Victoria Piñeiro, UOSW

Member Spotlight is a segment of the Region 6 Newsletter that profiles members from different Region 6 Locals and organizing campaigns each month. Get to know your fellow UAW members from across many industries and states!

Hi fellow UAW siblings! I’m Victoria Piñeiro, a third-year undergrad at the University of Oregon, a proud Latina, a student worker, and an organizer for the UO Student Workers Union (UOSW). I am a native Nevadan from Las Vegas, but Eugene has come to feel like a second home for me. On campus, I work at the Student Sustainability Center (SSC) as a Food Equity Lead. At the SSC, I work on programming that educates and helps implement sustainability into the lives of students. Many think of sustainability as strictly an environmental interaction, but my job is to help with sustainability of oneself, specifically through nutrition and food security. This past academic term, I started programming around on-campus cooking classes, a student-led food security coalition, workshops on​​ repurposing food waste, and educating students on how to make their food last.

Being raised in a union family, I know the importance of a union, so I joined the effort to unionize the undergraduate student workers as soon as I heard about it, and I now serve as the Organizing Co-Chair of UOSW. We as student workers deserve to focus on our studies and not constantly be worried if our paychecks will cover our rent, utilities, or groceries. I am very excited to start organizing around bargaining this month – we are ready to fight for our first contract!