Read a letter to UC President Yudoff and the UAW regional director from California representatives to the US Congress

"I consider it important, indeed urgently necessary, for intellectual workers to get together, both to protect their own economic status and, also, generally speaking, to secure their influence in the political field."
-- Albert Einstein, on why he joined the faculty Union at Princeton as a charter member.

Above: Photos of some of the Postdocs who are active in PRO/UAW on their campus. If you would like to sign up, please call (415) 538-0844 and one of these representatives or another Postdoc organizer will get in touch with you.

• UC Berkeley - Matthew "Oki" O'Connor , Ph.D., Bioengineering Department
• UC Davis - Laura Bartley, Ph.D., Plant Pathology Department
• UC Irvine - Tobias Kaufmann, Ph.D., Center for Cosmology
• UCLA - Xiaoqing Cao, Ph.D., Department of Biological Chemistry, David Geffen School of Medicine
• UC Riverside - Pesach Lubinsky, Ph.D., Botany and Plant Sciences Department
• UC San Francisco - Dil Kapadia, Ph.D., Department of Medicine
• UC Santa Barabara - Kirril Afonin, Ph.D., Chemistry & Biochemistry Department

PRO/UAW is the Union for around 6,000 Postdoctoral Researchers at the University of California. Through the Union we can exercise our legal rights to bargain with UC. Our elected Bargaining Team is surveying us to determine priorities and is negotiating a contract with UC. We can negotiate for improvements in wages, hours, benefits, and terms and conditions of employment. Postdocs will then have an opportunity to democratically approve the agreement that UC and our bargaining team reach, before it becomes a binding contract. Only through our Union can Postdocs negotiate on an equal footing with the University and put whatever they negotiate into a legally binding contract.

**Science Funding Updates**

1. Report talks about poor working conditions experienced by postdocs in the U.S.


2. New report talks about challenges facing new investigators and research universities as a whole given the current funding context.


3. Read this letter from UAW Local 4121 supporting Federal legislation that budgeted $30 Billion in NIH funding.