All Zone Media.
It could happen here.
It's the podcast where things happen and you do something about it. I'm your host, Via Wong, and we have done you know, okay, over the course of this, we have done so many union episodes that I lost count a year ago, two years ago, I don't even know. I lost count at the dawn of time of how
many of these we've done. But something I think some of you probably know this, but a lot of you don't, is that many unions have their own unions for the people who to do staff work and to do sort of a number of other things, and sometimes unions bust their own unions and this unbelievably sucks. And to talk about an instance of this happening that is happening right now, I am talking with Alex Chan, who is an organizer for the UAW, who is I don't know what.
Technical term is.
I'm going to describe it non legally bindingly as being purged for doing organizing.
But yeah, Alex, welcome to the show.
Hi, it's nice to be here. I think being purged is a great way to describe it.
Yeah, the tentative title for this is the UAW Staff purge. So it's not great. So why don't we start off. I've given a very very brief sort of description of what a staff union is, but can you talk a bit more broadly about what a staff union is, what it does, and why you all are sort of trying to organize one.
Of course, So in terms of staff unions, yeah, it's definitely an interesting phenomenon for people who are less familiar with the labor movement. But when unions have a lot of staff, sometimes those staff also need a union to make sure that they are treated fairly in the workplace. Coincidentally, this year there have been a lot of incidents that have shown why staff unions are happening in the first place. And so with my union, we are called UAW Staff United.
We are part of Region nine A of the us UAW is split into a lot of geographic regions, and nine A covers New York and New England, including Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Vermont, not New York State. New York State
is covered by Region nine. So we are a bunch of temporary organizers and local staff that are organizing for a lot of things, among them wages, workload, job security, healthcare, and so on so forth, very normal things that you would actually see in a lot of the contracts that we helped fight for in the shops that we work for and organize and the units that we help support. So uaw Staff United otherwise known as Yuzoo like the fruit.
Oh that's fun, No, it's cute, right.
We really love the USU imagery a lot. We were formed in twenty twenty three, first went public in the spring. I joined the unit in the summer, but I was just kind of peripherally around and organizing with a lot of these folks before they went public in the spring. God recognized slowly and then slowly came to the bargaining table in August. And so at this point we have been at the bargaining table for over a year and
we still do not have a contract. Normally, in most shops that you would see organizing, that would be cause for escalation, and so that is actually part of what we are doing here. After hitting one full year bargaining, we are still very stuck on items such as wages, job security, yep, all the very normal things that we can see in units that we help support and bargain for and so the situation that we're facing is slightly more complicated because of many other internal things that For example,
UAW has another staff union. It is called Staff Council, and that covers more regions of UAW rather than nine A. It also includes people who are our direct supervisors. On paper, those people are called lead organizers and they do make low six figures. Yeah, and yes they are our direct supervisors. So they are a managerial union, and they are what some people may call a business union, you know, works closely with management to secure a good deal, that kind
of thing. It's never really been known to agitate in a contract, and that is partially one reason why Yuzu was formed, because we knew that some agitation needed to happen in order to secure actually good treatment for people in our position. Our position meaning temp and local staff. Now I keep saying temp staff, right, is that the next question?
Yeah?
Yeah, I am so good.
I'm one step ahead.
Yeah.
I want to talk about both a the way your contracts work and be what the thing you're actually doing is, because I'm not sure, I'm not sure people are one familiar with what specifically you do and what a what a sort of like staff union organizer does, and the difference between you and the.
People that are sort of the organizer layer above you is.
Yeah, absolutely, So that has to go a little bit into how we are hired, and that's why I kept seeing temp staff and local staff. Our unit is formed somewhat on our pay structure, and so temp organizers are hired by the international or the region, and local staff are hired by the locals, which is kind of a sub unit of the regions and how different unions are organized.
There could be multiple units in one local, a local may hire a staffer, but that staffer could be subsidized by the international, and that is kind of what our unitformation is like, where funding comes from the international, and this layer of people does the most in new organizing, so supporting new shops that form new campaigns, that are organizing new unions that are just forming and need to
secure an election or a first contract. Some of our colleagues go a little bit further into the stage because of their local staff status where they're supporting contract renewals or bargaining around the second stage. But a lot of these has to do with on the ground, worker to worker, peer to peer organizing, supporting them and many different ways,
including data work, including just resources. Like when you think of how the parent union might be supporting a new shop, we are kind of the resources that are supporting the new shop that can help direct institutional knowledge, that can help direct logistical or legal information like how or what is necessary for an election or a petition, that kind
of stuff. And yeah, it's a lot of different tasks, and that's why for a lot of us, our job description is I'm doing air quotes here a flexible forty.
Hour work week, Jess Christ.
And of course that usually means a lot more than that when campaigns ramp up, and so you know, there are a lot of different models on how to combat that. But I'll get into that a bit later. So going back to the difference between us and perhaps our direct supervisors, our direct supervisors may be tasked with monitoring the status of a lot of different campaigns at the same time, and we might be assigned to one or two or three at a time to work very very directly with
the organizers and the new workers. Of course, this looks slightly different across different locals. Our different campaigns can be adjusted depending on the shop's needs, but our supervisors who are the leads will be handling a lot of different campaigns at the same time, and just like kind of overseeing that progress and giving the okay for the next stage or or whats whatsoever. So I wanted to go back a little bit to why we are called temp organizers.
Yeah, this is nuts. Well, I was so angry when I forgat about this.
So do you know what a temp organizer is?
Yeah, this is actually weird. So I have friends who are staff organizers for other unions that it doesn't work like this. So yeah, I'm going to let you explain it, because I.
Mean, do let me know about those in another Yeah, but for temp organizers in UAW, this is a holdover from the kind of older model of organizing, where theoretically a worker might come off the shop floor for six months nine months to do union work and then go back to the shop floor when that concludes, so that the job would remain open for them. So temporary, like
the nature is temporary. Someone is coming off to do union work and then you know, sometimes it's even part time, right, sometimes it's even part time, and the worker never stops working at their original job. But nowadays the model doesn't look like that anymore, right because, especially in say higher ed shops, people graduate out of their graduate union jobs. People may not have their reappointment if they are an
adjunct or contract faculty. And then a lot of our unit members u zoom, meaning a lot of our uzoom members come out of a shop that is UAW whether that means they're legal services or museum workers or higher ed, but it is less common nowadays to have a job to return to. However, the model remains the same in that the temper organizer job has three month renewals and a three year cap. Every three months our contract is renewed, and if we hit three years on this job, we
are no longer hired. Theoretically, you be hired to another job internally, but there's no pipeline, there is no internal movement that way. You would have to apply to the job like a regular other job that is a more full term job, or you just kind of like quote unquote like age out the system and you're just no longer an organizer. You no longer have a job. And so this has manifested in a lot of different ways.
There are a lot of my colleagues that have gotten tired or burnt out and have decided to leave before their three years or leave at their three years of their own will. There are folks that have left way earlier than their three years as well to pursue other opportunities. Yuzu at any given time has about forty to fifty
members and that is our nine a unit. Again, one thing that we have come to find out is that in the last five years of this temp organizer model, only three people who have hit their three year cap have managed to attain full term jobs in the UAW afterward Geese. And then there is me, who, again within the last five years, is the only person to have been not renewed before their three year term, very unceremoniously as well as in the middle of very active campaigns.
That brings us to another piece of context, and the reason why I keep saying five years is because in twenty eighteen there was a first iteration of the Yuzoo. There was a first attempt to forming this staff union of temp and local staff. Of course it was created by different people. But what happened then, especially under the Administrative Caucus when it was before the reform leadership septed in is that everyone was just fired Jesus. Yeah, everyone
was just let go. And there are people still around organizing these days in other positions or in other workplaces that you have talked to us about it. And there are people that are working in user now that had
friends or were peripheral to that happening. So we are all very familiar with how non renewal is a very retaliatory practice used in UAW in the past, or we thought was in the past, because we were so excited to have this reform leadership come in and now we are finding out that it is still a tool that
is consistent. And so when we are excited that there is democratic reform, especially with one member, one vote, which was extremely extremely exciting to see, we also need to point out that there are a lot of different places here that still need to change, especially in how the union treats its own staff.
Yeah, and unfortunately we need to go to ads. We'll we come back. I want to circle back around and talk a bit more about the ways of the UAW is acting like a fairly conventional boss trying to break a union.
And we are back.
So there's something really interesting, I mean I say interesting, it's something sort of terrible about the way that the UAW is relying on effectively a casualized workforce, because because you're dealing with these constant renewals, which are an incredible sort of pressure leverage because it means you don't have
job security. It honestly feels like the way Amazon works, where they're just like trying intentionally instead of trying to retain people, they're just trying to churn through as many organized as possible because like the more seniority people have and the more experience they have, the harder it is to like just completely underpay them.
Yeah, the keyword in here is flexibility.
Yeah, And it seems like, also on an institutional level, a terrible idea because you know, you're training a bunch of organizers and then the moment that they're you know, the moment they have a bunch of experience, you're just casting it into the wind and then hiring the less experienced person. It's like, you bring up a great point. Actually, something that I want to touch on is end bargaining. We have asked for training and we have not been
met with a satisfactory answer. People are not trained.
Oh my god.
Before they take on this position. But yes, you're absolutely correct with the institutional knowledge aspect. The campaigns that I'm working on, the organizing committees are real pissed that I have been suddenly disappeared. And I want to highlight something that one organizer brought up is that for all the talk of us being one big union, how we are the union, how we have a democratic saying this process, it's very weird that someone higher up in the union
can just make one of our members disappear. Yeah, and that is in reference to my unceremonious departure, of course. And the points that we, as you you really want to highlight and emphasize is that we really want to just hold UAW to the values that it has espoused, ending tiers, job security for workers, fair wages. Like I said, in bargaining, we had asked for training, and that has
not gone very well. UW is refusing to bargain over free speech and continuity representation, which refers to the hypothetical scenario if Region nine A were to be absorbed somewhere else the right for user to still exist, and they've refused to bargain over that we are stuck in wages at somewhere around three percent per year of four years. Yeah, it's not great, and there's been a lot of chaos behind the scenes that it is implied to be a bad thing to let the members know about the members
that we work with and organize with. But to a certain point things boil over, and especially in the case where I am suddenly not renewed, it is really important in our view that our members know what is happening. Yeah, that the members know what this is about, because they get the news landed on them after our social media posts come out, because I am told not to inform the organizers myself, and so the organizers had to hear about it from my supervisors about a week later with
no details. Mine non renewal was without cause, without justification, without reason. They did not give me an answer to my face. And then as Yuzu kept pushing higher ups kept flip flopping on who to blame and what the actual cause was. And what I'm getting is a sense of surprise that people are angry about this in the first place, as if this was a normal situation, that people were just getting fired any other day with a month's notice, and they're like, we gave her a month's notice.
Which also like I feel like, like, what was the last a bit of these people were on a shop floor?
Like do you know how disruptive it Like if someone had pulled like so we had when we we were organizing our union, we had we've had a number of great, writer, skilled staffers, and it's like if someone had just pulled our staffer out in the middle of the drive, like all of use would have been unbelievably pissed and it would have done incredible about it damage to the organizing because union organizing, as you are well aware, and I think as the audience should be increasingly aware, is built
on personal relations. You can't just yank someone out and then not allow them to even know what's happening. Like, that's incredibly disruptive. It pisces people off.
Yeah, it's been very enraging for a lot of our members, and so I've been extremely grateful for the support that I received, whether it be on social media or by our email campaign to management. And what I've seen from this is that management was really taken by surprise that there was a reaction at all, kind of unfortunately for them.
There are a lot of shops and a lot of units that I have supported and organized with and have relationships with, and even for the shops that I don't have relationships with, Yuzu members are working in those shops, and there is a common understanding that it'd be really weird for a stafford to be randomly pulled out during
a very active campaign. I've had a rough couple months of going at it because I think there have been some really unhealthy dynamics in the workplace with supervision that was unjust and punishment that was unjust for my attempt to advocate for different units and attempt to advocate for organizing, and I think that is why we have reached the conclusion that retaliation retribution must be involved somehow. On paper,
this was a very oddly handled situation. I was notified by email on three thirty PM on a Friday before Labor Day weekend.
Jesus Christ.
I was not informed by a meeting, not informed by a call. My supervisor didn't pick up my calls until two and a half hours later.
Oh my God.
In the meantime and where they were actually informing my co workers that I had been terminated and then came back to me saying that they were busy Jesus, which no firing happens like that. I'm sorry, but there was no conceivable way where the HR email happens. And then my supervisor is busy telling my co workers that I've been let go, which you know, we are interpreting as intimidation because why else would this be happening.
Yeah, even corporate best layoffs don't work like that, Like you at least get a meeting.
No, I didn't get a meeting until the Tuesday after to talk about transitioning my work, and they had no plan to transition my work. So currently no one is handling the work that I was responsible for, which is they.
Just screw your units.
That's quite dangerous for campaign and higher ed as the semester ramps up.
Yeah, yeah, oh yeah.
And of course the HR email was signed in solidarity and had no name. I didn't want to bring up that point. There is evidence. Yes, it's extraordinarily funny if you actually look at it. But yeah, just even if we didn't have the context of what has happened to me in the workplace in the last six months, even just on paper, looking at how this non renewal was handled,
it was handled atrociously. Yeah, and so there is not much else we can draw from it other than the fact that I was someone they wanted to get rid of expeditiously, but just didn't anticipate that people would be mad about it, which is, you know, to me a sense that people up there handling it are a little out of touch, like they haven't experienced what it's like to have this happen, to have a staff a randomly yanked out during the middle of a really active campaign.
Yeah, we need to go to ads again, but we will. We will be back soon.
And what our product services, we're about to have unionize them and then also ugnize your staff.
We are back.
So it's something we've been talking about in terms of sort of your specific situation and how it's the terrible impact and it's had on both you personally and the organizing that's going on. And I wanted to come around to talking a bit about the impact that this structure and the impact that getting denied benefits and stuff like that, the impact that this has in general on the way that organizing new shops works.
Yeah, I think that the impact this has very concretely is that it does not let us do good work. It makes us as organizers scared every three months that we have to have another plan. It makes us have to prepare a plan every time that rolls around, and then you know that takes our focus off of the organizing that we could be doing. I mentioned earlier about workload. Organizers get burnt out extremely easily because there are no
guardrails in place. And then there are plenty plenty of other circumstances that make it very difficult within this workplace too. For example, we don't have just cause we don't have grievance procedures Jesus Christ. And it makes a very damaging environment, especially when you consider that the members have to bargain for their own contracts, and then they look at us and they're like, wait a minute, why are your contracts
that bad? Yeah, it doesn't inspire trust. It doesn't inspire faith in how this union would organize for its workers if the staff are insecure constantly. And we are not asking for the moon and the stars in Mars, which is unfortunately what the UW lawyer accused us of doing so in a bargaining session. We're asking for very simple guardrails on job security, on workload, on healthcare that could help cover our dependence on wages that are not stagnant.
You know, they're not even giving us COLA, which is the phrase for cost of living adjustment, and christ a lot of us live in New York City, and then there's folks in Boston and hell, even the transport costs have been a bit of a sticking point where we're like, can we please just get an MTA card or the equivalent. But overall, this structure does not inspire faith in terms of how our contracts are actually negotiated and who is
responsible for these contracts. It is very difficult to hear from the UAW lawyer that we are reaching for MARS when we are asking for things that are very present in our standard contracts that our members receive. You know, we have taken language from the contracts that our members have and tried to apply them for our own situation, and we've been told that they're too extra. And then, you know, this has been kind of an odd year
for union staff. I wanted to highlight that anya earlier this year, National Education Association their staff were locked out during bargaining eleven ninety nine. SCIU also just formed their staff union and during the drive they had one of the organizers fired. Thirty two BJSCIU just announced their union and again during their drive one of their organizers. They've
posted this on social media. One of the organizers had a miscarriage and then asked for help, was put on a performance improvement plan, and then fired after a month. And you know, there are these really uncomfortable trends of this mistreatment happening because priorities might be elsewhere, or there is assumption that we are more expendable, maybe we are Kennon fodder, but that really really is not what is supposed to happen in places that are advocating for fair
labor standards. And I am glad that we're hearing more stories about this. I'm horrified at the stories that are coming out about this, but you know, I hope there are more that are formed because a lot of these things are very extreme.
Yeah, it's and it's you know, it's impacting not just the organizers. I think one of the reasons why unions issue RIGHTSIL declining is like, well, yeah, okay, you guys keep firing all of your organizers, Like yeah, of course we're not getting shops for it.
And I want to say what I think about just specifically, like the mood and.
The stars thing is this like okay, this is not to say that this kind of stuff will be okay at a smaller union, but like, this is not Like we've had a lot of independent unions on this show, and those are people you know, who have formed their own using completely independently. In the money they've collected is stuff that's come from them, like putting out their head on the street, right.
I mean, you know some of these unions have like a thousand dollars of assets. This is the UAW. The UAW has hundreds of millions of dollars. They have unbelievable amounts of money.
And earlier this year they were just bragging about how they are putting so many more millions into new organizing.
Yeah, and it's like, well, okay, if you're gonna put if you're gonna put all this money into organizing, and again they probably should. They should be doing more, because
what is the point of sitting on this much money? Right, It's like you're behaving like a financial institution and not a and not a union, but like you have the money to actually like cultivate and develop effective union organizers, and you have the money to meet like pretty mild contract contracts that are like that your contract is probably significantly cheaper than like the contract that they're negotiating, right, Like, this is just this is nonsense, Like we know you
have this kind of money also because you're paying your like managerial staff for six figures, so clearly you can do this and you're simply not. And I think that should outrage everyone.
I think that's exactly the response of a lot of our members because knowing that a lot of our temp organizers and staff organizers are people that are most passionately devoting themselves to the labor movement and you are met with such unstable job conditions is truly horrifying, because this is not this is not a path to careerism. Like as a temp organizer, there is not much upward mobility here. Let me be very clear, there's not much upward mobility.
It's not like this is a cushy job. There's no real way for me to just sit back and relax on piles of bureaucratic money or something like that. And that reminds me of how I shout out to our Korean comrades that I've met at labor notes, where I explained to them what a temporary organizer's job is like and how many people we handle and how temporary our
status is. I was talking to some of our equivalents in the auto industry as well, the union workers there, and they were pretty horrified at the workload, at the insecurity, at the just again lack of EQUIVALENCYE. And again I'm not trying to claim that Korea's labor organizing world is perfect, like absolutely nobody is. But the chocker to them is like, well, why are you doing this? Why do you Why are you working in this job? They have asked me this to my face, Why are you working in this job?
What is possibly good enough for that for you? And unfortunately, a lot of it is optimism of the will, and I think that's a lot of what's keeping us going. And so my last day is supposedly September twenty eighth, but hopefully this month there have been fantastic outpourings of support, and we are also picketing the political leadership conference on the Friday the thirteenth, Scary, and I think that is going to really align with how YUSUS needed to escalate.
I think this is again just a boiling point, and it has shown how all of this culminates in a very unfair labor standard and practice of which we have filed a few charges. But there's a lot more that needs to be done. And even if I don't get reinstated, I think that USEU is a great example of how there's still more change that needs to happen within UAW.
Yeah, I want to close by talking about through line.
Through a lot of these episodes that we've done, We've talked with a lot of people who work for Planned Parenthood, We've talked for a lot of people who work for NGOs, and this is this is the same behavior that they do where you know, quite frankly, what they are doing is exploiting, exploiting the labor of people who believe in the cause, and because people are willing to you know, because because people believe in what they're doing, because the
work that they're doing is vital and necessary, These NGOs and these unions think that they can just continuously exploit the people who work for them, and this damages the workers, This damages the people who they're nominally trying to help, and this damage is the entire left because when you're sort of charting through organizers and when you're sort of fundamentally betraying the missions that you're supposed to be doing in order to just do more exploitation, this significantly damages
literally the entire organizing project that we're all fighting for. So Alex, thank you so much for coming and talking and talking to us about this. And I where can people go to support you and support Uzoo?
Our accounts are UAW staff United on Instagram and Twitter. Please follow for more. Check out the adorable Yuzo Lemon logos that we have everywhere. If you're in New York or Boston, those are our major hubs we keep an eye off for a future Actions awesome.
Thank you again for coming on the show. And yeah, if you are a union staffer, because I know I know a number of you are listening to this.
If you're in the UAW, raise hell.
And if you're not and the UAW and you don't have your own staff union, consider it.
Thank you for having me.
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