UC/UCLA Teaching Assistants occupy United Auto Workers local over stolen election

[Hannah Bell]

There are 12,000 graduate students working as teaching assistants at the University of California who are currently members of the United Auto Workers. It might seem odd for teaching assistants to affiliate with the UAW, and stupid in light of UAW’s deplorable history of selling out its own members (See Unions, What Are They Good For?) However, as recently as 1999, graduate students were not even unionized. Most unions didn’t want to bother with a group of workers who might only be employed for a few years before graduating and moving on with their lives. When UC graduate students affiliated with the UAW, many thought it was a positive change. (Any union is better than no union, right?)

Not so, say current TAs, who accuse the UAW leadership of corruption and being out of touch with members. (See the Occupy California website). The students have formed an opposition movement called Academic Workers for a Democratic Union (AWDU) and hope to push the old guard out of leadership through elections. In a recent election, the AWDU slate looked as though it might win, according to IndyBay. Then, on April 30, the incumbent-controlled Election Committee cut off the vote count, without counting the ballots from UCLA and UC Berkeley (which has the largest contingent of AWDU members), essentially stealing the election.

Today, AWDU activists took over and occupied the UAW local 2865 offices at 2070 Allston Way, Berkeley (From the UC Davis Bicycle Barricade blog).

http://modeducation.blogspot.com/2011/05/students-fight-union-corruption-at-uc.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ModernSchool+%28Modern+School%29


Over the past weekend, the entrenched leadership of UAW local 2865—representing some 12,000 graduate students across the UCs—moved to disenfranchise thousands of rank-and-file student-workers across three campuses.

Union bureaucrats have deemed the ballots cast in last week’s election at UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Merced invalid. UC Berkeley is one of several strongholds of the union reform movement AWDU—Academic Workers for a Democratic Union.

The AWDU slate—both for the statewide executive board and local campus positions—had challenged the established leadership with calls for direct democracy, an intensification of the fight against Yudof and the Regents, and a strong stance against the privatization of California higher education.

UAW officials, not used to responding to the needs of the rank-and-file and completely unaccustomed to challenges from below, decided to suspend democracy rather than lose their much vaunted positions within the reified union hierarchy.

http://bicyclebarricade.wordpress.com/


This is the way the UAW bigshots think they're going to make up for their declining membership -- by unionizing teaching assistants & walmart workers into their company union.