I wrote this in a google doc and posted it to social media. However I really should have just added it to this blog because this is why almost all my union writings have gone - and since this post speaks to the importance of institutional memory I wanted to make sure I posted it here as well.
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Response to Garrett --- Defending the record of AWDU
I am responding to an email sent by UC Berkeley Recording Secretary Garrett Shishido Strain sent to the UC Student Workers Union UAW 2865 Joint Council. I have copied the email so that you can read it in full:
From: UAW 2865 Joint Council <uaw-2865-joint-council@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "garrett.strain" <garrett.strain@gmail.com>
Reply-To: UAW 2865 Joint Council <uaw-2865-joint-council@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday, July 27, 2018 at 10:11 PM
To: UAW 2865 Joint Council <uaw-2865-joint-council@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [Joint Council] Action Requested: Equitable Hiring
Hi All,
As a socialist, I believe that capitalism and racism co-constitute one another. I also believe that by virtue of its role in the means of production, the working class is the most strategically positioned group in society to build socialism. I got involved in our union (and the labor movement more generally) because I believe that the building strong, democratic, militant working-class organizations is the only way that the working class can achieve its historic mission of transcending capitalism and defeating racism.
I voted for Gerard because he's the organizer that will build our union into the strongest working-class organization it can be. And that organization looks much different from the way this organization, UAW 2865, has looked in recent years. Our union has been a white union for a long time; it was built into the culture of self-selecting activists that occupied leadership in our union. When I started grad school and joined the union, I remember going to a Berkeley head steward meeting as a rank-and-file member and being one of only two POC in the room.
Our union's membership declined every year from 2011 until last year – from a high point of 55% in March 2011 to a historic low of 36% in March 2017. We had no semblance of democracy in our union because the vast majority of workers had no voting rights as non-members. JC seats went vacant for years and meetings were dominated by an insider clique that prioritized discussions of "internal dynamics" over outward-facing political action. Any gains we won at the bargaining table – including protections against discrimination and harassment – were ephemeral or unenforced because most workers didn't even know they had a union, much less what was in their union contract. And workers couldn't go and ask their departmental union rep what was in the contract because the vast majority of departments across the state had no union rep. This is not the picture of a working-class organization that can mount an effective challenge to racism and other forms of oppression. It's the picture of a weak, moribund, and, yes, bureaucratic organization.
But this finally began to change starting just 10 months ago with the hiring of full-time staff organizers and the implementation of a statewide organizing program. That program has brought our membership up to 50% statewide for the first time in six years and it has brought in dozens of new leaders – including many leaders of color – from departments across campuses where we have not had representation. We're running campaigns, organizing eviction defenses, occupying offices, holding contested elections, mobilizing hundreds of workers for bargaining sessions and rallies, and enacting an organizing culture for the first time in years. We have come very far as a union, but we have even farther to go.
Only one northern field organizer candidate has been integral to this organizing program which has brought in hundreds of new POC members into our union – that candidate is Gerard Ramm. And that's why I, and I would guess many others, voted for Gerard. I suspect that several of the people on this list who voted against Gerard would like our union to return to the way it was before the organizing program, or maybe want it to be something else entirely. Well, then, you have your answer for why you voted the way you did and why I voted the way I did.
I've also heard several people cite "experience" as a reason to hire B.B. and not Gerard. But the question that has to be asked is: what kind of experience is most needed for this moment in our union? And again, if we're talking about building the kind of multi-racial working class power that it takes to truly challenge capitalism and racism – the kind of power that the
Las Vegas Culinary Workers and the
Chicago Teachers have built – it's going to take deep organizing conversations. It's going to take someone who will do walkthroughs and knock on every door in departments across campus, someone who will phonebank with members night after night, someone who will tirelessly identify and develop organic leaders in the workplace, someone who will train new leaders on how to move their co-workers to overcome fear and take part in union actions, someone who is willing to do what Ella Baker called spadework – the tedious, grueling work that it takes to build dynamic bottom-up organizations. Of all the candidates, I believe that Gerard is the only one with a proven commitment to doing the spadework that will build our union into a force to be reckoned with.
Solidarity,
Garrett Shishido Strain
UCB Rec Sec
The focus on this response will not be about the question of whom to hire: B.B. or Gerrard. I have been close friends with B.B. for over six years now, and I don’t know Gerrard at all. But I will quickly mention that I think it's pretty gross that Garrett positions himself as a POC against whiteness in the union and then evokes Ella Baker against B.B who is an experienced, knowledgeable, and effective Black organizer who has given numerous teach-ins about fighting anti-Blackness in movement and union spaces, and that Garrett later ABSTAINED on the vote for an affirmative action policy in hiring in the July 29th UAW Joint Council meeting (along with 6 of his comrades, and 1 other comrade who voted to OPPOSE affirmative action.) It reeks of the kind of liberal/moderate who evokes the whitewashed spectre of MLK to put down Black radical activists who are “too disruptive, too demanding” i.e. too Black for their comfort.
Rather, I want to address the revisionist history happening here in Garrett's narrative.
By 2010 our local union had become an empty bureaucratic shell of an organization for many years. I have spoken to many activists who were involved before 2010, such as Sarah Smith-Silverman (UCSC), Tim Gutierrez(UCD), and Molly Ball (UCD). All shared stories of how top-down, control obsessed, micro-managey, our union was. The majority of Joint Council seats were empty and rank and file involvement was little to nothing. When the UC student movement erupted in 2009 our union officially stood by and did nothing to support it. Then in 2010 our union negotiated a contract in two months, over the summer, in which members of the bargaining team said the membership didn’t want a raise, it would be greedy to ask for one given the budget cuts. This of course parrots the austerity politics discourse that the neoliberal university management wanted the union to accept. It was a discourse that the student movement had been challenging rather militantly - but given the union’s lack of involvement in that movement no one in leadership knew how to or had the courage to challenge it. At this time the executive board (e-board) held all the power, and a small clique of officers made the union a space where they could make 2x the salary (or more) of the TAs they supposedly represented, and would then find a career in the UAW or the Democratic Party. [See Daraka Larimore-Hall for example. This patrimonialism - a heavily top down structure that grooms leaders for entry into other political careers -
continued with the admin caucus even after reformers took over in 2011. Presidential hopeful Rob Ackermann who lost to AWDU in 2014 was hired by UAW 5810 as a field organizer…]
Rank and file members were pissed at the shitty contract (a 2%/year over 3 years raise) and the lack of a real fighting campaign. So a statewide no vote was organized and while it lost, it became the network that would be used to challenge the incumbent administration caucus. In 2011, just months before I would start graduate school at UCD, these reformers took power in the statewide triennial elections (we have since move to biennial elections) under the banner of AWDU- Academic Workers for a Democratic Union. AWDUistas wanted to break up the power of the e-board - many even wanted its abolition, but that was complication by constraints from the UAW constitution- and titles on the e-board were basically erased, making it more of a council than a board with hierarchical positions. AWDU sought to shift decision making to the local campus level, the JC, and whenever possible, the rank and file members themselves.
AWDU also wanted to build a labor movement that fought all forms of oppression, that was in solidarity with struggles internationally, and of course that really challenged its own bosses unlike the 2010 contract which they viewed as a capitulation. AWDU wanted to be on the forefront of fighting for social and economic justice, and for public education.
I started grad school in 2011, just months after AWDU had won power, which took more than just an election. The admin caucus in power (at the time calling itself USEJ - United for Social and Economic Justice), refused to count all the votes of the triennial election once they saw AWDU was going to win. Members responded by
occupying the union office. It was no coincidence that this tactic which had just been used in the anti-austerity student movement recently was being used by AWDU supporters - these activists were the graduate students who had been involved in that movement, unlike the union officers at the time. Eventually they got all the votes counted and won.
When I got to UCD I signed up for the union right away. I found and made friends with some really amazing people. But they were all very burned out from the struggle beginning with the No Vote and then the contentious election. At Davis I saw that what they had taken over was just a union on paper. There was no real “infrastructure”. There was no stewards network, membership meetings were only attended by officers and the rank and filers who supported AWDU. I wasn’t aware of the caucus politics or the recent history at first. There was one USEJ member here, Xochitl, who was in the law school. She was very good at getting membership cards signed (though her methods even then struck me as a little slimy like a used car salesman), but that was all. Signing cards was the only thing these USEJ folks were not only good at, but the only thing they were interested in. So while membership might have been theoretically high, in actuality the union had been a shell - a small handful of people who did nothing but sign people up. They couldn’t (and wouldn’t) fight. They weren’t involved in struggles outside the workplace (like the student movement).
AWDU had the challenge of actually building a union. I don’t mean getting people to sign cards and pay dues and leave the rest to the experts. I mean, actually organizing - building networks of members and connection with other local struggles. I became Unit Chair in Spring quarter 2012 of my first year after the previous Chair stepped down, and I held that position until Winter/Spring 2014.
In those two years membership percentage at UCD declined as well as the membership percentage statewide in our local. This is about the only thing that is correct in Garrett's revisionist history. However, the meaning of that decline is the opposite of what Garrett claims, and some folks have suggested alternative explanations for the decline With our limited resources we underwent the hard work of building a network of supporting and fighting the admin and fighting in solidarity with other movements, so as many hours were not spent just getting people to sign cards. I am more than ok with that. I want to ask people to join something worth joining. Membership percentage decline may not be as cut and dry (but again even if it is I stick by prioritizing building on the ground instead of on paper), because of growth in the numbers of tutors may have skewed the overall membership percent while actual TA membership decline may not have been as drastic. (I haven’t looked at this analysis so I won’t speak confidently either way on this, but I’ll just say that it’s important to disaggregate and find out where the union percent went down and where it didn’t.)
Under AWDU the union played a very important role in the 2011-12 student movement - fighting for public education and doing on the ground organizing with Occupy and with the anti-tuition hikes and UCPD police brutality movement. (Recall UCD pepper spray and UCB batoning protesters among other incidents…) We worked with CFT to try to get the Millionaire’s Tax on the ballot, only for CFT to pull funding and make a backroom deal with Governor Brown for the promise of some funding for k-12. The Millionaire’s Tax would have brought in more money, but CFT played it conservatively and didn’t want to challenge Brown or “risk having both props lose because they were competing on the ballot”.
The union also got the UC to drop yearly and lifetime caps in its healthcare plan UCSHIP. It worked with UCSA and even lobbied the capital, but the real work was the on the ground organizing and those like myself who salted the UCSHIP committees to push the committees to take these principled stances. We even got UCOP to pay for the mismanaged UCSHIP debt instead of passing a fee hike.
Then we started contract negotiations in 2013. It was the first time a reform caucus was in charge of bargaining, so we had a lot to prove. We did open bargaining for the first time and used the bargaining room as an organizing space - no more closed session, side bars, and backroom deals with UC management. Everything happened in the room, in front of members, and members participated in the conversations. We built a contract campaign, with a timeline based on escalations of events and ultimately centering the on the ground actions by the rank and file that would pressure the UC to give in to our demands. We went on strike twice! For the first time in nearly 10 years. We won gender neutral bathroom access in our contract! We fought for rights for undocumented grad students to get paid TA experience.
The entire time, there was a minority of admin caucus (USEJ, later to rebrand as SWITCh) people on the Bargaining Team. The BT members were opposed to contract expiration, which let us strike in solidarity with AFSCME 3299, who are the lowest paid UC workers and are predominantly POC. These admin caucus types had a very different approach to negotiations, they wanted all of the bargaining to happen in the room without the rank and file in the room or even backing them up with actions. They actually thought that talking with management long enough would win our bargaining demands. One of them famously said “When our members come back in the fall I want to show that what we have won!”. The AWDU response was that we thought it would be the power of the rank and file which would win things, and that their top down approach is the reason the 2010 contract was so bad. (For more on AWDU’s model of bargaining see my
blog post about it.)
We not only won a better pay raise than
the people who said we were sacrificing pay raises for social justice at 5/4/4/3, plus increases in the child care reimbursement and the eligible ages, and the issues I mentioned above, plus we made class size a demand and we won the right to a limited form of negotiations over class size in our contract. Graduate students across the country were inspired by our campaign and formed AWDU chapters in their local unions. NYU, UMass AMherst, and Garrett himself helped form such a chapter at the University of Washington.
It seems odd then, that after the 2014 contract negotiations, in which our membership numbers were below 50% but our member involvement was at an all time high that Garett who himself aligned with AWDU and formed an AWDU chapter is now trying to rewrite history and say that AWDU made the union weaker and more bureaucratic…
Garrett's above email literally mirrors the talking points of the admin caucus people at the time. Rob Ackermann (who works for the UAW through local 5810) and Jason Struna had a piece published in the
Berkeley Journal of Sociology. Read it. Compare what they say to what he says. It is virtually identical. Their piece “A reality check for social movement unionism” is a total distortion of the local history and in title it shows its allegiance to business unionism and the UAW international. AWDU’s own Alex Holmstrom-Smith and Shannon Ikebe
wrote a response piece, in the same journal.
After the contract negotiations were over our local become the first union aside from the IWW to join the BDS movement in the US. SWITCh was split on this issue. Its left wing joining the BDS caucus (with all of AWDU), it right wing saying that it would divide members or was beyond our scope, and the middle abstaining altogether. The UAW International overturned our vote - not on grounds of the vote being undemocratic, but because it’s position was that as a local we didn’t have a right to take a position on this issue -- which says a lot about what the International thinks about union democracy.
Our local also played important roles in the new anti-tuition hikes movements. Our officers and members educated and mentored undergraduate activists and acted as institutional memory. We were there marching and occupying buildings alongside them.
We also supported the Black Lives Matter movement, both on the ground and through calling on the AFL-CIO to expel police unions from its ranks. This sparked a debate in labor and on the left about the role of police and the state, about labor’s role in fighting anti-blackness.
We were also there supporting other campus workers and low wage workers. A handful of officers and activists from UCD were arrested with OUR Walmart workers on Black Friday in 2014.
Our union started the #FireKatehi movement - though most of those involved were undergrads - which deposed the UCD pepper spray Chancellor.
I also want to address the part of Garrett’s argument that positions itself as the sole voice against whiteness in the union - conveniently ignoring B.B.’s countless hours organizing on this issue as both an officer and rank-and-file member. AWDU was certainly majority white,as the UC grad system is overwhelmingly white. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t attract and support strong POC, and specifically Black, organizers. I also want to recognize that the mere presence of POC organizers, or Black organizers in particular, doesn’t mean that whiteness isn’t dominant. Whiteness/anti-whiteness isn’t just about numerical diversity or lack thereof. It's about practices in these spaces, it's about the kinds of education being done, its about which struggles we are showing solidarity with.
Under AWDU the Anti Oppression Committee was founded and more importantly FUNDED with a budget and a member organizer getting a salary. Anti-oppression practices were to be integrated into our union culture and daily practices. That committee exists to this very day, and continues to try to do the education work to combat whiteness in our union.
There is also the Black Interests Coordinating Committee (BICC) which put forth the letter calling on the AFL-CIO to expel police unions that the Joint Council approved and we sent officially as a local to the AFL-CIO leadership.
As mentioned above, the struggles we supported after bargaining ended were BLM and the Palestine solidarity struggles. We struck with the low wage workers in AFSCME, we supported OUR Walmart - whose members in the Sacramento area are mostly Black women.
Here at Davis, and I am positive on other campuses as well, we took our work building relationships with other communities seriously, building working relationships with groups like M.E.Ch.A., the Black Student Union, and Students for Justice in Palestine, among others. It is this kind of relationship building and community support that the hyper-focus on membership numbers that the organizing model of the last 10 months has become invisible to. When membership numbers are the sole metric determining success then these relationships are inevitably neglected.
It was these AWDU practices that won the respect of many graduate Students of Color on our campuses. Many saw that we did more than talk the talk, we walked the walk (or tried our best to) and they respected that, and some got involved because they felt it was a space for them. It is these practices, more often than not lead by our members or officers who are POC, that seem to be missing from the Garrett’s narrative.
None of the above sounds to me like a weaker or bureaucratic union, nor even a whiter union. It is a union that is coming alive, a union that is putting its democratic and anti-oppression principles first, a union showing what solidarity means, a union trying to show the way forward for labor. It was a messy process with lots of room for improvement and the mistakes made that all groups do as they learn best practices of their context and situation. But it is a history I am proud of and will defend until I die. That is a history that one cannot tell just by a single metric - membership numbers.
One thing is clear: one cannot claim the legacy of AWDU and claim to be a union reformer building social movement unionism while also trashing the AWDU legacy and mirroring the talking points of the old admin caucus.
Duane Wright
Former Unit Chair UCD 2012-2014
Proud AWDU member
For more info,
here is my power point that I have shown for years at UCD
And
here is my blog where I documented a lot of intra-union politics during my years in office
