BERKELEY – Academic workers have reached a settlement with UC Berkeley administration that will extend the Clipper BayPass pilot program through its full term and look for avenues to expand it to all workers. This concludes a grievance over activities that could have circumvented the transit articles in our contracts. Our unions and UC Berkeley have issued a joint statement about the settlement that discusses the future of BayPass in more detail.
MTC’s pilot of the Clipper BayPass program only includes a small, random subgroup of Berkeley students and workers. This may be in line with good practices for a transit study, but the University did not notify or negotiate with our union about its implementation. Under our contracts, workers have the right to participate in transit programs on an equal basis; if the University wants to change those terms, it must negotiate them.
“This settlement puts our members at UC Berkeley on the path to getting access to free transit across the Bay Area,” said Connor Jackson, a GSRA at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and a PhD Candidate in Agricultural and Resource Economics, as well as one of the main grievance handlers, “and continues the MTC’s important work of expanding access to effective, affordable transit to everyone in the Bay Area and across California.”
Read the full statement below:
