Fair UC Now! Strike Archive

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

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