University of California News
Academic staff members at universities across California have been on strike for three weeks. Assignments are not graded, and labs are closed. Graduate students have quit their jobs, teachers have called off classes, and even workers on construction sites have put down their tools in support.
The strike is historic—it is the biggest in the history of US higher education and it is a result of a nationwide organizing movement on college campuses. It has brought together 48,000 graduate employees, academic researchers, and postdoctoral scholars from the nine-campus University of California system who claim that the low wages they are paid make living in the cities where they work not an option for them. The academic worker’s unions report that $23,247 is the average salary for graduate employees.
Even after a year of prominent labor organizing at places like Starbucks and Amazon, the occasion is being hailed as a turning point. It has already achieved success by reaching a tentative agreement with some employees, which will result in significant wage rises, and it could continue for further weeks.
The UC employees are fighting for higher pay because they claim that their current earnings make it hard for them to live in the cities where they work, as well as childcare reimbursements and job security protections. They are represented by UAW 5810, UAW 2865, and SRU-UAW. Academic workers claim that it is difficult for them to pay their rent in areas of California where the housing crisis is severe; others claim to live in their cars. This stress has led to some academic workers quitting their jobs completely.
The vice president of UAW Local 5800, Sarah Arveson, a postdoctoral researcher at UC Berkeley, said, We continue to experience earnings that are incomparably below the cost of living in the cities where our UC campuses are located, and we genuinely feel it.
The strike, which started on November 14, has already yielded positive results; this week, the UC system reached a settlement with postdoctoral researchers and academics, agreeing to pay increases of up to 29%.
According to Arveson, many workers rely on these wage increases. With the new agreement, Daniel McKeown, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Irvine, has a much better chance of being able to continue his career in academia and eventually hold the position of professor.
The 39-year-old, who spent five years fighting to make ends meet as a doctoral student, has two kids, a doctorate in physics, and more than $100,000 in debt. McKeown’s job as a teaching assistant consumed a lot of his time and interfered with his studies, but because he was paid so little, he said he had to rely on loans to make ends meet.
“I find it quite frustrating that despite my efforts, all I have to show for it is an additional $100,000 in debt. I’m sorry about that. I wonder if taking on that debt was worth it,” he remarked.”We received unjust treatment on every level and were put in a precarious financial situation against our will. Never was it a fair transaction.
Instead, he observed colleagues being compelled to quit the industry for positions with higher salaries: “We get all this training and we just end up working for Microsoft. Many of us in physics have been forced out of fields where we wanted to continue working and conducting research but couldn’t afford to.
McKeown is hoping he and other postdoctoral academics and academic researchers will be able to continue working in the fields they love thanks to the income increases coming their way.
Long-term, everyone will benefit from this, he said. It will also be a victory and reinforce the educational system as we currently know it.
Academic researchers and postdoctoral scholars are still on strike in support of other workers, such as graduate students, who are still at odds with the university system, which the workers allege of unfair labor practices. According to the UC, their offer to student workers is “fair and generous” and would put academic employees “near the top of the salary spectrum among the country’s finest public universities.”
The institution has set a minimum wage of $28,275 for graduate student researchers and $24,874 for academic student employees, emphasizing that these positions are exclusively part-time. All graduate employees must earn a minimum wage of $54,000, according to the strikers.
Student Researchers United’s bargaining team member and UC Davis graduate student Ximena Anleu Gil claim that the university system has failed to make a sincere offer on pay.
Anleu Gil, a person with a disability, claims that she has had to live with numerous roommates, rely on assistance from her parents in Guatemala, and pay rent for the duration of her graduate studies.
“The existing setup cannot continue. We’re just frustrated that the UC is still not taking this matter seriously despite the extremely sensible solution we’re offering to them to help save workers from a hazardous scenario.
Most professors and students are saying, they just want to study and do their research again normally like they used to do earlier.
The University of California strike coincides with a rise in US labor mobilization following the epidemic, notably in higher education. Given anticipates that the UC workers will score significant victories that will have an impact on colleges all throughout the US.
Higher education employees all around the nation will use this as an example of what can be achieved through collective action as well as a new minimum wage requirement where workers demand a decent wage, she said. A university cannot be established if its employees do not receive a living salary.
But why has the protest erupted?
Following months of stalled negotiations between the UC system and the United Auto Workers, protests have taken place.
The UAW’s fundamental demands include a minimum pay of $54,000 for graduate students and a minimum salary of $70,000 for postdocs, with annual modifications based on level of experience and cost of living. The union is also asking for an extra two weeks of paid parental leave and a monthly reimbursement of $2,000 for child care.
The counter-offer from the UC system has been less generous. For postdocs, the offer includes a new compensation scale with an average 7.5% raise over the prior one, as well as a yearly child care reimbursement of up to $2,500. Additionally, UC offers graduate students a salary rise of 9% to 10% in the first year of a new contract, followed by an average annual increase of 3%. This offer also covers tuition and other university costs.
In a statement published online, the university system stated that it “believes its proposals have been fair, reasonable, and attentive to the union’s interests” and that it “looks forward to continuing negotiations with the UAW and completing these contracts as swiftly as possible.”
The statewide strike is focused on many of the same issues that have completely expelled life science professionals from university, a seismic move that STAT News recently covered in a special story. Less life science Ph.D. graduates are doing postdocs and more of them are jumping into lucrative industry professions as a result of the growth of the private sector.
Students generally worry that if they strike they will be fired or penalized in some other way. Some academics, nevertheless, are openly in favor of the strike. One of them is Kay Tye. Graduate students from UCSD are a part of Tye’s neuroscience lab at the Salk Institute, and she has informed them that as long as there is a strike, there would be no opportunity for scientific discussion at lab sessions.
The exact duration of these protests is unknown. Most of the work that keeps university labs running is done by postdocs and graduate students. Organizations like Tye’s won’t be able to do much without their labor. Workers on strike will only receive $400 a week, barely enough to get by.
Researchers in the field of life sciences and their peers from other departments are placing bets on their ability to outlast the UC system. That theory will be tested in the days and weeks to come.
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