Our CX Unit Teamsters Bargaining Team met with the UC team to begin contract negotiations at our Oakland Union Hall Sept 16-17. Our team detailed our bargaining priorities and goals for members, which includes fair raises, maintenance of healthcare and other benefits, and keeping parking affordable.

“Most of us work paycheck to paycheck, struggling for basic needs, and our benefits are thrown in our faces because of the costs while insurance providers play the denial game. Do the right thing and pay top dollar for top talent,” said Jennifer Carrero, a Child Development Teacher at UC Merced and member of the CX Unit Bargaining Team.

UC’s first proposal was for “Ground Rules” which would limit or restrict what we can do during the bargaining process and limiting what we could share about our progress. The UC also wants more control over the time and place of future sessions and who can sit in or participate in negotiations, which Teamsters Local 2010 Secretary-Treasurer Jason Rabinowitz refused. Rabinowitz said we will follow the law in this respect and invite whomever we wanted to our bargaining sessions.

As part of our action plan, our Bargaining Team members also emphasized our bargaining priorities at the UC Board of Regents meeting on Sept. 17.  Sharing that UC worker pay is at an all-time low compared to the cost of living and that UC keeps hiking costs for healthcare, parking, and retirement, while refusing to process and pay bilingual pay requests for our members who support students and healthcare. 

Members also spoke on the federal lawsuit filed by Teamsters Local 2010 and all of the other UC Unions against the Trump administration’s attempt to extort money from the UC while threatening and undercutting funding for our jobs and rights as workers. We urged the Regents to stand with us against these attacks and not capitulate to demands of kickbacks or extortion and make no agreement that would compromise our freedom of speech and rights as workers to rally and speak freely.

“Don’t dupe employees and keep your promise to employees for full healthcare. Give us the benefits we’ve earned,” said Dianna Sahhar, a Library Assistant 3 at UC Irvine and member of the CX Unit Bargaining Team.

Our team made the following proposals:

Article 1 – Access Would increase the number of Union shop stewards due to our Bargaining Unit’s significant growth.

Article 4 – Catastrophic Leave A systemwide donation pool for workers in need.

Article 5 – Corrective Action & Discipline UC would notify Union Representatives the same time they give notice of discipline to employees.

Article 7 – Grievance Procedure (TA) Reached a Tentative Agreement (TA) on a process for filing systemwide grievances where the same violation occurs at more than one location.

Article 9 – Holidays A new floating holiday and more flexibility for Medical Center employees to use Cesar Chavez Day.

Article 12 – Labor Management Meeting Increases the number of members to be released for labor management meetings.

Article 20 – No Strikes Ability to strike in sympathy with our sister Unions and honor other Teamsters sanctioned picket lines while our contract is in effect.

Article 21 – Nondiscrimination in Employment. Would add ethnicity, gender transition, and childbirth to the nondiscrimination list and proposes mutual agreement for abeyance requests.

Article 22 – Out-of-Class Assignment Out-of-class pay would begin after 10 days instead of 15 and institutes safeguards to keep departments from intentionally not compensating for out-of-class work.

Article 23 – Parking Parking fees would not increase for the life of the new contract and would issue refunds when parking is not available to workers.

Article 25 – Payroll Deductions UC would pay for payroll errors when it’s their fault and institutes a process for payment plans so workers aren’t negatively impacted by overpayments.

UC made proposals on the following Articles and proposed current contract language for sixteen articles:

Article 2 – Agreement Employee reclassification would no longer be subject to the review of the Public Employment Relation Board (PERB).

Article 15 – Management Rights Current remote work and telecommute policies would be subject to management rights. Our team said that UC already controls how this is managed through Article 10-Hours of Work.

Article 25 – Performance Evaluations Would implement a digital signing and storage process for performance evaluations.

Before we left for the day, UC gave us counter proposals to Article 2 – Agreement, and Article 5 – Corrective Action & Discipline.

The teams meet again in San Diego on September 24-25.

Please complete the bargaining survey emailed to each member and sign our petition to hold UC accountable. You can also show your support for our Bargaining Team by wearing Top Talent stickers and displaying a table tent and/or Zoom background.