BY THE UC BERKELEY FACULTY ASSOCIATION
The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) is famed for its tough bargaining tactics in its dealings with its unions. From its ongoing conflict with AFSCME for failing to comply with its own rules around subcontracting, to a belligerent tendency to cancel AFT bargaining sessions at the last minute, to a more recent attempt to avoid committing to rehire any of its pre-six lecturers during the pandemic, UCOP has treated its relations with unions as a zero-sum game. The University of California is California’s largest employer, and its unions have many friends among the state’s Democratic majority. These tactics have not played well in Sacramento, where legislators with close relations with the unions have repeatedly weighed in on the side of the unions.
Another way is possible! The University’s primary infrastructure is its people. We educate young people and produce knowledge. While classrooms, libraries, and labs are important, the minds, spirits and energies of those who work on campus are essential and indispensable. We — those of us who work at the UC, unionized and not — are the beating heart of the University of California. The unions that represent most workers on campus speak for those energies. The administration should be collaborating with UC unions, not trying to wear them down.
Budgets are illuminating; they reveal where an institution’s priorities lie. Berkeley’s Office of Government and Community Relations employs seven staff people. Its Office of University Development and Alumni Relations, on the other hand, employs 264. Our campus seems to have given up on arguing for our public service mandate and character, choosing instead to appeal to the generous but capricious whims of private philanthropy.
Rather than reshaping our mission to attract private funds and fighting with the unions over crumbs, UCOP and UC Berkeley administrators should be making common cause with them in the state capital. The University of California is vital to the State. It provides good jobs now, even as it educates the citizens of tomorrow to contend with the profound social challenges coming our way. That is an argument that campus administrations and the unions need to be making together.
If campus administration won’t put its energies there, the faculty, both through the Academic Senate and through BFA, must lead by example. The Council of UC Faculty Associations (CUCFA), to which BFA belongs, already works in Sacramento. In the year to come, faculty need to be organizing with our union colleagues as a coalitional bloc, making the argument to legislators for public funding for California’s most defining public institution – its higher education system.
Leslie Salzinger, Sharad Chari, Paul Fine and You-tien Hsing for the Board of the Berkeley Faculty Association
