This piece was submitted by Gwenevere Frank, a third-year Postdoctoral student at UC San Diego and member of UAW Local 2865, and Graduate Student Researcher Jesse Goldshear, who is affiliated with UAW Local 5810.
Workers across the UC system have a choice this fall. Currently, student workers are represented by Local 2865, a separate local from postdoctoral scholars and other soft-money researchers who are a part of Local 5810. Next week, workers will have the opportunity to vote on whether to join as a single union under one banner. Joining locals will allow our locals that already organize together to share more resources and pool our power to make changes in our workplace. As a Postdoctoral and a Graduate Student Researcher at UC San Diego, respectively, we encourage everyone who is eligible to vote yes.
Last fall we, our friends, colleagues, and about 48,000 other academic workers went on strike to demand basic respect from our employer, the UC system. We asked for enough pay to not have to live in our cars, to access basic healthcare for our partners and children, and to address abuse and harassment that takes place in our labs and classrooms that often goes unaddressed. When on strike, we came together as one group on the picket line: TAs, tutors, researchers, and postdocs unified under a common cause. Although we have a long way to go before we can describe our relationship with the UC as “respectful” or “dignified,” we made historic wins for our contracts, such as significantly higher wages and increased protections from harassment and discrimination. These wins greatly improved the lives of countless academic workers across the UC campuses, and we achieved them because we went on strike together. By presenting a united front across job titles and standing up for fairer conditions for all academic workers, both graduate student workers and postdocs, we were able to show the UC that they cannot function without us and have no choice but to begin to treat us with respect.
UC’s Title IX office is willing to protect bosses who abuse and discriminate against workers, whether their victims are student workers or postdocs. In 2017, according to the Daily Bruin, UCLA reinstated professor Gabriel Piterberg despite a series of allegations, dating back to as early as 2013, that he had sexually harassed his grad students. Workers from locals banded and successfully pressured UCLA into firing Piterberg. In 2019, our unions staged a joint direct action in order to get Postdoctoral Researcher Sandra Koch transferred to a new appointment after her Principal Investigator attempted to remove her from his lab due to her pregnancy. When the administration decides that our protests in favor of fairer working conditions are crimes, we both suffer the same legal repercussions. Our cause is one and the same.
Currently, we only exist as two separate unions due to a decision made by now-disgraced UAW International leadership over a decade ago. This current dual-union structure sets us apart, when in reality our struggles are the same. We are told we should accept unfair wages because our research is “a learning experience” or “a stepping stone” — quoting from emails we have received from UC administrators — as if landlords will accept academic citations as payment for rent.
Amalgamating our locals would make us one of the largest unions in California. It would give all of us a louder voice both inside and outside the workplace. It would give us unprecedented power to make demands, both from the UC when we bargain with them, and from lawmakers when we lobby for research funding and immigration policy that affect all of us. Amalgamating would also give us a louder voice in steering the direction of the UAW as a whole. We caught a glimpse of the power of this kind of bloc earlier this year when adding 14,000 Graduate Student Researchers to UAW 2865 led directly to the re-establishment of the progressive, West Coast-based UAW Region 6, which has been defunct since the early 1990s.
We work in the same labs. We teach in the same classrooms. And the UC uses the exact same facile excuses to justify paying us poverty wages and denying us rights as workers in their institutions. Our common interests are clear, and we encourage everyone eligible to vote “Yes” on amalgamation this fall so that we can come together and speak with a single voice to force the UC system to treat us with the respect we deserve.
-Gwen and Jesse
