Updates

On September 24th, UA filed two objections to our proposed unit of eligible employees. You can read UA’s objection to our proposed unit here. The groups of employees that UA objects to are all Research Professionals and UA Foundation employees. UA’s claim is that these employees don’t share the same community of interest as other full time staff, despite staff in these groups sharing the same work policies, often performing work alongside other UA staff, and receiving the same benefits.

We believe this is a further attempt by UA to waste time and fragment our unit. It’s no coincidence that this is happening at the same time that UA is trying to move some Research Professionals (and other grant-funded employees) onto contracts lasting a maximum of 3-4 months–reducing job security for workers while creating more administrative burden for everyone–despite the grants funding these positions often lasting years. Meanwhile, unionized grant-funded faculty in the same departments are not facing these changes since they have rights under their negotiated contract.

As a further update, UA Admin is planning to send out a questionnaire from the Alaska Labor Relations Agency (ALRA) to all 1,100+ staff that they are claiming are supervisory or confidential employees. If you receive this questionnaire from UA HR, please answer it as honestly as possible. We have also been gathering information about the work performed by those UA is claiming are supervisors or confidential employees. Please feel free to reach out to us if you have questions about supervisory/confidential employee status or want to share information about duties performed.

We need job security and workplace protections now more than ever. We’re signing this open letter to tell UA we are tired of waiting and we’re ready to vote for a more stable and equitable UA.

Last week, on September 10th, UA finally posted the Notice of Petition. You should have received a copy of this in your email under the subject line “25-1807-RC-UA Electronic Posting of Notice of Petition” from ua-labornotification. This comes after the Alaska Labor Relations Agency verified our showing of support last month on August 15th.

The Notice posting begins a period of 15 calendar days for interested parties (i.e. UA or other unions) to object to or intervene over the proposed unit description.  

The next step toward holding our union election is to finalize the list of staff who will be eligible to participate in our vote. Unfortunately, the University Administration provided an incomplete list that excludes a large number of staff from our bargaining unit. Over 1,000 staff members were classified as supervisors or confidential employees, which is almost half of all permanent staff at UA. 

However, under state law, only certain employees fall under this category. Supervisors are considered employees who have the power to independently make major decisions about other permanent staff (hiring, firing, etc); confidential employees are those who take part in developing the administration’s approach to contract negotiations and grievance handling. If you have additional questions about what defines a supervisor or confidential employee, you can read more on our FAQ. If you were excluded from the list, a coworker will reach out soon to clarify your job duties and whether or not they legally indicate supervisory or confidential status.

Without cooperation from University Administration, these excessive exclusions and the time it takes to resolve them will impact our ability to have a timely vote to form our union and begin bargaining a contract to improve our job security, wages, and benefits. That's why we're all signing this open letter to tell the university to respect our voice and let us vote. Please add your name here to show that you believe the university should move quickly to resolve these exclusions so we can schedule our election.

We are excited to announce that on Friday 8/15, the Alaska Labor Relations Agency (ALRA) informed us that we have successfully shown that a sufficient number of staff signed cards to proceed to the next step in forming our union–scheduling our vote!

This success was made possible by having thousands of conversations with our coworkers who agree that it’s time for University of Alaska staff to join our counterparts in having a voice about the future of our workplace, and for some of us, our home.

Our next step will be working with the University to define our unit of eligible employees before agreeing on an election date. That will enable us to include as many staff as possible in this democratic process. We look forward to a productive conversation with them, as well as an efficient procession.

If you’d like to learn more about how we got here, where we’re going & why, please visit cause-uaw.org and feel free to get in touch with us! You can also follow us on Instagram and Facebook for more updates.