Thanks to all 18 unranked faculty members who attended the last bargaining session with CCA administration, and to everyone who wore stickers to the faculty meeting and held banners. CCA administration has continually characterized CCA union proposals as “a solution in search of a problem” and suggested that there are “many” unranked faculty who are happy with how things are and don’t need job security or fair compensation. Every time you demonstrate publicly that the bargaining team represents the members’ priorities, the process improves.
The CCA union bargaining team has submitted another comprehensive proposal to the administration that includes all outstanding items. We have mostly resolved all the boilerplate contract provisions, and what remains are the issues of job security and reciprocal commitment to the CCA community, and money. We have been asking the administration bargaining team repeatedly since July to give us a formal response to the opening economic proposals we gave them a year ago. The administration has refused to bargain over economics, but has instead vaguely condemned our proposals as “stratospheric.” They are essentially demanding that we bargain against ourselves.
Members who visited the bargaining session on August 24 witnessed how the administration’s team arrived without a counterproposal and spent almost an hour in a separate room preparing it while the union bargaining team waited. The returned counterproposal on Classifications had just one sentence revised from the administration’s previous response from May.
This is how CCA administration has been “negotiating” since April 2016 on the core issues relating to job security – offering miniscule, essentially cosmetic changes to the status quo. Clearly the administration aims to lock the current system in place. On job security, the administration maintains an absolute right for discretion from the Provost to decide whether to promote unranked faculty, to offer longer-term teaching contracts, or to assign courses. Leaving everything to the whim of the Provost entirely undoes the point of a union. Unranked faculty make up less than 10% of the budget of CCA, so CCA could easily afford significant raises to unranked faculty for the cost of one overpaid administrator.
We informed the administration’s bargaining team starting on August 11 that we did not think it would be productive to keep meeting until everything was on the table. We will be happy to meet with them again when they’re ready to try to reach an agreement.
In solidarity,
The Bargaining Team and the CAT
The CCA union bargaining team has submitted another comprehensive proposal to the administration that includes all outstanding items. We have mostly resolved all the boilerplate contract provisions, and what remains are the issues of job security and reciprocal commitment to the CCA community, and money. We have been asking the administration bargaining team repeatedly since July to give us a formal response to the opening economic proposals we gave them a year ago. The administration has refused to bargain over economics, but has instead vaguely condemned our proposals as “stratospheric.” They are essentially demanding that we bargain against ourselves.
Members who visited the bargaining session on August 24 witnessed how the administration’s team arrived without a counterproposal and spent almost an hour in a separate room preparing it while the union bargaining team waited. The returned counterproposal on Classifications had just one sentence revised from the administration’s previous response from May.
This is how CCA administration has been “negotiating” since April 2016 on the core issues relating to job security – offering miniscule, essentially cosmetic changes to the status quo. Clearly the administration aims to lock the current system in place. On job security, the administration maintains an absolute right for discretion from the Provost to decide whether to promote unranked faculty, to offer longer-term teaching contracts, or to assign courses. Leaving everything to the whim of the Provost entirely undoes the point of a union. Unranked faculty make up less than 10% of the budget of CCA, so CCA could easily afford significant raises to unranked faculty for the cost of one overpaid administrator.
We informed the administration’s bargaining team starting on August 11 that we did not think it would be productive to keep meeting until everything was on the table. We will be happy to meet with them again when they’re ready to try to reach an agreement.
In solidarity,
The Bargaining Team and the CAT