“Reform” in UAW 4811: What’s next?

Where are we going from here? How do we shape what’s next?

This TA will pass. We know it will pass because we do not have the organization, staff on payroll, membership lists, PR firms, and aura of authority—aka the electoral machine—that its proponents have in excess. We are not going to beat their machine on its own terms. We may be rank-and-file, but at this moment we do not outnumber them, nor do we have the sufficient strategy and energy to outweigh their advantages. This is why we have chosen to do little more than advocate for a no vote on the departmental level (and at the campus level at UCSC and UCM) and encourage workers to think seriously about what comes next.

The 2025-2026 contract campaign can be seen as iterative on the 2022 contract campaign that preceded it. In both cases, ASEs joined forces with units seeking their first contract. In both cases, economic conditions within higher ed posed existential threats to our ability to stay in grad school. And, our leadership did everything they could to stave off a strike, or at least limit the duration of one.

In the aftermath of 2022, some of us argued that we could have won more if we struck longer, and many of us were ready to do so. Since then, many of us have learned that outside of our departments and campuses, the strike was disintegrating across the state. Perhaps we won all we could have given the weakness of the strike as a whole. Perhaps, as we saw in 2024, a strong, minority strike could’ve won greater concessions.

It is clear that the structure tests we carried out in the 2025-26 contract campaign were weaker and less oriented toward building strike readiness than those of 2022. It is also clear that the key demands that were democratically voted on during the November 2024 Bargaining Convention—including 12-month funding, guaranteed funding for the entirety of our degree programs, and centralized funding—were never seriously bargained for by the majority of our Bargaining Team, often split 20 to 4. We recognize the lack of strong, widespread strike prep during this contract campaign and the general disorganization of our membership, but also that this TA does not do enough to meet the needs of our membership at this moment.

While we will never truly know how a strike would have panned out, we can see that the UC did fear our strike threat, as evidenced by the messaging they sent to faculty and staff, as well as the gains present in the TA (including the codification of 50% appointments). Ultimately, this TA shows the most we can win without taking the risk of strike action (as opposed to a mere strike threat), and we believe that taking that risk is necessary in this moment to fight back against the austerity and restructuring being imposed on us by the UC. That is why we are voting no on this Tentative Agreement.

Since 2022, we have seen that repeated attempts by some to contest leadership by electoral means have repeatedly failed. In the months and years to come, we can expect the failure of an exclusive focus on electoral campaigns to repeat anew. We have also seen three years of concerted efforts to organize an issue-focused bargaining campaign fail to achieve 12 months of funding, a single year of guaranteed funding, or the complete abolition of functional tiers (particularly the 9 vs 12 months “tier,” which often maps onto AHSS vs STEM departments, respectively) within our contract. Both approaches—as well as the organizing projects carried out by the elected officers and staff of our union—share a fundamental problem: profound disorganization at the department level.

Over the course of this contract cycle, we have seen a shift in the strategic approaches of rank-and-file and reform elements in our union. On the whole, there has been a shift away from reactively critiquing leadership, engaging in procedural battles at MMMs, and other internal electoral contests, and toward reconstructing our union from the ground up. In practice, this means returning to our departments, rebuilding our organizing committees, developing new leaders in the younger grad cohorts, and finding avenues to exercise our agency as workers on a scale that does not touch the UAW 4811 apparatus which is decidedly out of our control. 

Many of us claim that we prize democracy in our union above all else. But we do not carry this zeal into our own labs and departments. Our union is more than a series of loosely connected group chats, websites, and Instagram pages. It’s a body of over 40,000 workers, many of whom see grad school as a temporary period of hazing and poor living conditions on their way to upper middle class comforts. (Although we have learned recently that our unit has shrunk by about 8%, yet another indication that our concerns about austerity and restructuring are not tomorrow’s problem, but rather, are ones we already face today). The only way to change this perception is to build workplace democracy in our shops. Workers need to feel their agency and experience victories on the small scale if they are going to believe that they can strike and win even more. By now, many of our 4811 siblings have never been on a picket line or even participated in a departmental, sectoral, or campus OC. Our task is to organize workers around enacting meaningful change where they feel it most. Localized, tangible issue campaigns—focusing on issues like TAship allocation procedures, qualifying exam rules, programmatic protections for international workers facing deportation, combatting retaliation by PIs and advisors, and shared departmental governance—all build up workers’ coordination and confidence. And as our union and the faculty continue to sign cards, these campaigns help stitch our units together in a way that reflects our aspirations for a truly democratic UC. 

If we want to change our union, we need to live by our principles. The next four years will be difficult. The Trump administration will continue to attack higher ed, the labor movement, non-citizens, trans people, free speech, and everything we hold dear. Meanwhile, our elected officers will encourage us to canvas for their endorsed electoral candidates, support the CA bond measure to replace (some) DOGE’ed science funding, and join card signing campaigns in their effort to turn UAW 4811 into a wall-to-wall union (sans faculty). Those of us involved in the Cross Campus Bargaining Strategy OC propose a different organizing plan. One that calls on each of us to return to our departments and start reconstructing our union from the ground up. We ask workers to build the union they want to see in their labs, cohorts, departments, and sectors. 

In time, we may be able to leverage this democratic reconstruction into campus and statewide electoral victories. But the electoral cart cannot come before the rank-and-file horse. This contract cycle has shown that electoral contests—including the final contest of the ratification vote—will sap energy and result in dramatic defeats without an upswelling of rank-and-file engagement in union organizing. At the same time, we have seen that we cannot call a ULP strike when our bargaining team is split 20-4 in favor of playing (mostly) nice with the boss. Nor can we call a wildcat without a major surge in rank-and-file militancy and confidence.

We believe that strong strikes can fight the ongoing restructuring of our industry, bringing the gains workers need, and support a broader reconstitution of the US labor movement towards the end of rebuilding working class power. Unions that pull off strong strikes have both leadership and membership that are prepared to strike—here, we seem to be lacking both. There is a dialectic between the actions of leadership and membership—good leadership can provoke changes in patterns of self-organization among the rank-and-file. However, merely contesting leadership elections has failed. We are forced to conclude that, for now, our efforts are best focused on organizing the rank-and-file, for a bottom-up reconstitution of the union.

While our issue campaigns have taken root in the minds of many workers, they have not ultimately helped them to conquer their fear, driven them to demand more of their representatives and employers, nor translated into unprecedented contractual victories. The symptoms are divergent, but the cause is the same: a disorganized (and depoliticized) rank-and-file. Our task in the years to come is to combat the cause and to finally kill the fear. And for now, that means we must return to our departments, talk to our coworkers, and build union militancy from the ground up.

Members of the rank-and-file Cross Campus Bargaining Strategy Organizing Committee