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Sunday, September 30, 2018

pro CLEW email from April 2018

I wanted to post this campaigning email I sent a bunch of colleagues and friends back in April of 2018, because I think my words have rung true - and if anything things got ever worse than I was imagining.

I didn't run on this slate, I remained a rank-and-file member, but I did publically support them. Also, I'm still not sure who exactly wrote up the ebaord.fun website, but I generally think its a good idea to not do thinks anonymously - unless there is an issue of safety, like whisteblowing or antifa etc.

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As you probably have heard our union is holding vacancy elections Tuesday and Wednesday this week, for positions on the statewide executive board. Voting will be taking place on the Davis campus from 10-6 on Tuesday by the MU and 10-6 Wednesday by the SIlo.

I hope you will consider voting for the CLEW (collective liberation for education workers) slate of candidates. https://www.clew-uc.org

You may know that back in 2011 a reform slate took power in our union after many rank-and-file members were upset by a union that: 1. Was not involved in the fight for public education when the UC student movement erupted in 2009-2010. 2. Negotiated a contract in just 2 months over the summer that only secured a 2% pay raise each year for 3 years (effectively a pay cut if you count inflation) and argued that members didn’t want a raise because they thought that would be selfish given the state’s budget cuts to the UC. Furthermore, these particular grievances  were exacerbated by the bureaucratic and top-down nature of our local, where the executive board and particularly the president had all the say. Campuses didn’t have autonomy or their own budget to pursue organizing in conditions that they best understood. The President and the financial Secretary held year-round 100% appointments, meaning these “leaders” made more than double what the average UC TA made. After AWDU came to power they enacted many reforms to decentralize/democratize power. Campuses have final say as to how they organize on the local conditions that they know best, and they are supported so by control over a campus budget. The Joint Council - the largest representative body in our union - was given priority in decision making over the executive board. The e-board simply saw itself as doing the necessary day-to-day support work that the larger democratic bodies - the Joint Council, the vote by rank-and-file members in referendums like our BDS vote, and the local campus units - decided on.

When I got here right after AWDU took power in 2011 I saw that the “union” before AWDU was basically only a union on paper- a skeleton crew of people ran things and there was a total lack of participation. AWDU majorly increased participation/involvement. I have seen the core number of organizers just at Davis grow from about 5-6 to about 15-20 with an ever increasing periphery of people involved from a a diversity of departments. We have built a union from the ground up - because a union is just a network of people, it is a collective project. The first AWDU bargaining team held open bargaining for the first time in our local’s history - previously you and I as a rank-and-file members   had no right to observe or participate in these negotiations. We even went on strike twice, for the first time in about 10 years. We have been involved in grassroots campaigns fighting for social justice, and we made history as the first major union in the US to officially join the BDS movement, and to call for the AFL-CIO to kick police unions out of its ranks.

However, the impending Supreme Court decision (Janus v. AFSCME) which has the potential to make the entire US public sector a union busting “right-to-work” sector, is now being used by many unions to push what is basically neoliberal austerity measures. Power is being reconsolidated in top-down fashion, money is being shifted from fighting various forms of oppression to just signing up members in order to maintain financial health, and metrics like union membership are driving all decision-making much like how standardized test scores drive neoliberal education decisions.

This election is only for a small number of positions in our local, however I think it is a temperature check to see what direction our union will lean. Will we adopt the business union practices that pragmatic neoliberal union leaders have been pushing or will we stand firm against adopting this logic and these practices? Some members (not me) wrote up a post about some concerns along these lines about some of the other candidates in the other slate (OSWP). https://e-bored.fun

Apologies for the long email, but I wanted to give enough background info that I felt was necessary for this election. Whoever you vote for I hope you vote this Tuesday or Wednesday.

Solidarity,

Duane

Formal Complaint at Davis and email responses

Here is the text of the full language of a formal complaint to the UAW 2865 executive board in regards to the unilateral starting of a new Davis list-serve for officers and activists and the purposeful exclusion of anyone critical of the OSWP clique from that list-serve:

Edit: I have added Tom Hintze's respoonse (he is an OSWP member who is on the executive board and is a Davis grad student) and my response to Tom below the text of the complaint.

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Hello E-Board,

I would like to file a formal complaint with you regarding the actions of both a paid organizer and an E-Board member. I’m requesting that the E-Board look into and address the fact that a number of people (e.g. myself, Ellie White, Connor Gorman, Amara Miller, Duane Wright, Nathen Menard) were intentionally excluded from our new Davis activist listserv (and thus an organizing committee meeting which happened Wed. 9/26) by Gerard Ramm and Thomas Hintze. This removal was without notification or consent by the people excluded and indicates an effort to silence dissent in the union. 

This complaint falls under two main areas. Concerning Gerard's conduct, this falls under Article 11 ("Meeting Standards and Progressive Discipline") of their CBA.  In regards to Thomas Hintze, this falls under Article 19 of our bylaws.

In addition to these, this kind of behavior violates a number of other bylaws. 

  • Article 5, Section 1 states, "The membership is the highest authority of this Local Union and shall be empowered to take or direct any action not inconsistent with the Constitution of the International Union, UAW or Local Union Bylaws." This action explicitly acts against the interest of members who have dissented and excludes them from the decision-making processes of the union.
  • Article 8, Section 13 states, "Campus Units shall have the right to communicate directly with unit members, without going either through the Executive Board or the President. Each campus unit shall decide at a monthly membership meeting their process for sending out emails. All communication must clearly state that it originates from the Campus Unit, and not the Local as a whole. This means that Campus Unit elected leadership shall have direct access to email lists and phone lists for their campus membership." This article, in conjunction with Article 5, Section 1 suggests that emails concerning things like organizing committee meetings and other key union gatherings should be available to all members, to ensure that membership remains the highest authority within the union.
  • Article 11, Section 3 states, "Committee meeting times and locations will be posted at least seven (7) days prior to the meeting time on the Local Union website. Except for the Bylaws Committee whose members are elected, the Joint Council shall appoint members to other committees. All Committee members are expected to attend meetings." Since OC meetings are often subsets of, and related to, larger statewide OC structures, it would seem that excluding people from these key organizing meetings is a violation of this bylaw as well.
The union frames itself as a democratic, member-driven organization, but this is directly contradicted by the actions of these individuals. They have made unilateral decisions to exclude certain members for political reasons. This is unacceptable, unconscionable and must be addressed. I would suggest the removal or replacement of these people in order to ensure these blatantly undemocratic actions don't happen again.

I'd like to also request that this complaint is met with a more substantive response than the last time someone was intentionally excluded from union organizing spaces - as Amara Miller's complaint has been met with startlingly little action.


Blu Buchanan
(they/them/theirs)
Rank-And-File
Davis Unit

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On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 9:33 PM Thomas Hintze <thintze1@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear all,

First, I want to start by giving folks on the activist list who may not have been involved in organizing since the ratification vote an update about our organizing successes these past few weeks. During the first orientation session, we signed up 230 new union members, or about 10% of the incoming graduate students at Davis, in one day. This is the best single day of organizing across the state this year, and we followed it up by signing up another 160 members over two days during TA orientations last week. This work is a vital part of our statewide membership organizing plan, which we approved at our Joint Council meeting in July.

In the absence of organizing committee meetings before orientations, a number of people who were interested in organizing, including Ashlyn, Savannah, and I, began meeting student-workers who checked the box on our membership cards indicating that they were interested in getting involved with our union. We set up a couple of ad hoc meetings to talk about our strategy for orientations, and then we went out and talked with workers. No new OC listserv was created, and the last time that I checked, it should be our goal as organizers to reach out to workers who want to organize and get them involved in working with our union.

Now, to address the alarming accusation of "crushing dissent." BB and Ellie, I believe that we have different philosophies of organizing, and I think that's ok. I believe that workers in our union have a right to organize themselves within different organizing structures, and that this in no way is "crushing dissent." In fact, I believe that in order for us to succeed in our mission of organizing every student-worker on our campus, we are going to need many different organizing strategies and many different organizing committees, all operating at once.

Some might say that different organizing committees would result in the consolidation of power. But what is the real outcome of workers organizing themselves in different committees across campus? I think this would bring about a decentralization of power, the likes of which we have not been able to achieve under our current organizing structure or with our current organizing strategies.

Imagine how power would be dispersed across our unit if instead of a handful of organizers we had a network of stewards, one in each department, who met in organizing committees that were anchored in different sectors of campus. Those workers would have the best idea of the real existing conditions that workers in their departments were experiencing. Then we would truly be able to diagnose the problems in our workplace, and to effectively have each other’s backs. Such a system would also allow a plurality of perspectives on organizing to exist simultaneously, and I believe it would resolve the problem that has been at the heart of our disagreements about organizing since at least winter of last year: whether to spend our energy organizing around campaigns or to focus on organizing workers. The answer is, undoubtedly, both.

And this is already happening. Since the beginning of this year, there have been multiple ad hoc committees meeting on campus, each with different people on their email lists. The meetings I have been attending are filled with new leaders, mostly from the STEM fields on our campus. These leaders are excited about the contract, and they want to organize their coworkers to enforce the contract and to fight for their dignity and better working conditions.

There is another organizing committee whose meetings I have not been invited to attend, and from what I have heard, the topics of conversation have largely been about whether or not to pursue decertification of our union as a response to disagreements about the contract ratification vote.

Now, what would it mean to decertify our union? According to the Labor Relations Institute, an ultra-conservative union-busting organization, decertification

"refers to the process where the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) allows employees to call for a special election to get rid of the union as their 'exclusive representative.'"

The article goes on to describe the consequences of decertification campaigns.

“The objective of a decertification election is to terminate the union’s right to represent you and your fellow employees. This procedure provides you with full relief by taking away the union’s authority to act as your bargaining representative.  If you are a part of the employee union that is covered under a collective bargaining agreement (whether you are a union member or not) you can still sign a petition and participate in the vote for decertification.  Once the union is removed as your legal bargaining representative you no longer have to join the union or pay dues or fees to it.”

Now, it's true, I'm now sure of what the motive could possibly be for wanting to decertify our union. There might be some benevolent intent lurking behind the desire to destroy an organization that has taken the blood, sweat, and tears of hundreds of thousands of workers to build over the past twenty years. But as we know, it's not the intent that matters, it is the effect of such an action, and of even having such conversations in the first place.

Within the labor movement, there is the possibility for manifold kinds of redress, many of which we have seen attempted or enacted over the course of the past year. Currently, there is an appeal of the ratification vote that has been sent to the Eboard. As I have said elsewhere, the Eboard is considering the claims that the appellants have made, and our Bylaws outline a robust appeals process that is internal to our union, and through the UAW constitution,can later can go to PERB and beyond. However, there is a bright line that marks off what is and is not acceptable behavior for a unionist. Publicly calling for the decertification of our union and for the destruction of our power as workers, as some members of our unit are currently doing, is partaking in management's dream of crushing our union, and the right's dream of crushing all unions. And at least one of the people who has called for decertification (Ellie) is the signatory on this email about "crushing dissent," and the another (Connor) the last respondent.

Certainly, there are models for people who disagree about the outcome of the ratification vote to continue working together to build our union. There are, no doubt, real grievances that people have with the process, and there are channels to resolve those disagreements. As I have said before, I am happy to meet with anyone at any time to share my perspective on the ratification vote and to hear yours. What I am not interested in doing is participating in any restorative justice project around this decision. The workers at our unit and across the state have voted, and their vote was decisive. I also want to make it clear that in my role as an Eboard member, I reached out to Amara personally on August 29 offering to continue discussing her formal complaint. She never took me up on my offer.

Another way for us to work together is around addressing workers’ grievances in the workplace. I am thrilled to be meeting with Emily F and Ashlyn this week with a host of student-workers to discuss the problems facing international students because of Trump's new immigration enforcement policies. We urgently need to find ways to come together for the best of our unit, and I am interested in discussing this with whomever I can.

But let me be clear: there are currently at least two committees on our campus. One group is building worker power by organizing hundreds of workers every week. I am not certain how many workers the other committee has brought into our union, but by my calculations, it would be antithetical for them to bring any new worker into a union that they are actively organizing to decertify. Right now is not the time to worry about crushing dissent. We should worry about those who would have the workers crushed instead.

In Solidarity,
Tom


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Duane Wright

10:28 PM (11 minutes ago)
to ThomasConnorAmaragerardramm90BluDavisuaw-2865-davis-officers
Tom,

At the MMM we were told by Savannah, Ashlyn, and Michael, that there was AN organizing committee meeting. OCs used to meet weekly. We were forwarded an email for a meeting of THE organizing committee. Here is a copy and paste of that: (more written after the copy and paste)

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Gerard Ramm <gerardramm90@gmail.com>
Date: Wed, Sep 26, 2018 at 12:33 PM
Subject: Re: Union Organizing Committee Meeting Today @ 5 - Voorhies 396

Hi all,

Our location for today's 5 pm organizing committee meeting is Voorhies Hall, room 396. Can't wait to see you all there! If you're having trouble finding it, you can shoot me a text at (860) 575 7296.

Best,
Gerard 


Sent from my iPhone

On Sep 21, 2018, at 5:29 PM, Gerard Ramm <gerardramm90@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi All,

Hope everyone's plans for the start of the quarter are falling easily into place by now. I  wanted to send out the official announcement for our next Organizing Committee Meeting on Wednesday, September 26th from 5-7:30 pm (Location TBD). We'll be meeting to discuss our progress on start of the quarter organizing, a bit about our unit's upcoming elections, scheduling a Know Your Rights Training, and our plans for organizing within our grad groups and departments this quarter. Emily and I will be co-facilitating so it should be a great time and I'll look forward to seeing you all there!

Also: in preparation for our tabling at the New TA Orientations on Monday and Tuesday, as well as our department orientations all next week, we'll be hosting a Get Lunch and Get Trained event this Sunday the 23rd at 2 pm in Voorhies Hall. Lunch will most likely be from chickpeas and the training will cover how to talk about unions and our union specifically with your coworkers. Reply-1 to this email to let me know if you can make it! 

Look out for an email with more details on meeting locations and I'll see you all next Wednesday!

Best,
Gerard


Are you now claiming that there was no formal OC meeting as there was all last year, and that this meeting that people were invited to last wednesday didn't exist? That in substitution there were just a bunch of ad hoc meetings?  
Are you calling Savannah, Ashlyn, and Michael liars? Is the above email a forgery?

Your use of the term committee when you say there are two committees doing work on campus, is WRONG. There are two caucuses - political parties basically. There is an official OC that was organized by the formal union structure and its paid staff, that is the OFFICIAL committee. Political caucuses are not committees, and their existence is not an excuse to DELIBERATELY cut off all communication to every single dissenter at Davis. (An example: during the BDS vote there was a BDS caucus and a Zionist caucus. Any official union resources that went to meetings were open and announced to all. We scheduled a debate on the issue - zionists didn't show but it was scheduled. Don't conflate caucuses and committees!)

It is PAST PRACTICE to communicate all happenings, meetings, and discussions through this Davis officers and activists listserve.  You all have been violating that. You started off your email by talking about all that has been done this year, but none of those events and none of the discussion about those events went through this campus listserve.

You are a union officer, and Gerrard is paid staff. Those meetings are official meetings. If rank and file members get together to discuss problems with union leadership that isn't a second committee. You are an English PhD student, you aren't too naive to not know the difference, so clearly you are trying to deflect here by obfuscating the differences between official union events like OCs and the self organization of rank and file dissenters in a political caucus.

By deflecting this way what you are trying to do is whitewash your efforts to marginalize all active dissenters while setting up parallel institutions - whether that is an actual listseve with a google email or just a list of people that are CC:ed or BCC:ed that you invite to all official events, the end result is the same.

Then you pivot from distortions to fear-mongering. Some folks, not all, have been discussing decertifying in the context of SWITCHING unions. This is NOT NEW. AWDU used to talk about dropping the UAW int he middle of Joint Council meetings in front of Mike Miller all the time. The UAW is fucking hierarchical, totalitarian, and corrupt as fuck. The entire history of the reform movement here has proven that. Their overturning of our democratic BDS vote proves that. Talking about certification has always taken place int he context of switching unions. There was never an agreement on which strategy would be better, switching or just working with other reformers in the UAW. We connected with the autoworkers caravan and we spread AWDU to every other UAW grad student local in the country. The discussion has always been "What is the best way to go about building a labor movement?" and whether that meant using the institution we have an reforming it, or getting a new institution has always been a discussion at the UC, so before you try to jump in and purposefully mischaracterize the discussions that you say you haven't even been to maybe try not putting words in other people's mouths.So to cite right wingers is totally disingenuous and again merely a rhetorical move to throw mud at dissenters, not an honest discussion.

Duane





Monday, September 17, 2018

Copy of "contract ratification vote appeal"

Some members of UAW 2865 have filed an appeal regarding the recent contract ratification vote. The original document is here, but in case the link is not viewable or the google doc is taken down I wanted to put a copy of the text of the document here, for the sake of the historical record.

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Mary Mussman
Department of Comparative Literature
University of California Berkeley
4125 Dwinelle Hall

To the Executive Board and the Joint Council of UAW 2865,

We the undersigned, as members in good standing of UAW Local 2865 (“Local Union”), write to appeal the contract ratification vote that took place in August 2018. The contract ratification vote violated union by-laws and did not follow both legally binding union procedures as well as customary voting procedures. Accordingly, through this appeal, we seek the invalidation of the contract ratification vote because it violates Local Union Bylaws and circumvented democratic procedures and assurances that are followed during elections that ensure all members a reasonable and equal opportunity to participate to vote.

We appeal the procedural legitimacy of the ratification vote which happened through a fundamentally undemocratic process and in violation of union bylaws on the following grounds:

CHARGES

1. The initiation of the ratification vote violated the Bargaining Team’s rules and procedures, and thus constituted an improper ratification procedure.

We appeal the initiation of the contract ratification vote because the Bargaining Team failed to meet the number of votes required to send out the ratification vote to members. According to the  “Community Agreements For Bargaining Team Internal Dynamics and Decisionmaking” document signed by all Bargaining Team members, in order to “vot[e] on presenting a final contract to members for ratification” the Bargaining Team must have “a majority [of] 50%+1 votes (10 votes)”. The Bargaining Team did not reach a voting majority as the final count was eight in favor of ratification, seven opposed, and one abstaining, and hence did not meet the required 50%+1 majority. Therefore the Bargaining Team violated the “Community Agreements” in sending out the ratification vote to membership, thus preemptively invalidating the results of the subsequent ratification vote. Furthermore, the failure of the Bargaining Team to reach a majority, also invalidates any claim that union support of ratification, or a “yes” vote on ratification, constituted the union’s  “official position.”



The email titled “Vote Now: Contract Ratification,” containing a link to the personalized online ballot for the ratification vote, was sent to members on or around August 20, 2018. This email’s content was heavily biased in favor of the YES position, including a lengthy list of what we “won” in the Tentative Agreement along with speculated negative consequences of not voting for this position; the NO position was only briefly mentioned at the end of the email, and its arguments were not listed on the email itself but on a separate google document that was linked from the email. The NO side received decidedly unequal treatment in this email that the vast majority of voting members (who voted online) saw before casting a vote. (see Appendix A).

This email was not approved by the Elections Committee, which is in explicit violation of the Article 13, Section 1 of the Local Bylaws[2] [3]  that stipulates that “All Local Union elections, strike votes, and contract ratification votes shall be held under the supervision of a democratically elected election committee. The election committee shall be responsible for the publication of notice for nominations and elections, the verification of eligibility for candidates, the organization and supervision of election proceedings, and the counting of ballots.”

The Executive Board of the Local Union admitted, in its email to the Local Joint Council on September 14, 2018, that “Due to a large number of resignations on the Elections Committee,  this time, the eboard voted on the time/place/manner of the ratification vote and helped to identify individuals to staff the in-person polls”. The Executive Board’s claim that “while a ratification vote is not an election, the Elections Committee has traditionally facilitated this vote” in the same email is misleading because aforementioned bylaws clearly stipulate that a ratification vote, like all other Local Union elections, must be supervised by the Elections Committee.


3. Union leadership violated democratic integrity of the election by directing paid staff to campaign for a “yes” vote.

Paid union organizers were assigned to campaign for the “yes” vote on the orders of some members of the union leadership. Staff contact members used their paid work hours to text and phone-bank members to convince them to vote “yes” on the contract ratification vote. The use of union membership resources to influence the results of this vote violates the democratic nature of the vote, and thus tainted a ratification vote according to the procedures set by the Local Union.

The Executive Board, in its email to the Joint Council on September 13, 2018, admitted to using staff and union resources to campaign for a “yes” vote.  The email by the Executive Board stated, “As the body in charge of directing staff, some of us instructed the field staff to inform members of the position that the majority of the bargaining team and members who participated in the statewide straw poll supported. The process for this allocation began during our regular field staff call (the calls open to the personnel committee and the organizing field staff) where we started a discussion on how to get staff to raise awareness and contact members about ratification vote.  Specific logistical instruction was given on follow-up calls after the bargaining team had voted to put the contract to ratification.”

Kavitha Iyengar, Northern Vice President, also admitted in an email to the Executive Board, Joint Council, and Anti-Oppression Committee, on August 23, 2018 that “members of the executive board had calls with staff to plan GOTV plans for the ratification vote and directed our field staff to tell members about the bargaining team's majority position, the official union position. We had directed staff resources toward getting out the vote for this ratification campaign through phone banking, text-banking, and walkthroughs... The raps included the message that voting yes is the majority position of the union since the majority of the bargaining team [sic] supported the tentative agreement.”


4. The Executive Board interfered with operations of the NO campaign.

While the official resources of the union were used to explicitly favor the YES side in the ratification vote, including through mass texts, the Executive Board issued a directive to prevent the NO campaign from using the same campaign strategy of mass texts. Kavitha Iyengar, Northern Vice President, admitted the interference in an email to the Executive Board, Joint Council, and Anti-Oppression Committee, on August 23, 2018, as she stated “Our directive about ‘no’ outreach was that it could not be presented as the official union position[4] , and that it could not be sent out via mass texting technologies.”


5. The timing and duration of the vote did not allow union members sufficient opportunity to inform themselves about contract details.

The timing and duration of the vote unduly limited the extent to which union membership could inform themselves about the details of the contract proposal, and also foreshortened any efforts to consider alternatives to ratification—including, but not limited to, a strike.

The timeline of communication with union membership about the final contract occurred as follows: union leadership sent an initial straw poll that included the Tentative Agreement on August 13th. This was the first time members were able to read the Tentative Agreement. The members were also asked in this poll  to determine whether to move the contract proposal to a ratification vote  Voting was kept open until noon on August 16th. With a small majority favoring the movement towards ratification in the straw poll, the actual ratification vote took place between August 19th and August 22nd.

For all but two UC campuses, both August votes took place a full month prior to school being back in session. The timing of the vote particularly infringed upon members on campuses on the quarter system, whose fall quarter begins in late September. Nevertheless, even for the two UC campuses that begin the fall semester in August, the initial straw poll and the ratification vote took place only as graduate student workers were returning to campus, and over the course of the hectic lead-up to the coming semester.

During this time, an extensive portion of the broader union membership was not available to deliberate with peers over the details of the contract. Further, there was no official union meeting to discuss ratification on any of the nine campuses. Given that the email containing the straw poll was the first instance in which most union members had heard anything about the contract’s contents, and the possibility of it being put up for a ratification vote, such conversations, if they occurred at all, were likely minimal—as they had to happen over the extremely short, ten-day turnaround between the initial email and the final day of ratification voting.

We also believe it was deeply undemocratic to hold the ratification vote before many new graduates were on campus and able to attend orientation where they would be given the opportunity to sign up for the union and becoming voting members. As this contract will impact those new graduate student-workers who will be employed for the next four years, it was unfair not to allow them the chance to vote on it and against the egalitarian spirit of our union. 

We believe that a genuinely democratic vote would only have been possible while students and workers were in session, and thus both physically present and mentally engaged with the bargaining processes, as to allow for a informed union membership. Exploiting the lack of worker presence on campuses across the state in mid-August, the timing and duration of the vote implicitly favored the “yes” vote by undercutting the momentum of possible organizing efforts in the direction of further bargaining and/or a strike.The timing moreover functioned to undermine efforts that concerned workers might have taken to organize around those concerns.

UAW Constitution Article 19, Section 3 states that “After negotiations have been concluded with the employer, the proposed contract or supplement shall be submitted to the vote of the Local Union membership, or unit membership in the case of an Amalgamated Local Union, at a meeting called especially for such purpose, or through such other procedure, approved by the Regional Director, to encourage greater participation of members in voting on the proposed contract or supplement.” This ratification vote was conducted in a manner contrary to the UAW Constitution mandate for it to “encourage greater participation of members”, since, as stated above, it took place in ways that minimized the members’ possibility of participation.


6. Technical errors and a lack of transparency created obstacles for workers to participate in the vote.

We also would highlight both technical errors and a lack of transparency in putting forth the pre-ratification straw poll and the actual ratification vote. Both votes were sent in an email that large portions of the membership either failed to receive or received only in spam folders in their email. This means that some members may not have been aware that the ratification vote was happening. Moreover, the means to remedy this situation and receive a new ballot  was unclear to many members. Technical issues with how the straw poll was tethered to individual member emails created a further lack of clarity over whether individual member votes were really being counted in the vote itself.

Members also reported issues with the secrecy of the ballot. The secrecy of the ballot could not be assured by the online voting platform we used as it required members to enter identifying personal information before casting the ballot, thus allowing member’s votes to be linked to their identities. It was possible that members did not feel completely free to cast the vote of their choosing for fear of repercussions. By holding the vote before the academic year had started at many campuses, left the majority of members without the potential to vote in person using the secret ballot used in in-person voting.

Therefore, as equal voting rights of all members were undermined, we contest the legitimacy of the vote.


REMEDIES SOUGHT

We request:
  1. The annulment of the contract that was ratified in August 2018.
  2. UAW Local 2865 immediately notify the University of California of this pending appeal, and provide it a copy of the appeal.
  3. UAW Local 2865 immediately notify the University of California that the Local does not consider the ratification complete until the appeal process is complete, and that the new contract not be implemented until the ratification process is completed correctly.
  4. Full investigation into the ratification process, especially the legality of the use of union resources to campaign for a “yes” vote, and the technical problems with emailing members the straw poll and the ratification vote.


Sincerely,

Mary Mussman, Lead Appellant
Member, UAW 2865 (Department of Comparative Literature, Berkeley)
4125 Dwinelle Hall
mary.mussman@berkeley.edu

Spencer Adams (Berkeley)
Erin Bennett (Berkeley)
Wendi Bootes (Berkeley)
Alex Brostoff (Berkeley)
Eleanor Cawthon (Berkeley)
Lindsay Choi (Berkeley)
Kathryn Crim (Berkeley)
Patrick Delehanty (Berkeley)
Beezer de Martelly (Berkeley)
Marlena Gittleman (Berkeley)
Matthew Gonzalez (Berkeley)
Connor Gorman (Davis)
Jordan Greenwald (Berkeley)
Veronica Hamilton (Santa Cruz)
Julia Havard (Berkeley)
Shannon Ikebe (Berkeley)
Adam Jadhav (Berkeley)
Colin Johnson (Davis)
Nicole Jones (Berkeley)
Marianne Kaletzky (Berkeley)
Dinah Lensing-Sharp (Berkeley)
Isaac Marck (Berkeley)
Ana McTaggart (Santa Cruz)
Marcelo Mendez (Santa Cruz)
Tara Phillips (Berkeley)
Chloe Piazza (Berkeley)
Kyle Ralston (Berkeley)
Sonya Rao (Los Angeles)
Michael Rawls (Davis)
Angus Reid (Berkeley)
Laila Riazi (Berkeley)
Brian Riley (Davis)
Betty Rosen (Berkeley)
Jocelyn Saidenberg (Berkeley)
Christopher Scott (Berkeley)
Joseph Serrano (Berkeley)
Phoenix Shetty (Davis)
Thomas Sliwowski (Berkeley)
Michael Song (Berkeley)
Simone Stirner (Berkeley)
Saniya Taher (Berkeley)
Jenny Tang (Berkeley)
Diana Thow (Berkeley)
Katharine Wallerstein (Berkeley)
Abigail Walsh (Santa Cruz)
Lawrence Wang (Berkeley)
Ellie White (Davis)
Duane Wright (Davis)







Saturday, September 15, 2018

Organizing Malpractice: The UAW 2865 ratification vote of 2018

When a professional commits acts that are unethical or illegal, or when their negligence causes harm we call it malpractice. We are familiar with the term malpractice in the medical profession, maybe the legal profession as well. But would malpractice make sense in the context of organizing, and if so what would it look like?

Unfortunately for me, I have just the example: the UAW 2865 ratification vote of 2018. I say "unfortunately for me" because this is my union (for those who are brand new to this blog). I believe that the professional staff organizers and the clique in power are guilty of organizing malpractice because of the following intentional practices, all of which run counter to the purpose of what organizers are supposed to be about:
  1. pushing a concessionary contract 
  2. lots of shady/unethical actions to push this ratification, some of which may have violated bylaws or the UAW constitution
  3. turning backs on other workers
  4. disorganizing and demobilizing workers
Let's examine these in order. First off, we have pushing a concessionary contract. My comrade Shannon Ikebe and another member from Berkeley, whom I haven't met, Tara Phillips, wrote this excellent detailed and pithy op-ed to the Daily Cal, which I will quote from:

"Some of the worst features of this contract include stagnant wages, no housing relief, and punishing concessions on international student fees. The 3 percent nominal wage increase barely keeps up with projected inflation rates, does not constitute a living wage, which is estimated to be $34,269 for one adult in Alameda County, and does not compete with GSI pay at peer institutions. Although the majority of workers listed their priority as securing affordable housing, there were no gains on this front. Instead, management recently increased rent in graduate housing at University Village, Albany. Despite some gains in sexual harassment protections — which management agreed to in the wake of the #MeToo movement and eight Title IX cases that were found to have been mishandled at UC Berkeley alone — that does not negate the regressive character of the entire contract.

Another key demand was remission of the exorbitant fee imposed only on international students, which amounts to about $15,000 a year for graduate students and about $29,000 for undergraduates. We developed an active campaign to fight this unfair treatment of our fellow international workers, many of whom testified in bargaining sessions to its detrimental effects. Not only did the contract fail to win on this demand, but it repealed the small international fee remission we had. Under this new contract, if you are a U.S. citizen, you may benefit from a $300 fee waiver for now (though there is no protection against future fee increases); if you are an international student, you will lose $108 from the $408 international fee waiver that you used to have. This fee sends a toxic message in the Donald Trump era, when immigrants are under vicious attack in our community and nationwide."


Ikebe and Phillips make the case for why the contract is concessionary, or as they call it regressive. I would like to briefly make a case for another way to think about this contract as concessionary, one that adopts a different frame of analysis than Ikebe and Philips's frame that looks at this single contract in isolation and just examines the areas of it which see rollbacks in pay and protections, I think this contract should be examined more longitudinally, not just cross sectionally like Ikebe and Philips. I am not proposing another frame of analysis because I think theirs is deficient or wrong, on the contrary I think their analysis is sharp and I myself have used it when talking to people about the contract, rather I would like to expand the ways in which we think about contracts, and I think these two analyses should be joined together. It is an additional frame or analysis, not an opposing or substitute frame of analysis.

A more longitudinal approach tries to view this particular outcome (in this case a loss) in the larger context of the struggle between UC management and Academic Student Employees (ASE's) over time. To force a class war analogy here, sorry, if this was a war we would see this outcome of this contract as a lost battle, simply for the outcome, however we need to look at the overall balance of forces and momentum on each side going into this one battle to really put it into context. In some cases a loss can be viewed a victory in this view (and a victory can be seen as a loss) - we often see this this in electoral politics when the Left runs a candidate who raises the visibility of radical politics, popularizes Left ideas, and builds an underlying organization. Even when this candidate loses, which they often expect, they see the gains that came out of it as a win in the long term. Or when someone was supposed to win in overwhelming numbers just barely walks away with victory it can still be seen as a defeat for the victor, because they were expected to do so much better, and the surprising performance of the underdog will be seen as a kind of victory itself. (Like if scrawny little me who can't fight for shit somehow lasted 3 rounds with Mike Tyson that would be huge, despite my loss, because who really thinks I'd last even 10 seconds let alone 3 rounds?)

So was this concessionary contract a win in the long term?

Those who pushed it would certainly say so, of course they wouldn't call it concessionary either, so that's no surprise.

I would argue it was an absolute loss on our side from this framework of analysis. Here's why: back in 2010 UAW 2865 settled a concessionary contract after just two months of negotiations, during the summer! The 2%/year raise wouldn't keep up with inflation, effectively making it a pay cut. ASE's organized a "No" vote against contract ratification, which despite its loss turned into a reform movement that would sweep union elections months later in 2011 under the AWDU (Academic Workers for a Democratic Union) caucus. AWDU got to negotiate a contract in 2013-14, the first time in our local's history that a radical reform caucus led the negotiations. I was a Davis representative on that bargaining team for most of the timeline of negotiations. The bargaining team still had a few members of the more centrist and conciliatory caucus USEJ (later re-branded as SWITCh), but AWDU had a clear majority the entire time. We built on-the-ground power and instead of focusing on talking with management in the bargaining room we focused on building a contract campaign, where on-the-ground power was built to pressure management, win public support, and engage with allies also struggling with UC admin.

UC admin's bargaining team was quite freaked out by the radical departure in bargaining room tactics and norms. They spent the first 3 days of negotiations freaked out by the fact that our team wanted to work in a more collective and horizontal fashion, so we had no lead negotiator. There were many memorable and humorous anecdotes that came from that, but more importantly it showed that even just changing up something small like that could really put them on the defensive and show their rigidity - a sign that they hadn't yet figured out how to "deal with" negotiations in this matter (translation: had had no fancy expensive training in how to undermine this kind of negotiations).

Furthermore we brought in open bargaining, packing the room with angry members who were there to give testimonials. Since we knew we wouldn't just "win" a good contract with a clever argument, but rather we had to fight for one and win it through pressure and disruption, we used the bargaining room as an organizing space. Bring members in, let management see how angry they were, let members get even more angry at the awful and offensive things management would say so that they could go back and tell their colleagues and friends about it, and give members a chance to be involved in what we wanted to ultimately be their contract campaign (not the bargaining team's negotiations). We also limited "side bars" - in fact I don't recall any while I was on the team. Side bars are secret conversations between one or two reps and managements lead negotiator. The conversation isn't on the record, and if you have a top-down union where the bargaining team is controlled by one person or a couple people, this is where the shadiest deals usually go down.

Lastly, we went on strike. Twice. For the first time in nearly ten years! AWDU union leaders told members that they were the center of this fight, and that we could only get what we wanted from management by fighting for it, all together. We planned a third strike, during finals week of Spring quarter, but the threat of a third strike was enough to move management on some key issues, and the strike was averted.

The point of that long explication of the previous round of bargaining was to show the stark contrast between 2010 and 2013-14. Management saw the union had become a threat instead of a collaborator. We needed to prove to them that we were actually organized and ready to fight, because dealing with us in the past they knew our union would cave easily without a fight. So we had an inertial force to overcome. However we also had surprise on our side. But our threats were nothing if they weren't backed up by action, because they had not seen our union be militant since its earliest days when ASEs fought for union recognition.

This temporal-relational aspect is very important strategically.

An analogy: if your boss always asks you to do something you don't like, and you have always just gone along with it, you develop a reputation as being the pushover or the one who can always be asked to do anything. You get dumped on all the time, because that is your reputation. If you always put up a mild fight but always cave, its just as bad, as the boss would never take your watered down protest seriously. But if all of a sudden one day you really stand up for yourself and walkout, you have totally changed how that boss perceives you, and how now they will approach you differently, they will have different expectations.

So the building of a credible strike threat and the concession that could be won were going against the inertial force of the previous conciliatory approach of the union, and it means that we really had to fight, a strike threat wouldn't have been enough.

The situation was quite different this time around though. In 2017-18 the UAW 2865 bargaining team was coming off of the momentum of the previous round of negotiations. UC management knew our union was willing and capable to strike. Coming into negotiations this time UC management had different expectations, and may have made more generous offers without the same amount of struggle on our end, because if they wanted to avoid a strike they knew it would take more and that our threats weren't empty.

So settling on a concessionary contract in the summer was more than just a concession in the moment, it was also a major deflation of the reputation we had developed. By not even holding a strike vote, let alone settling in the summer and aggressively pushing for ratification, our leadership signaled to management that the old radicals were out, that the new team may have been loud and in their face, but that ultimately it was all a show, that they would not put up a fight. the next bargaining team is going to have to break that expectation and will have the same inertial force to overcome as we did in 2013-14.

Next we have the issue of lots of shady/unethical actions to push this ratification, some of which may have violated bylaws or the UAW constitution, some of which Ikebe and Phillips touch upon in their article as well. There are so many things to discuss, but I can tell this is already going to be a long piece, so I will try to keep this section as short as possible.

First is the incredibly biased voting process itself. The language sent out was massively biased towards the yes side. I spent a day this summer session with my students just going over biased surveys - because I wanted to do my part as a teacher of sociology to help them see flawed and biased surveys since surveys are the most commonly encountered instrument of measuring the social world. I showed the email that the vote came with and the wording of the election form to my students and asked their opinion. I didn't say anything either way as to my opinion in the matter I just said, "My union sent this out, since we have examined surveys, I want your thoughts on this." They told me how it was very biased and obviously wanted people to vote yes. They didn't know the details, such as the way in which the 3% raise was being misleadingly framed as a larger raise, and they don't know about contract negotiations, so they didn't know to point out the bias in the way the email uncritically called management's offer its "last best and final", because there is often bluffing around "last best and final" offers, but what they did see was the space that was given to the Yes side, the language used that was very promotional, and the scary language guiding you away from voting no. In the actual ratification vote itself, one had to click an external link to even get any information about the No vote's perspective, the email only contained pro Yes information.

Second there is the issue of the elections committee. One of the bargaining team's co-leads wrote and sent out the email, bypassing the elections committee, the executive board, or any other body in the union. The elections committee had overseen these kinds of votes in the past, they vetted language for fairness and they oversaw the process as to remove bias. However Garrett wrote and sent out the email to all members by himself, going around the elections committee. This caused uproar on the elections committee and all but one members resigned, most in protest some due to capacity issues. So an elections committee with only one member, leaving eight campuses without representatives, was the only body to basically rubber stamp this process, and after the fact that Garrett had already unilaterally wrote and disseminated the language of the vote.

If that isn't bad enough, UC Merced didn't even have a bargaining team rep for any of these votes! When the bargaining team voted whether or not to have a straw poll Merced members had zero representation in that vote. When the straw poll came back 52% for and 48% against holding a ratification vote (clearly not a mandate for a ratification vote), and the bargaining team then voted on whether or not to hold a ratification vote Merced had no representatives in that vote. The bargaining team's own community agreements read that a majority would be "10 bargaining team members voting in favor" and "each campus gets two votes" Furthermore, specifically about voting to ratify the agreement read, "Voting on presenting a final contract to members for ratification: every campus have their two elected BT members vote using an online form & recorded with a majority being 50%+1 votes (10 votes). The bargaining team shall strive to achieve consensus whenever possible."

(screenshot of the BT agreement sent to me by a BT member)

So, by their own agreements, the Bargaining Team violated the following:
  1. Ratification Vote
    • Merced did not have 2 elected reps 
    • Majority was not 10 therefore not a majority
  2. Ratification Vote
    • Merced did not have 2 repts
    • Majority was not 10 (8 voted for, 7 against, 1 abstained) therefore not a majority
    • Consensus was not strived for. (52% of members and a 8-7 split on the BT was not striving for consensus.)

Next we have the issue of paid staff organizers heavily pushing the Yes in the ratification vote. Staff members are supposed to be neutral in elections. However, without any discussion or clarification the e-board member who is the staff manager instructed paid staff to push for a yes vote. I'm not making this up, the clique that runs the union admits it and doesn't think its a problem. In response to lots of people getting really upset by this they did release an email that says that they are sorry that they didn't comminicate the issue better. But there's nothing in the email that is an actual apology for using paid staff time to organize against rank and file members who want a better contract.

Here is the full text of the email:

A key part reads, "...we should have clearly explained to the JC as well as all staff members that the ratification vote is not an election and therefore the rules around prohibiting the use of union resources to campaign for elections do not apply. We understand that the permissibility of using union resources was especially confusing since an eboard member had sent an email during the straw poll that union resources were not permitted to be used for the straw poll. This agreement about the straw poll stemmed from the internal agreement from the Bargaining Team and only applied to the straw poll. Looking back, we should have explained the parameters of the vote far in advance. This would have given everyone a clear expectation of what is permissible and given the JC an opportunity to vote on implementing additional policies around internal votes if they so desired. This is still under JC discussion and has been recently taken up by the JC in the form of a resolution."

In other words, they feel bad that we didn't know that they would be using paid staff to push the yes vote, but since they found a loop hole making it not a violation (in their opinion) it wasn't wrong that they did it, only that they weren't more clear about it at the time.

As Ikebe and Phillips say, "It’s hard to believe that such a disastrous contract would have been accepted by workers in a fair and democratic process."

At the bottom of the above email you'll notice a reference to Amara, this refers to the UC Davis elected alternate to the bargaining team who was removed from the BT email list by another BT member from UC Santa Barbara unilaterally with no process. Amara immediately filed a complaint, and the person responsible, Meg, resigned. Meg then went on the offensive saying she isn't sorry and has no regrets in an email to the Joint Council, but then publicly on facebook failed to mention this context of her resignation and instead cited "bullying" and "anti-parent" remarks by other BT members. It is also unclear as to what kind of steps the e-board has made in response to this complaint, as Kavitha sent an email out a few weeks ago saying that they have responded to Amara, but Amara says they haven't responded to her at all.

Speaking of shadily removing access for people in elected position, during the vote at least two e-board members had their access to emailing the statewide membership revoked and it is still unsure as to who did that. Connor Gorman and our local president Emily Yen both found that their access to emailing the membership statewide had been revoked, and it is still unclear as to who did that and under what authority. It is important to note that Connor is very vocal in his opposition to the clique in power and Emily is not part of the clique and was on the vote No side.

That's all I will address here, but lot of other people have raised many other concerns about the shady actions of the clique in power, and I hope a comprehensive list and explanation is compiled at some point for the sake of historical record.

Moving to the third point, we have turning backs on other workers.I wrote about this extensively in a previous blog post "A referendum on solidarity?". Its not long so I recommend just reading the full text when you can.  But the main point is this - the Yes side wanted to settle now, and they recognized in their pro yes ballot language that other UC unions are struggling in their contract negotiations with the UC, and so they framed it in a aren't we lucky to have gotten this 3% wage when other workers can't even get this good of an offer after going on strike? Let's not lose this offer by not settling right now. I called this out as selfish and a total abandonment of solidarity. When we see other campus workers struggling to get a decent raise, the first reaction should be to join them in their fight, not turn our backs and say, "well at least I got mine".

Finally we have the point which looks at the big picture here and asks what the overall effect of these actions are, which I see as disorganizing and demobilizing workers.

Yes this contract was a disappointment.

Yes the dominant group on the bargaining team and the executive board did some hella shady stuff.

Yes our union officially turned its backs on other struggling UC workers.

But none of those are the biggest take-away for me. For me it is seeing a group of elected union officers and paid professional staff organizers who spent all of their time and energy into disorganizing and demobilizing ASEs in the UC system.

Rank and file members were ready to fight - 48% in the straw poll voted not only against a ratification vote but they said they were prepared to strike and to organize their coworkers for a strike. But because they wanted to settle and because they genuinely didn't believe that the rank and file had the power to make change themselves they poured their time and energy and our union's official money and resources into a blitzkrieg campaign to misinform, scare, and intimidate members into submission to the UCs latest offer.

Instead of building worker power they did all that they could to squash it!

This to me is the big picture, it is why I call their actions organizing malpractice.

Because of this betrayal of the members by the group in power many elected officers have resigned their position, many members have publicly rescinded their membership, and the entire union is in a state of disarray. Lots of good organizers are saying that this betrayal and the toxic culture of the union (stemming from its top-down nature and the desire of those in power to never be criticized) is why they will not be organizing with the union anymore, they will find other spaces on campus (or off) to organize. Some folks say that they will continue to work on campaigns like housing for example, but will never try to sign someone up for union membership.

Another major blunder that the union pulled during all this was 3rd partying itself.

When bosses try to preventively bust unions they tell workers that they don't need some third party involved with its own (greedy) interests (as they always emphasize union dues). Union organizers are always trained to explain to workers that a union isn't a third party, it is the collective action of the workers themselves.

However during this process the union leadership has made it clear that the bargaining team's 8-for yes vote means that that vote was now the official union position and as such it was totally fine to use paid staff and other resources to push this position. There was the "official union position" and then the membership vote. And the two were separate things.

And that is how you make yourself into a third party.

The membership wasn't the union, but rather the clique in charge that bypassed the elections committee despite violating the BT agreements was the union.

So then, you may be asking, what should have been done instead? Its easy to backseat drive/monday morning quarterback, and hindsight is 2020, but do I have any constructive suggestions for alternatives that could have been perused instead of the disorganizing and demobilizing members?

I wouldn't have written that rhetorical question if I didn't, so here it is:

When UC management gave it's alleged "last best and final" offer, the leadership should have instead of a straw poll (which wasn't really a straw poll since they campaigned, they didn't want to take a temperature check of the membership they wanted to shield their capitulation and betrayal with the illusion of democracy and approval)  called for a strike authorization vote. They could have said, "wow look at this, this is what the UC says is the best it can give us, but we know that we deserve better and if we fight we could win much more."

A strike authorization vote would have served the same function - of seeing where the membership stands on UC's offer, but it would have done so in a way that was more aggressive and had momentum moving forward, instead of regressive and concessionary.

Then when a majority of members voted yes they could have rejected the offer and UC would now be in the position of responding not just to a rejection of their bluff for a "last best and final", but they would be on the now escalated grounds of having a rejection in the context of a majority approval for a strike.

Then we go into the fall with an expired contract and go on strike with other UC unions and shut the shit down in the biggest strike in UC history.

That is responsible organizing. That is organizing for worker power. Not the negligent/malicious moves that we saw that just disorganized and demobilized a militant base of ASEs.