Unions organizing, may strike by next quarter

The largest unions representing UCLA workers met Wednesday to
discuss organizing into a coalition for a January strike.

Meanwhile, they struggle to organize and recruit members, a
difficult process due to the university’s size.

The Coalition of University Employees (CUE) organized the town
hall meeting to inform members of what other unions are doing about
their common target of grievance, the University of California.

“We need to get organized and get working … we need to
work together,” said Robert Hennig, a political sciences
lecturer and bargaining member for the University Council of the
American Federation of Teachers, who was a panelist at the
meeting.

Most attendees showed their support for a proposed two-day
strike, though the turnout wasn’t overwhelming ““
attendees barely managed to fill half the Neuropsychiatric
Institute auditorium during the noontime meeting.

Though CUE and UC-AFT authorized some type of job action for
this quarter ““ strikes, teach-ins and rallies ““
UCLA is the only campus in the UC system to not do anything
publicly yet.

Union leaders think a UCLA strike will affect the UC more than
strikes at other campuses earlier this year because it is the
biggest campus in the system.

In August, CUE and UC-AFT struck at the Berkeley campus the
first few days of the semester. Five other campuses ““ Santa
Cruz, Riverside, Irvine, Davis and Santa Barbara ““ struck six
weeks later, with informative picketing at the San Diego
campus.

The strike at UC Berkeley in August was fairly disruptive,
Horning said. But a UCLA strike has the potential to be more
upsetting, she said, because there are more than twice the amount
of telephone operators, childcare workers, administrative
assistants and other clerical workers at UCLA. According to CUE,
UCLA has 4,000 clericals.

“I think we saw (the disruption) at other campuses.
Classes get canceled, work doesn’t get done, deliveries
don’t happen, surgeries get rescheduled, bills don’t
get sent out,” she said.

The event also served as a forum to motivate people to join,
though there weren’t many non-members in the room. Union
leaders asked members a number of times to recruit fellow workers
when they return from the lunch meeting.

While UCLA’s size makes a strike more powerful, it makes
it difficult to mobilize workers, Horning said.

“We are fighting for hundreds, thousands, who may be
scared to fight,” Hennig said.

Many CUE members in attendance thought fear of losing money or
their job was the biggest reason more members didn’t take
their lunch break to attend the informational meeting.

They are afraid their supervisors will see them at the meeting
and treat them differently, said Bert Thomas, a clerical worker at
the Blood and Platelet Center.

Additionally, many clerical workers at the Wilshire Center, who
have to swipe their cards in and out for their lunch break, opted
not to attend, said Eloise Murphy, a Wilshire Center employee. They
don’t want to be docked pay for returning late, she added,
though she risked a 15-minute pay-dock herself to attend the
meeting.

All UCLA clerical workers contribute half a percent of their
wages to CUE in a fair share agency fee, but only 20 percent are
full-fledged members, said Claudia Horning, systemwide CUE
president.

“People don’t realize they aren’t
automatically members,” she said. “They see the agency
fee on their paycheck and assume it means they are already in the
union.”

CUE is working to increase its numbers with Wednesday’s
event as the kick-off. Horning said she wanted to see more members
attend.

Although no date was set for a coalition strike, Hennig was
clear when he said that UC-AFT will strike in January. The union
secured sanction strikes with other members of the AFL-CIO ““
including construction workers, the United Parcel Service and
Federal Express ““ who agree not to cross strike lines. The
California Nurses Association and United Auto Workers union which
includes teaching assistants and readers have also agreed to honor
strike lines.