We secured this opportunity to have legally binding negotiations with the University over staffing in our latest union contract. It’s the first time the University has agreed to negotiate over staffing in any department in the state, and we should take good advantage of these negotiations. This week was the first week of bargaining.
Coming out of this week, our plan going forward is to look through each of the largest classes to evaluate where they’re at with staffing and how much of an increase in staffing would be needed to run these courses acceptably. To do this, we need active participation from students and course staff in every course. One immediate step is for course staff to circulate this course quality survey to all students enrolled in your course (if you are taking courses yourself, go ahead and fill it out). Bargaining sessions will happen Mondays and Wednesdays from 2:30-5:00 and are open to all. We’ll hold a caucus from 2:30-3pm, where we’ll go over how bargaining works and talk about what we’re going to discuss during the bargaining session, and then the department & campus representatives will join from 3-5pm. Room booking is annoying, so the location is TBD.
For more frequent updates, make sure to tune into our “EECS Staffing Negotiations Discussion” (formerly “EECS Strike Discussion”) Slack workspace, which everyone should have been invited to a while ago (if you can’t find your invite, please email me to get added: drothchild@berkeley.edu). If you want to help out but you’re not available during bargaining, please reach out via email or Slack
For those who are interested, here’s a summary of how the first week of bargaining went:
This week we had two productive bargaining sessions. In the first session, we heard from Jedi Tsang about understaffing in 61b, where we would need an additional 82 TA hours and 115 tutor hours just to account for current levels of overwork, even without shortening OH queues or allowing ASEs to spend more than just a few minutes per ticket. Next, we heard from Jalen Gooch about CS 10, where there’s so few staff that readers run OH, the head TAs are appointed at only 8 hours instead of 20, there are only 6 TAs (all 8hr) and 50 AIs, and the class wouldn’t have existed this semester even in this understaffed format without an anonymous donation.
In the second session, we heard from members of course staff for CS170 and CS162, who similarly reported that we need drastic increases in staffing. Then, we heard from John DeNero, who presented two preliminary scenarios for what might happen if the university fails to supply the resources necessary for us to teach our classes in an acceptable format. In the first preliminary scenario, enrollment is cut by 20%, course staff headcount is reduced by 35%, including a 66% reduction in (u)GSI positions. In the second preliminary scenario, most large courses have all their sections eliminated and replaced with two “mega” zoom sections. Enrollment isn’t cut, and course staff positions overall increase by 20%, but (u)GSI headcount is reduced by 81%. In this scenario, readers & tutors would likely have to pick up admin work such as handling DSP accommodations. These scenarios are still preliminary, but we find both to be clearly unacceptable, since they would result in increased overwork, readers & tutors doing work that should be done by TAs or professors, and worse educational outcomes. Even though the details of these scenarios are still uncertain, John’s presentation highlights the absolute necessity that the campus fund our department adequately and that the >100 faculty in this department step up to actively take part in teaching courses instead of pushing the work onto a few professors & lecturers, and an army of administrative TAs.
Daniel Rothchild, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science