Next week, JPL employees who support forming a union are meeting for an All Hands on Deck meeting. We will meet at Caltech on Tuesday, October 7th at 6:30-7:30pm to hear from UC staff who recently formed their union and discuss important updates, goals, and plans to form our union in the near future. We’ll cover the state of NASA’s budget and its implications for JPL, as well as communications from management and why they are attempting to prevent us from gaining a democratic say in our working conditions.
RSVP for the All Hands meeting!
Attacks on space science funding and our livelihoods have created an urgent need to come together and form a union. Many of us are grappling with uncertainty about what the future holds at the Lab, and for space science nationally. By forming a union now, we won’t have to face external challenges on our own: we join a movement of 125,000 UAW scientists, engineers, researchers, and professional staff who are actively working together to protect science funding. Unionized scientists and academics at UCLA, Harvard, and more participated in lawsuits, national Town Halls, and congressional advocacy that restored funding from federal agencies. And many of us are actively working right with unionized researchers in California and around the country to push Congress to prevent further cuts.
JPL management says on their newly published website: “In our view, maintaining the ability to respond swiftly and effectively in direct collaboration with employees to address issues that may arise – without the constraints of a labor union – will preserve the unique strengths of our community and protect the shared mission at JPL.” By “constraints” they mean our voices: when we have the right to bargain as equals, they no longer have the ability to make unilateral decisions.
For example, as soon as our union is certified, JPLers have the right to transparent information about the Lab budget and to bargain over any changes that management wants to make to our working conditions, including access to bridge funding, layoff policies, priority reappointments, severance pay, and more. Disclosing this type of information is commonplace and helpful (for example, labor unions like UAW have publicly available financial information), but is not available about the Lab for workers like us to review. The quicker we can form our union and the more people who participate in that process, the more transparency we gain and the more power we will have to advocate for ourselves.
What I’ve seen so far in this effort to form a union is that every person’s contributions are vital and the more of us who participate in the All Hands meeting, the sooner we can all reach our shared goal of having a say in our workplace. You can indicate on the form if you need to attend remotely. If you have any questions, you can check our website or reply to this email. Hope to see you there!
Best,
Mary Lou Dorgalli
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