Issue 7: Vote No on the Tentative Agreement!
Read the tentative agreement here: November 2024 Tentative Agreement
We all received an email from UAW 4811 leadership recently outlining a Tentative Agreement (TA) from the UC that would extend our current contract from May 31st, 2025 until December 31st, 2025. If you feel blindsided by this, you are not alone; our union leadership gave us—the membership—absolutely no indication they were in negotiations about a contract extension.
This TA is not a win, and it has several issues (more detail on all of these below):
It offers no significant material benefits to rank-and-file workers.
It puts our union in a fundamentally unstrategic position to negotiate our next contract.
It circumvents democratic union processes and supplants them with a unilateral backdoor agreement.
By voting NO on the TA, we can send a strong message to both the UC and union leadership: that we are ready to organize for a better contract in 2025; that we reject the secret negotiations behind this TA; that we refuse to delay the fight at the UC’s convenience; and most importantly, that we refuse to bow to the UC’s relentless assault of austerity and retaliation, which harms our most vulnerable coworkers.
A. The UC’s offer contains no significant material gains.
In exchange for a flatly unstrategic extension, the UC is offering two things:
A one-time 2–4% raise starting in October 2025, which fails to address how inflation has deeply cut into the raises we won in 2022.
Limited transitional funding for researchers—a “pilot program” that is currently only available to six people per campus per year.
These adjustments do not even come close to addressing the pressing needs of our international and undocumented students, disabled students, parents, professional and master’s students, and undergraduate students. This extension drops our demand for the UC to end police repression on our campuses and invest in living wages and education instead of war and genocide.
We are at a critical political juncture. The Trump regime has promised mass deportations, crackdowns on democratic rights, and attacks on our right to have a union at all. We need to come together as a union and with other UC unions to demand protections now. In deferring negotiations for our next contract until well into Trump’s presidency, this agreement significantly reduces our leverage and abandons the needs of our union’s most vulnerable members. In short, we have little to gain from this deal and a lot to lose!
B. The UC’s offer is unstrategic for us and weakens our movement.
Extending the contract plays into the UC admin’s hands by demobilizing our union and tying our hands before bargaining has even begun. The UC wants to extend our contract to ensure that we cannot threaten a strike for at least another year. AFSCME and UPTE are currently in bargaining with expired contracts; the administration wants us out of the picture so that the three biggest unions at the UC aren’t negotiating—and potentially on strike—at the same time. It is a divide-and-conquer strategy.
Currently, our contract is scheduled to expire on May 31st, 2025, enabling us to threaten a late fall strike. (We are not required to strike as soon as the contract expires.) The UC’s TA postpones our contract's expiry date to December 31st, 2025, taking the threat of a fall quarter grade strike off the table. At best, our union could threaten a winter or spring quarter strike, potentially going into the summer. But fall 2025 is most strategic for us to strike because:
It allows us to threaten to withhold grades over winter break, when major deadlines are shared across all UC campuses (aside from the fall, not all UC campuses are aligned on the same academic calendar). Concentrating our leverage on the strategic cluster of winter deadlines allows us to threaten more economic disruption in a shorter strike window.
It allows us to avoid our worst time to strike, the summer, when significantly fewer ASEs are working and it is much more difficult to maintain strike momentum. A spring/summer strike would likely have to last much longer in order to win similar demands.
Our current bargaining timeline aligns with two other UC union contract negotiations, a changing federal administration, and the UC president resigning. These overlapping problems for the UC favor us; the UC wants to extend our contract to buy time to deal with these issues before negotiating with us.
A deal like this puts us on the UC’s preferred timeline, significantly curtailing our agency over when to strike.
C. The UC’s offer undermines democracy in our union.
This TA comes as a surprise to rank-and-file workers because it was entertained by union leadership in closed-door meetings with the UC. Our union is nominally committed to the democratic principle of “open bargaining,” where rank-and-file workers participate in every step of the usually months-long bargaining process. To circumvent this democratic process, the UC introduced this offer to our union representatives in a confidential mediation process unrelated to the contract timeline. By entertaining this deal, our bargaining team has again shown its willingness to cut backdoor deals and steamroll its own membership. To accept this attempt to undermine democratic bargaining in our union without protest would set a dangerous precedent. We know the university operates in bad faith—we should not play into their hands.
For all of these reasons, we plan to VOTE NO on this disastrous TA and urge all our fellow UAW 4811 workers to do the same. In the short window we have been given to consider this proposal, we encourage all workers to hold department town halls and discuss the TA with their coworkers. THIS IS A BAD DEAL! WE CAN DO BETTER!