“Revitalizing Union Democracy: A Call to Action”

I have been an activist in the Teamsters and the Clerical/CX unit since 2009 when I started working at UC Berkeley and before the Teamsters took over our beleaguered independent union at the time (CUE – Coalition of University Employees). I am also a local activist and have been involved in coalitions for immigrant/undocumented rights, against the privatization of public education, support of other campus unions and labor right. I was a UCB local secretary in CUE for 23 years before Teamsters took over in 2010 and then as a steward since 2010. I was part of a slate that was elected as a delegate for the Teamsters Convention in 2011 and have been part of previous election attempts to get rid of the anti-democratic and top-down business union model that the current Teamsters leadership of Jason and Co.

Like many rank and file members, I am deeply dissatisfied with the lack of input and control every day members have in the running and decisions of our union. The highly paid (no union leader should be paid 4/5 times the average of rank and file members- it shouldn’t be higher then the highest paid rank and file member) Jason and Co. clique has been selling concessionary contracts (e.g. the first and only union that agreed to the two-tier pension that the other campus unions had been fighting strong against) since 2010 and marketing them as big victories when they have been less then stellar. They have also spent millions of dollars for a new office, their organizers are nowhere to be seen in enforcing the contract, loss of clerical unit membership, and spending local money and staff to go out and organize others as oppose to retain what we have, among other issues (see the other bios of our slate for more on that).

Our slate has gathered from different places but we all have the same goal of taking our union back from this anti-democratic clique and build a democratic and fighting union that gets us the salaries, job protection, and better standard of living we need to survive in expensive areas we all live in. Along with that, we want to collaborate with the other campus unions and local communities to rebuild a rank & file led labor union movement.