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About the Union

Who are we?

Founded in 2004, UAW Local 4123 represents over 10,000 Academic Student Employees (ASEs) - Teaching Associates (TA or GTA), Graduate Assistants (GA) and Instructional Student Assistants (Tutors/Graders/SI Leaders) - across the 23 campuses of the California State University system. We are state bargaining Unit 11.

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A strong, vocal union membership equals success in negotiating wages, benefits, workload protections, and fair hiring processes. As unionized employees, we gain the ability to bargain with CSU on these and other issues, allowing us to have a real say in our lives as student employees. You can strengthen our voice by getting involved!

What do we do?

As the sole bargaining unit for Unit 11 employees, having a union serves four main functions:
 

  1. Collective Bargaining:
    We bargain a collective bargaining agreement, or the "contract," which ensures that the rights of Academic Student Employees in the CSU system are protected. The same contract also ensures regular pay increases, and other benefits that we could not have won without being unionized. You can read our full contract here.
     

  2. Representation:
    We represent an Academic Student Employee if they are in a dispute at their workplace. We work to resolve these issues through meet and confer first before raising an issue to the grievance procedure. You have the right to union representation at meetings with your employer. You can read more about those rights here.
     

  3. Contract Enforcement:
    The CSU system is far-reaching and wide, and most campuses are very good at implementing the contract as it is bargained. But on frequent instances, one or more of the clauses in the contract is violated, or the rights protected by the contract is not given to the Academic Student Employees. Our union resolves these issues through the grievance process and ensures a proper implementation of the contract. You can read more about grievances here.
     

  4. Fighting State-Wide:
    Our elected union leadership serves the interest of students state-wide. We have campaigned and successfully stopped CSU tuition hikes. We continued to fight for students with our Stop Student Debt Campaign, where we delivered thousands of signatures to the CSU Board of Trustees, showing a large support against the proposed tuition hikes.

Sister ASE Unions

UAW Local 2865 at University of California

UAW Local 4121 at University of Washington

UAW Local 2110 at New York University

UAW Local 2322 at University of Massachusetts

UAW Local 7902 at New School University & NYU

GEO-UAW at University of Connecticut

And many more, courtesy of UAW Local 5810

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