UAW 4811 has added 12,000 new union members in Student Services and Advising Professionals and Research and Public Service Professionals, 1,700 of which are at UC Berkeley. The new members bring the union’s total membership to 60,000 across all UC campuses.
These groups form two recently certified bargaining units when negotiating with the UC system: Student Services and Advising Professionals, or SSAP, and Research and Public Service Professionals, or RPSP. These bargaining units serve to group employees with similar job titles for collective bargaining.
The addition of these two units brings the total to 17 UC-wide bargaining units across all labor unions, with more negotiations at specific campuses. Five of the bargaining units are represented by UAW, including academic researchers, academic student employees and graduate student researchers.
According to UC Office of the President spokesperson Heather Hansen, there are roughly 7,500 RPSP employees and approximately 5,000 SSAP workers.
“The 12,000 SSAPs and RPSPs are staff members at UC who carry out the university’s research, educational, and public service mission,” said Christine Mullarkey, bargaining representative for SSAP-UAW and a senior college adviser in the College of Computing, Data Science and Society, in an email. “This includes admitting and advising thousands of students, securing and helping to administer billions of dollars in research grants, and helping to acquire and manage lab equipment and research materials.”
According to Mullarkey, SSAPs and RPSPs have been working to form a union since 2023 and got contracts in early 2026. Following those contracts, they requested to join UAW4811 in April and were admitted in May.
The contracts include provisions to give protections on health insurance premium increases, job security and hybrid and remote work. It also includes, among other provisions, a 5% pay raise on July 1 of 2026 and 2027, and a 4% increase in 2028 and 2029.
The contracts they negotiated will expire in four years.
“UC was aware of these employees throughout the organizing, certification, and ratification processes overseen by the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB),” Hansen said in an email. “The contract negotiations that concluded in March involved first contracts for both the SSAP and RPSP units following their certification.”
The 12,000 new members include about 200 student workers at UC Law San Francisco, who also bargained a first contract with it throughout 2025 and 2026, though UC Law SF operates separately from the UC system for labor relations purposes.