Dear fellow union siblings,
Our names are Matthew and Adam. We work at UVA and VCU respectively. We are part of our labor union’s statewide Political Coalition & Policy Area Work Committee. We are still in the middle of developing our platform, but one thing is clear: winning public sector collective bargaining rights for all state workers is top priority. We can’t win those bargaining rights without understanding why and how people with power took them away in the first place.
The story turns out to involve a union of Black UVA Hospital employees, an avowed segregationist governor, and decades of oppression for this state’s public sector employees. There isn’t a much clearer example of racism being used as a tool to divide the working class.
But, this chapter of Virginia history isn’t over. Our labor union — you and I together — have the opportunity to write the next chapter.
The first step is you coming to join me for a Teach In that our Political Committee is organizing on June 30th, 5:30p — 7:30p. We will cover the history of the ban on collective bargaining rights for state employees, what it means to bargain for the common good, as well as what collective bargaining is and why we need it.
Join us.
In solidarity,
Mathew Conover
Adam Ewing
Zoom Event is for UCW Members. Register here: bitly/teach-in-ucw
Link to this letter is here: https://bit.ly/the-beam-ucw
