The UC has 36 bargaining units represented by 17 unions located across ten campuses. I’ve spent most of my life working for small business owners in coffee shops, kitchens, and bookstores. The chance to be in a union never presented itself, and I never considered the possibility of building a union at my workplace until coming to work for the University of California Santa Cruz. I’ve told my story about joining UPTE (University Professional and Technical Employees) countless times in organizing circles as part of my introduction, but it remains a critical component of how I locate myself in the history of organizing at the UC, and the in the history of my own union as a voluntary member without a contract. When I was hired at UCSC at the end of 2017 I was shocked to discover that I was hired into a unit with no representation. Part of the appeal of working for UCSC was knowing that my position would be represented by a union, and I had no idea that any positions were left without union representation. It felt like a given that a government job would come with a union. At the time, Janus v. AFSCME had just been accepted for review in the Supreme Court, and in what would become my union, and other unions across the country, people were beginning to panic in anticipation of huge losses in membership. So, when I found out that I could voluntarily join a union, I signed myself up immediately. I had no idea the union I chose to join was a union founded as a minority union for workers without a contract, or that I was joining a long history of minority unionism at the UC.

Minority Union – Sometimes called a “members only” union, is when a local union represent any workers who join voluntarily and pay dues, rather than a majority of workers as part of a collective bargaining unit. Minority unions tend to focus on collective demands or grievances that are presented to management, rather than contractual demands, as employers are not required to bargain with them. Some examples are Amazonians United, or the Alphabet Workers.

In 1979, the Berman Act, or the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEERA), was passed, which gave workers in California at higher education institutions the right to collectively bargain. This is not to say that there were no unions in higher education before HEERA, just that these unions did not have a contract. In fact, at UC Berkeley AFSCME had two locals, AFSCME 371 which had been around since 1948 and was exclusively open to custodians; and AFSCME 1695, formed in the late ’60s and open to all other non-academic employees. Despite having no contract, or possibly because they had no contract, these locals focused on organizing around shop-floor issues and working conditions (including holding at least one strike). So in 1979, after the Berman Act passed, UC workers were ready. Unit determination hearings began, classifications of workers were carved up into “communities of interest”, elections were held and won. AFSCME won the clerical, service, and patient care technical units, but lost researchers by a small margin. AFT won librarians, CNA won nurses, there were the printing trades, and a handful of campus-specific units like firefighters. Job titles without a determined unit were assigned a code of “99” (for “missing data”) and a large subset of these job titles came to be known as the “Administrative Professionals” or “APs”. Largely a unit of women in career-track administrative positions- these are department advisors, financial aid officers, recruitment specialists and analysts, all the classifications that didn’t get captured in the clerical workers unit. Many of these workers had joined AFSCME before the Berman Act remained with them, continuing on as members without a contract.

At the time, AFSCME was still operating locally, but under the direction of their newly elected president Gerald McEntee in 1984, AFSCME international stepped in and restructured all the AFSCME units at UC. McEntee directed staff to fracture the new units by chartering them into campus locals and installing staff from the international to run each unit. These staff then identified that many of the most active members of AFSCME (the stewards and members of the executive board) were the staff without a contract, and immediately took action to limit the number of positions these members could hold, refused services to them like bringing grievances to arbitration, and told them point-blank that they were not interested in bringing in new units under a contract. AFSCME became a “business union”, a transactional union where staff provide services to members, and in return, members pay dues and show up to staff designed contract campaigns. Key features of the business union model are staff control of union resources and short contract fights.

So a group of very active workers who were members of AFSCME, some of them classed out of the units with contracts, some of them never in these units to begin with, began meeting separately within their own stewarding network and eventually left AFSCME to form their own union. University Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE) began as a minority union in 1990 with 90 members at UCB, expanded rapidly to UCLA, then UCSC, and because they were members without a contract they could do this without organizing a statewide unit. This foundation in minority unionism made UPTE a home for voluntary members systemwide who continue to serve as stewards and on local and systemwide boards. During their first three years, there were no elections and no contracts, but they filed a lawsuit to dispute overtime exemption classifications and forced the UC to remove titles from their exemption list, and a second action on behalf of a UCLA employee who was hired 12 months a year, laid off for a day and rehired so that he could never be a career employee. This one the UC settled winning workers the “1000 hour rule” or the “casual to career conversion” which set in place safeguards to prevent UC’s abuse of their own employment definitions. Eventually, in 1993 UPTE affiliated with CWA and won its own bargaining units. They took steps to build a union “in opposition” to the AFSCME International model. For instance, where AFSCME kept 90% of dues and left only 10% for the campus locals, UPTE kept 90% of the dues in the campus locals and took only 10% for statewide operations. And while this may have eventually proved impractical, it showed their commitment to keeping financial control in the hands of the campus locals. They were careful about the structure of their new union, creating a fiercely democratic constitution that limited the power of union staff and made it a fireable offense for staff to participate or interfere with bargaining and grievances. They believed that members needed to do as much of the work of running a union as possible (the critical and strategic decision making) and that staff were a “necessary evil” to maintain the day-to-day functions. This is very much what I would think of as the “Labor Notes Tendency”, a tendency in fundamental opposition to business unionism that keeps primary control of the union with the members. But, in order for this model to work it requires a huge focus on education, mentorship, and member engagement- not just contract fights. UPTE was founded at a moment when the labor movement was under fire. Its formation was a decisive fight against trends that were undermining labor across the US, but this moment also marked one of the lowest points for the labor movement in history. Despite their commitment to a strong rank-and-file union, the democratic structure of the union alone did not inoculate them from this. So when Janus v. AFSCME began making its way toward the supreme court, newer organizers that were now part of UPTE’s bargaining units and looking toward their upcoming contract campaign that was likely to coincide with a ruling in favor of Janus, panicked and organized an overthrow of the “entrenched leadership”- the founding members of UPTE-CWA 9119.

Lisa Kermish, my union sister, to who I am deeply indebted for this history, comments that “there are no pure angels or pure devils.” And I find myself thinking about this as I introduce Jane McAlevy into this narrative. “No Shortcuts”, published in 2016, was brand new when the Janus v. AFSCME decision was making its way through the courts. One of the key organizers of the 2017 leadership takeover was reading Jane McAlevy and cites her books as a key inspiration for their participation. With Janus on the horizon, new organizers who blossomed under the mentorship and support of the current leadership were also terrified about how the ruling could affect their capacity, concerned that the financial implications would cripple their ability to keep the minimal staff they had for day-to-day operations and limit their ability to organize heading into a contract fight. Staff already felt demoralized, undervalued, and disengaged themselves. Here, Jane McAlevy offered an inspiring solution with the systematic methods for organizing they felt they needed to survive Janus and win a strong contract. Relying heavily on her methods, a group of newer organizers unseated Jelger Kalmijn, our third president who sat for about 20 years. This is when I joined.

For my first two years, I worked primarily on convincing other advisors to join UPTE under the idea that the more of us we got to join, the greater our chances of getting a contract. Advisors on our campus were known for being hired below scale and could only rely on 2% increases per year, so far below inflation that I was told as part of my mentorship that in my first year I needed to learn the job, my second year I needed to master it, and my third year I needed to start looking for a new job and negotiate a retention or move up. It was understood that every year you stayed in your position you lost money. For two years I showed up to every strike, every action, brought unrepresented members to steward's meetings, and asked questions about contract campaigns incessantly. By 2019 the UPTE staff person assigned to our campus had identified me as a possible “member-activist” and recommended me for political activist training. By the end of that academic year, I was talking to my coworkers about starting an organizing campaign for representation. I remember meeting one of my colleagues and talking to her about starting to organize SSPs (a smaller grouping of Administrative Professionals called “Student Services Professionals”), and she warned me that there was a long history of failure to organize APs at the UC: “The good news is, the positions turn over so often it’s likely most of the burned people have moved on.” By 2020 the UPTE leadership was asking me to help them launch an organizing campaign, and remembering the warning from my colleague I started investigating what had happened before. Everyone I spoke to talked about the union’s lack of commitment to the organizing campaign and their refusal to dedicate staff and financial resources to organizing APs/SSPs and told me to tell UPTE leadership to put their money where their mouth was and dedicate staff and member time to the campaign. And they did. They convinced CWA to run a pilot campaign that got us two CWA staff, dedicated partial appointments of two UPTE staff to the campaign, and designated hours from the UPTE Vice President to work on the campaign alongside me and another voluntary member at UCB. We started having conversations early in 2020, while the wildcat strike was raging and gaining momentum, and no one really saw COVID on the horizon. My condition was that we needed to act fast and be prepared to fully launch the campaign in June so that we would have the whole summer to organize while advisors had some breathing room. Then in March, the pandemic happened, and later the CZU Lightning fires.

Everyone has a laundry list of how they were mistreated or under supported during the pandemic. To underscore what this was like for staff: While faculty and students received marginal support for the transition to online courses (training sessions, walkthroughs, technology support, student workers in Zoom meetings, etc.), staff received no additional support. They were expected to provide additional services to students and faculty in crisis and behaving poorly, while experiencing those same crises ourselves, and do it with a smile. To top it off, the UC Office of the President then froze our raises. Staff were ready to organize. In my monthly advisor meetings, my colleagues were asking about representation as early as May, 2020. I invited my union colleagues to present on what it means to be in a union and started signing my advising colleagues up for membership. Meanwhile, the staff hired by CWA were telling me that it was too early to form an organizing committee, that I had to wait until their FAQs sheet and other materials were ready, and that there was a “method” they expected me to follow before I talked to anyone about the campaign. This became a consistent pattern with UPTE and CWA staff throughout the entire campaign. I told them we needed to launch in June, they didn’t launch the campaign until two weeks into the start of fall quarter 2020. After delaying us for three months, the CWA staff ran the first round of assessments leaving our organizing committee with the hardest, non-responsive workers, then cut us loose to work on accretions. When the UCSC organizing committee members told UPTE staff we wanted to work on an equity campaign to deliver demands for a salary increase for all advisors on campus, they told us to do assessments. We told them we wanted to run a social media campaign and website, and they told us they already built one and it would take months to “train us to use it”. 

Finally, in May 2021, members of the UCB and UCSC organizing committees decided to take things into our own hands and developed a workshop called “How to Get a Raise at the UC”. We designed them specifically for unrepresented staff but opened them to everyone and made sure all the primary speakers were UC staff. The feedback was incredible. Bringing workers together from different units and different campuses allowed the similarities in the problems of our working conditions to surface. People would openly declare “I thought it was just me, I can’t believe I am not alone”. It became clear to workers in these workshops that this was a systemic problem, a UC-wide problem, and something that had to be solved collectively. In our feedback forms, people asked to get involved and bring the campaign to their campuses. Yet, when we told UPTE staff and leadership that we wanted to launch the statewide campaign in June (again, emphasizing the importance of launching around the campus workflow), they told us we had to wait to get new “assessment lists” from a Request For Information (RFI), and then refused to share them with us. This last piece completely killed our momentum. We fought with staff all summer to gain access to lists of workers that we could have looked up ourselves on publicly available websites. The original organizing committees at UCSC and UCB essentially disbanded. It became impossible to get people to show up to lead the workshops, and again, right at the end of summer, we finally got the new organizing lists, just in time for fall to start. My counterpart at UCB accepted a new position outside the UC, and I accepted a position that classed me out of the SSP unit.

I’ve had a lot of time to think about what went wrong in this campaign, and I keep coming back to the points where I didn’t trust my instincts. Like many workers, I had been conditioned to believe that the point of joining a union was to get a contract, and that organizing required union resources, which meant approval from leadership in order to access professional staff and their strategies. The problem with this model is that it imagines that the power of the union lies in elected leadership and not in each other. In the middle of our campaign, there was a second leadership takeover, stemming from a disagreement of strategy among the new officers. Again, relying heavily on the organizing strategies of Jane McAlevy but leaning into the professional staff angle, our current president worked behind the scenes with a fired staff member to regain control of the union. Much in the way that our founding members designed UPTE in opposition to AFSCME,  this new leadership immediately began reorganizing our union in direct opposition to “the old guard”. Where the old guard had limited staff and relied on members to run the union, they started hiring staff to oversee, design, and direct all organizing campaigns. Where UPTE was founded on the principle of local control, leadership is now moving to shift all resources to the systemwide office. It’s created divisions in our union, and many of our members have become deeply suspicious and angry, others hopeful and inspired.

When the transition happened, my UCB counterpart and I met with the new president to talk about our organizing campaign, and I had been prepped that I would need to get his approval and confirm his support or the whole project would be shut down. I had already been able to secretly secure a copy of the list of workers from the RFI, but I was under the impression it was critical to build trust with the new leadership and work collectively in order to preserve our access to staff and resources. When they refused to give us the member list, a list I actually already had, a list that contained information publicly available on campus websites, I suddenly realized that the only thing the union had done for me since the campaign started was to create barriers to the organizing I wanted to do. Both the old and new leaders were focused on unit modifications and assessments and I was focused on shop floor organizing.

When I look back on our disagreements, it’s clear to me that we are all deeply committed to our belief that the purpose of a union is to be a space where workers collectively fight consistent and overwhelming exploitation from their employer. But it’s common in unions, including mine, to fetishize the contract as the single most important way to do this. All of our disagreements can be linked back to their focus on contract fights and my focus on shop floor organizing. Pulling resources away from our campaign to work on accretions was a strategic decision to build membership into existing units with a contract. The design and scope of the Student Services Professionals unit was a strategic decision to build a large unit that could increase the negotiating power of UPTE in contract fights. The focus on assessments over shop floor organizing was a strategic decision to get additional staff from CWA to run the campaign and win a contract. 

And I would argue that this disagreement between a focus on shop floor organizing and contract fights is what prevents us from organizing any wall to wall campaign. UCSC alone has 16 bargaining units (14 systemwide and two campus-specific units). We have a union coalition called University Labor Unions, but they have never been able to organize a collective demand, instead focusing on communicating their bargaining priorities and seeking support for upcoming contract fights. In the one meeting I attended the members literally didn’t understand why I was there since I didn’t have a contract. We will never have a wall to wall collective bargaining unit at the UC, but that should not be a barrier to organizing collectively. We can look to the tactics and strategies of minority unions to help us imagine what’s possible when we act collectively outside the confines of contracts and labor law. 

My goal in the upcoming year is to work with my AP colleagues to set up a system of unrepresented stewards and work together to address the issues of our staff colleagues with or without union membership. In a recent staff survey we conducted, it became clear that many of our colleagues are working with staff shortages, required to pick up extra work without extra pay, are bullied by faculty, are housing insecure, and cannot envision life at UCSC any longer. Staff recruitments are failing, and people are moving out of the area or into the private sector. A key goal for me in setting up this network and starting to address staff concerns is to do the work of a union without the formal structure and see what comes out of that. As my union sister Lisa says, “You do the work of the union, and the structure can be built around it.”