brett hu
for head steward

My name is Brett Hu. I am the steward for the Communication department and veteran of the 2022 and 2024 strikes. I was elected as a delegate to the recent Bargaining Convention, where I authored a resolution to expand the right to strike and helped collect hundreds of signatures for several other resolutions. Despite this, I remain an ordinary rank-and-file union member through and through, and the Joint Council needs the perspective of such members. To that end, I am running with JuliAnne Rach on the Rank and File for a Democratic Union slate.

Union Made has a monopoly on power at UCLA. There are ten head stewards at this campus, and they will already have at least eight by the end of this election (uaw4811.org/leadership). Even if you have been satisfied with how they have run our union the past two years, I hope you can appreciate the need for diversity of opinion. Any well-functioning democratic union should have an opposition providing checks and balances on the current leadership.

So what kind of “diversity of opinion” will we bring? Especially as contract negotiations begin soon, we need CONCRETE things to fight for, not vague promises. For example, as international students across the country are being abducted by ICE for speaking out against the war on Gaza, we demand the immigration article in the current contract be strengthened to include every UC be a sanctuary campus. We further demand the elimination of non-resident supplemental tuition which continues to unfairly burden our international colleagues. And we once more take up the demands deferred from 2022: a cost-of-living adjustment for all and a minimum $54k pay with appointment guarantees to ease rent burden.

These demands are not exhaustive of what we want to see , but we should also say how our organizing strategy to achieve them is different. We believe power comes from the ground up, so lobbying politicians in hopes they will help us when both the university and Trump regime are escalating their repression has limited effectiveness. Many lawmakers speak favorably of labor but their actual behavior suggests otherwise. Instead, in addition to building out our membership across departments, we must work - and have worked - with more immediate allies, including undergraduate student organizations, community activist groups, and other UC unions to pressure the boss.

If elected, we also commit to transparency. Whereas Union Made makes their plans in closed office rooms and controls the conversation at membership meetings, we will hold regular town halls with open Q&A sessions. We will publicize the proceedings of each quarterly Joint Council meeting. After all, an informed membership is an empowered membership. We are living in an unprecedented moment; there can be no business as usual when unions’ very existence is being threatened. RnFDU will ensure the incumbent leadership rises to the challenge. Only then can we be a fearless, fighting union that stands face-to-face with our adversaries!