Posts tagged UC Berkeley
Workers at Bay Area UC campuses join statewide strike over wages, conditions
April 3, 2025 // Workers at Bay Area UC campuses join statewide strike over wages, conditions sanfrancisco By Tim Fang Updated on: April 1, 2025 / 11:33 AM PDT / CBS San Francisco Workers at University of California campuses and medical facilities in the Bay Area joined thousands of employees statewide Tuesday in a one-day strike, claiming unfair labor practices. About 20,000 employees represented by the University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) and nearly 40,000 workers with the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees began their strike around 7 a.m. UC Berkeley, UCSF, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory were among the Bay Area locations where workers were striking.
Opinion: Why Trump’s anti-Semitism crackdown should worry UC union
February 23, 2025 // Following President Trump’s executive order to combat anti-Semitism came reports that his administration has opened investigations at five U.S. universities — including at UC Berkeley. There is, unfortunately, plenty to uncover from violent student groups to passive university administrators. But investigators would be wise to also examine the role unions have played. My own lawsuit against the United Auto Workers (UAW), which represents 48,000 employees across the UC system, should be enough to raise alarm bells. At UC Berkeley, where I am a postdoc, campus administrators were poised to break up a post-October 7, anti-Israel encampment, when the union came to its rescue. The encampment prominently displayed the inverted red triangle—the Hamas symbol used in violent propaganda videos to target Israelis—and banners reading “Glory to the martyrs” and “Student Intifada.” That didn’t deter UAW officials, who legitimized the protest by establishing a “union village” within it.
Lawsuit: UC Berkeley Union Targeted Israeli Jews for discrimination, harassment
January 28, 2025 // Passing anti-Israel boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) resolutions Creating an apparent “hitlist” of Jews and those with Jewish and Israeli ties on UC Berkeley’s Board of Regents Ignoring union rules and procedures to advance an anti-Israel agenda Segregating Jewish union members by withholding information and opportunities given to other union members
UC Academic Workers Strike Over Pro-Palestinian Protest Arrests
May 22, 2024 // UAW 4811 is carrying out what the UAW calls a “Stand Up Strike.” Instead of a simultaneous systemwide strike like the one these same workers carried out in 2022, UAW 4811 is calling on its members on individual UC campuses, starting with Santa Cruz, to walk out. The strategy echoes the successful one that UAW’s traditional autoworker members staged against the big three U.S. automakers in 2023.
To afford historic labor contract, UC considers cutting TAs, graduate student admissions
February 1, 2023 // The full financial cost of the labor settlements between UC and 48,000 academic workers who help power the vaunted teaching and research engine are still being tallied. But preliminary estimates have dealt a “financial shock to the system,” said Rosemarie Rae, UC Berkeley chief financial officer. The UC Office of the President estimates that the increased costs for salary, benefits and tuition across all 10 campuses will be between $500 million and $570 million over the life of the contracts. Individual campuses have come up with their own calculations: At UC Santa Barbara, for instance, the Academic Senate chair estimated that the cost of pay hikes alone could spiral to more than $53 million over three years.
UC strike energizes unprecedented national surge of union organizing by academic workers
January 3, 2023 // In 2022 alone, graduate students representing 30,000 peers at nearly a dozen institutions filed documents with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. They include USC, Northwestern, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Caltech plans to officially kick off its organizing campaign this month, and other academic researchers are working to form unions at the University of Alaska, Western Washington University, the National Institutes of Health and such influential think tanks as the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute. Princeton University, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania, Pasadena, Caltech, Pardee Rand Graduate School, University of Wisconsin–Madison