Research and Public Service Professionals Vote To Form New UC Union
United Auto Workers Local 4811 picket on the UCLA campus. A new UC union, Research and Public Service Professionals-United Auto Workers, will serve as an organizational unit of UAW. (Daily Bruin file photo)
Research and public service professionals across the UC voted Tuesday to form a new union that will represent 7,200 workers.
The union, Research and Public Service Professionals-United Auto Workers, will represent workers who run “core facilities,” administer grants and analyze data, among other services. About half of those who the union will represent voted in the election, with 83% voting “yes” for the union’s formation.
RPSPs have cited multiple reasons for the formation of RPSP-UAW, including stagnant salaries amid increasing workloads and a lack of administrative transparency.
“In the face of federal funding cuts to higher education, many RPSPs also want a union to gain a stronger political voice,” a RPSP-UAW press release said.
The union will serve as a new organizational unit of the United Auto Workers, which already has a union branch representing UC workers. UAW Local 4811’s representation includes academic student employees and graduate student researchers.
Leila Espinosa, a project management professional at UCLA, said RPSP-UAW is forming separately from UAW Local 4811 because it represents professional staff rather than graduate student researchers and teaching assistants.
“The research and public service professionals really provide a service and really are critical to the mission of the UC in terms of their research and public service mission,” Espinosa said.
Espinosa added that while concerns regarding employment practices – including pay equity – are a main concern of the union, she believes the union will allow staff the ability to request information about policies and decisions that the UC is making, including in budgeting and finances.
Heather Hansen, a spokesperson for the UC Office of the President, said in an emailed statement that the University recognizes the “yes” vote, adding that it is committed to bargaining in good faith with the union.
“These UC employees play a vital role in advancing UC’s mission at a time when both research funding and union rights are under attack nationally,” she said in the statement.
In late July, the Trump administration froze $584 million of UCLA’s research funding from the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy. The federal government alleged in letters that it suspended funds due to UCLA allowing antisemitism in its research environments, illegal affirmative action practices and “men to participate in women’s sports.”
UCLA is the only public university to have received suspensions of this size since the Trump administration began withholding federal funding from universities.
There are currently two other unions which represent researchers – the University Professional and Technical Employees CWA Local 9119 and UAW Local 4811 – the former of which will be holding a strike vote from Sept. 22 to Oct. 1 following more than 15 months of negotiations, and what UPTE-CWA Local 9119 calls bad faith bargaining. The latter union is currently in negotiations with the UC.
“Forming a union has never been more important with higher education under increasing attack,” said Deborah Ferguson-Fitch, a research administrator at UC San Francisco, in the press release. “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.”
Josephine Murphy | National news and higher education editor
Murphy is the 2025-2026 national news and higher education editor. She was previously News staff. Murphy is a second-year history and political science student from New York City.