Category: Uncategorized

By David Bacon
CFT United, 5/25/21
https://www.cft.org/article/job-security-still-table-uc-lecturers

All photos © David Bacon, from strikes by lecturers, clericals, technical workers and others at the University of California Berkeley campus, 2002 and 2003.

When lecturers at the University of California fought in 1984 to win recognition for their union and the right to bargain, their biggest issue was job security. The university had a barbaric rule – lecturers were automatically terminated at the end of three to eight years of teaching, depending on the department. If, indeed, they lasted that long. At UC Santa Cruz, lecturer Roz Spofford proudly told her colleagues, “Our local was the first to fight the ‘four year’ rule. With AFT support, we were able to save the jobs of lecturers statewide.”

These contingent faculty members voted for the union by an overwhelming majority in one of the first elections held under the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act. They then went into negotiations. It took two years to win agreement from the university on their first contract, and its signal achievement was ending the termination rule.

UC labor activist Margy Wilkinson, addressing rally of UC students, staff and lecturers.

Other contracts followed. After strikes on some campuses in 2002 and a three-year campaign, the union won continuing 3-year appointments for lecturers who complete six years of teaching and pass an exam, jokingly called by some “passing through the eye of the needle.” The university has to renew the appointments so long as classes are available the lecturer can teach.

Today, however, job security is still the most important issue for lecturers, especially for those still trying to reach the six-year goal. Only 7.8 percent of lecturers since 2003 have had continuing appointments. According to John Branstetter, president of the UC-AFT chapter at UCLA, it is difficult for lecturers to reach continuing status, because the closer they get to the six-year goal, the likelier it is they won’t be rehired.

The solution put forward by UC-AFT is a system to protect the job rights of lecturers as they continue teaching, especially their right to be rehired from one year to the next. But the unwillingness of the University of California administration to recognize job security as a key issue is preventing agreement on a new contract, although the old one expired over a year ago.

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CCDS Socialist Education Project Fourth Monday Webinar May 24, 2021, 9 pm Eastern Time  More than Neighbors: US/México Solidarity   We think of México as a neighbor with whom we share a border. But just four decades after México won independence from Spain, the US annexation of nearly half of México melded the two countries’ peoples and destinies. The history of the US/México relationship, both on the part of the two governments and also on the part of the two peoples, is not past; it defines the present and determines the future. How is that manifested? How can those relationships be developed so working people of México and the US can effect transformational change?   Join Javier Bravo, historian and Morena activist in Guanajuato, and BIll Gallegos, veteran of the Chicano movement in the US. Both are founders of the bi-national México Solidarity Project.   Join Zoom Meeting https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88323891079?pwd=VlZCbDFBUEh5YTJsMmpabE5UdFlNZz09   Meeting ID: 883 2389 1079 Passcode: 270430 One tap mobile +19294362866,,88323891079#,,,,*270430# US (New York) +13017158592,,88323891079#,,,,*270430# US (Washington DC)   Dial by your location +1 929 436 2866 US (New York) +1 301 715 8592 US (Washington DC) +1 312 626 6799 US (Chicago) +1 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) +1 253 215 8782 US (Tacoma) +1 346 248 7799 US (Houston) Meeting ID: 883 2389 1079 Passcode: 270430 Find your local number: https://us02web.zoom.us/u/knrRN8WmE

By David Bacon
The Nation, January 12, 2021

In California’s agricultural heartland, farmworkers are fighting back against expensive rents, substandard housing, and economic disenfranchisement.

Support for this reporting came from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Poplar, Calif.-In the Covid era, poverty in California’s rural agricultural counties has become deadly. California now has over 2.7 million coronavirus cases. While Los Angeles, with its huge population, has the largest number of cases with over 920,000, the highest infection rates actually are to be found in less-populous counties with large farmworker populations. Imperial County, right across the border from Mexicali, Mexico, and Kings County, just south of Fresno, both have well over 10,000 cases per every 100,000 residents. California is the richest state in the United States, so it’s easy to forget that its rural poverty and substandard farmworker housing have contributed to the surge in Covid-19 cases here.

Tulare County, a large county in California’s southern San Joaquin Valley, was a tourist destination in better times-it’s home to the towering forests of the Sequoia National Park. But Tulare is also a working county-it was here that the United Farm Workers was born out of the 1965 grape strike, and it remains one of the most important agricultural regions in the state and the country. Tulare, with a population of about 466,000, has 34,479 Covid-19 cases, and 406 people have died. That gives it infection and death rates more than twice those of urban San Francisco or Silicon Valley’s Santa Clara County.

Covid rates follow income. Family annual income in San Francisco and Santa Clara is more than twice that of Tulare. Over 32,000 the county’s residents are farmworkers, and farmworker families survive on less than half of what most US families earn.

In Tulare, poverty forces people to live closer together to share rent and living costs, making social distancing difficult. People here go to work because they have no cushion of savings-a day without pay can be difficult; a week could be ruinous. Traveling to and from the fields in crowded cars or buses also places workers in close proximity. “Getting better housing has become a survival need at a time when existing conditions make the threat of the virus much much worse,” Mari Perez, an organizer with the Larry Itliong Resource Center in Poplar, a farmworker community in Tulare County, told me.

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