Terry Chea/AP Photo
Tyler Manning, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, leads a chant as striking academic workers picket on the University of California, Berkeley, campus, December 7, 2022.
One of the slogans that guided the United Auto Workers in winning the best contracts ever awarded to factory workers during the UAW’s glory years (1950 through 1980) was “Solidarity in the ranks.” That wasn’t simply a sentiment; it was a strike and bargaining strategy.
When the postwar UAW members struck one of the Big Three automakers to win a new contract, there were several commandments that guided them. One was that the representatives of all the workers—the skilled trades workers who kept the factory running and the assembly-line workers who affixed the parts on the chassis as they rolled by—sat together at the bargaining table and didn’t leave until they’d won a contract for all of them. Even though it was generally easier and quicker for management to reach an agreement with the skilled trades workers, who comprised just a small percentage of the overall membership, those skilled tradesmen (and women, who at the time were few) didn’t sign off on an agreement until the assembly-line workers and the paint shop workers and the cleaning crews had reached accords as well—all then bundled into a master contract. All stayed on the picket lines until a master agreement had been reached. Otherwise, UAW President Walter Reuther and the other union leaders knew, management could play one group off against the others.
In their first truly serious go-round with the management of the University of California, the leaders of the 48,000 striking teaching and research assistants, postdocs, and academic researchers—all of them UAW members—didn’t hew to this strategy. Each of the four categories of workers had its own local union, and each of them bargained separately. As the postdocs and academic researchers receive much of their funding from the federal government and other sources outside the UC system, it proved easier for management to agree to the kind of raises these workers needed to keep up (barely, partially, almost) with the absurd housing costs in coastal California. As the funding for the TAs and RAs comes entirely out of the UC treasury, however, management has thus far offered raises that fail to meet many of the basic needs—shelter above all—of these grad students.
But once the postdocs and academic researchers ratified their agreements, they were required to report back to work this week, leaving the TAs and RAs to walk the lines by themselves—now, during winter break, when their immediate leverage has plummeted. Their two locals felt compelled to go into mediation. Fortunately (I think), the mediator is Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg, a longtime labor-liberal who once was a staff attorney for SEIU’s massive local of state government employees, and who recently mediated an agreement between Kaiser Permanente and its striking mental health employees.
Reportedly, it was Gov. Gavin Newsom who suggested that Steinberg be the mediator. On TAP devotees, if such exist, may recall that on three separate occasions I’ve noted Newsom’s AWOL-ness during this strike. Bringing in Steinberg may prove to be his one intervention, but if Steinberg can bring Newsom and the legislature into the process through a pledge to better fund the grad students, that’s an intervention that may prove both decisive and beneficial.
Those On TAP devotees may also recall my frequent observations that the UAW has had far more success in recent decades organizing college campuses than they’ve had organizing auto factories. I’m delighted, therefore, to report their overwhelming success last week at organizing a new Ohio-based battery factory for electric cars, by a vote of 710 to 16. The factory is a joint venture of General Motors and LG Energy Solution, a South Korean firm, and the election proceeded without the companies waging an anti-union campaign.
On the one hand, the vote shows what may be possible when workers can vote on the question of union representation without being pressured and intimidated by their employer. Had such an election taken place in the anti-union South, however, where most of these new battery factories are set to be located, even a pledge of employer neutrality from the likes of GM, Ford, or Stellantis may not suffice to keep the workers free from pressure. Volkswagen, after all, didn’t oppose the UAW’s attempt to organize the VW factory in Chattanooga, but the mayor, the governor, and all the local powers that be told the workers that Tennessee would instantly become a postapocalyptic wasteland if they opted to go union. Even in those exceptional instances when corporations go docile, alas, there remains the goddam South.
And speaking of corporations going docile, the 300 employees at ZeniMax Media, a Maryland-based developer of video games, are currently voting on whether to affiliate with the Communications Workers of America (CWA). ZeniMax is owned by Microsoft, which has pledged not to oppose any of its workers’ efforts to unionize. Some critics suspect that Microsoft’s unicorn status as the one tech giant that doesn’t oppose unionization is largely a function of its campaign to win support for its purchase of Activision, which the FTC blocked late last week. Those critics may prove right, but as I noted when Microsoft President Brad Smith announced this heretical policy in early June, the company may have realized that allowing its workers to unionize may actually give it a competitive advantage over its peers when it comes to attracting Gen Z and millennial programmers—given the overwhelming pro-union tilt of the young. After all, the UC pickets of today may write the Microsoft programs of tomorrow.
