place down legally,” Brahinsky said. “The idea of going on strike, we’re all like, ‘that sounds horrible. I want to teach my class,’ but we’d be willing to do that if we’re thinking the sort of long game of willing quality of education in the system.”