Meet your UC bargaining team: UC Berkeley representatives
Although strong contracts aren’t won by expert negotiators alone, having frontline members from every campus and across job titles is essential. We are the subject matter experts in our day-to-day work and know better than anyone what we need to advance our world-changing research, provide life-saving patient care, and make sure our technical expertise is respected.
UPTE’s bargaining team at UC is comprised of 25 members from a range of healthcare, research, and technical job titles from each UC campus and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. Each month, we’ll highlight members of our bargaining team from various UC campuses and workplaces. You can find a full roster of our bargaining team here.
What motivated you to run for the bargaining team?
Jamie Gardner - UC Berkeley, Staff Research Associate 2: Research workers make up a big part of UPTE’s membership at Berkeley, but we've been less organized than some of our union siblings. A lot of us are the only UPTE members in our lab or work team, we have high turnover, and it's a field that appeals to introverts. So I agreed to step up and help organize. It's been great talking to research workers across the state, talking shop, seeing where we have the same issues, and finding places where the rules are wildly different for no apparent reason.
Jonathan Bradford - UC Berkeley, Principal Lab Mechanician: I wasn't initially planning on running because I was worried about the amount of time I would be away from work and didn’t want to fall behind on projects. After more thought and out of a sense of duty to my fellow members at Berkeley, as well as my desire to win our best contract ever for our members statewide, I decided to run for the bargaining team so I could bring my firsthand experience and perspective to the table with UC administrators and represent the priorities of me and my colleagues.
What’s the number one issue you hear about from your coworkers?
Jamie: Let's be real, it's money. Especially in the Bay Area, it's gotten so expensive to live, it's a struggle even in the previously-more-affordable East Bay. Being underpaid affects everything else—people commute in from far away and have to pay for gas, parking, or transit passes; the stress wears on your body and makes you wary of expensive doctor's visits; you can't travel to visit family or take the vacations you're saving up days for; being denied reclassification for higher-level work you're already doing costs you money you can't afford to lose.
Jonathan: For myself and a lot of the members in technical titles, the biggest issue by far is low wages. Our members are falling behind with inflation and struggling to make ends meet. In my unit, there has been a fair amount of people leaving jobs outside the UC that pay more. The byproduct of low wages is high turnover and increased workloads for those that have chosen to stay, which hurts us as individuals but also the important work we support.
How will winning a strong contract benefit your work or the people who benefit from your work?
Jamie: It's one and the same. If we could reduce turnover--make our "career" jobs into actual careers, where people stay long term & grow in their jobs, of course that would be great for us. But it would be a huge help to our research projects too. When someone leaves, they take everything they know about their project with them: from the papers they've studied on the topic to where their samples are in the freezer. Even with the best documentation, it takes months or years for their replacement to rebuild their expertise.
Jonathan: I work in a machine shop making complex components for novel experiments. In the physical sciences, you can't do groundbreaking research by simply buying off-the-shelf equipment. My coworkers and I proudly make complex instrumentation that other shops find too difficult or unprofitable to work on. A strong contract will allow my department to retain and attract the skilled machinists needed to do the high-level work that UC researchers—and by extension, the rest of society—need from us. Because of our work, researchers have the freedom to design any experiments they want knowing we can provide the unique and complex components they need.