UC Research and Public Service Professionals Vote to Unionize

Research professionals across the University of California system voted overwhelmingly to unionize this week — adding 7,200 employees to a growing movement of higher education workers joining the United Auto Workers (UAW).

The new unit, RPSP-UAW, will represent Research and Public Service Professionals (RPSPs) — a category that includes grant administrators, policy analysts, data specialists, and other full-time staff whose jobs directly support UC’s research mission. The vote passed by a landslide: 3,080 to 612.

Among those celebrating the results is Chris Gifford, a project policy analyst at UC Santa Barbara who works within the Academic Senate, focusing on graduate education and policies related to diversity and equity. Gifford has been at UCSB for a decade, and said the union comes at a time when “higher education in this country is under constant attack from the outside.”

“On top of those attacks,” Gifford said, “we are facing constant budget cuts and constraints. We’re banding together to protect our jobs and the education and research mission of the UC system.”

There are roughly 125 RPSPs at UCSB, and the campus had the highest voter turnout percentage across the UC system—which Gifford says makes them “small but mighty.” As for their role in operations, “we’re the ones coordinating the grants, the various contracts, and the policies related to research,” Gifford explained.

While the scope of federal budget cuts still remains unclear, the anxiety is alive and well. Gifford said several grants on campus have already been canceled, and there are “a lot of unknowns.” That uncertainty itself has added urgency to the union’s formation. “We’re as much in the dark as anybody else when it comes to what these potential cuts could mean to our jobs,” he said. 

In addition to the hope of protecting their employment, the union has a list of priorities for the bargaining table: raising wages, improving health care, and formalizing remote work flexibility. “Our salaries in the UC system don’t keep up with the cost of living in California or the rate of inflation,” Gifford said.

As for welfare, “we want to protect and expand our health benefits and retirement benefits. Paid time off is a big concern for a lot of folks in our unit,” he said. “Another big concern is protecting remote work. Many of us can’t afford to live near the UC campus that we work at.”

RPSPs are often invisible to the public but vital to the groundbreaking work at UCSB. Of the work RPSPs help enable, Gifford pointed to the “world-class research in oceanography and climate change. We have people working on wildfires, which is obviously a giant concern for anybody that lives in the state of California. We have amazing research going on having to do with cancer and other forms of medicine.”

The union vote comes amid a broader shift in higher education labor organizing. With this win, RPSPs join more than 50,000 researchers, graduate students, and academic workers already unionized with the UAW across the UC system.

“I’m thrilled we won our union because I know my colleagues have the expertise necessary to help strengthen the UC in these difficult times, and now we finally have our seat at the negotiating table,” said Leila Espinosa, a project management professional at UCLA, in a statement.

Deborah Ferguson-Fitch, a research administrator at UCSF, called the vote part of a larger movement. “We are joining a movement of research and professional employees in UAW who have been at the forefront of fighting funding cuts and protecting jobs and values in higher education,” she said.

For Gifford, the hope is that the union will not only protect workers but also help safeguard the public mission they support every day. “I believe the university knows the value RPSPs bring,” he said. “As for the public, maybe not yet.”