By Kyle J. Arnone, Renee Hudson, Dustianne North and Julia Tomassetti
Triennial elections for the leadership of our union, UAW 2865 ““ the union that represents teaching assistants, readers, and tutors UC-wide ““ begin today.
The incumbent leadership, running as the United for Social and Economic Justice slate, is defending its position against the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, a student-led slate of reform-minded candidates.
Our union has a poor record of democracy, a consequence of many years of neglect and bad practice. The incumbent leadership is so immersed in an exclusionary style of leadership that they can’t imagine another way to lead; it’s the only model they have.
While a record of exclusionary decision-making is troubling for someone committed to democracy as a moral principle, it is as much a matter of good strategy. Recent research supports the notion that when run democratically, unions perform better for members in terms of wages, working conditions and racial and gender equality. This lack of internal democracy has hindered our union’s ability to fight the budget cuts.
For instance, Head Steward positions ““ the critical link between members and leaders ““ remained vacant at UCLA for many years. Head Stewards are critical for connecting campus-specific issues to the statewide leadership of the Local.
Our UCLA unit also rarely held monthly membership meetings, one of the few venues where members get face-to-face time with campus representatives. Only in February, after activists stimulated the first contested election in recent history, did our unit at UCLA fill all 11 elected positions and begin holding regular membership meetings.
This campus culture of exclusionary decision-making necessarily carries over into statewide decision-making bodies. The Joint Council is mostly populated with Head Stewards and other campus-level positions and is the only venue where campus representatives have an opportunity to decide on the objectives and strategy of the Local.
Unaccustomed to taking part in decision-making at the campus level, many Joint Council members lack the skills and context needed to make the body function properly. The last Joint Council meeting ended abruptly after two and a half hours when a Joint Council member moved to adjourn the meeting. The only resolution proposed by a non-AWDU member was a resolution to end all resolutions ““ a vote to end all votes.
Several non-AWDU members complained that the meeting had been too long; no one likes a long meeting. But the Joint Council convenes only four times per year. At that rate, we would only meet for 10 hours per year, and if the Joint Council doesn’t make the important strategic decisions, then decision-making falls exclusively into the hands of top union officials.
These examples reflect an internal political culture accustomed to deferring decisions to a small cadre of top union officials.
Our union is one of the few permanent intercampus organizations that represents the interests of a large segment of our student population. It can potentially be a vital meeting ground for facilitating efforts to build coalitions.
The union needs to reach out to campus organizations fighting against fee hikes to build a broad coalition that connects the interests workers, students and student-workers.
While AWDU shares many of the same goals as the incumbent leadership ““ improving the welfare of members, fighting against budget cuts and fee hikes and participating in solidarity actions, among others ““ we differ in approach.
We believe that democracy and active member participation at the campus level is critical to building power at the state level. We plan to revitalize campus units by making learning about and participating in the union easy and fun, and also to decentralize decision-making by stripping the Local president and vice presidents of exclusive authority.
Already we have developed a workload survey that would allow respondents to browse the statistics generated by the survey by campus and department, empowering members to take action on their own behalf; filed collective grievances against UC’s benefits decentralization plan, a backdoor policy that effectively cuts the number of TA positions, thereby increasing class sizes; and started a campus choir as a way of making the unit a comfortable space for debate and building solidarity.
All these efforts are predicated on real, substantive democracy. But this is just a start toward putting the demos back in union democracy and putting our union in a position to be an effective force in preserving the integrity of public education.