Teamsters Bargaining Team Hold Ground & Reach Tentative Agreement on Key Articles
During this week’s bargaining sessions we were able to reach a tentative agreement on Article 17 Military Leave, improving temporary leave per training order, eligibility for pay, and including leave for members of the Civil Air Patrol; Article 28 Positions and Appointments, adding conversion to career status for accreted titles; and Article 29 Probationary Period, adding credit toward probation for accreted titles.
The UC passed us three proposals: Article 16 Medical Separation, Article 17 Military Leave, and Article 36 Sick Leave, attempting to enhance leaves for per diem workers in line with the new state law.
We passed the UC four proposals: Article 44 Vacation, improving use for illness or personal reasons other than vacation, including senior professional accrual rates and caps for recently added titles, allowing for cash-out for over-maximum vacation amounts, and improving eligibility for pay in relation to curtailment; Article 32 Resignation/Job Abandonment, improving the deadline for final paychecks from 10 days to 3 days; and Article 45 Wages, including fair raises for all our members, rejection of UC’s proposed takeaways, and substantial increases for per diem workers whose pay scales are falling behind.
There was much discussion around the UC proposal to remove healthcare caps and replace them with temporary subsidies, the Team also tried to gain a better understanding over an agreement that the UC made with one of our sister Unions where they replaced the flat dollar cap with a percentage cap for employee healthcare premium costs. “I personally feel that we need to be very careful not to agree to anything that cost us more in the long run. I already feel they are trying to take away what we gained in the last contract” Jennifer Carrero, UC Merced Early Childhood Education.
We also discussed the shortfalls of UC’s current bilingual pay practices where the locations are intentionally refusing to certify workers as bilingual and requiring other workers to be bilingual in their job descriptions and not pay them. “The UC compared being bilingual to knowing how to use Excel— essentially that it is just another skill to list as a job requirement without additional compensation. This clearly demonstrates that being bilingual is not something the UC values enough to compensate for when they require it from us to communicate with the patients.” Tiffany Rodriguez, UC Berkeley Optometry
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Learn more about our contract negotiations and have your questions answered at a membership meeting at your worksite. Find a CX Unit member meeting by clicking here to go to our online calendar.
