By OLGA R. RODRIGUEZ
BERKELEY, Calif. (AP) — A month into the nation’s largest strike involving higher education, the work stoppage by University of California academic workers at 10 campuses is causing stress for many students who are facing canceled classes, no one to answer their questions and uncertainty about how they will be graded as they wrap up the year.
Some 48,000 student employees walked off the job on Nov. 14 to demand higher wages and better benefits. The employees, represented by the United Auto Workers Local 5810, say they were left with no other choice but to strike to demand increased wages necessary to keep up with the sky-high rents in cities like Berkeley, San Diego and Los Angeles.
Last week, university officials agreed to a 29% pay hike for postdoctoral employees and academic researchers who make up about 12,000 of the 48,000 workers. The university system also agreed to provide more family leave time, childcare subsidies and job security.
But the postdoctoral employees and researchers have refused to return to work until a deal is also reached for the 36,000 graduate student teaching assistants, tutors and researchers who are bargaining separately for increased pay and benefits. The strike is being closely watched and could have a ripple effect at schools across the country.
Colleges and universities increasingly rely on graduate student employees to do teaching, grade papers and conduct research that had previously been handled by tenured faculty.
Many University of California students fear the strike may extend well into next year, disrupting their plans to apply to degree programs.
University of California, Berkeley sophomore Janna Nassar said she believes academic workers should be better paid, but she is growing concerned as the strike continues. She was counting on final review sessions with her graduate student instructor for one of her economics classes before she takes the final exam next week. But now the 18 year old said that’s not an option.
Before the strike, she said she attended lectures for that class three times a week and two discussion sessions with the graduate student instructor. She is required to complete the class before she can declare a major in economics next year.
“This is the hardest I have studied in all of my semesters here, and I feel the least prepared,” she said. “It’s really disheartening to know that I might have to declare late or maybe I won’t be able to declare econ and will have to choose another major.”
Susana Sotelo, a UC Berkeley sophomore who plans to declare a psychology major, said four of her five classes were taught by graduate student instructors or lecturers. Those classes have been canceled or moved online and turned optional.
The one class taught by a psychology professor also moved online and he told the students that no new material would be taught for the rest of the semester to support the strike, she said.
Sotelo, 19, said she is not yet sure how she will be graded for her classes except for her psychology class, which will be considered successfully completed if she turns in her research project. Ironically, her research work is about the stress undergraduate students go through when choosing a major.
“My one professor has been very understanding. He sent various emails saying that to support the strikers, he would not give any assignments and would cancel discussions,” Sotelo said.
The average pay for UC student employees is about $24,000 annually and many academic workers say they have to skip meals or take additional work to make ends meet with their meager salary.
Jonathan Mackris, who is pursuing a doctorate in film and media at UC Berkeley, said he teaches an undergraduate class about silent film history but often must take on other jobs, including grading papers or teaching reading and composition.
He said he brings in $2,100 a month and pays $1,870 for a studio apartment near campus. His landlord recently told him his rent will increase to $1,950.
“I go through phases where sometimes I’ll wake up at like two in the morning and like be really stressed about it,” he said.
The bargaining units say they are demanding the university agree to pay that will lift workers out of “rent burden,” which is defined by the federal government as having to pay at least a third of your salary toward rent.
The student workers are also demanding childcare, no more supplemental tuition for international students and better protection from harassment in the workplace, especially for scientific researchers who can be pressured into working long hours into the night and on weekends.
UC officials said in a statement they believe the proposals they have made to the bargaining units “are fair, reasonable and honor the important contributions these bargaining unit members make toward the University’s mission of education and research.”
The university said it has proposed total compensation for those working part-time to range from $46,757 to $74,798, depending on the bargaining unit title and campus.
“The proposals offered by the university to the UAW would place our graduate students and academic employees at the top of the pay scale across major public universities and on par with top private universities,” the university said in a statement.
If graduate employees and researchers win better pay at the UC system, it could prompt similar changes at colleges that compete with UC or where graduate workers are organizing unions, said Tim Cain, associate professor of higher education at the University of Georgia.
“If the unions succeed in getting close to what they’re seeking, it will be eye-opening,” he said, adding that “if the conditions fundamentally change at the UC schools, then the marketplace changes for other schools as well.”
Across the country, 75% of academic workers doing research in labs, libraries and archives, and teaching undergraduate courses are graduate students, according to Cain.
Cain sees the strike as part of a broader shift in U.S. labor after the pandemic placed a heavier burden on workers and drew attention to nationwide wage disparities.
“We’re in a moment where there is a great deal of labor activity among workers who are not well treated by larger systems, and I think a number of people working in higher education see themselves as part of that larger disruption,” he said.
What the effects of the disruption will be on UC undergraduate students whose education had already been in disarray because of the pandemic remains to be seen. But for Nassar, who isn’t certain if she will be able to declare an economics major, the effect seems long-lasting.
“It’s like a breaking point,” she said. “It’ll probably affect us for the rest of our undergraduate careers.”
Associated Press writer Collin Binkley contributed from Washington.
The end of the semester is a critical time for academic workers on strike. Part time faculty at The New School and student workers and postdocs at the University of California are fighting hard to hold the line against increasing attacks from their employers. At The New School, the rumor is they might be close to winning.
Olivia Wood December 8, 2022
Part time faculty at The New School in New York City (UAW Local 7902) and student workers across the University of California system (UAW Local 2865, UAW Local 5810, and SRU-UAW) are midway through the third and fourth week of their strikes, respectively.
Higher education is a key site for the labor movement right now, with all six of the biggest new bargaining units filing for election in 2022 coming from this sector. The UC strike is the biggest strike of academic workers in U.S. history, and the The New School strike is the biggest-ever U.S. strike of part time faculty. These workers are showing workers everywhere the value and power of organized labor action, and their power will only grow as students, full time faculty, university staff, and workers from other unions join the picket lines and refuse to do business with the schools.
At most colleges and universities in the United States, early to mid December means final exams, followed by the submission of final grades. From an economic standpoint, this concludes a production cycle for the university: course credits are “produced,” and dorm and meal plan contracts end. Winter commencement means new alumni are also produced. Financial aid paperwork is processed. All of this means that the end of the year is a critical time for universities’ bottom lines. Now is the time to press forward.
Accordingly, the administrations of the University of California (UC) and The New School are growing increasingly desperate to crush the strikes, settle union contracts for as little cost to the university as possible, and return to the status quo. As a result, the universities are escalating attacks on the workers while the unions fight to hold the line.
This week, The New School announced that it would begin docking pay and benefits of both union members and any full time faculty allies who were joining the strike in solidarity. Part time faculty make up 87% of the teaching staff at The New School. This means workers will be forced to pay the full cost of their healthcare premiums or lose their coverage, right as New York is experiencing a new post-Thanksgiving surge of Covid-19, RSV, flu, and other respiratory viruses. The university is also attempting to hire “temporary progress reviewers” (scabs) to grade student work in advance of the final grade deadline. This move comes a week after the university forced a vote using the legal tactic of “last, best, final offer” and union members resoundingly voted it down.
Part time faculty at The New School remain committed to the strike, and the full time faculty at three of the university’s constituent colleges unanimously voted to hold steady in their support of the union, demand that The New School rescind its plan to dock pay and benefits, and consult with lawyers on possible legal action. Thursday afternoon, students began an occupation of the lower levels of the main academic building.
This occupation comes just one day after students at five different campuses of the University of California occupied their dining halls and began distributing free food to all who came. Striking workers at some of the campuses have also been occupying administrative buildings on and off for the past two weeks. However, it is only this week that the University has begun to crack down on the occupations, sending in police to evict the workers at the UC Riverside Dining Commons, at the UC Office of the President, and other locations.
Similarly to the faculty at The New School, seven departments at UC Davis have signed a letter supporting the strike and pledging to support all faculty who choose to join the strike in solidarity. Additional letters have been signed by departments across other schools. According to the UC Faculty Association, more than 36,000 final grades will not be submitted, as faculty refuse to scab for the striking academic student employees (ASEs) who would normally be doing the grading for their courses.
Now, at the end of the semester, is a critical time for the unions to continue and expand their disruptions of university operations to whatever extent possible. This is the heart of a strike’s power. At the same time, workers from both inside and outside of these workplaces must organize in solidarity to expand the strike and support the workers, who are being attacked on all sides by their employers. Solidarity with the striking workers!
Readers can donate to the UC strike fund
Olivia Wood is a writer and editor at Left Voice and an adjunct English lecturer in the NYC metropolitan area.
Selling Blood, Skipping Meals, Sleeping in Cars:
Why Academics Strike
Photograph Source: eilidh_wag – CC BY 2.0
Last week, thousands of railroad workers ready to strike got stabbed in the back by Biden and congress. These trainmen, constantly on call and without even one paid sick day, object to being worked to death. They aren’t the only ones. Another massive strike in another business sector was already underway: Forty-eight thousand academic workers struck in California November 14. They walked off the job in one of the biggest labor actions of the century and the largest in higher education history, due to starvation wages. Their employer, the University of California, has not reacted well, has in fact taken a divide and conquer approach, according to Nelson Lichtenstein in the Guardian December 5. This means offering some spoils for those who are already better compensated and a very hard line toward those at the bottom of the pay scale, namely graduate students. Because of course.
The striking researchers, postdocs, graders and teaching assistants want a minimum annual salary of $54,000 for graduate students and $70,000 for postdocs – something commensurate with the cost of living in California, where the average annual rent in Los Angeles surpasses $36,000 a year. For teaching assistants earning $24,000 that often means sleeping in their cars. Lots of these workers resort to selling blood to make ends meet. Welcome to the lousy underside of academic labor in America, famishing scholars so parasites in university administrations can bloat up on six-figure salaries.
United Auto Workers bargains for these workers. Its president of “Local 5810, which represents more than 11,000 UC postdocs and academic workers,” according to the Washington Post November 14, accuses the university of acting unlawfully at the bargaining table. This is probably a gross understatement. Negotiations have already dragged out over a year, so you can imagine the sorts of brazen shenanigans pulled by university poohbahs protecting their pelf. For those besotted with a tinsel image of these hacks, who cry, No! However on earth could it be? University luminaries twisting the financial knife with bargaining mischief? Shocking! To such people I can only say, the blood of impoverished intellectuals waters the groves of American academe, literally, and has done so for decades. The fact that “the University of California strike is also the largest strike in higher education in U.S. history, according to the UAW,” per the Post has more than a little to do with the nonsense labor has had to tolerate at the bargaining table.
The tenure-track model for these workers is a thing of the past. According to one academic striker quoted by the New Yorker November 29, “You don’t make very much as a grad student, and you’re expected to do menial tasks for your professors…for many of us, that same deal [eventual tenure] that made the whole thing function is really no longer on the table, which means that the way we’re paid in the meantime is much more significant.” In other words, these academics have accepted the reality that they are working stiffs.
“The University of California Strike Has Been 50 Years in the Making,” headlined a story in New York magazine November 18. In addition to higher wages, New York reports that these workers demand childcare stipends, transit passes and paid leave, the sorts of things essential to the survival of your average prole and one his or her bosses fiercely resist providing, “in a state where the cost of living has skyrocketed in recent years.”
The roots of the strike, however, reach back, according to New York, to Proposition 13, the property tax-slashing law adopted in California 44 years ago. “This bled the state of much-needed income,” with a recent estimate “that if just the state’s commercial-property owners were taxed at fair market value, it would provide California an additional $11.5 billion in annual tax revenue – most of which would be paid by giant corporations.” Without that money, the state struggles to support amenities like its flagship university system, and thus, at the bargaining table, officials claim poverty. Such protestations, however, omit the wildly expensive metastasizing class of university administrators who pull down small fortunes and whose utility is negligible. After all, prior to the late 1970s, most schools got along just fine without them. Universities ran much more cheaply and could afford to give postdocs and grad students salaries more in line with the cost of living. Those salaries were, in absolute terms, smaller than what they get today, but so were expenses.
So far, the rank and file has rejected the university’s stingy pay increases. “Many teaching assistants would earn less than $30,000 a year,” with what management offers, according to the Post. The proposed annual childcare stipend “would barely cover a month of childcare,” workers were quoted. One wonders what their employers expect these parents to do for the remaining eleven months? Lock their kids in the car and hope they’re alive when they return from the job? “Teaching assistants at UCLA earn an average of $24,000 a year,” the union told the newspaper. Students’ parents shelling out many tens of thousands of dollars a year in exorbitant tuition thus pay a fortune for instructors who must sleep in their vehicles. As for the children of those teachers, well, they’re not the university’s problem, or at least that’s the official attitude.
Lest you think this gigantic strike is somehow an isolated one-off, think again. All over the country, education workers have walked off the job. Massachusetts teachers defied a strike ban by walking out illegally three times recently, and six thousand Seattle teachers struck September 7. “The top issue was the district’s proposal…to end student-teacher ratios for many categories of special education,” labornotes reported. Almost a week later, bargaining got results, and members ended the strike. And 2022 featured other job actions in education as well.
Back in California, a wave of wildcat strikes hit UC Santa Cruz and other UC campuses in 2021. “Workers demanded cost-of-living stipends to account for the soaring price of housing in the state,” according to the Post. “Following the strikes, UC Santa Cruz agreed to increase housing stipends for teaching assistants.” Those assistants told the Post they commute hours for affordable housing. They, doubtless, are the lucky ones who actually have roofs over their heads.
One doctoral student described donating “blood plasma twice a week for roughly $200 in extra income.” Another teaching assistant mentioned skipping meals. So it’s no wonder that in August 2021 UAW “gained 17,000 student researchers, in the largest union victory of that year.” More recently, this month, “UAW announced that 97 percent of more than 36,000 workers who voted across the UC system had authorized an unfair labor practice strike.”
The UAW is now an old hand at organizing traditionally non-blue-collar workers. Years ago, as a UAW shop steward in the newspaper business, regularly filing grievances, I saw close up how this union works. People may complain about its performance lately in the more traditional automobile organizing field, but in journalism and academe, it has thrown desperate workers a life-line. The union officials who decided to expand in this way were prescient, correctly perceiving that employers who expect their underlings to survive on their jobs’ prestige exploit labor almost as badly as sweat shops. UAW’s expansion in these areas rescued a whole class of desperate employees. Lots of previously abused workers, who labor with their brains for a pittance, are grateful.
That’s why it was dismaying to read in Truthout December 2 that UAW negotiators told striking academics their original demands were “unreasonable.” This week, “the bargaining team sacrificed workers with disabilities, for zero concessions from UC and with zero accountability in addition to slashing child care in half and dropping dependent care,” according to Magally A. Miranda Alcazar, who cites other givebacks very unpopular with a rank and file now united under the banner of “No COLA, no contract!” The union hierarchy should listen to this protest. Especially at this dangerous juncture with the strike in its fourth week, and, as noted in the Guardian, management trying to split the strikers by dangling a decent offer to a smaller group of them, while leaving the largest cohort, that is grad students, out in the cold (literally). The union certainly has no business siding with the boss, not least because such a failure will only prolong the strike. The UAW must do what it’s there for: representing the interests of rank-and-file workers with unshakable solidarity. Anything else is a betrayal.
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