Disability Rights are Worker Rights! Support the Access Needs and Public Health Articles in UAW 2865 Contract.

A wide coalition of disabled student workers (including workers with Long COVID), student parents, caregivers of elderly people, and other members of UAW 2865, 5810 and UAW-SRU have been organizing around two articles in our ongoing contract negotiations: an Access Needs Article and a Public Health Article. These two articles aim to make work safer and more accessible for all academic workers at UC—specifically, we are calling for:

1. universal online access without medical documentation, and
2. a lifting of the UC’s illegal ban on instructors asking students to mask, and other layers of protection for workers amidst the ongoing COVID pandemic.

We have built mass support around these demands, including that of Bargaining Team  members across all three locals. However, a slim majority of the Bargaining Team continues to cut, table, and avoid including our demands.  

This FAQ outlines the importance of our demands and responds to the frequently used arguments by which some Bargaining Team members suggest that our demands are unreasonable. But our demands are reasonable and incredibly important. Meaningful change always seems impossible until it’s done.

Sign our open letter in support of the Public Health Article and learn more below.

Background:

• Why is the Access Needs Article important?

• A union contract should guarantee “good working conditions”; at minimum, this means access to one’s workplace and resources necessary to perform one’s job should be equitably available for all. Nothing about working should injure one’s health, temporarily or permanently. The Access Needs Article enshrines this guarantee to good working conditions for disabled workers and others, specifying the right to have their access needs met. This language surpasses the inadequate Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The Access Needs article seeks to remove burdensome medical documentation requirements placed by the University—barriers not required by ADA—that often prevent workers from securing the support they need to complete their work and simultaneously normalize inaccessibility. The article includes the right to universal online access, vital to disabled workers and many others amidst the ongoing COVID pandemic. It makes centralized funding a requirement, which means that the financial consequences of failing to plan for accessibility will be borne by University administration instead of disabled workers. Centralized funding is a key step to dismantling structural ableism. The article also includes improved structural access in buildings, supervisor training to ameliorate issues of disability discrimination, and speeding up the timeline of interactive process via interim measures, among many other measures that would revolutionize the experience of disabled workers across University of California campuses.
• Any worker can suddenly experience new disability, either temporarily or permanently, and consequently discover that the UC has long used public money to build an institution that is inaccessible. Access needs are an issue for all workers, especially amidst the ongoing COVID pandemic, as one in five COVID cases leads to Long COVID, impacting more than 23 million US residents.
• Without this specific language in the Access Needs Article, workers are forced to use the burdensome grievance process or to fall back on the ADA. The ADA is similar to minimum wage in that it is the legal bare minimum an employer can get away with—and yet, the UC has never effectively met this minimum standard. Enforcement of the ADA is left to each individual disabled worker, who are among the poorest and least privileged workers at the UC. It is left to us individually to muster the financial, legal, and emotional resources and the stable health required to sue.  Employers get away with violating the ADA over and over because most disabled people do not have the resources to press these suits, even though evidence of violation is abundant. To resolve this flagrantly illegal situation, the UC should create a highest common denominator of accessibility as the standard. The Access Needs Article is an important step in this direction.

• Why is the Public Health Article important?

• When the UC forced employees back to in-person work in 2021 during the ongoing pandemic, the leadership of UAW 2865 and UAW 5810 could have exercised our legal right to refuse to return to work until our workplaces were as safe as they could be, including layers of protection like masks, ventilation, surveillance testing, quarantine measures, and universal online access. Instead we returned to in-person work as if the pandemic was over. Most concerningly, in March 2022, the UCs replaced a mask mandate with an illegal ban on instructors asking students to mask, even though in the same month a Federal Court ruled that mask bans were illegal. Multiple studies show that in-class mask mandates limit COVID transmission. The UC has stripped vulnerable workers of a highly effective mitigation tool, contradicting their own promise to protect vulnerable people.    
• This set a precedent of “past practice”: tacitly accepting unsafe working conditions. With that precedent in place, using the grievance process reactively to fight these unsafe working conditions is the weakest possible strategy available to us. The current contract negotiations offer an unparalleled chance to regain lost ground with specific contract language that lays out the exact safe working conditions, in person and online, we expect from the UC going forward. This will be vital to protect us as COVID continues to mutate, and more workers become disabled by Long COVID, including facing increased adverse health impacts from repeated reinfection. As climate change creates more unsafe working conditions, including fires, toxic air quality, and future pandemics, we must take proactive steps to secure our rights to safe and healthy working conditions. We must refuse this frightening normalization of mass infection, mass death, and disablement.  

Dispelling Myths About Access Needs Articles

FALLACY: “We already have a robust access needs article. We will use it to defend workers through grievances.”

WE SAY:

• Most Article 23 contract violations are never grieved. There have been only two such violations grieved in the last two years. This has several possible implications:

• Article 23 is underutilized.
• Most access needs are met prior to formal grievance, OR
• Disabled ASEs suffer through devastating impacts to their health and finances, because of the lack of accessibility, and are forced to drop out instead of getting their needs met. 

• The best case scenario for everyone is prevention and avoiding the need for grievances in the first place. The UC is hostile to disabled workers and already overburdens us with labor on top of our regular coursework & teaching: jumping through hoops of medical documentation requirements, educating our PIs about our rights under the ADA & section 504 of the rehabilitation act, and providing hours of free DEI work to the university. Grievances can be long (6+ months), time-consuming, and emotionally exhausting processes that disabled workers frankly cannot afford. Strong, clear contract language would mean many more of these issues could be resolved informally by workers pointing our employers to the contract.
• Clear language on accessibility holds the union accountable in supporting our fight for access. In the past, disabled workers seeking union support for inaccessible or unsafe work spaces have been told by union reps that “it’s not a union issue,” even though we have a disability-specific article (Article 23). Clearly, that article as written is not clear enough to inform union reps of their obligations to support disabled workers.
• Previous attempts to resolve access issues with grievances have gone poorly. When disabled workers finally convinced UC Davis union leadership to initiate a COVID safety grievance, disabled workers poured incalculable unpaid hours of labor into it, including sharing their stories of trauma in the grievance meetings, because the union reps promised that arbitration at the end of the process would force the university to make changes. Instead, one of our reps met privately with labor relations and settled our grievance without our knowledge, leading to toothless joint labor management meetings that wasted disabled workers’ time and labor. This betrayed our trust, the union’s own contract enforcement training and principles, and the popular slogan of disability advocates: “Nothing About Us Without Us.” That union rep never explained why, never apologized, and later resigned. Our workplace is still unsafe for us; in fact, it is more unsafe now, without masking protections, than it was when the grievance process began. Union leadership still has not apologized for how it has treated disabled workers or explained how they will prevent such issues from occurring again in the future. Stronger article language would help clarify the union’s responsibilities in supporting disabled workers.

FALLACY: “We can’t specify language because it will make our case for grievances weaker.”

WE SAY:

• The best strategy is to avoid the need for grievances in the first place. Stronger language on access will help with this.  Previous ambiguous language has not aided disabled workers. We do not have a robust track record of supporting disabled workers via previous contract language. (See first point.) By asking disabled workers to go through the turmoil of the grievance process, the union is asking for faith on credit. But if they are willing to do the work, they should be willing to do the work to help us achieve clearer language now.
• Clearer, stronger language around access will benefit not only future UAW workers but all disabled workers. The audience for a contract article is not just the UC, or labor lawyers, but also union reps and workers. Clearer language would give the UC less space to wiggle out of providing access. It would signal to union reps that access for disabled workers is a union issue. Additionally and crucially, it would clarify for workers their rights as union members in conjunction with their civil rights, empowering them to demand better from their employers and their unions. Access isn’t a personal favor; it’s our right.
• The union’s worries about “adverse inference” aren’t warranted. Due to the particularities of bargaining, reps have argued that proposing stronger language on access risks our being unable to appeal to that language later if it’s struck from the final contract. But one could make this argument about any of the gains the union is fighting for. If we don’t fight for it, we can never win it—and we think it’s worth it to fight now.

FALLACY: “We don’t need a stronger article. We need better enforcement.”

WE SAY: 

• See first point.
• We do need better enforcement—and a stronger article. A stronger article will improve enforcement. We also need to rebuild trust between disabled workers and a union leadership that has often left us behind; many disabled workers have seen how the UC and our own union leadership have treated us in the past and understandably decide not to file grievances for grievable contract violations. This is a problem.
• Respecting our wishes and our desire for autonomy and self-determination through this stronger article language would be a major step towards a more collaborative relationship. Paternalism is a defining attribute of ableism; many union reps have treated us as if we don’t know our own needs or what works best for us. Trust us when we express to you what we need in an article. Trust our lived experience. We are experts in what it is like to be disabled in the UC & what we need from our union leadership.

FALLACY: “We have to have the same contract across all units, and SRU & 5810 already have a tentative agreement.”

WE SAY:

• Disagreement between units doesn’t undermine our power. It is common for different units representing different groups of workers to have different language in their contracts because we have different work environments, job duties, and needs. Disabled Academic Student Employees (ASEs, 2865) may have different working conditions from disabled Student Researchers (SRU) and Post-Docs (5810), but disabled ASEs have expressed, loud and clear, that the biggest hurdles for us in meeting our access needs in our workplace are the dehumanizing, expensive, and exhausting medical documentation requirement and the lack of supervisor training which leads to violations of our rights under the ADA/Section 504 of the rehabilitation act.
• It’s not clear that the decision to TA the current access needs article reflects input from UAW 2865—especially UAW 2865 disabled workers. This can’t be said more clearly: the fact that other units arrived at a decision of their own doing, and without adequately consulting disabled unit or union members, shouldn’t bind UAW 2865 members to support that decision. And it certainly doesn’t bind them to voting “yes” on a contract with a bad access needs article.

FALLACY: “The UC has threatened to pull the article unless we settle for a tentative agreement. This would mean we revert back to the original article language from 2018. This would be terrible!”

WE SAY:

• We can’t base our reasoning on UC’s untrustworthy statements. The UC has already been bargaining in bad faith and has stacked up multiple unfair labor practices (ULPs). We should not give in to the UC’s bad faith bargaining and should remain in solidarity with disabled workers!
• It’s not clear that reversion is the worst option in this case. Many disabled ASEs familiar with all three articles have stated that the previous contract was better than what SRU & 5810 have settled on. It would not be the end of the world if we reverted. After all, some members of the bargaining team have been telling disabled ASEs, as an excuse for gutting the access needs article: “We already had a great article, it was just underutilized.” Did we already have a great article, or would reversion to 2018 language be a nightmare? Which is it?

FALLACY: “Disabled workers can just file an ADA lawsuit to get their rights met.”

WE SAY:

• Disabled union members are union members. We pay membership dues just like everyone else. We deserve to be represented by our union in cases where our employer renders our work environment inaccessible. Disability access is a workplace issue and it is a union issue, as is discrimination and workplace health and safety. Legal experts state that unions are well-positioned to fight for disability rights in the workplace. Please read about the disability tax. Disabled workers are disproportionately burdened, financially and otherwise, and adding the cost & stress of an expensive, time-consuming, and traumatic lawsuit will not help.
• Relying on the complex, contested field of disability law practice is not a solution. Pro bono ADA lawyers are overburdened and often have such massive case loads that they turn most cases away, even strong cases with merit. Legal cases can take months or years to resolve an issue. What does a disabled worker do in the meantime? We, like all other scholar-workers represented by UAW, need—and deserve—to make progress on our academic goals. This is precisely why we need the union.

FALLACY: “If we don’t table the disability articles, UC will pit them against wages. Workers will stop striking and sell out disabled workers for higher wages.”

WE SAY:

• We do not have to accept UC’s attempts to divide and conquer. These issues are interlinked. We should have faith in our colleagues. Just because a given worker’s main priority might be wages does not mean they would cease striking if it meant sacrificing their disabled colleagues, or international student colleagues, or student-parent colleagues, or any other smaller group within the body of the union. We are all stronger when we fight for our most vulnerable members.
• Wages are a disability issue. Disabled workers are some of the most financially vulnerable workers on campus. Disabled people do not see wages/disability rights as an either/or, but as entangled needs.

FALLACY: “Disability justice is a minority issue and our contract should only cater to the majority, to be democratic.”

WE SAY:

• Disability is one identity category that cuts across all demographics. Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality shows how policy, like that of the UC, disproportionately harms multiply marginalized people. Approximately 20-26% of the US population is disabled. Our numbers grow every day due to policies of neglect— Long COVID has increased the number of disabled workers dramatically: at least 23 million people have Long COVID in the US alone. We are one of the largest “minority” groups. Prioritizing the needs of the most oppressed benefits us all! We need to abandon the scarcity myth forced upon us by the UC. We can all thrive here if we have the right supports in place, which is what these articles are all about.
• Anyone can become disabled at any time—even you. Equitable and inclusive access needs articles benefit pregnant workers, elderly workers, workers who break their legs or are otherwise temporarily injured, and workers who fall sick due to Long COVID or other illness. Supporting these articles now, even for nondisabled workers, is an investment towards your future selves.
• Disability rights are worker rights and supporting disability justice is labor solidarity. For example, many of us who do not have children still vehemently support articles that support workers who are parents. Democracy as we practice it in the US today is built on both majority rule and protecting minority rights, because any majority can function to oppress the minority just as well as other totalitarian structures. Robert’s Rules of Order states that “American Parliamentary Law is built upon the principle that rights must be respected: the rights of the majority, of the minority, of individuals, of absentees, and rights of all these together.” Whether extending parental leave or removing harmful medical documentation requirements to access support resources, it is in our collective best interest that all of our colleagues get the support they need to thrive in the university.

WE SAY:                 Disability Rights are Worker Rights!

Join us.