Why the United Auto Workers?

We chose to affiliate with the UAW because it currently represents over 100,000 academic workers across the United States, including non-tenure track faculty at Barnard, the New School, and UMass Lowell. In the last eight years alone over 40,000 academic workers around the country have chosen to become part of the UAW, and more than 10,000 of them are in the Northeast (our region).

For decades, UAW members have devoted resources to help faculty, post-docs, and student workers win difficult campaigns to establish unions. The UAW supported 18 years of organizing at NYU for the graduate employees to win an election outside of the NLRB, a 16-year struggle at the University of California, a five-year struggle at the University of Washington, and more recently a more than seven—year struggle at Northeastern University. The experience and expertise developed over these years has been indispensable in helping academic workers unionize in the present.

The UAW has experience with helping to negotiate and enforce strong contracts, and believes members are the highest authority in the union. Most recently, postdocs at Mt. Sinai won the highest minimum salaries for postdocs in the country, in their first contract. Last year, the University of California recognized Student Researchers United-UAW as representative for more than 17,000 workers, after a supermajority of UC student researchers signed cards selecting SRU-UAW as their union. In NYC, 3,000 Columbia graduate student employees voted by an overwhelming 72% to join the UAW and recently approved their first union contract by 97.6%.  In addition to drawing on the UAW’s wide experience bargaining contracts with academic administrations, we can exercise a stronger political voice through the UAW.  With active members at more than 45 major campuses across the US, the UAW has become a strong advocate on policy issues that matter to us as academics, such as federal support for science funding and enhancing the rights of international research scientists.

Read more about the contract gains of academic unions here.