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After more than a week of delays and disputes the votes from the just-ended UAW 2865 election have been completed, and AWDU, the insurgent slate allied with the recent University of California student uprising, have won a significant victory.
UAW 2865 represents the UC system’s student academic employees, this was both a student election and a union election. Both sides won some positions, and both sides are claiming a measure of vindication in the results, but incumbents USEJ were shut out in the most prominent officer races and took barely 40% of the seats on the local’s statewide council.
I’m still getting up to speed on this election’s long-term implications, but quite a few people in California who I’ve grown to like and trust over the last few years are very pleased by this news.
Here’s how AWDU is describing the road ahead:
Now it is time for us to bring this strength to our fight against the attacks on higher education. As a next step, we are calling on all graduate students and undergraduate tutors – no matter who they supported in the election – to come together for a statewide membership meeting of the union on May 21st to chart the way forward. We’ll get you more details soon. But high on the agenda is stepping up the fight against increasing class sizes, fee hikes, rising housing costs, new budget cuts, and UC management’s capping of funding for fee remissions and health benefits for graduate student employees.
We will stand together against the attacks on higher education, in real unity borne of fruitful discussion that includes disagreement. A grassroots, bottom-up union is strong when it provides space for open debate, and we hope that every member continues to express criticism when necessary. We also know that many members of the USEJ slate and many USEJ supporters never wanted to stop the vote count in the first place. We hope that the Elections Committee’s dismissal of the fabricated allegations by some of the outgoing union officers will help up us begin a more honest dialogue with each other.
The incredible diversity of our newly elected Joint Council and entire union is a vital strength that we must actively build upon. By working together, including with the new Joint Council members from USEJ, we will win historic advances for the rights of student-workers and the expansion of public education. We look forward to building a new kind of union together.
Student sit-ins and occupations have become a common sight in California over the last couple of years, but this week has seen something new — a sit-in at a union office.
Two factions have been competing for leadership of UAW Local 2865, the local that represents academic student employees in the University of California system. Balloting in the union election ended eight days ago, but the vote count was suspended abruptly last weekend, and has yet to resume.
The incumbent United for Social and Economic Justice slate shut down the count last Saturday, claiming irregularities in the voting and alleging that the insurgents were using “scorched earth tactics” to disrupt the process.
The challengers, Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, countered that USEJ pulled the plug because of fears that AWDU might win an upset victory, and staged a sit-in in the union office to press for transparency in the process. Expressing concern that the disruption “contributes to the public perception that unions are corrupt and outmoded,” a group of labor scholars released a public letter calling for the count to resume.
The AWDU, which grew out of California’s student protest movement, says Local 2865 has operated undemocratically, has passed up opportunities to forge coalitions with activists in the state, and has rolled over in contract negotiations.
On Tuesday, the two sides agreed on protocols and mediators for a resumption of the count, but that resumption, slated for yesterday morning, hasn’t yet occurred. Meanwhile, the two sides continue to exchange accusations on their respective blogs (USEJ and AWDU).
Fingers crossed for a swift and just end to this stalemate.
Four McGill students, including the co-presidents of the university’s New Democratic Party Club, were elected to serve in Canada’s national parliament last night.
The New Democratic Party, long a marginal player in Canadian politics, made stunning gains last night, nearly doubling its previous best-ever vote percentage and almost tripling the number of seats it holds in parliament. With the Conservative Party winning a governing majority, the NDP now stands as Canada’s official opposition for the first time.
These gains came largely at the expense of the Quebec nationalist party Bloc Québécois, whose support collapsed to less than one fourth of voters in its home province. The NDP took 45 of its 68 new seats nationally from the BC, and the wave of voter support that carried it to that result often brought victory to candidates who had entered the race with no expectation of winning.
The most notorious example of this is Ruth Ellen Brousseau, an NDP candidate who lives a three-hour drive away from her district, works full-time in a bar, and left the country for a Las Vegas family vacation in the middle of the campaign. Despite not giving any interviews or campaigning in her district — and despite rumors that in a Francophone district she speaks only clumsy French — Brousseau won election last night with forty percent of the vote.
The student winners’ stories aren’t as colorful, but they’re no less weird. Charmaine Borg, the new MP for Terrebonne-Blainville, has a four-sentence bio on the NDP website. Matthew Dubé had just 87 Twitter followers on election day … and apparently took down his Twitter account that night. Laurin Liu ran for (and won) re-election to the board of directors of McGill’s student radio station just a few weeks ago.
As co-presidents of the McGill NDP club, Dubé and Borg apparently spent most of their time this election working to re-elect a local NDP incumbent, not even mentioning their own candidacies in an April 5 student newspaper article on the campaign.
Each of these three candidates now must make plans to move to Ottawa to begin a career as a legislator, a job that carries a $157,731 annual salary.
I haven’t been able to find any of the new legislators’ ages online, by the way, but eligibility won’t be a problem — any Canadian citizen 18 years old or older is eligible to serve in parliament. (In the US, in contrast, you need to be 25 to serve in the House of Representatives.)
Nearly a dozen students occupied a portion of the Rutgers administration building overnight in defiance of an administration that cut off their access to food and water yesterday evening. The group was able to sneak supplies in via a makeshift pulley system, and say they have no intention of leaving until their demands are met.
The group is demanding that Rutgers’ president endorse a tuition freeze, that new scholarships be put in place for underprivileged and first-generation students, that transcript fees be eliminated, and that the university increase “support for the rights of ALL University affiliated workers.” In addition, the group is calling on Rutgers to implement a new shared governance structure for the university. (A detailed explanation of the demands can be found at the above link.)
The occupiers have a Facebook page and a Twitter feed, and the For Student Power blog has been liveblogging their action since yesterday afternoon.
Students at the University of California at Berkeley are hunger striking to protest the university’s lack of commitment to ethnic studies.
Five representatives of the group met with a university official yesterday. Vice Chancellor Harry Le Grande agreed to two of their demands — that he support an ethnic studies bill currently pending in the state legislature and “publicly acknowledge the unfulfilled promise of the creation of a Third World College at UC Berkeley.”
There was no movement, however, on the demand that the university reinstate Ethnic Studies staffers whose positions were recently eliminated, or the demand that the university’s “Operational Excellence” restructuring initiative be halted.
The hunger strikers have been holding vigil in front of California Hall since their action began, though they left their position for a time overnight when threatened with arrest.
studentactivism.net 
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