Ethan Friedland
for Unit Chair
NELC Department Steward, Delivery Picket Mastermind, Kitchen Committee Chef, UC Divest Steering Committee Member
Encourages more participation and transparency
Opposes all tiers
Serves as NELC Department Steward since 2022
Volunteers for Kitchen Committe
Serves on UC Divest Steering Committee
Organized the Satellite Pickets
Reads Avestan
My name is Ethan Friedland (he/him) and I am a third year PhD student in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures. I am running for Unit Chair with the Rank and File for a Democratic Union slate. During the 2022 strike, I organized the strategic satellite pickets that shut down UC deliveries and construction from 3am–12pm every weekday. The success of these strategic pickets—despite opposition from leadership—underlines the importance of inter-union solidarity and the power of direct action. Since then, I’ve represented my department as a steward and have organized with my colleagues to win safeguards against the UC’s retaliatory and uneven implementation of our contract, and I’ve worked with Kitchen Committee to feed our community. Further, I serve as a member of the UC Divest steering board, and have organized to force war criminals off our campus and push the UC Regents to begin the process of divesting our money from arms and occupation. The fight for an ethical UC that prioritizes students and workers over corporate profits is integral to our efforts as a union, and I am committed to building on this work as your Unit Chair.
Since we began our new contract in 2023, UAW workers across the UC have struggled. The UC chose not to allocate funding to pay for our increased wages, and individual departments have shouldered the burden. Departments have slashed or reduced appointments in response to these pressures, effectively nullifying many of the gains of our strike. These austerity measures are an existential issue for many of our colleagues, necessitating both a centralized response and a forward-thinking, systemic approach to our next contract.
If the UC is capable of withholding our wage increases, we must change the system itself to ensure that workers have a say in running this university. Union MADE’s top-down, closed-door approach is not capable of mobilizing the workers necessary to enact such structural change. The series of concessions during the 2022 bargaining and the post-contract concession on tiers illustrate the necessity of a more democratic and militant organizing ethos. Our union must organize in such a way that we never encounter the pressure, nor entertain the desire, to compromise on the needs of parents, international workers, workers with disabilities, and workers of color.
Internally, I want to encourage greater membership participation in the union, emphasize transparency and accountability among leadership, and embrace dissenting groups that have been pushed to the margins for being too radical. I’ve fought with broad, diverse, and sometimes contentious coalitions to target arms manufacturing and the UC’s investment in war. A coalition of workers, rather than an establishment clique, will make for a stronger union.
Externally, I want to prioritize direct action as the only strategy that addresses the cause, rather than the effect, of workplace injustices. Instead, I intend to organize from the ground up, to maintain deep and sustained engagement with other unions, and to employ strategic action rather than spectacle to fight for fair and dignified conditions for all our workers.