Santa Cruz Coalition of Univ. Employees

Many of you apply for and receive reclassifications of your position. In some cases, you generate the request - in others, it's your supervisor or manager. In either event, you fill out and submit a new job description that may represent new work you're doing, perhaps at a higher level of expertise and responsibility.

When you submit your reclass request, it often takes between four and six months before the Union receives it from Labor Relations. For example, we received eight such requests to review reclassifications in early November and all of them had been completed and submitted by workers in early March. The Union is concerned that workers are being told that the Union delays reviewing the reclass requests for long periods of time, when in fact the University delays forwarding them to us.

There is no timeline for reclassification. You can submit one at any time and the University is under no obligation to review and respond and is further under no time constraints if they do. If the Union does not approve a reclassification, it does not go through. CUE is commited to meeting with workers going through the reclass process. We understand that sometimes reclassification is a way to get a raise.

Often, workers who are reclassified to a higher position have been doing that higher level work for a year or two or three before the reclass took place. When the University places a worker in a higher level job (that's been performed for a long time) and then does not include a raise, it confirms for the Union that the University does not have the worker's best interest at heart.

Since mid-2006, the University sent the Union sixty requests for reclassification. Fifty-two of them proposed to move the worker into a unit called 99 - a designation that means the position and the worker would be unrepresented by any union. If approved, those workers would then be working "at-will", that is, with no protection from discipline including termination.

Overall, the University's reclass proposals either do not include any raise in pay or offers minimal wage increases. On the other hand, recently there have been a few "equity adjustments" (raises) that resulted in some workers getting 12% and 16% wage increases.

Because University workers cannot move through the steps on the salary schedule based on seniority, or longevity, reclassification is often the only way to get a raise. Workers should give careful consideration, however, to the balance of becoming an unrepresented employee by being designated a 99. There are certainly instances in which the designation is warranted and appropriate, but at the rate UCSC is going, a large number of (former) CUE workers will be moved out of the union into the great unknown (and we believe perilous) arena of non-union employment.

We are interested in any feedback you have to this. If you have questions, concerns or just want to discuss it, contact Nora Hochman, CUE Organizer, at 420.0258, or email her at nora at santacruzcue dot org.