Centralized Funding

What is Centralized Funding?

Centralized Funding, when implemented, would be an article in the contract that says the University shall provide centralized funding (i.e. funding not coming from departmental or individual lab/PI budgets) to all units and departments whose budgets are not sufficient to pay the negotiated wages. We are essentially demanding that if any budgets were approved before ratification of the new contract and therefore do not account for subsequent raises, or if any units have lost funding due to federal cuts, it is the University’s responsibility to make ends meet. More specifically, the UC can provide centralized funding by drawing from the $6.9 billion Blue and Gold Pool (BGP), an investment pool administered by UC Investments that can be easily liquidated and, in the words of the Regents, supplies “additional resources to address a portion of [the University’s] overall budget needs.”

Why Centralized Funding now?

Following the 2022 strike, the UC did not provide departments with sufficient budget increases to honor the newly ratified wages. Individual departments and PIs that could not afford the new ASE/GSR salaries increased workload for the same appointment percentage, decreased appointment percentages to below 50%, and/or eliminated available appointments.

Departments get their teaching budgets from the Graduate Division, and PIs get their GSR budgets from grants. When budget increases don’t come with the wage increases, faculty can’t keep up. But what about the University? In 2017, a state audit revealed that the UC “failed to disclose up to $175 million in budget reserve funds,” 2 while in June 2024 the Regents crowed about the unprecedented growth in their investments that added another $6.9 billion to their coffers.3 Even as the UC’s financial resources grow, tuition gets ever more expensive, administration keeps growing uncontrollably 4, and the University gets as much as a 56% cut of research grants won by PIs (which the University supposedly spends on departments, but no one has seen an itemized bill). And somehow, at the end of the day, there is still not enough money to pay the people that carry out the University’s operations the wages that the University agreed to.

All of this is particularly concerning in our present moment, as the Trump administration has frozen $500 million in research grants and is demanding a $1 billion ransom for their restoration. We already saw the impacts of these federal funding cuts last year, as rollbacks of NIH and NSF funding led to the loss of jobs across several labs. These cuts have compounded the existing challenges facing PIs across campuses who have been forced to fund raises and budgetary increases through increasingly anemic grants. A contractual commitment to centralized funding would require the University to instead create a funding source on which these struggling labs could draw right now to compensate for the current crisis.

What have we done so far?

Last November, elected UAW 4811 members gathered at the 2024 Bargaining Convention to vote on bargaining priorities for our 2025 contract campaign. Centralized Funding was voted onto our list of priorities by these delegates, reflecting it is a top priority for workers across the state.

We began bargaining our new contract in July, and we’ve yet to see any economic demands make it on the table. Our union’s initial bargaining demands (IBDs) clearly state that it’s a priority to ensure all workers impacted by funding disruptions are provided with emergency bridge funding, and early communiques from bargaining team members suggest that our proposed Appointment Notification article will include language requiring that the UC ensure all hiring units (i.e., departments and programs) have adequate funds to provide 12-month appointments at 50% FTE to grads, preventing the boss from blaming our union for their own greed. If both of these are included in our contract, that would essentially guarantee centralized funding for workers across the state. It will be up to the UC to figure out how they fund this, but we know they can use the Blue and Gold fund in the interim while the boss figures out how to put pressure on the state legislature to provide more public funds for our university.

Now, nearly a year after the Bargaining Convention, it’s critical that workers across the state make it known to both the UC and our own union’s bargaining team that centralized funding is still a top priority for us — perhaps even more now than it was last November, given the federal funding crisis and the UC’s continued austerity measures. We must ensure this language makes it into the article that we pass to the UC and that the integrity of the article is kept throughout the bargaining process.

What can I do?

The Bargaining Team was elected by membership to represent membership. When membership agrees on a priority, it is their job to bargain for it. We urge you to:

  1. Circulate the info sheet below among your colleagues

  2. Sign the letter addressed to the UC and our BT, urging them to prioritize Centralized Funding (link)

  3. Stay informed about bargaining (mailing list)