What’s all this about OPEB?
OPEB, which stands for Other Post-Employee Benefits, is a system to jointly (through both employer and employee contributions) prefund health benefits that full time faculty will receive after they retire. If you’ve been following our Board of Trustees meetings, you know that accurately budgeting for employer-side OPEB contributions has been a recent topic of interest. The topic of employee contributions is wholly separate and involves understanding the history of how these deductions came to be.
So how is OPEB supposed to work for employees? When CCSF joined the Retiree Health Care Trust Fund, CCSF needed to comply with the employer and employee contribution requirements. In July 2016, following negotiations with AFT, the process of collecting employee deductions began.
The agreement reached, and ultimately codified in Article 21 F of the AFT contract, is as follows:
— Full-timers hired before January 1, 2014: The deduction is 0.25%. It will rise 0.25% per year to a max of 1%.
— Full-timers hired on or after January 1, 2014: The deduction is 2%.
These deductions are only applied to faculty who are full-time general fund employees (who are also eligible for this benefit). Categorical (grant-funded) employees are not eligible, even if they are full-time.
What’s happening now? A few months ago, a couple faculty members brought a concern about incorrect OPEB deductions in their paychecks to your AFT 2121 Grievance Team. (Note: The AFT 2121 Grievance Team is the team that deals with issues of the District improperly following our contract or failing to follow our contract.) We determined that these faculty were indeed being over-deducted, and we initiated the grievance process with the District over their misapplication of Article 21F of our contract.
This week, the AFT 2121 Grievance Team has responded to more inquiries about the faculty side of OPEB contributions along with concerns and inaccuracies about the status of this grievance.
Part of this grievance process includes first gathering payroll information from the District to determine the extent of the issue. We are still trying to get complete and accurate data from the District to determine the scope of the problem, specific individuals affected and amounts involved. While the parties are still in the process of going through over 40,000 payroll records, it appears that there have been both over and under deductions. This grievance will likely affect a large, still unknown number of faculty and because it is related to pay, getting accurate accounting for each faculty member is essential. When the team determines that you are impacted and calculates the amount you are owed, you will receive notification that provides further details.
That said, you can also support the process and take action by filling out the payroll reporting form: https://leadernet.aft.org/
Update: COVID Sick Leave
Last Spring, faculty finally won an agreement to be credited with our COVID sick leave.
To nobody’s surprise, implementation has been slow and full of errors.
HR and AFT 2121 agreed that the office of instruction didn’t have complete records of who was in–person. So instead of using the office of instruction information, the District had chairs and deans report our hours to HR. But when they posted the information on our employee dashboards at the end of summer, here’s what we’ve found:
-
Some faculty have sick leave showing but the numbers are wrong. Some are close, some are not so close, but in every case we’ve seen, the number showing is less than what it should be.
-
Some faculty have zero COVID hours showing even though they worked in person. All librarians are in this group – the whole department.
-
All the COVID sick leave is listed as hours, so what should be five days comes out as five hours.
-
In fact, we have not yet found a single instance where the numbers posted on the Employee Dashboard are correct, except in cases where the correct number is zero.
This week, the AFT 2121 grievance team found the reason. It turns out that even though the District earlier had acknowledged that the office of instruction didn’t have all the information, they used the office of instruction data on our employee dashboards. Payroll might have the correct numbers that the chairs and deans submitted, but faculty can’t see those numbers.
HR has not given a timeline for getting the correct leave posted. Your Grievance Team will continue to push for proper implementation of our agreement.
Follow Us!