SANTA CRUZ – A group of UC academic employees has successfully turned disapproval of a 2010 contract agreement into momentum for a reform movement that swept candidates into top positions in the union, UAW Local 2865.
After a contentious election, the reform group, Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, took every executive board position, beating out the slate that heavily featured incumbents, United for Social and Economic Justice.
UAW Local 2865, which represents more than 12,000 UC academic student employees, such as teaching assistants, is the largest UAW local in the west and the largest graduate student union in the country.
In all, more than 3,000 union members voted in the election, and most of the executive board seats were decided by a few hundred votes.
Some campuses, such as UC Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley, were decidedly in favor of the Academic Workers slate, while others, such as UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside, leaned heavily toward the United for Social and Economic Justice candidates.
The United for Social and Economic Justice members did win several campus head steward positions, and took half of the seats that participate on the statewide bargaining team.
During the election both sides lodged numerous complaints regarding how campaigning and balloting were conducted.
At one point, as challenges came in from both sides, the vote count was halted, resulting in simultaneous sit-ins by the reform group in the UCLA and UC Berkeley union offices until the count was restarted.
United for Social and Economic Justice candidates Daraka Larimore-Hall and Xochitl Lopez, who ran for president and northern vice-president respectively, both said the other slate participated in bullying, harassment and intimidation.
“I’m hoping that there isn’t a continued rift, but based on the context leading up to and surrounding the election I am concerned,” said Lopez, a UC Davis student. “I’m going to put my best foot forward, because the goal is to get work done for the members.”
Members of the reform group have said that their rivals attempted to use their established status in the union leadership to affect results.
“I haven’t seen any credible evidence to this point of the bullying and harassment and the other allegations they talk about,” said UCSC graduate student and Academic Workers supporter Brian Malone. “We’ve done internal investigations into this but there doesn’t seem to be anything to those charges. It’s another example of how previous leadership doesn’t believe you can disagree and debate things within the union.”
In December, three campuses, including UC Santa Cruz, voted against a contract negotiated with UC by Local 2865. The contract was eventually approved with 62 percent of the vote, much lower than the 96 percent of the vote the previous contract in 2007 garnered.
The election results will not be official until the challenges are addressed by the union’s joint council, but members on both sides are looking ahead to the task at hand, pointing to budget cuts and working with other unions that represent UC workers as top concerns.
“I’m not worried at all about the divide in the union,” said Dan Buch, a UC Berkeley graduate student who is aligned with Academic Workers. “I think we will pull together and I have no concerns about a north-south split. I think we all understand that we are union brothers when its all over, and we will come together and fight as one.”
