POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN
During the recent landmark strike by some 48,000 graduate student employees in the University of California system, many Senate (tenure-track) faculty members chose to honor picket lines in various ways. Such sympathy actions are legal, but employers are entitled under the law to dock the pay of anyone who does not work. UC, however, has no system for accounting the various forms of faculty work — teaching, research, service, etc. Thus, apparently on the order of UC President Michael Drake, on Friday, January 13, Senate faculty received forms asking them to voluntarily “attest” to the quantity of work they withheld during the strike. In response, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), an AAUP partner organization, issued the following statement:
On 13 January 2023, the UC Office of the President requested that campuses distribute self-attestation forms asking Senate faculty to report the quantity of labor they withheld in support of the multi-unit UAW strike so UC can dock their pay accordingly. While UCOP has the legal right to dock pay for work that was not done during the strike, we believe that UC’s attempt to survey faculty about whether or not they honored the picket line is unlawful and you are not required to submit these forms. The University of California Council of Faculty Associations (CUCFA) and the Santa Cruz Faculty Association (SCFA), a collective bargaining unit for UCSC’s Senate faculty, sent a cease and desist letter on 17 January 2023 to the administration stating that UCOP’s deliberate implementation of these forms in response to protected activity is illegal and must be rescinded immediately.
In requesting these attestations expressly in order to dock pay, the administration is treating strike-related absences differently than the many other instances in which faculty have missed department meetings or canceled a class and not had their pay withheld, such as while caring for a sick family member or attending conferences. This indicates that the primary purpose of distributing attestation forms is to undermine Senate faculty solidarity with other workers and to discourage our participation in protected concerted activity. UCOP’s willingness to penalize us specifically and uniquely for strike-related absences has a chilling effect on campus labor organizing.
Leaving aside the question of its legality, the effort to dock faculty pay disregards the many ways faculty contribute to the University’s mission beyond our contractual obligations, required duties, or a standard forty hour work week. Senate faculty regularly give far more to the UC than is explicitly required of us without receiving any additional compensation for our efforts. What kind of employer refuses to materially acknowledge the many ways employees went above and beyond during the COVID pandemic and then threatens those same workers with pay docking for engaging in acts of solidarity with graduate student workers fighting for a liveable wage?
Furthermore, attestation forms – with their desire to precisely quantify and their timecard-like concern with counting the hours, days, and percentages of monthly labor performed – reveal a profound misunderstanding of faculty work. Senate faculty well know that the boundaries of our work for the university are not easily determined and confound the type of calculation demanded by these forms. It is unclear how we are supposed to determine the percentage of work we believe has been withheld. As salaried employees who often work uneven hours as circumstances demand, many faculty worked above and beyond their regular schedules in the weeks leading up to and following the strike in order to mitigate their absences. How are we to account for these complexities in the quantitative metrics of self-attestations?
Choosing to spend significant staff time and resources on creating and processing these forms instead of helping campuses complete missing grades and prepare for the new pay scales for ASEs, postdocs, and student researchers, shows an administration with little understanding of the challenges the strike and its settlement still pose to the teaching and research mission of the university.
We are disappointed that UCOP has chosen to punitively distribute attestation forms and believe that these are an unlawful attempt to suppress labor action. CUCFA will continue to advocate for faculty rights and to stand in solidarity with other workers to fight for a public university where working conditions are safe and equitable, and where workers can afford to live where they work.
As of today the UC administration has not responded to the cease and desist letter.
Contributing editor Hank Reichman is professor emeritus of history at California State University, East Bay; former AAUP vice-president and president of the AAUP Foundation; and from 2012-2021 Chair of AAUP’s Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure. His book, The Future of Academic Freedom, based in part on posts to this blog, was published in 2019. His Understanding Academic Freedom was published in October, 2021.
