Update, Dec. 1:
In a 10-9 vote Nov. 30, the UAW 2865 bargaining team voted to move the UC’s latest “reasonable accommodations” article to a tentative agreement, effectively eliminating the last access needs article on the table.
Similarly, in a 10-9 vote the same night, the bargaining team voted to move the pay floor in their wages proposal to $43,000 — down from an initial $54,000 demand — and keep the cost of living adjustment language out of the wages contract. Both representatives for the Davis branch of the union local voted in favor.
Members of the UAW 2865 Justice Coalition, a group of disabled workers across UC who also contributed to a FAQ about disability justice articles, released a statement Dec. 1 objecting to the tentative agreement. The coalition organized in the midst of the strike, now in its third week.
“Moving forward, the Justice Coalition will continue to organize union members, maintain discussions with bargaining team members to urge them to reconsider the (tentative agreement), and fervently campaign for a ‘no vote’ on the proposed contract if necessary to ensure that disability justice needs, living wage demands, and labor rights are adequately represented in the contract,” the statement reads.
Original story:
Empty labs and classrooms — and workers carrying “UAW ON STRIKE: UNFAIR LABOR PRACTICE” signs — may be the most visible indicators of the thousands of graduate student workers, postdoctoral students and career researchers taking up an indefinite work stoppage across the University of California. But not all workers who are withholding labor can be present in-person.
Third-year UC Davis master’s student Megan Lynch spearheaded the creation of the UC Access Now coalition in summer 2020. She said physical strike lines may not be as welcoming to disabled workers.
In order to be eligible for strike pay, workers must picket in four-hour shifts and complete a total of 20 hours to be paid.
“A four-hour shift at an inaccessible picket line — there are some people who, with the pandemic still going on, they can’t take that risk,” she said. “Even if there wasn’t a pandemic going on, they can’t physically manage the stamina of that. That doesn’t mean they don’t have any way of contributing.”
Lynch added that strike lines settling in the middle of lawns — which can be a barrier for those with impaired mobility — and lack of widespread masking during another potential wave of respiratory disease are other reasons the physical line may not be as welcoming to disabled workers.
Extra UAW strike signs carried by in-person picketers lay on Hutchison Field on Nov. 14.Janelle Salanga / CapRadio
Though not all disabled workers on strike are on the physical picket line, they are fighting to prioritize accessibility and shape more inclusive, equitable union contracts. As bargaining teams develop contract proposals, disabled workers are pushing for articles that could codify the right for an instructor or student to request universal masking in a given space, ensure COVID-19 mitigations like continued access to PCR testing and establish universal online access without accommodation. For them, it’s a manner of saying “disability rights are workers’ rights.”
Accessibility benefits everyone
Matthew Ryan, part of the SRU-UAW bargaining team and a PhD candidate at UC San Francisco, said in a statement that it’s “essential” to the union that those with disabilities are “front and center” during the strike.
“Remote activities like phone banking were prioritized during our planning, and we advocated for and won remote access to strike pay for the first time in UAW International History,” he said. “There should be no barriers to participation here and [we] welcome any feedback about how we can make our spaces more accessible.”
But remote picketing — and accessible picket lines — vary between campuses, and strikers.
For third-year UC Davis Ph.D student Adam Moore, who is at high-risk for severe outcomes if he gets COVID-19, the first week of strike activity looked like a lot of meetings, phone calls and texts.
Aside from withholding work and phone banking to build support for the strike, he’s been pushing for in-person strike captains at campuses to create a culture of protective COVID-19 measures through sharing suggestions with them and on social media.
Health and safety — namely COVID-19 mitigations — are part of creating accessibility, Moore said.
“Anyone in these universities can become disabled at any time … they could get COVID, and months later get long COVID, and now they’re disabled,” Moore said. “They should have been protected from getting COVID in the first place… if it’s during their time that they’re working for the UC, they should have these rights in place.”
For those going in-person at the UC Davis picket line, located at the field at Hutchison and La Rue, union rank-and-file students and workers like Lynch and Heather Ringo, a third-year English Ph.D student at the university, have pushed for greater accessibility.
Sophie Worthington-Kirsch, a third-year Ph.D student in the university’s chemistry department, has worked closely with union reps to plan the picket line and says they did ask her and other disabled workers on strike to share thoughts about what an accessible picket line could look like.
“Things haven’t always come together perfectly,” she said, noting that she hadn’t always come to planning meetings. “We’re limited to a certain extent, because we’re on the college campus, and the college campus isn’t necessarily accessible.”
Ringo and Lynch added that they wished the current location would’ve been closer to an ADA-accessible Porta Potty or similar bathrooms, along with water fountains close by, if not pallets of water available, or a location that offered more shade.
Because the field is at the edge of campus, Ringo and a coalition of other folks have set up a mutual aid tent in a shaded area to provide food, water, coffee, seating, N95 masks and a sensory decompression space for workers showing up in-person.
The sensory decompression and mutual aid tent set up near the physical picket line at UC Davis.Photo provided to CapRadio by Breanne Weber“Folks had said things like ‘We need seating, we need chairs’... Autistic folks said, ‘We need spaces where we can get away from the noise, and food and water,’” Ringo said. “It’s very clear that the values and principles, even if we don’t do it perfectly, that the intention here is taking care of folks.”
Ringo said she’s also hoping Davis unions involved in strike activity will be more amenable to types of remote picketing that aren’t just phone calls, and to acknowledge that since the main component of the strike is withholding labor, picketing in many different ways can only help the movement gain momentum.
“Protest doesn’t have to be a certain thing,” she said. “Other campuses say, ‘Oh, you can do art,’ and other campuses are like, ‘Hey, if you’re disabled and you can’t do your 20 hours [to get strike pay] … that’s fine. Just do what you can.’”
Ringo added that “there’s so much talent there that’s being underutilized because you’re having this kind of rigid inflexibility, in terms of thinking about what can be striking,” noting that organization around the mutual aid tent developed through text chats and online communication before taking root at the picket line in-person.
Some union proposals could set new precedents for access and support
Open-door bargaining meetings with online access via Zoom are an access need intimately tied to worker transparency and union leadership accountability.
Hundreds of striking rank-and-file workers and students have signed a petition calling to ensure bargaining teams don’t engage in closed-door meetings.
That’s in part so the workers can ensure demands like tying yearly raises to cost-of-living in a specific area — called a cost of living adjustment, or COLA — remain in union proposals.
Last week in open-door meetings the UAW 2865 and SRU-UAW bargaining teams voted on striking the language that ties wage increases to cost of living, removing the COLA from the bargaining table for the moment. The decision was contested by rank-and-file union members.
UC says that a COLA wage proposal would have a “large-scale and unpredictable financial impact on the university.”
“The University has no ability to control or predict rates charged by private landlords and companies,” spokesperson Ryan King said in an emailed statement.
With chants and messaging from the union focusing on higher wages for researchers and workers, Moore said a COLA is a disability justice issue. While contract language isn’t specific to disabled people, they’re more likely to shoulder extra costs from additional doctors’ appointments, prescriptions and specific workplace accommodations.
But Moore said “it’s not nearly enough.”
“The proposed base pay of $54,000, that’s going to be good for me in Davis — that is not going to be good for my counterparts in Santa Cruz,” he said. “If you think about someone at Santa Cruz who’s disabled — it’s hurting them more and we’re still not getting to the equity that we need, and the equity that has been a major part of all the publicity around the strike.”
UC Santa Cruz was the starting point for wildcat strikes — strikes that didn’t go through union bureaucracy to complete a strike authorization vote — from late 2019 to early 2020, and rank-and-file workers there say they won’t vote to approve a contract without a COLA.
Along with the Disability Justice Committee in UAW 2865, Moore has been organizing around including a public health article in union bargaining. It has 300 supporters as of Nov. 28. The committee is in the process of introducing that article to the bargaining committee, then to the actual negotiations with UC.
“Coupled with the ventilation upgrades and continued access to PCR testing, what we’re doing is trying to piece together different layers of protection because no one layer is perfect,” he said.
Along with the pending public health article, all four of the bargaining teams proposed an access needs article, with language specifically chosen to highlight access as the default.
Erica Mineo, a UC Access Now coalition member who studied biological sciences while at UC Davis, noted that “reasonable accommodations” reflected the language from the 1990 Americans with Disabilities Act.
“We’ve had 32 years of evidence to show that doesn’t really work — and it’s never really helped disabled people get access as a default from the start,” she said. “It’s always about us begging for crumbs from the university, so we wanted to change that.”
The originally proposed access needs articles (here’s the one UAW 2865 initially put forth in bargaining, as an example) have language enshrining workers’ right to an accessible workplace, including workplace materials, work buildings and universal online access without documentation. They were developed through consultation with UC Access Now and caucuses of disabled workers throughout each of the unions; UAW 2865’s chapter at UC Davis was the first to have a disability caucus among the 10 schools.
The access needs articles would also require university administration to maintain a dedicated source of centralized funding from which to pay for accommodations.
However, three of the bargaining teams — both UAW 5810’s, representing postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers, and SRU-UAW, representing graduate student researchers — have tentative agreements with UC on what is now known as the “reasonable accommodations” article.
UAW 2865’s bargaining team, as of Nov. 23, is continuing to bargain around both accommodations and access needs.
“Disagreement between units doesn’t undermine our power,” reads a FAQ from the Disability Justice Committee about the access needs and public health articles. “It’s not clear to [tentatively agree] the current access needs article reflects input from UAW 2865 — especially UAW 2865 disabled workers.”
Mineo, who is autistic and has anxiety, said ableism pushed her out of the university with three classes left, since UC Davis said it couldn’t allow her to take two non-lab classes remotely.
“If we had those access needs articles, especially the centralized funding, the flexibility, the idea that buildings are accessible by default, the online accessibility by default, if we had that, I think students like me could come back and finish our degrees,” she said. “The access needs articles might not change that [ableist] sentiment overnight, but it might spark conversations.”
At noon at the UC Davis sensory and mutual aid tent — and on Zoom — on Nov. 29, disabled strikers are holding a disability studies teach-in open to all.
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