United Auto Workers - Technical, Office, and Professional (TOP) Workers

Technical, Office, and Professional (TOP) Workers

In the 1990s, the UAW began to focus on new areas of organizing both geographically (in places like Puerto Rico) and in terms of occupations, with new initiatives among university staff, freelance writers (through the subsidiary National Writers Union) and employees of non-profit organizations, including workers at Mother Jones Magazine and the Sierra Club who are represented by UAW Local 2103.

The UAW took on the organization of academic student employees (ASEs) working at American universities as teaching assistants, research assistants, tutors, and graders under the slogan "Uniting Academic Workers". As of 2011, the UAW represents more student workers than any other union in the United States of America. Universities with UAW ASE representation include the University of California (UAW Local 2865), California State University (UAW Local 4123), University of Massachusetts Amherst (UAW Local 2322), University of Washington (UAW Local 4121), and New York University (UAW Local 2110). In 2008 the 6,500 postdoctoral scholars ("postdocs") at the ten campuses of the University of California, who combined account for 10% of the postdocs in the nation, voted to affiliate with the UAW, creating the largest union for postdoctoral scholars in the country: UAW Local 5810.

The expansion of UAW to academic circles, postdoctoral researchers in particular, was significant in that the move helped secure advances in pay that made unionized academic researchers among the best compensated in the country in addition to gaining unprecedented rights and protections.

Read more about this topic:  United Auto Workers

Famous quotes containing the words professional and/or workers:

    ... a supportive husband is an absolute requirement for professional women.... He is something she looks for, and when she finds him, she marries him.
    Alice S. Rossi (b. 1922)

    Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world ... the Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.
    Friedrich Engels (1820–1895)