If your workplace doesn't yet have a union, speaking with your coworkers is a good first step towards building one!

@organizeworkers.bsky.social has resources to help you get started!

Our strength and ability to collectively fight back depends on the active involvement and organization from higher ed workers across the state. What we face now is just the beginning. Now is the time to get organized to build our power. Now is the time to join your union.

ucwva.org/get-involved/

We are organizing across job categories—staff, faculty, and student worker— to build a strong and thriving wall-to-wall union because we know that our power, together, is strong.

We are drafting legislation to make the BOV more representative and more responsive to worker concerns, and to restore our right to bargain collectively. We are planning member-led town halls to hear from other workers and build a collective vision for our universities.

UCWVA’s chapters are working on many fronts to push back against federal interference and fascism, and push forward a vision of our public universities that's democratic, accountable, and worker-led. Members are mobilizing to support staff, faculty, students, and student workers who face retaliation

We demand that they comply with state law by removing Ken Cuccinelli and other Board appointees who were rejected by the Virginia Senate, and have unconstitutionally continued to serve. We demand that our universities commit to democratic governance by university workers.

We demand that the Boards of Visitors across Virginia commit to keeping politically motivated interference out of our universities.

All of this becomes possible when we, the people who do the work day in and day out to make our institutions run, have the power to make decisions about our own working conditions, including our leadership. This is our university-not the Board of Visitors’, not Glenn Youngkin’s, and not Trump’s.

We fight for academic and intellectual freedom, free and open inquiry, the rigorous pursuit of knowledge, and workers’ autonomy to conduct our affairs free of government coercion.

We fight for public universities and public teaching hospitals that serve the public good. We fight for jobs that pay a living wage. We fight for the workers’ rights that generations of past union members have fought for.

We fight for our community, and against attempts to divide and discriminate against us on the basis of race, sexuality and gender, immigration status, class, and faith.

As workers, we know that when we build power together, something better is possible. We fight for a higher education system that is accessible to all.

These politically motivated attacks threaten the university’s core mission of teaching and learning, and our community’s safety. The politicians and members of the Board of Visitors pushing them forward seek to create a climate of fear and repression in our workplaces. Together, we will resist.