Re:UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking fo...
by chrisseaton on Monday March 02, 2020 @06:04AM
(#22463364)
> voted to affiliate with UAW
But why? They’ve got nothing to do with the car industry.
Re:UC Santa Cruz fires 54 grad students who were striking fo...
by dragonwriter on Monday March 02, 2020 @09:32AM
(#22464705)
The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, (UAW for historical reasons) is a broad multi-industry parent union, and has been since something like the 1950s or 1960s; The National Writers Union is part of it, among others.
UAW provided organizing and other support beginning shortly after the first few (unrecognized) campus unions were set up by the grad students.
Sure there is; the rules for decertifying unions and replacing them are not mysterious.
> They somehow got in control of union representation for the entire UC system.
Because the grad students formed unions and voted to affiliate with UAW, even before their rights to do so were recognized.
> I’m not familiar enough with labor law to know the exact proceedue, but presumably students would need to mount a state-wide campaign to vote UAW out (if it is even possible).
That's the main option (they'd need support of 30% of the represented employees to force a vote)
In principle, they could also challenge the designation of a single statewide bargaining unit and argue that the separate campuses (or at least, their campus) grad student workers are somehow not part of a community of common interest with the rest of the existing BU, which would allow separate decertification for just their campus.