In the biggest national strike of the year, 48,000 Academic Workers are on week four of their strike across the ten campus University of California system. The bargaining units include academic and post doctoral researchers, and graduate students teaching assistants. These are the workers who teach classes, lead discussion groups, labs, and tutoring sessions, do the bulk of day to day research tasks, grade papers and exams, and keep the university running. The workers, represented by UAW 5810, UAW 2865 and the newly-formed SRU-UAW, are simultaneously bargaining for four contracts.  

UC has reached tentative agreements with 2 units, the postdocs and academic researchers, who are about a quarter of the striking workers. However, they have not returned to work out of solidarity with the workers who have yet to settle. These 36,000 workers who are still bargaining appear to be far from a deal. Bargaining has entered a “stalemate” for the UAW 2865, which represents teaching assistants, readers and tutors.

If the negotiations continue without movement, it’s likely that the strike will continue past the end of the quarter Friday and past the grading deadline of Dec. 14. Grad students are not proctoring exams, grading exams or papers, or compiling final grades. Standing firm until the end of term and refusing to submit grades is a powerful move that puts pressure on UC management at its most vulnerable point. 

At the top of their joint demand is more money—a lot more. Graduate teaching assistants earn about $24,000 a year, but they want up to $54,000, more than twice as much as they now make. And all the strikers demand healthcare coverage for dependents and child-care reimbursements.  

A 10-9 majority of bargaining-team members for UAW 2865 last week voted to lower their base pay demand from $54,000 to $43,000, dropped the demand for dependent health care coverage and lowered their demand for child care reimbursement from $6,000 to $3,300 per quarter. 

The average UC worker spends more than half their income on rent. Some of them sleep out of their cars, work two or three jobs, take on credit and student loan debt, and/or commute from hours away. The extremely expensive California housing costs and inflationary spiral further exacerbate cost of living expenses.

Graduate school should be affordable to everyone, but the exploitative low wages mean that working class students, single parents, and disabled students are driven out. “A lack of support for parent-workers forces too many people out of academia and contributes to a crisis in gender equity at UC,” according to the union.  “In academia, an impoverished apprenticeship was once considered a brief prelude to a more secure and prosperous career. But that promise has been utterly discounted by the university itself, which has constructed an enterprise model that requires a huge class of precarious adjuncts to toil alongside a shrinking number of tenured professors who receive high prestige and pay.”

“Financial struggles are especially unsustainable for disadvantaged student workers who often come from underrepresented backgrounds or are the first in their families to attend college. It is unconscionable to allow such hardship within a university system that claims to prioritize increasing diversity among workers, to serve an increasingly diverse student body.”

The University of California has a $152 Billion dollar endowment fund. California is the richest state in the richest country in the world. Yet this state-funded institution has created a financial situation that makes it increasingly difficult for working class students to work in academia. Students from wealthy families write checks to pay for their tuition, fees, and living expenses. Working class students take out loans. That means they are paying massively more for their education, as year after year the interest on their debt accumulates.

The grad students’ resistance to their exploitation by the prestigious UC system entailed exhaustive organizing, training strike captains, creating committees in every dept, and teaching workplace leaders how to have organizing conversations. The energy and skills they developed to resist the unlawful and bad faith bargaining by UC is a model that teachers can use to organize in their locals and across the state to fight for decent wages and working conditions.

Mary Flanagan    

  UTR retired