UPTE members successfully march on the boss at UCSF and demand that they release our elected bargaining team representatives
Earlier this year, UPTE members across the UC system nominated and elected colleagues to represent us as members of our union’s bargaining team for our current contract negotiations. Our bargaining team's composition was designed to ensure we had people from each campus and area of expertise in healthcare, research, and technical job titles present at the bargaining table to make sure that we could speak confidently and with first-hand knowledge on the issues impacting UPTE members.
UC didn’t seem to think having that experience in the room was important. When we gathered for our first bargaining sessions, first at UC San Diego and later at UCSF, UC leadership refused to release Lalaine Rojo, a lab assistant and one of our elected bargaining team members, from work to participate in negotiations on behalf of UPTE members.
Lalaine has spent the last ten years working at UCSF, where she is a Lab Assistant II working in the Anatomy Department. She takes her role as a voice for her colleagues as both an UPTE Unit Representative and bargaining team member seriously, saying, "I've always been the kind of person who fights against injustice. We have to choose our battles, sure, but we shouldn't just stay silent and accept unjust circumstances. I want to make sure I’m here to speak up about the challenges lab assistants face, and why UC needs to take our concerns seriously.”
It’s hard to feel surprised that UC doesn’t share our belief that frontline workers are an essential voice at the negotiating table, considering the only “experts” UC has present at the table are Labor Relations employees who have never done our work a day in their lives. But that doesn’t mean we were going to let their exclusion of Lalaine stand.
We not only filed a grievance, which is a contractual avenue for solving disagreements with management that can often take months to reach resolution, but we decided to put the power of collective action behind our demands. In true UPTE fashion, after a lunchtime rally and bargaining team report back at UCSF Parnassus, nearly 100 of us marched together as a group to deliver that grievance in person to Lalaine’s manager in protest of their refusal to release her.
And guess what? Not even two weeks later, Lalaine was released from work to attend our very next set of negotiations at UCLA. After more than a hundred of her coworkers joined the delegation to Lalaine's boss, UC has agreed to release her for bargaining. Lalaine had one word to express how it felt seeing her colleagues rally around her and demand her release: “Empowering. It was such a big deal for me to see my coworkers and my fellow UPTE members show their support. It made me feel like I’m not alone and my heart was just so full. I want everyone to know that we have a voice, and together it is so powerful. Let’s be proud of the work we do and what we’re trying to accomplish.”
You can watch a video of that march on the boss on UPTE’s social media channels (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter).
