Dear UAW Sibling,

In the past month, working people in the Los Angeles area have faced a severe and historic wildfire disaster – a disaster exacerbated by climate change and corporate greed that destroyed more than 16,000 structures (mostly homes), forced more than 180,000 people to evacuate, and killed at least 29 people. Many UAW members in the area were evacuated, spent days without power, or completely lost their homes. As of now, the fires have finally been almost completely contained, but a full recovery will take much longer, and poses new challenges for ensuring recovery efforts prioritize the needs of working people, not the profits of landlords and corporations.

Region 6 Hardship Fund

UAW members are already organizing to advance a recovery agenda that centers working people. Since the very beginning of the disaster, UAW members jumped into action organizing mutual aid efforts to support evacuees, share resources, and raise hardship fundsto support those directly impacted. In the aftermath, members have joined community efforts to clean up debris, to demand action from elected officials to advance housing and racial justice, and more. Keep reading to learn more about these efforts, as well as emergent political action and updates from organizing and contract campaigns around the Region!

Wildfire Mutual Aid

Jon Hillery, Local 4811, UCLA

In response to the January fires in Southern California, UAW 4811 members at UCLA worked together to aid those affected by the fires. Across Region 6, members raised more than $27,000 for a hardship fund to help members in Los Angeles and Santa Barbara. Multiple people were relocated because of this support and others were able to endure large costs due to loss of food during power outages and transportation during evacuations. The phonebanking members did was successful in connecting evacuees and potential evacuees with hosts they could depend on, while giving necessary guidance about safety in smoky conditions and potential evacuations that was not being otherwise communicated in the workplace.

Message from Region 6 Director Mike Miller

The fires that have ravaged Southern California over the past weeks have exacted terrible costs in human suffering as well as loss of life, property, and jobs. We will all have to work together with love and solidarity to recover from such devastating loss. The pain will also continue into the future and will require concerted political action from us to both recover and diminish the likelihood of recurrence.

Prior to the outbreak of the fires, there were already an estimated 75,000 people homeless in Los Angeles County. Now that the fires have destroyed over 16,000 structures – mostly homes – thousands of individuals and families find themselves homeless with few viable options. Despite emergency price gouging laws on the books, greedy landlords and property managers are jacking up prices to exorbitant and illegal levels. Bidding wars over available housing stock have erupted. And working class people – already struggling to make ends meet before the fires – face a new set of difficulties in keeping a roof over their heads, as profiteering landlords are tempted to force existing tenants out to capitalize on the housing shortage and escalate prices. California Attorney General Bonta is rightly pursuing price-gouging during this housing emergency.

This is good, but not enough. UAW Region 6 members are proud signatories of the open letter to Los Angeles’ elected officials drafted by Keep LA Housed (KLAH), a coalition of community groups and tenants’ rights advocates. Together we are calling on the city to freeze rents during this declared emergency, enact a moratorium on evictions, and offer cash assistance and relief to impacted renters, among other important measures. Beyond dealing with the current crisis caused by the fires, however, we must fight to build affordable public housing for everyone.

The apocalyptic fires in Southern California also require us to think deeply about their causes and to organize for fundamental change. With the climate crisis turbocharging wildfires, Region 6 members must redouble our efforts to create a sustainable and equitable future for all working people. This will require challenging the short-sighted profit motives of corporations and the wildly misplaced priorities of our captured political class.

We must organize more workers, fight to hasten a just transition to an EV future, advocate to expand green public transportation, and decarbonize our buildings and economies in as many ways as possible.

Looking forward to seeing many of you at the Region 6 Leadership and Political Action Conference January 31–February 2 at the Pico Rivera hall.

In Solidarity,

Mike

Building Working Peoples’ Power Under the 2nd Trump Admin

Rafael Jaime, Local 4811, Region 6 Political Action Committee Chair

In his first few days in office, President Trump has signed a rash of Executive Orders aimed at actualizing his campaign agenda – attacking immigrants, refugees, and trans people; withdrawing the US from the Paris Climate Agreement while expanding investments in non-renewable energy; dismantling government diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; and more. Several of his Executive Orders are already facing legal challenges, including his executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship, which 22 states and multiple cities – including California, Washington, Nevada, Oregon, Arizona, Hawai‘i, and the city of San Francisco – have filed lawsuits to block. And on January 24, a federal judge in Seattle granted Washington Attorney General Nick Brown’s emergency motion to block the Executive Order from going into effect while the legal case is ongoing.

Like on the campaign trail, Trump’s actions as President are aimed at dividing working people while advancing the interests of ultra-wealthy billionaires and corporations. As a union, we have a critical role to play in advancing an agenda that actually works for working people, and it will take mass member participation in a range of efforts to win – supporting legal efforts, taking direct action, organizing unorganized workers to grow our movement, enforcing our contracts, building political power, and much more.

Our Region 6 Political Action Council has already started building work in many of these areas, including launching our largest ever political program this past fall and establishing subregional working groups to continue growing strategic political action on an ongoing basis. And at the Region 6 Leadership Conference (January 31–February 2), hundreds of members from around the Region will come together to assess the current moment and develop strategic plans and coordination for advancing members’ issues in 2025 and beyond. All members are strongly encouraged to help make this work more powerful by participating in one or more of these ongoing areas – find more information at https://www.uawregion6.org/political-action.

Phonebank to Lift Research Restrictions: Thursday 1/30 at 12pm

Phillippa Steinberg, Local 4121, University of Washington

Over the last week, the Trump Administration rolled out an unprecedented set of restrictions on federal funding that are impacting members across our region, starting with funding freezes on the NIH, followed by a pause on all federal grants. While the situation is still unfolding, one thing is clear – this is part of the Trump Administration’s broader agenda to attack higher ed and our work as academic workers.

I’m a UAW Steward and an Academic Student Employee in Molecular and Cell Biology, and these restrictions are impacting my work on developing effective flu vaccines by researching which variant of flu will be most infectious the next flu season. Many of us in my lab are uncertain about the future of our research, as we rely on NIH funding to work on SARS-CoV-2 and flu evolution (including for avian flu that is on the rise across the US). With the recent attacks from the Trump Administration on funding and limiting international collaborations, the future of crucial public health research is now at stake.

We’ve successfully fought back against similar attacks before by coming together through our union and organizing to build a powerful higher ed labor movement. That’s why I’ll be joining academic workers across the country this Thursday at 12pm at the Call to Action phonebankto demand our congressional representatives take action to lift these restrictions and allow scientific research in the United States to continue without interruption.

More Updates from Around the Region

New Organizing: Graduate Assistants at University of Nevada Reno and University of Nevada Las Vegas held press conferences announcing that a majority of Nevada state legislators signed onto letters calling on administration to recognize the union. After filing for union recognition with majority support in December, non-tenure-track faculty at University of Southern California are now in the process of fighting USC admin’s legal challenges to their union. Operational Student Employees at Western Washington University rallied on January 24 to again file their union petition and demand that administration finally recognize the union and begin bargaining a fair contract.
Contract Campaigns: After resoundingly passing a strike authorization vote in December, Grad Workers and Postdocs at Caltech reached full Tentative Agreement on their first contracts! Workers will decide whether to ratify the agreements on January 28-29. At University of Oregon, Student Workers held a mass meeting on January 27, where they will decide whether to take a strike authorization vote. And as their January 31 contract expiration nears, hundreds of Postdocs at University of Washington (Local 4121) rallied to demand a fair contract, including priority issues of wage increases and international scholar support. Many more campaigns are ongoing!
Contract Enforcement: Since winning their first contract last year, Educational Student Employees at Western Washington University (Local 4929) have faced serious misclassification by management that is resulting in widespread underpayment for many members. ESEs rallied alongside OSEs on January 24 to deliver a grievance and demand management classify workers according to the contract they agreed to.
Green Jobs Arizona: Region 6, Jobs to Move America, Unite Here Local 11, UAW Center for Manufacturing a Green Economy, and Worker Power launched Green Jobs Arizona, a coalition focused on securing strong community benefits and good union jobs for green manufacturing projects in Arizona.

Upcoming Events

Region 6 Gender Justice & Civil Human Rights Committee meeting: February 10, 6-7pm via Zoom. Open to all Region 6 members! RSVP here.
Region 6 Education & Communications Committee meeting: February 21, 12-1pm. Open to all Region 6 members! RSVP here.
Region 6 Political Action (CAP/PAC) meeting: February 20, 6-7pm via zoom. Open to all Region 6 members! RSVP here.
The UAW Women in Leadership Conference will be April 3-6 at the Pat Greathouse Center in Ottawa, IL. Contact your Local for more info and to join. Attendance is limited.
The UAW Health & Safety Conference will be April 27-May 2 at the Walter & May Reuther UAW Family Education Center in Onaway, MI. Contact your Local for more information and to join.
UAW Higher Education Council meeting: June 21-22, 2025 at the Region 6 office in Pico Rivera, CA. Contact your Local for more information and to join.
Save the date! Region 6 Summer School will be July 24-27 in Los Angeles. More info to come.

Wildfire Recovery that Works for Working People