Organizing Associational Power: A Strikers’ Inquiry Into the 2022 UAW Strike Against the University of California

Sociologists Thomas Gepts and Sarah Mason, PhD, discuss the six-week strike in 2022 of 48,000 UAW-represented academic workers across all 10 University of California campuses, explaining how differing strategies and organizing tactics employed at each campus yielded contrary results: at UC Berkeley, academic workers voted largely in favor of the new contract; at UC Santa Cruz they voted largely against.

Mason and Gepts share their research demonstrating how differences in power resources at each campus let to divergent worker interpretations of the strike’s limitations and possibilities. They also discuss the archival material collected during the strike and their subsequent interviews of strikers, which have been recently donated to the Reuther Library but have not yet been opened for research. Gepts, Mason, Margaret Eby, PhD, and Elizabeth Emmott-Torres are the authors of “Organizing associational power: A strikers’ inquiry into the 2022 UAW strike against the University of California.”

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“Organizing associational power: A strikers’ inquiry into the 2022 UAW strike against the University of California”

Episode Credits

Interviewee: Thomas Gepts and Sarah Mason

Producers: Dan Golodner and Troy Eller English

Music: Bart Bealmear