Missed our online 2024 UPTE UC Strike School? View a recording above!
Thank you to everyone who showed up and out to our online 2024 UPTE UC Strike School. Our Strike School is designed to make sure you feel comfortable, confident, and well-informed about the importance of building a credible strike threat and how you can contribute. It will take all of us—nineteen thousand research, healthcare, and technical professionals across UC—working together to win a strong contract for our projects, patients, students, and ourselves.
Our groundbreaking research, top-notch technical expertise, and life-saving patient care make the University of California a premier, world-class university system for a reason. While we continue to bargain with UC administrators in good faith, we don't expect UC to give us everything we need because we ask nicely.
We've seen what other workers at UC, the Big Three automobile manufacturers, and Kaiser Permanente have had to do to win strong contracts in recent years, including the possibility of a strike. While we hope we can reach a deal quickly at the bargaining table, we want to make sure we're prepared for all potential outcomes.
UPTE President Dan Russell kicked us off by highlighting our strength in numbers: “The demands that we are presenting at the table are not what our bargaining team came up with but what you and more than nine thousand members statewide set as our priorities through our priorities campaign, bargaining survey, and platform ratification! This is the first time we have ever had a majority of everyone we represent participate in an action - but it also means that we still haven’t engaged the other half. Talking to people about going on strike is one of the hardest conversations we have, so it is reallyimportant that you all are joining us and preparing yourselves to do just that.”
“In order to demonstrate to UC we have a credible strike threat, we have to show that more and more people are participating in actions every time we do them,” said Sonya Mogilner, a clinical licensed social worker and UPTE UC Davis Chapter Co-Chair. “These actions demonstrate our unity, our ability to mobilize quickly, and our level of engagement across all of our various worksites and jobs. We call these actions structure tests, and they’re essential to a credible strike threat.”
Chey Dean, a Staff Research Associate 4 and UPTE UCSF Chapter Co-Chair, broke down why a credit strike threat is an essential tactic to winning a strong contract: “A strike is the most powerful tactic we have to get the boss to respect our demands. Simply put, a strike is workers like us democratically deciding to withdraw our labor when the boss doesn’t take us seriously. The only way to have an effective strike is to have conversations with your coworkers as early as possible. Deciding to strike is not a decision we want to make lightly. The first step is conversations like this we are having across the state to educate our coworkers about our rights as union workers. At the same time, our bargaining team is at the table fighting for the demands our families, students, and research deserve. If the University doesn’t listen, we will have to escalate.”
“There are nearly twenty thousand workers in UPTE job titles; what do you think will happen if only one thousand of us strike?” asked Max Belasco, a Business Systems Analyst 3 and UPTE UCLA Chapter Co-Chair. “We won’t win! What about if fifteen thousand strike? We’re getting there. The only way we get ninety percent of our coworkers and a supermajority of our colleagues statewide to strike is by having leaders who are responsible for talking to their coworkers in every single worksite. If each of our leaders statewide talks to an average of ten people, we will hit a supermajority of our coworkers statewide. What’s it going to take to get ninety percent of your coworkers to strike?”