Update on the UAW Election: Rally Tomorrow

Here's our take on the whole story with the election fraud perpetrated by the Administration Caucus/USEJ. On one hand, we're so skeptical of these corporate hack careerist bureaucrats that at some level we're really not that surprised by their decision to exclude the ballots from Berkeley and UCLA and "partially certify" the results of the vote. On the other hand, it's so over-the-top, absurd to the point of being a cliche, that it's really difficult to understand how they could do something so obvious. It's like they're following a script written by third-rate union-hating conservative propagandists.

At any rate, we wanted to reference a couple of updates that our compañeros over at thosewhouseit have been posting. First, the hilarious claims made by Daraka Larimore-Hall, the Admin Caucus/USEJ’s candidate for President and the current President of UAW 2865, that in reality it's AWDU that's trying to steal the election. The evidence he presents is the above photo, which supposedly shows a member of AWDU tampering with a ballot box. There's just one small problem -- it was taken before the voting even began. "If it’s the end of the day," writes thosewhouseit, "then why is the sun shining from the east?" He's assembling the box.

Also, we wanted to post some info about the rally tomorrow (Monday) at UC Berkeley to demand that all the votes be counted:

I want to give you all a personal update on what has happened with the UC grad student union elections over the weekend. Most importantly, I am asking for everyone -- students and non-students -- to come out to Sather Gate TOMORROW (Monday) at 11:30am to demand our union count every vote. I know this sounds absurd, especially during finals week when we’re all stressed, but at this point we have to fight for our votes to be counted!

Here’s what happened:

Elections for UAW Local 2865 -- representing 12,000 graduate student workers UC-wide -- ended on Thursday afternoon. All ballot boxes were taken to UCLA to be counted on Friday. There were many challenges concerning the boxes, their seals etc, but on Saturday morning the elections committee decided to go on with the count and then deal with each challenge afterward, as according to our bylaws.

Halfway through the count on Saturday, it became possible that AWDU (the reform slate I’m affiliated with) had won the elections. Rather than continue the count, the chair of the elections committee decided that the elections were “partially certified” and that the more than 1,500 ballots from Berkeley and UCLA (nearly half of all ballots cast) will not counted till the next meeting in July.

To put this in perspective: This is as if, in the 2008 national elections, the Republicans had decided to not count the votes of California and Hawaii, and to let a Republican-controlled congress decide how to deal with those ballots later. Would you find such a process fair? I didn’t think so. Would you do something about it?!? Hell yeah!

We need YOUR help to make sure all votes are counted!

1. Gather for a rally TOMORROW at 11:30 at Sather Gate. Then we will march to the union office in downtown Berkeley to demand that our votes are counted (meet us there at 12:30 if you can’t make it to Sather -- 2070 Allston Way). We really need everyone to come out to put the political pressure on!

2. Email the current UAW President Daraka Larimore-Hall larimorehall@uaw2865.org and demand that all the votes are counted! Please bcc me [awadu@googlegroups.com] so we can keep track of how many emails are getting sent.

3. Tell your friends! Please forward this email far and wide -- we need all the support we can get, from students and non-students alike!

Thank you to those of you who voted in this last election and showed your support in so many tremendous ways. In some terrible twist, if it hadn’t had been for all of your efforts, our current union leadership would not be acting so scared right now. But right now, this isn’t about which side will win or lose the elections -- this is about upholding democracy and our right to vote. Please come out and show your support.

[Update Monday 9:45am]: Here's a statement from the guy in the photo:

I am the person in the picture. I would estimate that it was taken around 10:00 a.m. on Wednesday, April 27. It could be a little before or after; I wasn't keeping track of the exact time. I was setting up the polling place at Sather Gate on Wednesday morning. This is a picture from just before I opened up the poll. I had tested the ballot box, and the way the slot had been cut, you could not get ballots to go in because the second layer of flaps blocked the opening. So I opened the box to tape those flaps down, then closed it again. After doing that, I finished arranging the materials on the table and opened the polling place. My solution to the ballot box design flaw didn't work particularly well, because the flaps inside came un-taped and the ballots got a bit gummed up inside. But I didn't open it again, because by that point voting had started.

More Union Machinations

We really couldn't hope to clarify things as well as thosewhouseit, so if you're interested in the union check out their post on union machinations and astroturfing in light of the upcoming election in the local. The picture above features Daraka Larimore-Hall, the president of UAW Local 2865, on the far left, campaigning for the asshole who's working overtime to cut $1.4 billion from public higher education -- at a minimum. Thanks, Administration Caucus!

(The Daily Cal also published an article on the contested election today.)

On the Myth of Professionalization Among Grad Students

This article was written by a UC Berkeley grad student in Jurisprudence and Social Policy and posted on the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union (AWADU) site:

Last year, a woman in my department became a celebrity for a month or two. Folks who had never met her had heard about her and asked me about her research and her advisors. The source of her short-lived fame? She -- a political theorist with an emphasis on postmodern feminist thought -- got a job. And not just a job, the golden ticket of jobs: A tenure-track position at a reasonably good university. She was a source of both awe and reassurance -- it does happen, see. Really! But also: What did she do? How did she do it? What did she do that I can do, too?

Her professional success came at the same moment that journalists at the Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times alike were running a series of stories about the “crisis” of tenure and the absence of tenure-track jobs in the humanities. These statistics-based doomsday pieces were accompanied by angry opinion pieces from professors who had started to resent and regret the con they believed they were perpetuating on incoming graduate students in these fields. Rumors of indefinite hiring freezes in the wake of the financial crisis were racing through campuses just as applications to graduate school -- where, unlike credit card debt, the student loan bills wouldn’t come due for a few years -- were skyrocketing in the absence of sufficiently intellectually stimulating post-college jobs. My fellow political theory graduate students and I were in a state of high anxiety, and justifiably so.

The reality of our situation as graduate students in the year 2011 is this: Most of the scientists will be OK, occupying post-docs until either breaking into a research university or “settling” for a well-paying industry job. The professional schools are a mixed bag; newly minted lawyers are increasingly relying on “bridge” grants from Boalt while they fruitlessly search for jobs, while optometrists probably face pretty decent prospects. But for those of us in the humanities and social sciences, the future looks bleak -- at least if we cling to the dream of growing up to be just like our advisor. We’ll probably end up working 2-3 teaching positions, possibly at different universities within the same metropolitan area, sans benefits, maybe still sending out tenure-track job applications, maybe eventually giving up and attempting to figure out what else one can do with a PhD in Jurisprudence and Social Policy (for example), or more likely -- competing for jobs on the basis of a bachelors’ degree we’ve long thought irrelevant.

So here’s how it works: A dwindling class of tenured professors, the “rock stars” of their discipline, are paid very well (you can look up individual faculty salaries here) by the university to maintain our reputation and placement in the US News and World Report rankings to attract paying customers -- oops I mean undergraduates -- research grants, and yes, elite graduate students. They are recruited to places like UC Berkeley (a public institution, thus not always able to match the salaries of, say, a Columbia) in part with an implicit promise: You won’t have to do such menial tasks as grade papers or interact with undergrads. There will be “squadrons of GSIs” (Dean Edley’s exact words) eager to do such work so that they may study at your feet. If a newly hired professor does not yet have tenure, there is enormous pressure to devote every waking second to publishable research -- and not to teaching. In other words: Professors may be amazing teachers who care deeply about reaching out to undergrads (and some -- to their own detriment -- work their ass off to be so), but the university systematically incentivizes minimizing the time spent working with students. Meanwhile, an increasing proportion of teaching is done not by tenured or tenure-track faculty, but by “lecturers,” who are basically piece-workers without job security or benefits. This benefits the university (hey, the customers/undergrads still get taught, but with a smaller price tag), doesn’t always bother the tenured professors (whose teaching load is reduced but job is secure), isn’t always obvious to the undergrad (lecturers are, after all, often as good or better than a tenured professor at leading college-level classes), and isn’t the subject of nearly enough anger and/or discussion amongst graduate students.

Statement on Benefits Decentralization Plan

From the email:

The Berkeley Unit of UAW 2865 has recently learned of a draft, campus-wide Benefits Decentralization plan, which has been presented by the Budget Office as follows:

With this change, the Campus Budget Office will no longer process monthly transactions reimbursing campus departments for the actual cost of academic and staff benefits, including graduate student fee remission expense. Instead, departments will receive an allocation of central funding for this expense. The campus will, simultaneously with the decentralization of expense, establish permanent base budgets for units fully offsetting the initial cost and, assuming incremental funds are available, expects to provide annual budget adjustments to departments in response to changes in benefits costs. [emphasis added]

Among the main reasons for this change, the Budget Office mentions funding reductions from UCOP, and a desire to increase budgetary flexibility at the department level. While certain important details of the Benefits Decentralization plan remain undisclosed, based on the draft proposal circulated by the Budget Office, we feel a need to express strenuous opposition to this plan, and to make plain our intention to block this proposed reform.

University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee Sick Out

From Burnt Bookmobile:

We’ve heard, from numerous sources and from talking to TAs at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, that a large and indefinite “sick out” is taking place among the teaching assistants. Exact numbers are unknown, but appears to be many. As state employees and students they are doubly effected by the new austerity measures proposed in the looming legislation at the Capitol. People who aren’t TAs or involved with teaching on campus are mostly hearing about this through rumors. Apparently there’s of a constant stream of emails in the email lists shared by the TAs, saying things like “It looks like I’m coming down with something. I’m not going to be able to teach my class. Can someone cover it?” To which others reply with “oh no, it looks as if I’m also coming down with something as well.” And this goes on and on. We can only hope that it continues, strengthening the resolve of others who are on the verge of their own collective sick outs, strikes or occupations.

Updates on the NO Vote: How the UAW Works [Updated]

This open letter from a former Berkeley unit chair is a helpful addition to the numerous reasons we have for voting NO on the tentative contract agreement that the UAW leadership is pushing on us. But it's even more interesting in terms of the way it details some of the internal practices within the union, practices that make it completely unresponsive to and unrepresentative of its graduate student members:

The year before last I became, almost accidentally, first the acting then the elected Chair of the UAW for Berkeley. I was recruited to this position and agreed to it without much understanding what it entailed. This seems to be standard MO for the current statewide leadership; after I had agreed to stand for the position it was hinted to me that nefarious and disruptive people might try to challenge me for what is, after all, an elected position. As it turns out, no one did, I was “elected” by all of you without you having any idea, unless you actually read all those emails full of dense and formal bureaucracy-speak that you receive on a regular basis, and the leadership avoided having to deal with anyone who might make waves.

My position made me a member of the bargaining committee, and we prepared to negotiate a contract last year. Days before the first meeting with the University, in the midst of what was then the still-unfolding budgetary crisis, the state-wide president (do you know who your union president is? did you vote for her?) suggested we take the university’s offer of a one-year extension of the current contract with no changes at all. This was presented as fait accompli at a meeting of the committee, and we voted unanimously to accept it.

In the aftermath of all of that, I became increasingly frustrated with how poorly the union represented its members, how shockingly little democracy was actually involved, how easily the state-wide leadership quashed any dissent, and how wholly it bought into the University’s antagonistic relationship while capitulating on a regular basis to the University’s interests. I was in the perfect position to do something about this, but I was not the individual to do it for a variety of reasons. Clearly, that is why I was put in the position to begin with. So I resigned, and as I did so, I urged various people to step in and do what I was unwilling to do. I’m not proud of all of this, but I do have the satisfaction of knowing that Berkeley’s current representatives are a force for agitation among the state-wide leadership, and I support them.

Now, the University really is a vicious negotiator. You will note that we are only now, in the last week of November, voting on a contract, while these negotiations began last Spring and the previous contract expired at the end of September. You probably heard something about the switching of “fees” for “tuition” and whether or not that would invalidate our guaranteed fee remissions, a well-timed announcement that now puts the union in the position of touting as a win what is actually a holding of the status quo. The bargaining committee is not made up of evil people, nor are they secretly trying to shore up the UC’s bottom line at our expense; I’m sure they really believe that this is the best contract they can get. But they are tired of the process, they have been skillfully manipulated by the University, and they are actively quashing efforts to allow debate among the actual membership of the union around this contract.

Another form that the anti-democratic nature of the union might take is the real possibility of fraud in the vote count. This text comes from a flyer that was being handed out today on Sproul plaza:

The UAW Elections Committee, made up of elected representatives from each campus, agreed on voting procedures that require each campus to submit voting tallies to the committee, after which all ballot boxes are sent to one place and a final tally is made. The totals of the campus tallies and the total tally are compared.

On the morning of November 30th, the chair of UAW Elections Committee announced she would be withholding the daily campus tallies from the rest of the Elections Committee. Further, the Chair refused to hold a conference call with committee members to discuss this last-minute change in voting procedure. This unilateral act violates the November 28th decision of our Elections Committee -- duly authorized by the Constitution and Bylaws of the union.

Call Fawn Huisman, chair of the Elections Committee and express your concern over this unilateral and arbitrary violation of democratic procedure and the constitution of the Union.

360-441-5376

In the last few days, a new blog called "UAW for Sanity" has appeared and begun to push back against the folks advocating a NO vote. It purports to be a "grassroots" blog, but at least three of the five authors are members of the UAW joint council. Not that that makes their opinion irrelevant, but it certainly makes the idea that this constitutes some surge of "grassroots" outrage laughable. As @santacruztacean put it the other day,



One final note: as of this moment, 946 people have pledged to vote NO. Last day of voting is Thursday. At Berkeley, you can vote at Sather Gate and North Gate from 8am - 4pm, and at Kroeber Hall from 10am - 2pm.

[Update 12/2]: More on the UAW's astroturf blog here. Also, an interesting recording of a confrontation at a polling station at UC Irvine is here. Paid UAW staffers (non-students) have been brought in to get people to approve the contract:

4 Paid and bias[ed] UAW Staffers were spotted on the Palo Verde (Graduate) Housing Bridge. Reports are that they were at the polling table and that one of them was “removed” and replaced by a less biased one.

Below, you may listen to the audio recording of the incident linked from the UC Rebel Radio Audio Archives. The louder voice at around 10:00 (and before) is the person operating the poll. He is a paid staffer, not a student. He talks at length to this graduate student about the contract, especially around 15:00, where he discusses what the ‘yes’ and ‘no’ would mean. He says things like “A ‘NO’ vote is not caring for childcare”. It is pretty fucked up.

At 16:20 Coral (a Union polling member) tells him he is out of line. Someone then text messages Fawn (UCI physics graduate, statewide elections committee person) to tell her this shit is fucking crazy. Someone tells Coral they want to put the recorder on the table. She then calls Fawn about this. Fawn shortly shows up to take over operating the poll.

NO VOTE Starts Tomorrow

Despite its claims to the contrary, the tentative contract that the UAW bargaining team signed with the UC administration is bullshit -- it would lock academic student employees (GSIs, readers, and tutors) into a salary cut in real terms for the next three years. But there's one good thing about the contract: it reveals clear lines of solidarity, dividing friends and allies from enemies. We see these lines in not only the concessions made to the university and the union's striking lack of transparency, but also in the bargaining team's adoption of the UC administration's own rhetoric of crisis:

Building for a Grad Student Strike

Some links related to the union struggle, both inside and out:
- "Why We Are Voting NO" (AWaDU)
- "An Open Letter from UAW Bargaining Team Members: Why You Should Vote NO On the Tentative Contract Agreement"
- "UAW Rank-and-File Confront Local 2865 President"
- "UAW Bureaucrats Sell Us Out"

Grade-In at UC Berkeley Today [Updated]

Today, Sather Gate, noon. (More info here.)

Also, don't forget about the public student conduct show trial that's taking place at more or less the same time (bad timing!). It's at Clark Kerr campus, building 14. It starts officially at 1:30pm, but they're asking folks to get there between 1-1:15pm in order to be let in.

Updated [1:57pm]: picture from the ongoing grade-in...

Banner Drops at UC Berkeley

(mostly here and more here)