Reformers Sweep UC Union Election

Graduate students at the University of California voted resoundingly to elect a slate of reformers to lead their union, United Auto Workers Local 2865, according to results released on Sunday night.

Reform group Academic Workers for a Democratic Union netted almost 60 percent of the Joint Council seats and took control of the Executive Board, winning 55 percent of the vote across campuses. Cheryl Deutsch, AWDU’s candidate for president, won with 56 percent of the vote statewide. The union, which represents roughly 12,000 graduate students working as teachers, researchers assistants and tutors is the largest UAW local in the West.

"We swept the board," Charlie Eaton, financial secretary-elect for the AWDU, told HuffPost on Monday. "But I think the really exciting part is that it's like a whole new generation of union leaders who are inspired by Wisconsin."

Election results come after student activists mobilized last week to defend a democratic election process in the wake of the Election Committee's decision to halt the vote count. In a letter to members, Elections Committee Chair Travis Knowles said the counting was halted because of the level of "hostility" in the crowded ballot count room. The issues, he wrote, "included secret audio recording of procedures, yelling and physical altercations –- all of which prevented the election committee from doing its job and counting the ballots."

Members of AWDU, meanwhile, have called those claims "fabricated,"insisting that the counting was halted only after it became clear the reformers might be able to win the majority of seats on the Executive Board.

Following a week of sit-ins protesting the cessation of the count, it was announced that the count would resume last Thursday.

Before the election, incumbent group, United for Social and Economic Justice, held eight of ten Executive Board seats, which operate at the state level; they also held the majority of Joint Council seats, which operate at the campus level. This election cycle, members elected AWDU reformers to all 10 of the union’s Executive Board positions and to 45 the union’s 80 Joint Council positions. Before the election AWDU held just 30 seats.

“We saw an urgent need for UAW 2865 to support and sustain the massive protests and walkouts against fee hikes and budget cuts at U.C.s in 2009 and 2010," Brenda Medina-Hernandez, a AWDU member and third-year graduate student in History at U.C. Davis, said in a statement. "The union is the best place to build coalitions across many different campus activists groups and unite in the fight for California's future.”

In a letter to students on Monday, members of AWDU leadership said "the election itself and our struggle to count every vote has already transformed our union."

"The debate and struggle were contentious," the letter continued. "But this struggle opened up a huge new space for thousands of our members to participate in deciding how to defend our interests as a union. Turnout in the election increased to about 3,400 votes from just a few hundred votes in the last Triennial Election for the Joint Council and Executive Board ... Now it is time for us to bring this strength to our fight against the attacks on higher education."

UAW Local 2865 has called for a statewide meeting in Berkeley, Calif. on May 21, inviting students to discuss the union's strategic plan going forward. High on the list, they say, will be battling statewide budget cuts to higher education, increasing class sizes, and health benefits for graduate student employees.