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Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

There’s no clear path to replacing UAW. They somehow got in control of union representation for the entire UC system.

The US is a closed shop country, so it is illegal for students to simply cancel their membership in UAW and join a graduate student workers union.

I’m not familiar enough with labor law to know the exact proceedue, but presumably students would need to mount a state-wide campaign to vote UAW out (if it is even possible).

Even then, I don’t know if campuses would be allowed to negotiate separately or not.

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Wow being a graduate student is closed-shop in the US?! That’s crazy I never knew that. How does that square with academic and political freedom? A student who researches union abuse must join and fund a union!

California, not the US in general.

Depends on the state and the public/private designation of the university. There is also the (mostly unanswered in the courts) question of whether private university graduate students are primarily employees or students. Read up on the kerfuffles at NYU and Columbia University to see how gnarly this all gets.

It's worth noting that graduate students were not able to unionize until recently at many private universities in the US. Even though they now can legally unionize, many remain unionless for one reason or another.

> There’s no clear path to replacing UAW.

Sure there is; the rules for decertifying unions and replacing them are not mysterious.

> They somehow got in control of union representation for the entire UC system.

Because the grad students formed unions and voted to affiliate with UAW, even before their rights to do so were recognized.

> I’m not familiar enough with labor law to know the exact proceedue, but presumably students would need to mount a state-wide campaign to vote UAW out (if it is even possible).

That's the main option (they'd need support of 30% of the represented employees to force a vote)

In principle, they could also challenge the designation of a single statewide bargaining unit and argue that the separate campuses (or at least, their campus) grad student workers are somehow not part of a community of common interest with the rest of the existing BU, which would allow separate decertification for just their campus.

> voted to affiliate with UAW

But why? They’ve got nothing to do with the car industry.

The International Union, United Automobile, Aerospace, and Agricultural Implement Workers of America, (UAW for historical reasons) is a broad multi-industry parent union, and has been since something like the 1950s or 1960s; The National Writers Union is part of it, among others.

UAW provided organizing and other support beginning shortly after the first few (unrecognized) campus unions were set up by the grad students.

> The US is a closed shop country, so it is illegal for students to simply cancel their membership in UAW and join a graduate student workers union.

Wow, and there are people arguing that free market will solve it!

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