This week, across the University of California’s 10 campuses, many classes have been canceled or shifted to Zoom and research has stalled. Roughly 48,000 teaching assistants, student and academic researchers, and postdocs hit the picket line on Monday, calling for increased pay and better benefits.
Given the UC system’s size, the scale of the strike is significant. United Auto Workers, the labor union representing the UC employees, says it is the largest work stoppage at any higher-education institution in history. If it continues, the strike could also disrupt final exams.
Many academic workers told The Chronicle that the disruption is necessary to pressure the university system to raise their pay. They said their current salaries fall well below the cost of living in California, one of the most expensive states.
Some teaching assistants are making just over $23,000 a year, and 40 percent of graduate workers reported spending more than half of their income on rent, according to a union survey. Their other demands include sustainable transportation benefits, reimbursements for childcare and international scholars’ visa fees, and improved disability accommodations.
Some graduate students said the working conditions have made them consider leaving academe altogether. And professors said they’re worried they won’t be able to attract researchers to the UC system.
Union efforts among academic workers have picked up over the last decade, including many organizing campaigns and strikes since the pandemic hit. At the University of Kansas, 1,500 workers announced on Tuesday that they intended to unionize, which would establish the first-ever union at the institution. Adjunct professors at New York University and the New School could soon go on strike. Graduate students at Yale University will vote on unionization later this month. Workers are bargaining for better working conditions and wages, especially since inflation has increased their financial stress.
The quality of education that we’re able to offer also suffers when we’re struggling to make rent.
All UC-system campuses will remain open during the strike, a university spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Chronicle, and “have been preparing to mitigate the impact of any strike activity on our students by ensuring, to the extent possible, continuity of instruction and research.” The system is encouraging faculty members to provide additional support and resources to students during the strike, the spokesperson said.
“Additionally, campuses will be prepared for contingencies should a strike interfere with the conclusion of the academic term,” the statement added.
University-system officials believe the best path to an agreement with the union is through a third-party mediator, a spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Chronicle on Monday afternoon, which they have proposed to the United Auto Workers.
‘Plant the Seeds for Sustainable Reform’
Some faculty members said they’ve been left with questions about how to maintain “continuity” and proceed with their courses, as well as what right they have to respect picket lines amid the strike. Meanwhile, other instructors have canceled classes and paused their research in solidarity with the striking workers.
The Council of the University of California Faculty Associations, which is an umbrella group for faculty associations across the UC system, recently published a guide informing faculty of their right under California law to abstain from teaching and research in order to not to cross the picket line.
“It’s not the striking workers that are hurting undergraduates’ ability to learn,” said Charmaine Chua, an assistant professor of global studies at UC-Santa Barbara. “It is the university’s refusal to pay workers enough to live here that is harming undergraduate students’ ability to learn.”
Grad students said they hope the strike helps university officials realize how much they contribute to the university.
“We do the vast majority of instructional work and research at UC,” said Yunyi Li, a Ph.D. candidate in cinema and media studies and a teaching fellow at UCLA. Li also holds a leadership role in UAW 2865, one of the branches within United Auto Workers.
Li said this semester marks her ninth time working as a teaching assistant. She chose to live 10 miles away from UCLA’s campus, where rent was more affordable. Still, to pay her rent, she has had to work a second job and apply for awards and fellowships.
“The quality of education that we’re able to offer also suffers when we’re struggling to make rent,” Li said. “There were definitely times where, given the salary and working conditions, it has made me want to leave academia.”
Bernard Remollino, a graduate-student researcher and teaching assistant at UCLA, lived out of his car from 2018 to 2019, struggling to find safe parking spots every night while juggling his dissertation and teaching responsibilities. Before moving into his car, Remollino said he had to funnel 80 percent of his stipend back into covering rent for the graduate-student housing offered by the university. Sometimes, he had to decide between setting aside money for rent and eating dinner on a given night.
Remollino has now moved into an apartment that he shares with his partner. But he’s making just enough to get by — and that’s with a second job as an adjunct professor at a community college.
“We’re definitely not only doing this for the present moment,” Remollino said. “We’re trying to plant the seeds for sustainable reform within the university system.”
Faculty Voice Support
Since the strike began, research that is primarily conducted by graduate students has been put on hold. That includes important cancer experiments at the University of California at San Francisco, faculty members said.
Noelle L’Etoile, an associate professor in the department of cell and tissue biology at UCSF, said she believes a majority of faculty members support the union’s demands, particularly increasing wages. But L’Etoile worries about where the funding will come from. In her lab, graduate workers’ pay comes out of grants from the National Institutes of Health — “static amounts of money,” L’Etoille said. She wishes the university would find a way to help pay for higher wages.
If poor working conditions aren’t fixed, professors will struggle to hire graduate workers, she said.
“Our jobs are on the line because we can’t recruit students and postdocs to do the jobs that we need them to do,” L’Etoile said. “Because they could go elsewhere.”
Margot Bezrutczyk, a union member who works as a postdoc at the UC-managed Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, worries about how the strike will affect the lab’s research in the short term. But the low pay, she said, is leading to high turnover.
“It really hurts the quality of research that we can do in the lab,” Bezrutczyk said. “If people were paid a salary that they felt comfortable with, we would be able to keep people longer, finish projects, and get better papers.”
On Monday, Tobias Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies at UCLA and a director of the Institute for Research on Labor and Employment, attended a rally in the afternoon. While walking across UCLA’s campus, he saw picket lines surrounding academic buildings.
“A lot of faculty support the strike. They understand there are deep structural problems with the way we fund higher education,” Higbie said, “and that the way the graduate assistants are paid is a real problem and a long standing problem.”
At the UCLA rally, graduate workers carried picket signs and marched in a circle around the campus’s central plaza. At UC-Santa Barbara, students and workers marched around campus for over an hour; at one point they came through the campus library, where undergraduates cheered them on.
“This generation is kind of throwing down the gauntlet for the older folks to reimagine what higher education could be like,” Higbie said.
