This document was written in preparation for the UAW 2865 reform conference held in Santa Cruz, May 3, 2008. It discusses the history of UAW-QUAD and other reform efforts inside UAW 2865, with a particular focus on efforts at Santa Cruz.
In 2004-05, a group of grad student labor activists at UC Santa Cruz organized through an activist group independent of the UAW Local 2865, the unions for Teaching Assistants, Readers, and Tutors at the UC. This group, the Grad Student Solidarity Network (GSSN), was primarily oriented toward organizing solidarity activities with other workers, especially campus workers, though there was some consideration of furthering grad student organizing as well. At the time, other campus unions were very active; AFSCME, organizing in conjunction with student activists (GSSN as well as, more prominently, the Student Worker Coalition for Justice), carried out an ambitious strike in spring 2005, which was quite successful at UCSC (and modestly successful statewide in achieving AFSCME's contract goals). Furthermore, the AFSCME campaign cemented SWCJ as an activist group, led mainly by undergrads but with significant participation from AFSCME (at the organizer and membership level) and grad students. CUE followed suit, slightly less successfully, and UPTE followed suit, still less successfully, with strikes in spring 2005.
GSSN saw itself as organizing activities among grad students which the union should have organized (but which the union did not have the willingness or organization to organize). Some GSSN members had the ambition of organizing a type of "flying squadron" of union members, separate from the official union. GSSN kept itself resolutely separate from the structures of the union itself. Partly, this was based on past frustrations with working through the union structures
In spring 2005, a few of us who had been involved in GSSN or had been mobilized by GSSN without being part of GSSN's planning process worked to support Scott Bailey's run for the UAW Local 2865 presidency. Scott ran against the previous president, a former math grad student from UCSC named Dan Lawson. Dan's perspective was very short-sighted and bureaucratic, and did not involve much in the way of organizing of any kind, whether top-down or bottom up. We didn't have a lot of illusions about Scott's campaign, but we thought he would be a step up over Dan. His campaign seemed to be as much an in-house coup as an insurgency; he was supported by the majority of the Executive Board and Joint Council. When several of us at UCSC encouraged Scott to have a more extensive platform, including issues of union democratization, he was eager and responsive. (We were a bit surprised at how quickly he was willing to take on our ideas, which should have suggested something about the seriousness with which he was taking them up.) Scott won an overwhelming victory, with UCSC delivering a disproportionate number of votes, overwhelmingly for Scott.
Around this time and shortly thereafter, some of us began to think that we needed an organizational vessel other than GSSN, one which maintained a critical distance from the leadership of the union, but which reclaimed the notion that "we are the union" and which worked to reform the union and push it in a more useful and democratic direction. A number of factors were involved in this shift:
1) The big fights of 2004-05 had involved other unions, but in 05-06 our contract would be coming up. It seemed impossible for us to continue to maintain a distance from the activities of our union.
2) While we quickly realized that the Scott Bailey regime had congealed quite bureaucratically, we initially held hopes that it would allow more space for democratic, bottom-up organizing than the previous regime.
3) There was a looming issue on our campus which seemed to us like something which ought to be a union issue, but which the union had always refused to take up: the issue of burgeoning classroom sizes, which meant increased work for TAs and decreased quality of education for undergraduates. The union's approach had always been to see this issue exclusively as one of workload, best addressed through filing workload grievances on the basis of our weekly and term-long caps for total hours of work. It probably would have been possible to use grievances as part of a larger, organizing-based strategy to deal with classroom size issues. One problem, however, was that any time the classroom size issue was raised, the central leaders of the union would respond very defensively and dismissively, for reasons that were never adequately clear to us. What was clear was that the issue had been raised before, and that the most central leaders had developed a dismissive posture and "line" which was aggressively disseminated to the secondary leaders. This line did not engage quality of education issues as issues which were germane for a union to deal with, and it mostly brushed aside even the issue of speedup, which has always been a central concern of unions. We believed that this was one of the central issues if not the central issue we faced as TAs on campus; it was also an issue which opened onto many other issues, both as workers and as advocates of social justice. Furthermore, we believed that the best way to move forward on this issue involved a multi-pronged approach which, among other strategies, pushed the union to include a demand for classroom size protections as a central demand of bargaining. This would clearly require an engagement with the institutional union.
4) We also wanted to preserve the ability to do things in an activist modality, outside of the structure of the union, including around issues which weren't necessarily "classic" union issues. It seemed to us that another "prong" of the campaign around classroom size issues would be a "justice in education" campaign, involving undergraduates as well as parents, professors, and community allies.
For all of these reasons, we formed a new grouping, which eventually came to be known as UAW Members for Quality Education and Democracy (UAW-QUAD). Formed according to the motives described above, we saw ourselves as organizing around three objectives, in no particular order: 1) continuing to provide the independent, activist and to some extent reflective space of GSSN (which had basically stopped meeting, several of its leading members having been central to the foundation of QUAD) - organizing, going forward, mainly around justice-in-education issues, 2) "being the union" at the campus (chapter) level (since we constituted the vast majority of active union members on our campus, this didn't seem like that big a stretch), and 3) working to reform the union at the statewide level.
The third goal came into focus in spring 2006, when a substantial group of us organized to attend our first statewide membership meeting of UAW 2865. Our immediate goals were to promote bargaining over classroom size issues and to make connections with other union members around the state. We were one of the largest (if not the largest) campus contingents at the meeting, and certainly the best organized around a specific, independent platform. We had been stymied for months by our campus unit chair and bargaining team member, the only really active person on our campus who was not more or less identified with QUAD, who seemed to be convinced that bargaining over classroom size issues would be a horrible idea, but couldn't give us a consistent, much less convincing, argument behind that view. We initially caught the leadership off-guard, and won some procedural votes, but over the course of the day they turned the screws to encourage people to vote their way, and people also became weary and wanted the whole thing to be over. As a result we lost the votes to include a demand bargaining over classroom size (which was in the end a procedural vote as well - the parliamentarian ruled that the body could not amend the bargaining team's report, which included the bargaining demands to be ratified; we could only vote up or down on ratification - a "no" vote on ratification would create a bargaining crisis, and require another statewide meeting in a month.)
Our biggest success at the meeting was networking with allies from two other campuses: Davis and Riverside. The Davis bargaining team members had long been lone wolves on the team, fighting for greater transparency, and they had backed bringing our demands to a vote. The Riverside members were told by the leadership to vote our proposals down, and felt incensed at the undemocratic nature of this procedure. These relationships were the beginning of an alliance of sorts, which would continue and deepen during bargaining the next year. (For reasons that were never completely clear to us - though they seem to have had something to do with the 2006 elections - the union rolled over the contract for a one-year extension, adding UC Merced's academic student employees to the contract.)
In 2006-07, after a number of involved discussions, QUAD decided to run people for unit chair, recording secretary, and all three head steward positions on our campus. Our rationale was that we needed people in the unit chair and recording secretary positions to be on the bargaining team, since this was the best way to push our agenda forward in terms of the classroom size issue specifically and a social justice agenda for bargaining more generally. Through discussions with our allies from UC Davis and our own experiences, we had come to see healthcare as an increasingly important issue as well, particularly in terms of the lack of an affordable domestic partner and dependent plan and the lack of coverage for gender transition services. We also wanted to fill our head steward positions, since head stewards would have a vote on the joint council, and the joint council basically had the power to approve changes to the bylaws. The leadership consistently used both the existing bylaws and changes to the bylaws to thwart our attempts at change, so we thought we needed to fight back, both through our own bylaws amendments and effectively opposing bylaws amendments we disagreed with.
By running people for these positions, QUAD effectively established hegemony in the campus chapter of the UAW. The central leadership gradually gave up its efforts to control things from afar, effectively granting us an unspoken but real autonomy. This allowed us to do some effective and exciting organizing through the union - particularly organizing fall orientations better than we ever had in the past. More people were involved in the union than ever before. We also organized an effective fightback against proposed healthcare cuts, which was invigorating and exciting but also controversial. The campaign was jointly organized by the campus chapter of the union and UAW-QUAD; our opponents on the bargaining team saw QUAD as an illegitimate body, with one bargaining team member referring derisively to the group as a "self-appointed faction." QUAD also stepped into the breach to agitate around the UAW's workload action at the end of spring quarter 2007. (The UAW has traditionally - perplexingly - refused to use fliers for actions, and no flier was approved for this action until the last minute if at all.)
At the Santa Cruz campus some activists had frustrations with our organizing heavily focusing only on reform within the union at the statewide level, to the marginalization of campus-based, more autonomous activism. In part, this was due to a barrage of decisions coming down from the bargaining team and executive board to be implemented on the ground with little room for campus-based initiatives. At a statewide level, our relationships with activists from Davis and Riverside deepened, but became focused almost entirely on the two bargaining team members from each campus. A very intense set of circumstances and relationships converged upon these six people, who became more or less the hub of a statewide reform-minded part of the union leadership. At one point – the winter 2007 statewide meeting – almost the entire contingents from all three campuses met together, at a bar, separate from other campus contingents, furious with the undemocratic conduct of the meeting. More than 30 people attended this meeting. We decided to form some kind of a statewide grouping to reform the union. However, unfortunately, this never really took life outside of the six bargaining team members.
The contract campaign came to a head during summer and early fall 2007. QUAD members once again organized the fuck out of orientations. Five of the six bargaining team members from the three "reform" campuses agreed to work together to prioritize bargaining issues around workload (especially classroom size), healthcare (especially dependent care, domestic partner care, and trans-inclusive healthcare), family-friendly leave policies, and non-resident tuition remissions. The sixth bargaining team member from one of the three campuses agreed with these general goals, but over the course of a few weeks stopped working with the other five reformers, and started working with the political majority of the bargaining team. From QUAD's perspective, she had been deliberately subjected to intense psychological pressure and "flipped" opportunistically. From her own perspective, I think she felt that QUAD and its reform allies had some worthy goals, but insufficient strategies. She thought that our agitational, confrontational style could only go so far, and that real reform could only happen through working more collaboratively within the structures of the union. Of course, we would beg to differ; in our experience, that collaborative "style" has lead time and time again back to the same old bureaucratic "content," and only a disciplined, independent reform effort, involving activists from not just three but a majority of UC campuses representing a majority of union members would have to come together to create the possibility of real, fundamental change. We suspect that the interests of the bureaucracy are too entrenched – at the level of the International Union, over and above the power-hungry, autocratic nature of a few local bigwigs – to make meaningful change possible from within. Of course we will be derided for saying this publicly at all, but we would be delighted to be proven wrong, even in part.
In the event, the loss of one key ally, along with a series of other intense events distracted and disoriented the remaining five reform bargaining team members to some extent. Although perhaps – no longer able to win votes if one or two people defected from the majority, but consigned to lose every contested vote – we could do no better than we did. In the end, the mood about the contract settlement among the reformers ranged from bittersweet to just bitter, despite the achievement of a number of gains, several of which were forged on the backs of issues we had fought for.
Since then, the union and QUAD have been at a virtual standstill at UCSC. In the 2007-08 school year, neither the union nor QUAD have recruited any significant new activists, though a number of QUAD members have been working together in a new group, Students for Trans-Inclusive Health Care, which has made some real progress organizing around its issue.
On April 6, 2008 UAW 2865 held its annual general membership meeting at UC Davis. Reformers from Berkeley, Davis, Riverside and Santa Cruz devised a plan to propose several initiatives that would, if passed, increase campus autonomy (e.g. empowering campuses to use their own email lists, creating a campus discretionary fund, etc.). The meeting ended abruptly when a member called quorum (100 members makes quorum, and just over 50 members were present), which meant no decisions could be made during the course of the meeting. The meeting proceeded nonetheless as these meetings tend to proceed: executive board members presented reports that are then open for some discussion. A number of officers and members interested in reform decided to leave the meeting early so that we would have a chance to make plans for the future. The May 3 reform conference planning committee came out of this discussion.
At UC Santa Cruz and at the statewide level we've made some progress toward changing the union. We've made union meetings spaces for collective and democratic decision-making and we have successfully organized departmental meetings. In the past few years at Santa Cruz we increased the number of active members and successfully fought back impending healthcare cuts. At Santa Cruz we have also successfully organized around campus orientations and we've turned people out for our healthcare and workload actions. We achieved a greater—though far from ideal—level of transparency by the bargaining team.
Though we have made some achievements, there are many things we did not achieve and there's a lot left to do. At Joint Council and Bargaining Team meetings we reformers often found ourselves too easily marginalized by the majority of officers. This has meant that we were unable to win achievements around several issues we were passionate about, including explicit protections against ballooning class sizes, gender confirmation services, improved healthcare for partners and dependents, improved rights and benefits for undergraduate workers within the union, and non-resident tuition remission, among other things. We also found ourselves perhaps overly focusing on machinations at the statewide level rather than putting much-needed energy at building our reform efforts from the bottom up. Until the recent relationship we at UC Riverside, Santa Cruz, and Davis formed with reformers at UC Berkeley, we had not extended reform efforts beyond the three original campuses.
The purpose of the May 3 Conference in Santa Cruz is to reenergize our organizing toward making the union into an effective, grassroots and democratic space for organizing to further the cause of social justice. We hope to develop a platform around which we can coalesce as a statewide union reform group and have strategic discussions about what our short- and long-term goals are as reformers. Most importantly, we believe that our union, UAW 2865, has mostly untapped potential to not only further our own interests as teaching assistants, readers, and tutors at the University of California, but also to make higher education in California more accessible to working-class and oppressed people. This can only be achieved if the union has an active, informed, and empowered membership.
Photo from UAW 2865 reform conference
Santa Cruz, May 3, 2008