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