In the fall of 2022, academic workers across the University of California walked off their jobs in the largest ever strike in U.S. higher education. The six-week long strike challenged the university’s image as an engine of economic mobility for Californians struggling with the high cost of living.
The strike was a united action by three separate UAW locals —UAW 2865, SRU-UAW, and UAW 5810 —representing some 48,000 workers, including postdocs, academic researchers, graduate student researchers, teaching assistants, readers and tutors. For the first time, they coordinated their campaigns and aligned their bargaining demands, increasing the impact of the strike. Together, they won significant increases in compensation, improvements in childcare and paid family leave, and stronger protections against bullying and harassment. After ratifying their new contracts, members of the three unions voted to amalgamate and form UAW 4811, now the largest union at the University of California.

To document the strike and the years of organizing that preceded it, the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment (IRLE) and UAW 4811, with support from the UC Berkeley and UC Merced Labor Centers, launched a first-of-its kind multi-campus research initiative in the summer of 2023 to document the historic #FairUCNow campaign. Graduate student fellows on nine UC campuses worked together to collect oral histories, newsletters and campus communications, photographs, and other materials, creating a research archive of hundreds of unique digital and physical artifacts. They collected materials that provide insight into the years of organizing work that preceded the strike and the day-to-day experiences of academic workers on the picket lines. In the process, the fellows forged a new model for community-based archiving rooted in collaboration, democratic decision-making, and union solidarity.
The results of the UAW Labor Summer Archive Project are contained in the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign collection at the Walter Reuther Library at Wayne State University. The largest labor archives in North America, the Reuther is home to the records of the United Auto Workers (UAW) and named to honor the union’s iconic president. With this donation, the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign collection will take its place alongside hundreds of other collections shedding light on the union’s remarkable history.

Project History
Working with the UCLA chapter of UAW 4811, the IRLE assembled a planning committee of rank-and-file union members in the spring of 2023 to assist with the recruitment and applications process and program development. They devised an application which, in addition to asking about relevant research experience and skills, included questions about their engagement with their union and what that organizing work meant to them. The fellowship committee —which included three faculty representatives from the UCLA IRLE, the four members of the planning committee, and representatives of UAW 4811 — reviewed the applications and extended offers to twenty-five students, several of whom declined, yielding a final group of eighteen fellows representing nine UC campuses across the state.
Over the summer, fellows organized weekly “skill shares,” offering lessons based on their expertise in oral history, ethnographic interviewing, archival processing, and privacy and confidentiality. Together, they crafted templates to guide their interviews and acquisitions, including metadata templates and detailed permissions documents for interviews and artifacts. The group also convened an in-person retreat at the end of the summer, during which they critically-assessed the work that had been done and outlined concrete next steps for the next phase of the project. These next steps included additional skill shares, creating handbooks on data archiving and power mapping, and the development of various member education materials based on the archive. The group also had an extensive discussion about where the archive should be donated to ensure long-term preservation and access and, after a vote, decided to donate the collection they had assembled to the Reuther Library at Wayne State University, where it will remain in perpetuity.
Collection Highlights
The UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign Archive contains 1000s of individual items from campuses across the state. These include:
- Oral Histories with organizers, department stewards, bargaining team members and statewide elected leaders, as well as rank and file members including first year graduate students and international students.
- Photographs documenting major actions and events, such as marches to the State Capitol in Sacramento and to the UC Office of the President in Oakland, as well as day-to-day activities on picket lines.
- Publications and printed ephemera distributed online and on picket lines, including newsletters, handbooks, and fliers developed by rank-and-file members and various caucuses and affinity groups within the union.
- Formal and Informal communications that capture the wide range of mediums and channels through which news about the campaign was distributed, including campus communications, legal communications, press releases, and hundreds of memes scraped from social media.
- Press coverage of the campaign from publications and outlets across the country.
Project Director
Caroline Luce (UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment)
Project Participants
Daniel Arcand (UCSD)
Michael Buse (UCLA)
Pratik Gandhi (UCD)
Andrew Hass (UCB)
Cameron Kincaid (UCD)
Bedlam Martin (UCSB)
Lavayna Nott (UCLA)
Casey Shanahan (UCLA)
Ashwin Bajaj (UCI)
Vega Darling (UCSC)
Thomas Gepts (UCB)
Heeba Hartit (UCR)
Dana Kopel (UCLA)
Bineh Ndefru (UCLA)
Ejemen Ogbebor (UCM)
Kelsey Weymouth-Little (UCI)
Marie Buhl (UCM
Sammy Feldblum (UCLA)
Monica Geraffo (UCLA)
Daisy Herrera (UCR)
Cole Manley (UCD)
Kai Nham (UCLA)
Bhavani Seetharaman (UCSC)
Remember This!
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Day of Conscience Against Sweatshops
A garment worker carries a “Bill For Your Dirty Laundry” at a “Day of Conscience to End Sweatshops” rally and march in Los Angeles’ garment district on October 4, 1997. Organized by UNITE and its allies as part of their campaign against Guess? Jeans, the event was part of a national day of action that…
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Boycott Forever 21
In 2001, the coalition of organizations that had come together to support the Thai Workers in El Monte pooled their funds to establish the Garment Worker Center (GWC), as a legal clinic to support workers in filing wage claims under the new procedures established by AB633. They hired three young Asian American women to run…
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Guess? Who Pockets the Difference (1996)
In 1995, UNITE! (Union of Needle Trades and Industrial Textile Employees, formed after a merger of the ILGWU and ACTWU) launched a campaign against Guess? Jeans, the largest apparel manufacturer in Los Angeles. Known for its distinctive stone-washed jeans, Guess? operated its own retail stores and made down-market lines sold at department stores, averaging over…
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Ratification Vote Chart
One of the main challenges in organizing graduate student workers is the large percentage of turnover between graduating and incoming students each year. Collective bargaining and contract ratification involve complicated internal and statutory processes that can seem overwhelming and confusing to new union members. During the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Campaign, rank-and-file members developed…
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Daily Picket Debrief
This photo was donated by Sammy Feldblum, a participant in the UC UAW Labor Summer Program who contributed to the UAW Fair UC Now 2022 Collection. As Feldblum described, the significance of the image was in capturing the challenges of trust-building and communication. As he wrote: “I chose this photo not because I am the…
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March to the State Capitol
The University of California is one of the largest public universities in the United States and the third largest employer in the state. As a result, when UC workers go on strike, the state government can become a crucial point of leverage. Many state legislators, particularly those who serve districts where the UC’s campuses are…