The University of California Teachers’ Union Disputes: “Unfair” Negotiations, the Labor Relations Board, and the Housing Costs of Graduate Students
Research has ground to a halt across the University of California (UC) as tens of thousands of postdoctoral researchers, graduate students and non-faculty academic staff members have gone on strike.
Demonstrators allege that the UC system has used unfair negotiating tactics. The union has filed more than 30 unfair-practice charges with California’s Public Employment Relations Board this year, alleging that UC has bypassed the official bargaining process, withheld information needed to bargain and intimidated union members. The board has issued complaints in 15 cases. The system remains committed to continuing its good faith efforts to reach agreements as quickly as possible, according to a spokesman for the university.
On November 15, the provost of the University of California sent a letter to UC leaders stating that he respects workers decision to strike and acknowledging the challenge of high housing costs in California. But the union’s request to tie compensation to housing costs “could have overwhelming financial impacts on the University”, he added.
According to a survey, salaries for doctorates in biological sciences aren’t as high as they should be. A wave of graduate students unionizations at universities has been the result of this frustration and many researchers are leaving to work outside of academia.
Academic workers had argued they could not afford to live in places such as Los Angeles, San Diego and Berkeley because of the high housing costs.
The University of California Student Student Labor Strikes: Pay and Benefits Increases for a Family-Style Persistence Agreement that Provides a Better Work Experience
The university has offered a more modest salary bump of less than 10% for the first year and a fixed 3% increase in each subsequent year, not directly tied to cost of living and with no set minimum salary.
Part of the pay discrepancy is that graduate students are classified as part-time workers who, on paper, do only 20 hours of work per week, with the rest of the time devoted to their studies. But for many, this does not reflect reality. She had classes for the first two years of her degree and has been doing research full time ever since. Ro Sandoval, a neuroscience graduate student at UC San Diego, says that every single graduate student they know works more than 40 hours per week.
Miranda started breeding a cohort of laboratory mice a few weeks before the strikes began. “If the strike goes on for much longer, I will have to not use all those animals I’ve prepared, and that probably sets me back around two months,” he says. “We all have to make sacrifices to our experimental timelines, but people are striking because they feel what we’re doing here is important.”
The strike was notable for its size and scale, but also because of what it could mean for other universities, said Tim Cain, associate professor of higher education at the University of Georgia. If graduate employees and researchers ratify the contracts, it could prompt similar changes at colleges that compete with UC or where graduate workers are organizing unions.
The pay hikes and boost in benefits could have an impact beyond California. For a number of decades, colleges and universities have relied on faculty and graduate student employees to do teaching and research that had previously been handled by tenured faculty, but with no pay or benefits.
“These agreements will place our graduate student employees among the best supported in public higher education,” Michael V. Drake, president of the University of California, said in a news release Friday. If approved, these contracts will allow us to attract the top academic talent from across California and around the world.
The strike at the University of California is the largest strike of academic workers in higher education according to William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education.
Just this year, graduate student employees at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Clark University, Fordham University, New Mexico State University, Washington State University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute all voted in favor of unionization.
“There’s a fundamental shift in who’s doing the academic work in higher education,” Cain said. Wages for graduate students haven’t kept up over time, and many are struggling to find full-time faculty jobs.