Join UC-AFT

Why Join UC-AFT?
 
Membership status gives you full voting rights in the union and sends a strong message of solidarity that is particularly important in hard economic times. 
 
Please take a minute to fill out and send the union membership form (below).  It doesn’t change the amount you already pay, and your department isn’t notified of your membership status.  (Members, however, are not able to request a rebate of the portion of dues spent on political activity).  As a member of UC-AFT, you are also eligible for special benefits provided to members.  If you’d like to hear more about the benefits, individual and collective, of joining the union, please read on. 
 
 
What We've Won: 
 
Because of our union’s success at the bargaining table, lecturers are guaranteed a 3% cost of living increase in October, 2008 and another in 2009 – and this despite the university-wide budget cutbacks coming from Sacramento!  The union also won additional raises for lecturers with ten to twenty years of service at UCI.  And, if you teach composition or foreign language classes, you’re seeing workload reductions from nine to eight units.  In addition, the University was unable to unilaterally impose furloughs on lecturers and, in September 2009 as other UC employees faced wage cuts, the UCOP announced that lecturers were "non-affected by" the furloughs.
 
Our union’s Memorandum of Understanding with the University of California has some of the best salary and job security protection provisions for non-tenure-track instructors of any college or university in the nation.  It did not get that way without a solid organized core of lecturers and some hard work by our leadership.  We need new lecturers to join with us, and any long-term lecturers who still have not joined to acknowledge what we have already accomplished by filling out a membership form.
 
The entire text of our contract (the Memorandum of Understanding) is available online at  www.cft.org/councils/uc/lec.contract.  If you have questions about your rights to be rehired, getting a continuing appointment after six years, or about any other employment issues -- feel free to contact your labor representative, Mary Coomes, or grievance steward and President Andrew Tonkovich at any time. 
 
What Benefits Do Members Receive?
See details at CFT.org
 
Membership Form:
 
Click on the Join UC-AFT link in the Main Page box on the right hand side the Local 2226 page.  If you're unable to access the membership form online, please e-mail to request the form at mary.ucaft@yahoo.com.