Vote No: Open Letter from UCLA Rank and File Workers

The open letter below was written by UCLA rank and file members of UAW 2865 and Student Researchers United. It was sent in email form to fellow workers at UCLA on the first day of the ratification vote period, Monday, December 19, 2022. The signatories are only some of many at UCLA (and many more statewide) who are confident in the grassroots power of the strike and urgently determined to win more than what UC has offered.

To our colleagues at UCLA and across the University of California,

Last Friday, small majorities of the UAW 2865 and SRU bargaining teams voted to tentatively agree to a contract proposal from the UC. This took place only 10 minutes into their meeting and only an hour after hearing widespread objections from members about the rushed timeline and how the contract doesn’t meet their needs.

Voting on whether to ratify this contract begins today, but before you make your decision, we as concerned rank and file members from departments across UCLA would like to share why we believe that the proposal is inadequate and that a stronger contract is within reach if we vote no. If you believe we can and must win more from this contract, vote no on the contract and sign the pledge to continue striking for a better one.

Our Vision for a Path Forward

Many of us are understandably feeling tired and vulnerable after striking for 5 weeks, having made insufficient gains at the bargaining table, and experiencing a demoralizing pattern of poor and opaque decision-making from union leadership. Yet, our power has always been in the hands of the rank and file; not our union leadership, nor the UC. The concessions from UC we have won thus far are from rank and file members pushing the Bargaining Team to not accept a worse deal.

And our power has not been exhausted. We understand the UC’s recent offers of higher wage as evidence of their desperation to end the strike. Keep in mind that we haven’t even reached our greatest leverage points and grade and labor withholding are not one-time impacts but have continuous reverberations. More than 39,000 grades will be delayed past the grading deadline because faculty allies refuse to do the labor of striking TAs and readers. The start of the Winter quarter poses another chance for disruption that UC would rather avoid. Our strike has already made history by demonstrating a willingness on the part of the rank and file members to think critically about concessions that are being sold to us as “historic” or “life changing” and to push the UC and our bargaining teams further than they and we might have imagined possible.

We believe that voting no on the current tentative agreement and recommitting to a long-term strategy of withholding labor and disrupting the day-to-day functioning of the university will help us secure a more transformative victory. This would mean de-emphasizing marches on the picket line and instead incorporating the effects of a strike on workers’ schooling and research into our strategy. The real power of a long haul strike is in mass grade withholding, refusing to teach discussion sections or submit grants, supporting undergrads in demanding their tuition back, picketing events crucial for the university’s public reputation, and disrupting construction sites and loading docks and steadily increasing our power through the solidarity of other unions.

In short, it means shutting down business as usual, hurting the UC’s bottom line, and ultimately forcing them to offer us a contract that meets our collective needs — whether or not UC tries to declare “impasse”. It also means using the picket lines and other collective actions to transform our union from within to ensure that decisions are made democratically with input from members. It means building deep solidarity with one another, and centering the needs of our most marginalized members, so that our union is healthy and sustainable after this cycle of contract negotiations.

What is actually in this contract, and why do we believe we can and must win more?

Some of our concerns with the Tentative Agreement are as follows:

1. Wages: While the current wages proposal improves upon UC’s previous position, it would not provide relief from rent burden for most grad workers or take effect quickly enough to change the lives of many. A contract’s “record-setting wage increases” are not distributed equitably across titles and do not adequately address the high cost of living across the UC campuses. We believe in equal pay for equal work.
2. Inequity Across Campuses: The tentative agreement would also entrench wage inequalities across campuses, with ASEs at UCLA, Berkeley, and UCSF arbitrarily receiving an additional $2,500 over our friends and colleagues at campuses like UCSC and UCSB, which have higher costs of living. This is a clear strategy to “divide and conquer” by the UC undermining our solidarity and future goodwill between campuses.
3. Childcare: The proposed 27% increase in quarterly child-care subsidies are not enough to even pay for UCLA’s own childcare costs for one month. We can and must do better to support families.
4. Dependent Healthcare: The proposed dependent healthcare is only available to those who make too much to qualify for MediCal. The proposal also provides no insurance coverage for spouses and other dependents.
5. Non-Resident Fee Remission: This contract must do more to support international students. Entering workers will still have to scramble for outside funding to cover their 15k annual non-resident supplemental tuition–which is scarcer than for domestic students as international workers do not qualify for many fellowships. Moreover, capping this waiver at three years effectively lets the university decide how long an international student’s research takes.
6. Access Needs: This contract will fail to meet the needs of workers with disabilities, dropping the worker-centered framework of “access needs” for a standard of “reasonable accommodations” where UC gets to decide what is reasonable. UC would continue to make disabled workers go through costly and dehumanizing medical hoops to secure accessibility — a burden that pushes disabled people out of academia entirely. This contract also includes none of the Public Health provisions drafted by our union’s Disability Justice Caucus to rectify UC’s ongoing failure to support workers (especially disabled and immunocompromised folks) during COVID-19.
7. Community Safety: The current proposal does nothing to change the status of the UCPD. This is a key issue for many of our fellow workers, particularly Black, queer, and workers of color as it relates directly to their ability to feel safe at a university that is often hostile. In Westwood, Black and Latino residents make up 2% and 7% of the population while accounting for 29% and 10% of stops for “suspicious activity,” and 31% and 23% of all arrests. We believe that we can ensure workplace safety for all without the presence of UCPD on our campuses.

Ultimately, we believe that, while five weeks of striking have demonstrated the immense power we hold, this contract does not represent the university’s “last, best, and final offer.” The UC has weaponized similar language before in order to try to break our strike, and have moved on some of our key issues anyway, such as wages, anti-bullying language and transit. We can and must continue the fight to win more for workers who will still be rent burdened and for all whom this contract continues to treat as second-class employees. Like we’ve done before, we need to call their bluff now in order to move us to a contract that addresses everyone’s needs.

For now, we leave you with the following questions to ask yourself as you make your decision this week: Does this contract satisfy my needs? Does it satisfy my friends’ needs? Can we afford rent on this contract, not in 2.5 years but now? Can we afford dependent healthcare on this contract? Does this contract have disability protections? Community safety? Adequate child-care subsidies? Did the bargaining team do all they could for us? Do we, the rank and file, feel that we left nothing on the table? If your answer to any of these questions is no, consider voting no on the contract and sign the pledge to continue striking for a better one.

In Solidarity,

Adam Benjamin, African Studies

Sucharita Kanjilal, Anthropology

Matt Schneider, Anthropology

Damanjit Singh, Anthropology

Ashley Mensing, Anthropology

Doğa Tekin, Anthropology

D.H. We, Anthropology

Rachel Schloss, Archaeology

Zach Anderson, Asian American Studies

Benjamin Kersten, Art History

Aly Fritzmann, Atmospheric & Oceanic Sciences

Emma Tran, Community Health Sciences

Dylan Kupsh, Computer Science

Sophia Sambrano, Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Paula Ayala, Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Magally Miranda, Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Rocio Rivera-Murillo, Chicana/o and Central American Studies

Gene McAdoo, Education

Sam Stern, Education

Anthony Kim, English

Nidia Bautista, Gender Studies

Naz Oktay, Gender Studies

Michael Buse, History

Safa Hamzeh, History

Sara Hussein, History

Dana Kopel, History

Brianna Lavelle, History

Liam Moore, History

Tatiana Hernandez, Information Studies

Megan Riley, Information Studies

Kai Nham, Information Studies

Mads Le, Information Studies

Juniper Bahr, Math

Ivan Biggs, Mechanical Engineering

Allison McCoskey, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Elisabeth Koch, Near Eastern Languages and Cultures

Sahiba Sindhu, Philosophy

Robert Kao, Physics and Astronomy

Rachel Forgash, Political Science

Michael Mirer, Political Science

Vincent Doehr, Political Science

Alfredo Trejo III, Political Science

Samyu Comandur, Political Science

Yazmin Meza Lazaro, Psychology

Michelle Chang, Psychology

Selene Betancourt, Public Policy

MJ Hill, Sociology

Pharren Miller, Sociology

Victoria Tran, Sociology

César Bowley Castillo, Sociology

Edgar Reyna, Urban and Regional Planning