UAW 4811 represents 48,000 student employees, postdocs and researchers across the UC system. It announced the tentative agreement last Friday. The proposed deal includes increases in wages, job security, and child care benefits.
"We’ve also won groundbreaking protections for international workers who are under attack from the Trump administration right now," says Tanzil Chowdhury, a UC Berkeley graduate student who was part of the bargaining team. He says these protections include a $400,000 legal fund, up to 3 weeks of paid leave to handle visa issues, and rehiring rights for people who lose their work authorization. "And I think that’s just really important because, you know, nearly half of our workforce are international workers."
But not everyone is happy with the tentative agreement. In an email, Andy Haas, a union steward in UC Berkeley’s English department, told KALW, “Altogether, it's better than nothing, but it's not much, especially considering the scale of the crisis and the potential leverage that tens of thousands of graduate workers could have wielded if we had organized and negotiated more strategically.”
Haas said that the union’s initial demands included “reasonable protections” from things like “cuts to departmental funding, increasing insecurity for job appointments, ballooning class sizes, terrorization of international workers by visa revocations and ICE threats” but that "all the protections of any significance were dropped in this tentative agreement.”
Union members are voting on the four-year contracts until Friday.
