September 22, 2025
To: Kevin Mitchell, Chair, Divisional Council (DivCo)
From: UC Merced Faculty Association Executive Board
Re: UC Merced Regulations on Employee Organization & Representative Access to University Property
We write today on behalf of the UC Merced Faculty Association, which is a non-union, independent organization of UC Merced Senate Faculty affiliated with the Council of University of California Faculty Associations.
The Faculty Association is deeply concerned about the potential chilling effect on employees’ protected activities and the likely violation of employee rights, particularly those related to working conditions, that will occur should the Employee Organization & Representative Access to University Property policy be enacted.
The two biggest issues with this policy are:
(1) It treats university affiliates the same way it treats outside actors
(2) It treats all activity, even conversations between consenting parties, as it would a large and obstructive gathering.
As a result, the policy effectively restricts the everyday interactions of university personnel and creates a permission structure for the university to prevent employees from engaging in speech and activities regarding their workplace that is protected under employment and labor laws. We see three significant ways in which this policy is overreaching and believe that it should be overhauled before it is ready to be adopted.
First, the definition of representatives as “any person acting in the interest of or on behalf of a registered Employee Organization, including both university and non-university personnel” is so broad as to possibly include anyone who ever mentions an employee organization. For instance, if a faculty member merely commented favorably on an achievement of a graduate-student union’s activity, they could be considered as acting “in the interest of” that union and thus subject to this policy. This is true even if the faculty member is not part of any Employee Organization and is merely making a statement as an outside observer.
Second, the definition of working hours seems to be applicable exclusively to hourly employees, who have a clear start and stop time to their day and clear break periods. By contrast, faculty, graduate students, and many staff have flexible schedules and work from many places, and could thus be construed as working at practically any moment they are on the campus or using campus technology. As such, this policy could effectively be used to restrict a wide range of activities by salaried employees.
Third, the definitions of public and restricted space ignore the fact that the everyday interactions of many employees occur in space that is “restricted.” For instance, collaborators sitting in a laboratory would be effectively barred from having a casual conversation about an Employee Organization or an issue assumed to be related to an Employee Organization, such as work conditions, without walking to a break room or, in one of our many buildings without breakrooms, outside and placing themselves at least 5 feet away from the building. This is both untenable and would put most university affiliates incidentally at risk of violating the policy in the course of their everyday life.
In addition to being overly broad and inclusive of everyday activity in its definitions, the policy restricting people from using university equipment—which includes university computers, telephones, and email—creates an undue burden on employees. Indeed, many employees have their primary phone and computer from the university. If one Employee Organization member used a university-owned laptop in their free time to send an email to their Employee Organization, they would violate this policy. In other words, the university expects Employee Organization members to have second phones, laptops, and emails for even the most mundane activities, including contacting their Organizations. If the university accepts that faculty use university-purchased laptops and cellular phones to organize things like their child’s little league games during their free time, we do not see why this policy would forbid employees from using laptops and cellular phones to connect with their Employee Organizations.
Additionally, the punishments for violating this policy are quite draconian and could be used to effectively remove the legal status of Employee Organizations as a result of the behavior of a single actor. Someone could willingly violate these policies as an individual and claim to have done it on behalf of an organization, resulting in the organization being effectively removed from university grounds (e.g., payroll deduction loss, loss of access to the campus). While we recognize this is an extreme example, the policy should have guardrails in place to prevent malicious actors or rogue representatives from undermining an entire Employee Organization.
As a small point, we do not think that the rules regarding bulletin boards or picketing/demonstrating/leafleting should be included in this policy. They are specified elsewhere and that policy should be linked. If not, the university runs the risk of having conflicting policies when one policy, but not the other, is updated.
In conclusion, we see this policy as a potential violation of fundamental employee rights, contrary to the University’s stated mission to “promote and celebrate the diversity of all members of its community,” and as being too broad to be practically interpretable. An improved policy would have different roles for university employees—who live much of their lives on campus and are intimately connected with campus resources—and outside representatives of Employee Organizations. Further, it would treat consensual conversation between people in any work environment separately from organized meetings and events sponsored by Employee Organizations.
As a final point, we believe this policy represents one of many recent steps in the wrong direction for UC Merced. It seems to be part of a collection of overly draconian policies that undermine free speech and activity while promoting a potentially punitive campus environment. These kinds of policies will make faculty think twice before taking a job at UC Merced and will have a chilling effect on protected behavior. UC Merced should be a leader in speech and freedom and should uphold these values in every policy.
