University Professional and Technical Employees-CWA 9119 said Thursday that 2,100 IT and technical employees across the UC system voted to join the union, bringing the union’s tech bargaining unit to about 8,400 workers.
Of the about 2,100 workers who voted, 96 percent were in favor of forming an open shop union.
The newly represented tech workers include application programmers, business systems analysts, data systems analysts, database administrators and other IT workers, the union said.
Once certified, the workers will fight for contractual protections, including negotiated wage increases, 30-day advance notices before any remote-work policy changes are made, protections against firings and layoffs, preferential rehiring rights, and collective bargaining rights over the adoption of new AI tools and their impact on its members.
UPTE — which also represents healthcare, research and technical workers across the UC system — said its workers have received a 39 percent increase in wages since 2018, compared to 24 percent for non-union represented peers.
Organizers said the campaign — which took more than a year — was driven by concerns over mass layoffs in the tech sector, as well as growing workloads without any added pay and the rollout of AI technologies with little transparency or worker input.
“Millions of Californians rely on the University of California for their healthcare and education,” Max Belasco, a business systems analyst at UCLA, said in a statement provided by the union. “Until now, we haven’t had the opportunity, as the people who understand AI to say: we want a seat at the table.”
Belasco said tech workers should have a role in shaping how AI is used across UC, particularly where automation could affect public services.
“If the workers who provide these critical services to the people of California don’t have the power to demand transparency and advocate for the safe deployment of AI tools, there will be no safeguards in place to ensure AI will be used as anything more than a poor cost-saving measure,” Belasco said.
The University of California’s public labor page says the system works with nine unions representing more than 270,000 employees across its campuses, medical centers and other locations.
The vote to unionize highlights a broader anxiety among workers in the tech sector, where companies increasingly cite AI as the reason for restructuring measures and job cuts.
LinkedIn plans to cut 606 jobs in California by July, including 519 in the Bay Area, as part of a broader reorganization. Cloudflare, based in San Francisco, plans to cut more than 1,100 employees worldwide as it reshapes its business around AI, its founders told employees earlier this month. Meta has also begun cutting roughly 8,000 jobs while moving thousands of workers into AI-related roles as part of a companywide restructuring.
“We know when you try to make quick, dirty decisions to cut labor through AI, you’re actually creating a more vulnerable system,” Dan Russell, a UC Berkeley business technology support analyst and president of UPTE, said in the union’s statement.
Russell said workers closest to the systems are better positioned than management consultants to understand the risks of deploying AI without guardrails.
“With the right to bargain over our working conditions, we can set the right tone not just for our workplace and tech organizations, but also for the millions of Californians who turn to UC every day for critical research, healthcare, and educational opportunities,” he said.
UPTE, founded in 1990, is affiliated with the Communications Workers of America.
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