Irvine Faculty Association

Dear IFA members and all fellow UC Irvine Faculty,

On October 26th, every UC employee received an Open Enrollment notice with new rates for healthcare benefits. The increases in the employee health benefits share are unprecedented and alarming. Costs for healthcare benefits will be going up between 15% and 193% per month, depending on one’s plan and coverage. For example, if you currently pay for Kaiser for yourself and your spouse/partner, your cost will increase by 74% on January 1. Employees who insure themselves and their whole family (spouse/partner + children) through UC Health Savings Plan will see an increase of 171%. Every health benefit plan and coverage tier is affected, and these changes will impact the over 200,000 employees who receive benefits in the UC system.

UCOP presented these changes to UC Unions and the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA), of which the Irvine Faculty Association is a member, just three days before the start of Open Enrollment, leaving no opportunity for input. Struck by the exorbitant increases, the UC unions and CUCFA pressed for answers. UCOP representatives cited inflation, deferred preventative care during the pandemic, rising drug costs, and clinical workforce shortages as root causes for these price increases. While these are all real issues impacting healthcare costs everywhere, when pushed for details about how prices were negotiated and set for UC employees, UCOP’s answers were unsatisfactory and lacked transparency.

Importantly, the cost to employees of the various healthcare plan options is determined by the insurance company rate increase less the employer share contribution. UC did not provide information about either the rate increase or the employer contribution, so there is no way to tell if UC is paying its share of the increased cost. But other sources indicate that Kaiser’s rate increase was probably about 15% this year[1], which would mean that UC reduced its share of contributions by about 20%.

CUCFA has prepared a letter to UC President Drake protesting the magnitude of these increases in our health benefit costs and UC’s secrecy and lack of transparency in devising and announcing these policies. We encourage you to sign on to this letter, which you can do by clicking on this link:  https://bit.ly/ucHealth

If you have any questions about this message or the IFA, you can contact us at irvinefa@gmail.com.

Thank you,

The IFA Board

On March 19, 2023, CUCFA endorsed the following letter, which will be sent to President Drake, UC Chancellors, and Board of Regents calling for the inclusion of caste within the University of California’s anti-discrimination policy. To join this call, sign here by April 10, 2023:

Dear President Drake, UC Chancellors, and Board of Regents,

We, University of California faculty, staff, and students, are writing to request the inclusion of caste within the University of California’s anti-discrimination policy to further solidify the UC’s commitment to diversity and equity and ensure appropriate protections for caste oppressed students, staff, faculty, and community members. With the current UC-wide anti-discrimination policy undergoing revision, it is important that the updated policy explicitly includes caste to better address the ongoing caste discrimination across the University of California.

Caste is a structure of oppression that affects over 1 billion people across the world. As one of the oldest systems of oppression in the world, the caste system is a structure of graded inequality based on notions of purity and pollution. Caste is determined at birth and affects all aspects of life, including your right to human dignity, where you can worship, where you can live, who you can marry, and your prospects for educational and career advancement. To this day, caste-oppressed peoples continue to experience profound injustices including socioeconomic inequalities, usurpation of their land, rights, and brutal violence at the hands of the dominating castes.

Caste is prevalent across various faith communities across South Asia, and also transgresses regional and national boundaries to be found globally across communities part of the diaspora. Similar forms of caste systems also exist in various non-South Asian communities, with some examples being the caste system in Japan that marks the Burakumin caste as untouchable by birth, and the casta system across Latin America.

In the US, caste impacts over 5.5 million South Asians and has infiltrated a broad range of spaces and industries from education spaces to the tech sector to religious centers. According to the 2016 survey “Caste in the United States” produced by Equality Labs, 25% of Dalits reported facing verbal or physical assault based on their caste in the US, one in three Dalit students report being discriminated against during their education in the US, two out of three Dalits surveyed reported being treated unfairly at their workplace in the US, 60% of Dalits report experiencing caste-based derogatory jokes or comments in the US, and 20% of Dalit respondents report feeling discriminated at a place of business because of their caste.

Universities in the US are no exception. Caste-oppressed students and faculty are subjected to discrimination, bullying, and humiliation. According to the preliminary findings of the 2022 Caste in Higher Education Survey administered by the National Academic Coalition for Caste Equity (NACCE) and Equality Labs, 4 in 5 caste-oppressed students, staff, and faculty reported experiencing caste-discrimination at the hands of their dominant caste peers. Further, 75% of them did not report caste-based discrimination in their universities or colleges because caste was not added as a protected category and/or their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion departments lacked caste competency due to a lack of provisions and training. Given the prevalence of caste discrimination, leading universities and colleges across the US have amended their anti-discrimination policy to add caste as a protected category, including Colby College, Brown University, Brandeis University, and, most notably, the California State University system in 2022. Recently, Seattle also amended its anti-discrimination policy and became the first city in the nation to ban caste discrimination.

The call to ban caste discrimination has also been ongoing in the University of California system, with UC Davis becoming the first UC campus to add caste to its anti-discrimination policy, and UC Berkeley’s ASUC Senate unanimously passing SR 21/22-029 urging administration to amend the anti-discrimination policy to include caste in order to create equitable learning opportunities for all students.

We call on the University of California to also recognize caste within its anti-discrimination policy and commit to protecting caste oppressed peoples against discrimination on the basis of caste. Caste-based discrimination is an urgent civil and human rights issue that requires immediate action and we request you to recognize the humanity and the reality of caste oppressed faculty, staff, and students. Given UC’s commitment to ensuring a safe and equal working and learning environment for all, adding caste as a protected category will affirm the university’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and support for those most marginalized.

To support adding caste as a protected category, please sign your name and affiliation below by April 10, 2023.

The Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), in collaboration with University Council-American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT), which represents over 6,000 UC Unit 18 faculty and librarians, is collecting faculty and lecturer signatures on a letter we intend to send to President Drake and UC Regents later this month. The letter is pasted below, and if you are interested in adding your name to it, click here.

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Dear President Drake and UC Regents,

We, the undersigned members of the UC community, stand firmly against any move on the part of the UC Office of the President (UCOP) to impose the costs of UAW-ratified contracts on the already strained finances of departments, research centers, libraries and faculty. The result would be a diminished quality of research and education for undergraduates and graduates. We urge campus administrators, UCOP, the California legislature, Governor Newsom, and federal granting agencies to recommit to fully funding public higher education.

On December 23rd, 2022, UAW members across the UC system ratified contracts with much-needed and significantly increased pay and benefits, including childcare subsidies, increased access to healthcare, family leave, and transit benefits. These overdue contracts improve the lives of UAW members—our students and postdocs—who have long endured inadequate pay and benefits. Despite numerous warnings by public education advocates, the UC system has enjoyed these lowered labor costs for decades. It is only now facing the question of how to pay for these much-needed improvements.

The University is seeking to impose these costs on departments, research centers, and faculty PIs, leading to a reduction of graduate student appointments, an increase in the already high number of undergraduates per discussion section, and a correspondingly negative impact on course curriculum, undergraduate assignments, and grading. This reduction also weakens currently funded research and allows fewer future funded research opportunities for graduate students. TA and GSR appointments are central components of funding for graduate students, and both are major inputs into the research and educational work of the institution. Given these anticipated effects, the costs of the new contracts negotiated by UCOP cannot be borne by departments, research centers, and faculty PIs. Indeed, by pushing the costs downwards in this way, the university is both effectively canceling the gains of this historic strike and negatively impacting the research and education mission of the UC.

We refuse this divide-and-conquer tactic and stand alongside our undergraduate and graduate students, department chairs, and deans in insisting on a funding model that advances the UC system’s fundamental mission of education and research. We refuse the imposition of unilateral, punitive austerity as the university’s response to a strike by academic workers against poverty wages.

We know the UC system has funds at its disposal and can work to raise additional public funds at both the state and federal levels to cover the costs of the new UAW contracts. UC leadership must not only reallocate administrative budgets but also robustly appeal to state legislators and federal grant agencies for larger budget appropriations. We expect to see a budget and planning process that allocates funds to the central missions of teaching and research and underwrites the short-term and long-term costs of the improved contract. The strike, the largest academic labor action in US history and the largest across any industry in the US last year, has highlighted the urgent need to reprioritize educational goals above financial goals.

We intend to take our concerns to the Academic Senate, the UC Regents, the California Governor and legislature, and the media. We do so to advocate for public education and to stand with our undergraduate and graduate students and junior colleagues as we all work hard to carry out that mission.

Dear colleagues:

We write to follow up on Provost Hal Stern’s email requesting that faculty fill out “attestation forms” about their strike activities. The position of University of California Council of Faculty Associations (CUCFA) and the Irvine Faculty Association (IFA) is that UCOP’s deliberate implementation of these forms in response to protected activity is unlawful and must be rescinded immediately, and that faculty are not required to submit these forms and should not do so. We are disappointed that UCOP has chosen to punitively distribute attestation forms and believe that these are an unlawful attempt to punish faculty who may have supported labor action that was undertaken in response to UC’s documented unfair labor practices, and in so doing to suppress such action in the future.

Below is a letter from the Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA) and the Santa Cruz Faculty Association (SCFA) demanding that UC cease and desist from interfering with faculty’s protected rights. You can also see a statement from CUCFA here.

The IFA encourages all Senate faculty to reach out to those in leadership roles in their departments, programs, schools, and to express their concern about UCOP’s disregard for the many ways faculty contribute to the University’s mission beyond our contractual obligations, research, and administrative and service obligations. We also suggest you join us in writing to the UCI Senate leadership (see our January 16th letter to the Senate chair, available here on our website, here) to express concern about the lack of a well-informed, well-conceived and critical response to UCOP’s attestation plan. In expecting faculty to pay back wages for work they were unable to do during the strike while not offering any meaningful explanation for how to calculate labor withheld, nor acknowledging the extra work many of us performed after the strike, UCOP and our campus administrations have demonstrated a lack of thoughtfulness, transparency, and coherence.

We hope you will join us in expressing your concern about this unlawful attempt to interfere with faculty’s protected rights.

If you are not already a member of the Irvine Faculty Association, this is a great time to join. Visit  https://ucifa.org/join/ to learn how.  We are 100% member supported. Monthly dues are a modest $9.25/month and are deducted from your monthly wages.

Sincerely,
The IFA Board

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January 17, 2023

Letitia Silas
Executive Director, Labor Relations
UC Office of the President
1111 Franklin Street
Oakland, CA 94607

Delivered via Email to: Letitia.Silas@ucop.edu

Re: UC’s Interference with Faculty’s Protected Rights

Dear Labor Relations Executive Director Silas,

We write on behalf of the Council of University of California Faculty Associations, and the Santa Cruz Faculty Association, to demand that UC cease and desist from circulating or attempting to collect responses on the “Attestation Form for Faculty” it has recently distributed. UC’s attempt to survey faculty regarding whether they honored the UAW picket line interferes with faculty’s right to engage in concerted activity. It is unlawful and must stop immediately.

As UC has itself recognized, the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEERA) grants non-managerial Senate faculty the same right as other employees to engage in concerted activity for mutual aid and protection. Non-striking employees who honor a picket line by refusing to cross or by withholding their own labor in solidarity are engaged in protected activity, and it is illegal to discipline, discriminate, or retaliate against those workers. (See City and County of San Francisco (2017) PERB Decision No. 2536-M, pp. 19-22; Trustees of the California State University (2017) PERB Decision No. 2522-H, pp. 16-17.)

It is also illegal for UC to poll or interrogate workers about their intent to honor a picket line or engage in other protected activity, and to surveil employee protected activity. (See Alliance of College Ready Public Schools (2020) PERB Decision No. 2716, pp. 26-28 [public employer interfered with protected rights by polling employees about union support]; City of Commerce (2018) PERB Decision No. 2602-M, pp. 5-6 [public employer questioning of employee’s interfered with protected rights]; Special Touch Home Care Services, Inc. (2011) 357 NLRB 4, 11 [finding it unlawful under the NLRA to poll employees about intent to strike except in limited healthcare context].) UC acknowledged as much in guidance it issued before the strike, warning supervisors against surveying or questioning employees about their intent to support the strike or about their union activity.

Despite these clear prohibitions, UC has for the first time instituted the “attestation” forms that it distributed on January 13, 2023. Although there are uncountable instances in which faculty have cancelled a class or missed committee or department meetings without being made to account for their time or agree to pay deductions, UC is now attempting to interrogate faculty about how they spent their time during the strike and to force faculty to submit to a three-month deduction plan. Not only does this violate Labor Code provisions that prohibit involuntary wage deductions, this policy change has come about only because faculty engaged in protected activity. In fact, the form clearly links the withholding of labor to the UAW strike and asks faculty about whether they withheld labor only for the duration of the strike, not for any other time period. There is no question that the form targets and penalizes concerted activity only, with the intent of chilling faculty’s exercise of their protected rights.

UC has the right to withhold pay from academic workers who engage in a strike, but it cannot institute a retaliatory system of polling about strike activity or force payroll deductions in violation of the Labor Code because of faculty solidarity with other workers. UC’s deliberate implementation of these forms in response to protected activity is illegal. To remedy this interference with faculty’s protected rights, UC must immediately rescind and disavow these forms.

Sincerely,
Constance Penley, President Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA)
Wendy Matsumura, Vice President Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA)
Jessica Taft, Co-Chair of the Santa Cruz Faculty Association (SCFA)

As you are likely aware, in the next few days faculty will receive attestation forms to document any strike-related withholding of labor they engaged in during the recent TA and postdoctoral researcher strike. The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA) is presently consulting with relevant counsel to determine the legality of such a demand and what options faculty have to respond or not. Until we obtain legal guidance we suggest you do not fill out or submit this form. It is our opinion that given the fact that we are not operating under any collective bargaining agreement regulating such activity, and as important, given that the university has not acknowledged or offered to compensate ladder faculty for the amount of extra work performed during the strike, such a requirement is at the very least ethically dubious.

Linked here is a letter we sent to the Chair of the UCI Academic Senate stating this fact and asking the Senate to act to protect the interests of its members and the wider UCI community rather than simply as an uncritical conduit for UCOP and campus administration demands.

We will be in touch as soon as we have formal guidance as to the proper way to respond. In the meantime, we hope you will share this information with your colleagues and ask them to consider joining the IFA so that we can represent the UCI faculty in the broadest possible way.

Dear Chair Striedter,

We write as members of the Board of the Irvine Faculty Association to express our strong concern at the content of your January 14th email to Senate faculty regarding strike-related pay, guidance and implementation, as well as the letter attached from Assistant Vice Chancellor, Marianne Liu Beckett, outlining the administration’s attempt to obtain attestations from employees as to anytime they missed or took off because of strike activities.

Specifically, we are concerned that your immediate response to UCOP’s  plan to ask or require faculty to self-report on strike activities was not to point out that as Senate faculty are not unionized, there is no procedure in place through collective bargaining to assess how much time we are being paid for and no basis for us to make a determination as to what percentage of our work time was taken off. Moreover, given that most Senate faculty actually did more work to cover the work not done by striking TAs and/or researchers–including after the contract was signed and grades had to be submitted–any attempt to reclaim wages is both legally and ethically dubious.

In this regard, we find it troubling that you would simply report that “deans, assistant deans and chief personnel officers will have additional information as they work with the Academic Personnel Office to implement this process.” We ask you to consider that it is the process itself which is deeply flawed and should be challenged by the Senate on behalf of the faculty, as well as on the behalf of our non-ladder faculty colleagues.

To this end, we hope that when the “guidance” comes down about how faculty and other personnel are supposed to report their activities in order to have pay deducted, you will act as advocates for faculty, whom you represent, and not administration/ management. We ask that you respond to the guidelines in a manner that defends the interests of Senate and non-Senate faculty and staff, the extra work that everyone had to do during the strike, and the need to ensure that all about rights and prerogatives are protected going forward.

We look forward to hearing from you as soon as possible and before the administration attempts to impose attestation procedure, how the Senate will act on behalf of its members and the UCI community more broadly.

Sincerely,
The IFA Board
On behalf of the Irvine Faculty Association