To Win a UC for All, We Need to Build Up a Powerfu...

To Win a UC for All, We Need to Build Up a Powerful and Militant Union

Yueran Zhang

Apr 2 · 16 min read

By Alexa N. and Yueran Z.

We are student workers at the University of California, Berkeley and committed organizers in our student worker union, UAW 2865 (the union representing student instructors, readers, and tutors at the UC). We are also current and former leaders of our union’s Berkeley unit. Over the past couple of years, we have worked tirelessly with our co-workers, rank-and-file union members, and other statewide leaders to build a stronger union and increase rank-and-file participation. At the same time, the democratic structure of our union has also provided opportunities to express our somewhat distinct positions at key contentious moments, such as the 2018 contract ratification vote (in which we voted “no”) and the vote on the UAWD resolution to democratize our international earlier this year (in which we voted “yes”). We believe our power as workers to lift ourselves out of precarity while raising the quality and accessibility of education at UC is ultimately derived from massive and militant direct action, driven by an engaged rank-and-file.

For this reason, we are excited by the ongoing wave of wildcat strikes for a cost of living adjustment (COLA) which started at UC Santa Cruz last December and has now spread to other UC campuses. The energy generated by wildcat strikers has clearly illustrated what militant direct action looks like. We believe this action should happen on a massive scale, and that all organizers need to work towards this shared goal. Therefore, in this piece, we seek to connect the current wildcat organizing to the organizing efforts within our union over the past two years. We also make a case for the combination of militant direct action and majority-building organizing that it will take to win our vital COLA.

What Power Do We Have?

The wildcat organizing for a COLA has generated powerful momentum around ambitious demands. These actions have galvanized hundreds of new workers into action, cultivated solidarity with other unions and community members across the UC, and drawn massive political and media attention across the country and around the world. Excitingly, the COLA movement at large exists both within and beyond our union’s scope and capacity. This has inspired hundreds of undergraduate student activists not only to join risky direct actions, but to lead them. As such, the campus rallies called by the wildcat organizers are among the largest we have seen during our time at Berkeley. The sense of solidarity felt at wildcat general assemblies has been absolutely empowering. Wildcat organizers have also raised critical questions for our union: what should collective bargaining with UC look like? How can and should we wield a democracy of over 10,000 members representing over 19,000 workers? What does diversity mean in such a large class-based organization? Most critically, the workers organizing wildcat strikes have exposed the precarious living conditions we have endured for too long and ask for something we desperately need: a huge raise to lift us from rent burden.

These actions are rapidly surfacing key strategic questions, namely what it will take to win both a COLA and the kind of university and workplace we want: a truly public university, a tuition-free and worker-controlled UC for all. To answer these questions, we must examine both the power of our boss, and our own power as student workers.

The UC is an extremely powerful multi-billion dollar institution, and it is determined to ensure every budget cut or purse-tightening is on our backs. The UC Administration’s brutal assault on both the wildcat strikers and our union shows their ruthlessness. Over the years we’ve spent organizing in our union, we’ve seen UC fight us tooth and nail at every advance. Management under-appoints student workers to avoid providing tuition and fee remissions. They misinform student workers, denying that reading course materials as part of the prep for teaching counts as work. At the same time, they have spent nearly $1 billion on a failing new statewide payroll system, UCPath, while refusing to provide workers with raises that keep up with inflation. While the nominal goal of the UC system is to educate, student workers provide over 50% of its total teaching time while accounting for less than 2% of its operating budget. Clearly, the priority of UC is elsewhere.

In the face of this dynamic, our power to advocate for ourselves and fight the boss comes from our capacity to stand together as workers. 19,000 student workers acting as one collective body is more powerful than any of us as individuals. This simple fact is what drove student workers like us to unionize at the UCs over 20 years ago, and at every turn we can see what having a union has won us. Last year, our union won hundreds of thousands of dollars in backpay and compensation after many of us experienced stolen wages by UCPath, and closed the loophole that allowed UC to engage in wage theft by sponsoring the successful SB 698 in the California State legislature. Early this year our union won a multi-million dollar arbitration settlement in response to Berkeley’s electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) department’s consistent practice of appointing undergrad teaching assistants below the threshold for tuition and fee remission.

But having a union is not enough; building a strong union is key to our continued ability to win demands for all student workers. We see a COLA as a key demand in a larger project of creating a public university system for everyone, and an ambitious demand at that. We want a UC where workers win substantial protections against all forms of harassment, smaller courses that provide our students with higher quality education, leverage to repeal Proposition 209 and create a genuinely more diverse UC, freedom from “non-residential tuition”, and the ability to demilitarize not only campus police (UCPD) but police in our community (BPD). We want a union where our power and militancy match our ambitions.

The only way to force our boss to make such transformative concessions is to completely shut down the University of California, which we can only do by withholding our labor on a massive, overwhelming scale. Seeing ourselves as workers and our struggle as part of the labor movement is key: our boss insists on treating us only as students, not as workers. It is only when we identify as workers that we can shed the idea that it is a privilege to be a student, and in doing so understand our class position within the UC system as part of the cheap, exploitable labor that keeps UC running. As workers, our power comes from our ability to halt production in our (physical and digital) workplaces. The greater the number of workers withholding labor, the more damage we are capable of causing to our boss, and the greater our power. When we unite every student worker across all UC campuses to strike together, we can shut down the UC in a most thorough fashion and finally bring it to heel.

We are energized by the extent of the ongoing wildcat organizing, but given what we know of the strength and callousness of our boss, we need to build current actions into an organizing effort that massively expands our power statewide and leads to a supermajority strike. A COLA is going to cost UC a tremendous amount of money; to truly force their hand, we will have to cause, or clearly hold the ability to cause, commensurate damage. Huge rallies, community solidarity, and media attention may amplify the power of a strike in crucial ways, but they cannot substitute for more workers withholding more of our labor. Building the ability to pull off such a monumental strike requires systematic, deep, and sustained organizing over a long period of time. If we do not commit to an organizing plan that allows us to massively disrupt UC, UC will simply continue to dismiss wildcatting workers just as they have at UCSC.

Organizing the Unorganized

The controversy around contract ratification in 2018 forced us to reflect on our vision. Both of us voted not to ratify the contract — we would have preferred to go on strike and put up a fight. We wanted to flex our collective muscle and strengthen our institutional memory. At the same time, we were also painfully aware that our union would almost certainly not have the capacity to pull off a massively disruptive strike. A majority of workers were not yet members of our union. Most workers were completely disengaged from the ratification process (including at Santa Cruz, where about 70% of in-unit workers did not vote in the oft-cited contract ratification poll). Our union lacked networks in most departments at Berkeley and across the state. On top of that, the Supreme Court decision on Janus vs AFSCME emboldened the UC administration and decimated our union’s operating budget, slashing it by over 40% overnight. Had we won a strike vote, the strike itself may not have even been large enough to cause the disruption necessary to win a significantly better contract.

Coming out of the 2018 contract fight, we became even more dedicated to organizing our co-workers to build a stronger union, to defend workers’ rights through ongoing militant actions, and, ultimately, to ready ourselves to strike on a monumental scale. This hard work has already begun to pay off. Since the beginning of the last contract campaign in 2017, union density has increased by over 20% statewide, bringing thousands of new workers into the labor movement. Rank-and-file union members and organizers visit teaching sections, walk through worksites, and customize one-on-one orientations to have irreplaceable in-person conversations with workers who had previously slipped through our union structures, explaining what a union is to workers who are unfamiliar with the idea. Organizing teams have been built in most departments, especially in STEM departments, which represent a majority of workers at UC. We have formed contract enforcement committees to inform fellow co-workers of our rights and to fight together against late or missed pay, harassment, discrimination, and workload issues. More international student workers feel confident in organizing for the issues they care deeply about. By any metric, we have a much stronger union and a much more engaged and strike-ready membership than we had two years ago.

But there is still much work ahead of us: a large number of workers in professional schools, workers in STEM departments, undergraduate student workers, and international student workers still do not even know that they have a union or what a union is. Apathy is a prevalent problem, as it is not obvious to many workers why they should care. In other cases, there’s fear: workers depend upon the beneficence of their advisors for funding and job recommendations, and have lacked the political education, organizing experience, and trust to realize that any personal and professional consequences of standing up to our advisors are surmountable when we recognize our common boss — UC — in solidarity.

It’s exactly these disengaged and fearful co-workers that we need to move towards strike-readiness if we want to pull off a powerful, massive strike capable of forcing the concessions necessary to lift us out of rent burden. In our experience on the shop floor — in labs, offices, and classrooms — these workers need to be gradually moved towards strike-readiness through consistent, targeted organizing. We must bring these co-workers in through one-on-one outreach and in-person conversations — which will require creativity in the face of this global pandemic — and concretely show the power of workers coming together by addressing specific issues in their workplaces. We must build a team of rank-and-file organizers in every department capable of winning their co-workers’ trust. This takes a tremendous amount of work. The UTLA spent four years building the organizing infrastructure among the rank-and-file in every school and going through a series of contract actions as “temperature checks,” which made it possible to go on strike with more than 90% participation in 2019 and win rights which management insisted they could not even bargain over (just as UC tells us we cannot bargain over a housing stipend since it is not a workplace issue).

A Plan to Win

We admire our comrades organizing wildcat actions. We share the vision of a strong, militant labor movement and are eager to work together towards this shared goal. At the same time, from our conversations with wildcat organizers, we recognize three strategic disagreements regarding how to build a strong, militant labor movement. We hope to lay out these points of disagreement clearly and with absolute respect, so that we can start to build a plan in which our energies and strategies best complement each other.

First, some wildcat organizers hope that once a strike is launched, it can spread, moving an increasing number of workers to take action. Thus, “spreading the strike” is a prominent slogan in the current wave of wildcat organizing. We wish “spreading the strike” could engulf every campus, but we see it as inevitable that without well-developed organizing structures already in place to engage the vast majority of workers, “spreading the strike” will hit a wall sooner or later. Of course, strikes provide exciting opportunities for political education, and they often reach workers who have never considered how their union benefits them. However, if nearly half of our fellow workers statewide neither consider themselves “workers” nor understand their peers as “co-workers” engaged in a common struggle, how can they be rapidly moved to take up the mantle of a strike? A small wildcat strike may act as a precursor to a massive strike, but this usually happens when workers have already built up the confidence to take mass action through years of political education and escalation, as OEA strikes in 2019 taught us. To build momentum towards such massive strikes, we need direct actions that flex our muscle, as well as a process of mass organizing, political education, and escalation oriented towards bringing in a supermajority of workers.

Second, we have heard the argument among some wildcat organizers that a conservative union leadership has been holding back a rank-and-file that is ready to act. But as we talk to workers across campus and the state, we believe the real obstacle to a massive strike is that there are still many workers who are not ready to act and, in doing so, risk their livelihoods (ability to pay rent, retain healthcare, keep their tuition and fee remissions) for goals that feel ambitious to the point of being impossible to actually achieve. Unless wildcat participation grows at an exponential rate, these workers, who represent a supermajority of all UC student workers, will never be ready to act without continuous organizing and outreach to bring them in. We have talked to coworkers who express a wide range of concerns and anxieties which give them pause before committing to striking: will I have any legal protections? How will my advisor/supervisor react? How will my students be impacted? What if I’m the only one in my department striking? What happens if my pay or healthcare are withheld? Is there really a chance to win? We need to seriously engage with these concerns if we are to overcome them. When we strike against UC, we want everyone together — this is what solidarity means in the labor movement, and this solidarity is our essential power.

Third, in conversations with some wildcat organizers, we have heard the rampant belief that it is impossible to make a “worker” out of their “engineering colleague.” This type of pessimistic framing assumes that it is impossible to move many workers, and that therefore the best course of action is to take action as a militant “vanguard” minority. We refuse to commit to this downward pessimism. We believe it is possible — and we have to believe it is possible — to move every worker to take action together.

This belief is not whimsical idealism, but a conviction based on our actual past organizing experiences. Yueran was deeply involved in the unionization campaign at Harvard in 2017–2018, and has seen firsthand that many workers — particularly STEM workers and international student workers — who arrived on campus apathetic and completely skeptical of “the union” eventually voted “yes” to form a union, and then went on a majority strike in which thousands of workers participated! This happened because workers expended an inordinate amount of energy to build organizing networks that reached nearly every single worker. If a majority of student workers at Harvard — the richest university in the world, where workers may be predisposed to identify with the prestige and brand of their institution — can form a union from scratch and strike for their first ever contract, there is no reason why it is not possible to eventually organize not only those atomized workers in STEM, but those in all disciplines at UC, into a mass strike across the state.

It is also critical to acknowledge that the disciplinary divisions in our union — STEM workers in departments where union density is lower versus humanities and social sciences workers in smaller, more poorly funded departments — are also racialized divisions. Some of the biggest departments with the lowest union density are also departments where racial and gender representation are extremely biased. In focusing resources on our weakest areas in order to build a majority-participation and militant union, we must reckon with how such a course of action privileges these departments in our organizing work over departments where workers already have a deep sense of solidarity and militancy based on their shared experiences of oppression. We need to reckon with the fact that we are organizing within a white supremacist institution that disenfranchises workers of color and those who are not citizens, and that, as a result, our union has and will fall prey to the same issues. We must do a much better job than our employer at addressing the historical inequities encoded in our disciplines. This requires that we, as leaders and members of our union, address the underlying conditions that have prompted the wildcat strike, and the fact that the first department at UC Berkeley to declare itself ready for this strike was African American Studies. We need to create more space within our union for departments with a large number of workers of color to engage and develop as leaders, at the same time as our union continues to engage the “biggest worst” departments.

Building the power to shut UC down is hard, and doing so will take time. Looking to Harvard student workers, UTLA, OEA, and some of our wins over the past couple of years, we see that we have to engage in laborious, thankless, day-to-day organizing. Organizing activities such as section visits, walkthroughs, one-on-one orientations and accompanying workers to grievance meetings do not sound titillating. They do not invite media attention. But they are incredibly important — and militant — because working under capitalism means solidarity is seldom spontaneous.

This is not a debate between “ideal” versus “actual” organizing. In the past, student workers have successfully organized massive, supermajority strikes at a number of universities, including the UC. In 1998, more than two-thirds of all graduate student TAs across the UC went on strike together, which forced the university to recognize and bargain with our union. As long as we keep organizing and continue to flex our muscle with escalatory direct actions, there is no doubt that our union could pull off such a massive strike again.

However, assessing our current power means acknowledging that neither the wildcat strikes nor a successful strike authorization vote toward an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike will generate this mass action now. We are not suggesting we “wait” until 2022 when our current contract expires. Rather, we believe that, by fostering an unremitting focus on majority militancy, it is entirely possible that in 2 years we will have created the organizing infrastructure, energy, and momentum to spread a truly massive strike, so that we stand together as 80% or 90% of our co-workers disrupting the status quo at UC. We are excited by the wildcat strikes and determined to organize an impactful ULP strike exactly because we believe these militant actions, in combination with deep, majority-oriented organizing, help us build towards a supermajority strike.

Looking Ahead

Our coworkers on wildcat strike have put the question of militancy front and center. The slogans and actions have inspired a new layer of student workers to see themselves as part of a militant struggle. Across Berkeley, the wildcat strike has created a renewed sense of agency and an expanded horizon of what is possible. We want to sustain this momentum and help transform these wildcat actions into a massive strike. To do this, we need to work together and plug everyone into the detailed, all-encompassing and wide-ranging organizational structures of our union.

The COVID-19 pandemic has raised many practical questions about how we organize while practicing physical distancing, what a strike would mean under such strained circumstances, and what our power is in the upheaval of moving to online-only instruction. We don’t have easy answers. These questions open unique opportunities to rethink many premises and tactics of labor organizing; our current mobilization for a ULP strike also lends them a decided urgency. These questions must be answered collectively and democratically, using everyone’s creativity and solidarity. This is why we believe all union members, especially those invested in the wildcat strikes, should get involved in our union’s ULP strike organizing committee and help shape our union’s strike decisions. This is the next concrete step not only to build statewide power and engagement, but to intensify our militancy.

As workers whose labor constitutes the functioning of this university, our leverage is our ability to withhold that labor. When our union leaders recently met with UC administrators for “pre-complaint mediation” over the ULP charges, the UC administrators expressed complete frustration at our ULP strike pledge. With more than three thousand student workers pledging to strike, the UC has grown increasingly anxious. They see our threat of a strike as imminently real, and we must ensure that it is. The combination of the wildcat strikes and this ULP strike pledge has already built a threat of power that makes UC nervous, and we must ramp up this pressure. We must make sure the threat of our ULP strike is as powerful and credible as possible, by ensuring that more than a few thousand student workers are absolutely committed to unleashing this threat. Moreover, we must channel the energy generated by the wildcat and ULP strikes towards an organizing project seeking to make every worker ready for a massive, supermajority strike. Only together can we build this massive strike that brings in every worker and completely shuts down UC in order to win not just a COLA, but a UC for all.

Alexa N. is a PhD Candidate and student worker in Plant and Microbial Biology at UC Berkeley and a head steward of the UAW 2865

Yueran Z. is a graduate student in Sociology at UC Berkeley, an international student worker from China, a retired head steward and part of the UAW 2865’s statewide international student committee