UPDATE: FIRST ASE CONTRACT BARGAINING SESSION

Yesterday, Academic Student Employees (ASEs) started our 2025 contract campaign by proposing some of the strongest immigration protections in any union contract. In return, UC management signaled that they want to make many of our rights unenforceable. Click here to reaffirm your union membership, support immigration rights, and push management towards our demands. Signing will not duplicate your membership.

Update from Bargaining Session #1

The ASE Bargaining Committee is proud to have proposed an immigration article that includes a guarantee that UC won’t share resources with ICE as well as increased support and rights for workers facing visa/travel restrictions. The Bargaining Committee also proposed protections from discrimination that include much stronger free speech provisions and improvements to grievance and arbitration language that would provide swifter justice for workers pursuing remedies to contractual violations. 

Management proposed language that includes an ominous reference to a Management and Academic Rights article that nobody has seen yet. Management will likely try to place rights that ASEs can currently enforce through the union grievance process under that heading, potentially rendering them unenforceable. Management also signaled that they want to restrict ASEs’ access to supplies we need to research and teach and keep ASEs from attending grievance meetings. To prevent that, ASEs will need to take collective action.

Check out the bargaining tracker here to view all proposals submitted by the ASE Bargaining Committee and UC Management. Find more bargaining info at the ASE bargaining webpage. For rapid updates on what’s going on at the bargaining table, please subscribe to the ASE bargaining updates Telegram channel at this link.

The Bargaining Committee and fellow ASEs just before entering bargaining.

Sign the Petition to Support International Scholars’ Rights
Compelling UC to side with workers and not Trump will take collective action on the part of all ASEs. The Bargaining Committee’s immigration proposal draws from the international scholars petition that thousands of workers have already signed, and the more ASEs add their names, the greater our collective power to compel management to meet our demands. If you are already a member, adding your name will not duplicate your membership. Please click here to sign on!