UAW 2865

UAW Local 2865 - 19,000 Student workers strong

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Say Their Names

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With rage and sadness we mourn the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and so many more, and honor the uprising sweeping across the country. 

Academic Student Employees (ASEs) and members of other UC unions have been impacted by racist policing in our workplace for years. Last February, UC Irvine police arrested a Black alumna who happened to be passing by a protest. In 2018, a Black AFSCME 3299 member, David Cole, was violently arrested while exercising his legally protected right to strike on the picket line at UC Berkeley. We know that UCPD collaborated at UC Santa Cruz with state forces to surveil and control students and workers simply struggling for livable working conditions. At this very moment, police are using UCLA’s Jackie Robinson Stadium, until now a COVID-19 testing site, to hold protesters arrested for demonstrating against police violence.

The overt violence we’ve witnessed in the recent murders of unarmed Black people in our country is shaped by the context of the structural violence of socio-economic inequity. At our university, already-existing structural inequity was deepened by the gutting of affirmative action and attacks on collective bargaining. ASEs have spoken out all year about inequities they face at UC. UAW 2865 filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against the University of California in early March over its militarized surveillance and policing of ASEs, and offered this settlement to the University proposing to disarm UCPD. As a union we commit to constantly doing better to fight racism, anti-Blackness, and police violence in our workplace and our society.

Unionists live by the maxim that an injury to one is an injury to all. To honor this maxim, we must approach this work as accomplices capable of doing the work of anti-racism together, rather than asking people of color alone to explain and educate, and make our union a powerful tool for justice (find more resources here. UAW 2865 joins the call issued by workers at universities and colleges all over the country to cut ties with police departments. We demand that our university defund and demilitarize UCPD and end collaboration with external police departments. We demand that our university prioritize the health, safety, and economic wellbeing of all its workers and students, and especially those who are people of color. We demand an increase to admissions and programs for retaining Black students at all levels of the institution. 

Find the longer UAW 2865 statement issued on Friday with a list of demonstrations to attend here, a list of protester bail funds to contribute to here, a petition calling for abolishing UCPD here.

Protest Berkeley UAW 2865 Members attended June 1, organized by Oakland Tech Students

In solidarity,

UAW 2865 Executive Board

Kavitha Iyengar, President (Jurisprudence and Social Policy, UC Berkeley)
Tom Hintze, Northern Vice President (English, UC Davis)
Rafael Jaime, Southern Vice President (English, UCLA)
Alec Uebersohn, Financial Secretary (Molecular and Cell Biology, UC Berkeley)
Haley McInnis, Recording Secretary (Sociology, UC San Diego)
Stefanie Doucette, Trustee (English, UC Irvine)
Andrew Elrod, Trustee (Sociology, UC Santa Barbara)
KDan Lee, Trustee (Biological Sciences, UC San Diego)
Sarah Manski, Sergeant-at-Arms (Global Studies, UC Santa Barbara)
Gwen Chodur, Guide (Nutritional Biology, UC Davis)

UAW Academic Workers Respond to Betsy DeVos’s Misguided Title IX Rules

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The Trump administration and Betsy DeVos aren’t letting the COVID-19 crisis slow their efforts to weaken the rights of survivors of sexual assault and harassment. Despite strong opposition, which was voiced by the UAW and tens of thousands of people during the public comments process last year, DeVos issued new Title IX regulations last week that represent a major attack on gender equity.

“One of the main reasons we decided to unionize is because the existing rules are so unfair,” said Lauren Moseley, a bargaining committee member for Graduate Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2110, which represents more than 3,000 research and teaching assistants at Columbia University. “At Columbia, widespread lack of confidence in a system that has too often protected serial harassers makes student workers reluctant to come forward and pursue complaints—and the new Department of Education rules will only make things worse by tilting the scale further in favor of harassers. Our union will continue to stand with survivors by fighting for stronger and fairer recourse in the event of sexual harassment and assault.”

“Academic unions are on the rise because too many people have been intimidated, threatened and forced off their chosen career path for speaking up about the harassment and assault they experienced on campus without real recourse,” said Kavitha Iyengar, President of UAW 2865, which represents more than 19,000 academic workers across the University of California system. “We know – we have represented many of them at grievance hearings, and fought for their rights. DeVos’s new regulations only make it easier for universities to cover up the record of serial harassers and abusers, and deny justice to victims.”

A recent report by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine shows that academia is second only to the U.S. military in the rates of harassment and assault that workers experience. It calls for sweeping changes in how universities address both individual cases and the issue at large. DeVos’s new regulations fail to address the study’s findings.

“Consistent with this administration’s attitudes, DeVos’s new regulations fly in the face of the recommendations that respected scientists are making about how to solve this problem,” said Anke Schennink, President of UAW 5810, which represents over 10,000 postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers at the University of California. “Our union secured some of the first contractual protections for survivors of assault and harassment on campus because it is one of the most common issues our members deal with.”

“A recent study we did among our members found that only a small percentage of those who have experienced predatory behavior come forward. And these new regulations will only make the problem worse,” said Sam Sumpter, Vice President of UAW 4121, which represents over 6,000 academic workers at the University of Washington. “DeVos’s new regulations make clear what survivors are up against: a retraumatizing system that’s rigged to avoid accountability. We have fought hard for enforceable contracts that serve as a counterweight to the broken response processes that embolden perpetrators in the first place.“  

UAW, which represents more than 80,000 academic workers across the U.S., has negotiated some of the first contractually-binding protections for survivors and accountability measures for institutions and perpetrators of abuse at universities across the country. In one case at the University of Connecticut, new protections were used to preserve the job of a survivor and allow her to continue on her career path without being forced to work alongside her abuser. At UCLA, a young woman who experienced pregnancy discrimination was able to keep her job and her visa thanks to  union-negotiated protections and worker solidarity actions. And at other universities, from Harvard to Columbia to Boston College and beyond, academic workers cite the need for structural recourse to sexual harassment as a main reason to unionize.

For more information, visit WorkersEquity.org. 

Info on UC Job Protections Through June 30th

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UC has clarified that its commitment to no-layoffs through June applies both to Academic Student Employees and Graduate Student Researchers. This is a victory for the student researchers, postdocs, and academic researchers who started this petition demanding UC take measures in response to COVID-19 to ensure the safety of researchers in labs, and also prevent layoffs. Sign the petition now to keep the pressure on UC to continue prioritizing workers in its COVID-19 response.

Click here to read the FAQ in detail.

Covid-19 Crisis Makes One Thing Clear: We Need a COLA Now More Than Ever

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By Tom Hintze, UAW 2865 Northern Vice President

The Covid-19 crisis that is destabilizing our world is having a dramatic impact on workers at the University of California. At every campus, UC – our state’s largest employer – is now making fast and unilateral changes to how and where we work to limit the spread of the pandemic. 

For academic workers, this comes in the midst of another crisis. Grappling with sky-high housing costs, workers across the UC system have gone on wildcat strikes to demand a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). Recent announcements that we should work from home to avoid Covid-19 further underline the need for a COLA now, which will help ensure that housing-insecure workers can properly self-isolate to contain the spread of the disease. With the University moving in-person classes online, our living conditions are becoming our students’ learning conditions. Workers expected to teach classes from home must have access to the space and technology required to do so. 

Management’s reorganization of our working conditions has underlined the desperate need for a contractually-guaranteed COLA to help us cope with the ongoing housing crisis. According to federal data, grad workers at every single UC campus are now rent burdened – meaning we spend at least 30% of our take-home pay on rent. Many of us pay up to 60% of our pay (Teaching Assistants take home about $2,400 a month for nine months of the year) to afford a room in a shared apartment, or in many cases, a shared room. 

As grad workers who perform the majority of teaching and grading work at UC, we rely on our classroom and office space to teach sections, tutor students, grade and complete research. If we are expected to work from our homes, it isn’t appropriate to pay us so little that we must do so from a shared dorm room (the rents on which UC raised last year). For student parents, school cancellations mean caring for children at home, which places an additional burden on them. 

The good news is that UC has already agreed to bargain over changes in the workplace due to Covid-19. And, after long negotiations between the union and the university, UC has agreed to reinstate health care coverage for all 80+ Santa Cruz workers who were fired due to their participation in the wildcat strike. But this public health emergency underlines the already precarious situation grad workers are in, and the urgent need for UC to negotiate a COLA, an on-campus rent freeze, resources for working at home, and accomodations and trainings for all workers at UC. In other words, UC needs to ensure that we can live with dignity and do our work effectively.

Recently our union, which represents more than 19,000 academic workers across UC, scheduled an Unfair Labor Practices Strike Authorization Vote in reaction to UC’s unilateral changes to working conditions, refusal to bargain directly with the union over COLA, and unjust discipline of wildcat strikers. If the vote is successful, our members will have democratically decided to authorize a state-wide strike, which would affect every campus and every department at UC. Members will ultimately decide what to do and when in this fast-changing situation, and the University must address all the issues we face as workers and community members at UC. 

It is my hope that UC agrees to bargain a meaningful, contractually-binding Cost of Living Adjustment, among the other things that I and my colleagues need to make it through this crisis. Until then, we will continue to organize in opposition to a system that puts our dignity and health at risk.