The Strike: Meet Mr. Mediator

Tuesday, December 13, 2022

The mayor of Sacramento, Darrell Steinberg, has been selected by both sides as the mediator for the student worker strike. Before you say, wait - he isn't a labor relations professional, note that he actually has a labor relations background. Moreover, as a politician, both at the municipal level and earlier at the level of the state legislature, you do lots of informal mediation to get compromises. From the Sacramento Bee:

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg will mediate negotiations between the University of California and two United Auto Workers bargaining units that represent about 36,000 striking academic workers. The nearly month-long walkout came to a partial end when 12,000 senior-most researchers, also represented by the UAW, voted last week to ratify contracts that boosted their pay by at least 20%. They returned to work on Monday.

The two UAW units representing teaching assistants, tutors and graduate student researchers, among others, voted to move to private mediation on Friday. The decision followed the university’s announcement that it would not present any new proposals in bargaining. UC has asked for a private mediator since the beginning of the strike. Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office proposed Steinberg as a candidate for mediator, according to the unions, and both parties agreed to his appointment. The mayor, a former staff attorney for CSEA/SEIU Local 1000, met with both parties over the weekend, his office confirmed.

In October, Steinberg facilitated an agreement between thousands of striking mental health workers and Kaiser Permanente after only a week of negotiations. The walkout had lasted 10 weeks. “We feel that in order to make progress, it is time for somebody else to step in,” said Tarini Hardikar, a bargaining team member from UC Berkeley, in a statement...

Full story at https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/education/article269910107.html.

To hear the text above, click on the link below:

https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/steinberg.mp3

Moving Right Along: The Big Ten Strategy for the Final Regents Meeting

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

As by now all blog readers will know, the Regents are meeting today at UCLA. The Health Services Committee will meet first in the morning and will likely hear about the student worker strike in public comments.

In the afternoon, however, comes the Big Event: What is billed as the final meeting to decide whether to override Chancellor Block and veto UCLA's move from the Pac-12 to the Big Ten. (This session is also the final Regents meeting of 2022; the meeting that was set for tomorrow in Riverside of the Special Committee on Innovation Transfer & Entrepreneurship has been cancelled.)

As we have noted in past blog postings, both athletic conferences have adopted various strategies for trying to influence the Regents. The most recent - by the Pac-12 - is to highlight the fact that its Big Buck negotiations for TV and media rights are stalled because no one knows for sure what the Regents will do.* The Big Ten, in contrast, seems to have adopted a moving-right-along strategy. That strategy seems to be to assume that UCLA's move to the Big Ten is a Done Deal and therefore very publicly set plans for the future on that assumption. The Done-Deal approach - we're just moving right along - seems to be to emphasize that the agreement reached last summer by UCLA under full authority of the Regents is ironclad. The implicit implication of moving right along with future plans is that breaking the deal would lead to costly litigation. From The Athletic:

As college football conferences weigh changes to their scheduling structures before College Football Playoff expansion, the Big Ten will incorporate a methodical approach to 2024. The Big Ten will keep its East and West divisions through the 2023 season, and then USC and UCLA are slated to become official members on Aug. 2, 2024. It’s a near certainty the conference will then switch to a single-conference layout for scheduling and championship game qualification. But there are a few details to discuss before making it official, largely the number of protected rivals and opponent frequency. The topic has generated significant discussion but likely will wait until the league’s winter meetings in mid-February or perhaps as late as the spring meetings in May before it concludes.

“The goal is to have it done soon,” said Iowa athletics director Gary Barta, who ranks

second in tenure among Big Ten [athletic directors] behind Ohio State’s Gene Smith. “I don’t know what soon is, but at this point, it’ll be into the next year. But the sooner the better because we’re all trying to make plans. I think most of us anticipate where it’s headed, but we need to finalize it.”

Other issues have taken precedence over the future scheduling model, especially after the Big Ten accepted USC and UCLA on June 30. The conference had to finalize a future media rights deal, which it did in mid-August. Commissioner Kevin Warren then focused on the intricacies and negotiations associated with Playoff expansion, which was approved for 12 teams and will begin in 2024...

Full story at https://theathletic.com/3995657/2022/12/13/big-ten-football-scheduledivisions-usc-ucla/.

So, now - with everyone's strategy in play - all we have to do is wait for the Regents to dig themselves out of the hole the governor put them in...

* http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/12/a-lot-of-folks-are-assumingregents.html.

To hear the text above, click on the link below:

https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/moving.mp3