A Referendum on Solidarity?

Last week the bargaining team for my union, The UC Student Worker Union UAW 2865, which represents 18,000 Academic Student Employees - primarily graduate students employed as Teaching Assistants or Instructors., called for a straw poll of the membership to see if there was sufficient interest in having a ratification vote on UC management's latest offer in contract negotiations. The results of the referendum were 52% Yes and 48% No.

The official statement for the Yes side included the following language:
"It is unlikely that we can run a powerful enough strike to move the university. With membership at less than 50%, and most workers not feeling ready to walk off the job, our numerical strength is lacking. Our sister unions, AFSCME 3299, CNA, and UPTE, held a systemwide, majority-participation strike and have yet to see movement at the bargaining table. The best way to support their fight is by ratifying our wins to set important precedent for their upcoming bargaining sessions. "

I have many issues with this, including that when broken down by job title we see that there are actually over a majority (56%) of TAs/GSIs and AIs who have joined the union and those job titles have the most disruptive capacity when compared to the small minority of undergraduate tutors who have joined the union and skew our overall numbers downward so a real power analysis of our strike capacity is obscured by the above framing.

However, since this straw poll results were released the bargaining team has voted to send UC managements latest contract proposal to a ratification vote to see if members accept or reject the offer. Given that, I want to focus on what I see as the biggest issue here, that this vote which will be happening Mon 8/20 - Wed 8/22 is essentially a referendum on solidarity.

I'm not sure what kind of union leadership sees other struggling unions in their workplace, among them the UCs lowest paid employees the campus service and patient care workers in AFSCME 3299, and thinks "They sure are struggling. Good thing I've got mine." My first reaction was "Oh good, we will have our no strikes clause lifted if we let our current contract expire so we can go on strike with AFSCME like we did in November 2013!"

The central principle of unionism is solidarity - an injury to one is an injury to all. Our union family is being hurt by management right now, they are struggling for better pay and working conditions, and respect at work, and the UC continues to disrespect them. Solidarity dictates that we do all we can to fight together with AFSCME, UPTE, AFT, and other campus unions. 

In its conception the UAW was one of the most iconic models of a new type of unionism called industrial unionism, which unlike the craft unionism that organized workers by the particular type of job they did and mostly ignored so called "unskilled workers" that was dominant at the time, tried to organize all workers under an employer no matter how "skilled" their job supposedly was under a single union. It is unfortunate that at the UC craft unionism is the lay of the land- with technical and professional workers in one union, service workers in another, academic student employees in another, lecturers and librarians in another, post doctoral research fellows in another, nurses in another, and more. If we were to practice industrial unionism we wouldn't turn our backs on the other campus workers just because we were offered a mediocre wage increase and our leaders are afraid of striking.

If the majority of the bargaining team that supports this ratification vote had instead called for a strike authorization vote, and all the communications they did to members - the phone banking, the emails, the texts, were instead focused on the message of solidarity and the old slogans "if we fight we win" and "collective action gets the goods" then we would already be one huge step closer to being strike ready before the academic year begins again and many members return to work.

If our local ratifies this contract then the best we can do officially is not go on strike as a union, we can merely send out an email to members to tell them that they have the contractual right to respect the picket line and not be disciplined for it. But that is all. 

The executives that run this university make hundreds of thousands of dollars, and their pay raises are significantly more than what us workers get. They see this university as their piggy bank, money deposited by the sky-high tuition paid by students. If we vote NO and reject this contract offer we can put our official resources into building for the largest strike the UC system has ever known.

We can fight together as one, unions and students, and demand a more just university.

Vote NO

Fight Together, Win Together!