A History of Our Local

Pre 2020 History:

UGW-UE Local 1466 is the result of years of tireless organizing by generations of grad workers. Before our first union contract in 2022, there was no minimum wage for RAs, no guaranteed sick time, and virtually no increases to minimum pay for over a decade. Graduate workers regularly received very late contracts and had no recourse for missed paychecks, unjust discipline, or workplace abuse. In 2016, graduate workers began meeting regularly, attending IWW union trainings, and organizing on the department level. 

In the spring of 2020 as the pandemic upended daily life, graduate workers formed a University-wide organizing committee, affiliated with the United Electrical, Radio, & Machine Workers, and launched a union card drive to seek mandatory collective bargaining with UNM.

UE and organizing grad workers:

UNM grad workers decided to affiliate with UE because of its reputation as a progressive, democratic, fighting union. UE includes members working in diverse sectors across the country from rail crew drivers, hospital workers, co-op workers, manufacturers, public service workers, federal contract workers, teachers, paraeducators, clerical workers, graduate workers, scientists and librarians. UE was founded in 1936 and is the only national union in the U.S. that did not buy into the Red Scare hysteria of the 1950s and allow for members to be pitted against each other. For that reason, UE was gutted by conservative politicians, big businesses and others working with them. UE lost half its members in that decade but began rebuilding in the next. However, unions nationwide were weakened in this period continuing to this day with anti-union policies such as “right to work” laws, limits on public sector strikes, and Supreme Court decisions such as Janus vs. AFSCME and Glacier Northwest vs. Teamsters. Still, UE has grown from its lowest point in the 1950s. UE Local 1466 (our union!) was the first in a massive wave of grad workers organizing with UE. It was also at the beginning of an upsurge in organizing by academic workers and organized labor nationwide including the UC grad workers strike, a near strike of the UPS Teamsters and the stand-up strike of the UAW at the big three automakers. UE has doubled its membership in the last two years mainly through grad worker unionization.

Fall 2020:

The organizing committee launched a union recognition card drive, a supermajority of workers signed cards, and we filed for certification with the New Mexico PELRB. We were the first group of public workers in New Mexico to pursue certification under the state’s “card check” laws. This meant that if a majority of our coworkers (50%+1) signed union cards to vote for unionizing, our union would be certified, and UNM would have to bargain with us. By the time we filed in December 2020, over 1,000 graduate workers ( 66% of our bargaining unit) had signed – primarily through virtual/socially distant organizing.

Jan 2021 – Feb 2022: Fight for Union Recognition

Under state law, UNM admin was obligated to bargain once grads had demonstrated majority union support. Instead of coming to the table to fix decades of issues, UNM admin hired an expensive union busting lawyer to argue that graduate employees weren’t workers and should be denied the right to unionize. UNM’s lawyers forced the Public Employee Labor Relations Board to hold extensive hearings and berated the board with absurd arguments. After months of this charade, it became clear that UNM was willing to bully and lie to strip graduate workers of basic legal rights. In the summer of 2021, union members decided that if we were excluded from the bargaining act we would strike for our union recognition – if UNM wanted to claim we weren’t workers, we wouldn’t go to work. We began holding dozens of one-on-one conversations, department meetings, and unionwide town halls. Less than a month after graduate workers publicly announced their intention to strike for recognition the labor board ruled in our favor. 

Rather than begin negotiations, UNM admin wasted another 8 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars of taxpayer money on court appeals. Graduate workers did not give up – we got louder. We traveled to Las Cruces to help our colleagues form a union at NMSU, we held rallies, we occupied the president’s office, and we organized students, faculty, and community members to demand the University come to the table. Finally, in February 2022, after 13 months of escalation and admin embarrassment, UNM agreed to begin negotiations.

This was our first exposure to what became a pattern when dealing with UNM admin: they fight us, we beat them, they figure out a new and even more ridiculous way of fighting/stalling, we beat them, the cycle repeats until we build enough power to achieve our goal. 

In 2022, we negotiated our first contract:

This entailed another stage of organizing across the union, as UNM’s team attempted to drag out the process with low-ball counter-offers. They retaliated against our counter-offers but threatening our health insurance premiums, digging up a statute pertaining to the portion they were “allowed” to cover now that we were considered workers. Not only did we ensure in our contracts that UNM covers health insurance premiums for any grad worker at .25 FTE and above, but we pushed them from a 2% raise to the minimum to a 7.12% raise across the board (10% for those making the minimum)! Up to this point, the University had covered SEVIS fees for international students, which is a fee assessed to first year international graduate students. However, UNM admin were a bunch of babies and refused to cover it when we won our first contract. We subsequently pushed the administration to cover the SEVIS fee for first-year international students.

These wins are significant, but they are not enough, and as we are reopening negotiations in two years, we need to ensure that we have recourse for UNM’s union-busting and delaying tactics in future negotiations. Although PEBA guarantees our right to unionize, it comes with limits that hurt labor power, including an anti-strike clause that threatens decertification. We are presently forming a coalition with public-sector unions across New Mexico to remove the anti-strike clause from PEBA.

Spring 2023 Contract Enforcement

After securing our first collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the University in December of 2023, we immediately had to pivot to contract enforcement. We know that no matter what is said at the bargaining table, the UNM Administration will do all that it can to outright violate or not enforce the CBA because that is not in its interest as an employer. Thus, after every set of negotiations, we have to be prepared to quickly and effectively educate our membership about their new rights, protections, benefits and/or raises.

In addition, after our members ratified our first CBA, we had to elect our first Executive Council within 90 days, begin to elect department stewards, and write and ratify new bylaws for our changing organization. Our initial bylaws were ratified in the fall of 2021 and our Coordinating Committee and membership saw necessary changes to help our organization thrive.

We also launched our first concerted effort on legislative lobbying in early Spring 2023. Our goal was to explain to state legislators who UNM grad workers are, what we do and why we are so crucial to higher education in the State. We went up to Santa Fe multiple times and made important political connections. We began our efforts to get money put in the state budget for grad workers like other University employees including staff and faculty.

Fall 2023 Compensation Reopener

In our original CBA with the University Administration, we negotiated a Fall 2023 compensation reopener so we could bargain over minimum stipends and raises before reopening our full CBA a year later because we know graduate workers desperately need compensation increases to make up for 10 years without them and a rising cost of living. Though our organization was still getting off the ground with new stewards recently elected, and a new Executive Council, we were able to work with stewards and members to organize a walkout and turnout to bargaining. This organizing and the reputation of militancy of our local helped us win a 6% across-the-board raise and standardize grad worker contracts to 18 weeks, or one week more of pay for prep work before the semester. Most importantly, we accepted the 6% raise only because the UNM Administration agreed to our strategic demands for another compensation reopener in Spring 2024 during the legislative and University budgeting processes, and to align the expiration of our CBA with that of other campus unions so we can have joint organizing campaigns around bargaining in the future.

Spring 2024: Where we are now

Spring 2024 began with enforcing the gains we won in the fall reopener. The UNM Administration did nothing to ensure that grad worker contracts were standardized to 18 weeks as we had negotiated and we had to make sure that all eligible workers got the raises we won.

We also continued legislative action for the upcoming legislative session that we began in late 2023 making multiple trips to Santa Fe to meet one-on-one with key legislators on the Legislative and Senate Finance Committees asking for funds for graduate worker compensation to be included in calculations for Instruction and General funds in the State Higher Education budget. Though the UNM Administration refused to work together on a lobbying strategy to secure these funds, our union single-handedly won $1.9 million for graduate worker compensation statewide, putting us in a position to demand UNM come to the bargaining table with even more funds. This was the first time State funds were allocated for graduate worker compensation.

Soon after securing these State funds for graduate worker compensation, our union began preparing for our compensation reopener. Stewards talked to dozens of coworkers about our upcoming bargaining and we had a public delivery of our intent to bargain in which UNM lawyers hid behind locked doors as about 20 grad workers tried to simply hand them a piece of paper. This set the tone for Spring 2024 bargaining which was defined by the UNM Administration team’s incompetence and inability to schedule adequate bargaining dates. Our priorities for this session were to get RAs included in raises, significant across-the-board raises, elimination of the 18-week contraction standardization issues, and bringing Project Assistants up to the same rates as other assistantships. We launched an organizing campaign including a photo campaign, a membership drive, a steward-proposed and -led rally of 300 people, our largest action in at least a year, and a picket outside the Board of Regents meeting. Through this we got some movement on RA inclusion in raises, but not an outright guarantee like we need. We also won large raises to the minimum stipends for PAs (30%) and GAs (12%) and began to end the stratification of minimum stipend rates among assistantships. Plus, we won a 4.5% across-the-board raise for those already earning above the new minimums. The UNM Administration’s bargaining team did not base their offers on facts about the UNM budget nor on how much money we brought to the table from our lobbying efforts demonstrating that our organizing power is what moves them at the table.

Now, we are turning our attention to building our organization and strategizing for the full CBA reopener in Spring 2025. We recruited many strong stewards and great Executive Council members this past year, but want to make sure we are organized in every department. We are also still working towards higher membership rates, but made significant increases this year and are close to majority. Next year’s bargaining will be longer and more complex as we negotiate over not only compensation, but benefits, workers’ protections, the grievance procedure, and more and we need to be prepared to fight for our priorities. Finally, next year we will have a great opportunity to try to end the prohibition on striking for public employees in coalition with other public sector unions in the State. We have begun organizing around this through our work in establishing the UNM/UNMH Coalition of Campus Unions with United Academics of UNM (faculty union), CIR SEIU (medical interns and residents), District 1199NM (healthcare workers), Communication Workers of America (custodians and other service staff) as well as making connections with other public sector unions like the Albuquerque Teachers Federation, AFSCME and more. Moreover, the political timing is somewhat favorable as it’s the last full legislative session during Gov. Lujan Grisham’s second term with a supermajority of Democrats in the State legislature.

Key timeline events –

Pre- union recognition – organizing and bad working conditions

December 2020 – filed for recognition with the labor board

Summer 2021 – began preparing to strike for recognition, August 2021 – board reverses decision and agrees to certify union

December 2021 – UNM spends 4 months complaining,  union certified anyway 

February 2022 – UNM drops appeal (after major mobilizations and Provost embarrassing himself + faculty senate)

May 2022 – we start our first contract negotiations

• We had 40+ negotiating sessions 
• We held 5+ major rallies/pickets 
• We set a deadline
• We did a majority deadline petition signed by ~860 current graduate workers 
• We mobilized over summer focused on workplace rights issues, especially non-discrimination
• There was a struggle over healthcare coverage near the end of bargaining where UNM threatened to take away our coverage since we are workers, not students
• Have a sentence on key wins of the first contract

Spring 2023 – contract enforcement and electing our first executive council and stewards, new constitution and bylaws

Fall 2023 – compensation reopener with a decision to strategically reopen in Spring 2024 and align contract negotiations to be during the legislative and budgeting processes

Spring 2024 – legislative action, compensation reopener, continuing to build our organization