Largest higher education strike in the United States to begin Monday

November 11, 2022 10:21 AM

This monday a multi-unit strike comprised of 48,000 student employees (TA's, student researchers, and post-docs) will be held across all UC campuses. The average TA salary in the UC system is $24,000. The students are bargaining for Cost of Living Adjustments (COLA), the ability to add dependents to their university healthcare, job stability, and parity for international students, among other demands. University administration referred to these demands in a letter to their staff as part of the unions "social justice agenda".

The union has also accused the university of myriad Unfair Labor Practices.

Here are the answers to some FAQ's about the strike, and a link to support the strike fund.

posted by dreyfusfinucane (54 comments total)

Give them hell! I have a friend who is going back to Berkeley to caucus with the strikers this week and I am in full support.

The persistent classification of graduate students as glorified trainees instead of workers that provide skilled labor in their own right is garbage. The fact that institutions and senior academics alike can both lecture graduate students about professionalism and argue, with a straight face, that students only work 20hrs per week is absurd.

As I said: give em hell!
posted by sciatrix at 10:35 AM on November 11, 2022 [21 favorites]

University administration referred to these demands in a letter to their staff as part of the unions "social justice agenda".

It's weird to me that people see the term "social justice" and think "ew." I don't know how people can not be behind social justice. It's like drinkable water, or life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: how do you look at those and go, "not for me, thanks, I'd rather things be as shitty as possible for the greatest number of people, always and forever."

Maybe we need to bring back scarlet letters, only now the A would stand for Asshole.
posted by nushustu at 10:35 AM on November 11, 2022 [14 favorites]

Good for them. I support this 100%

I am an adjunct for a class this semester (it is a one credit hour class w/ premade curriculum so there wasn't much prep for me) that's on-site 1.25 hours a week plus all the normal stuff teachers do. I will receive 1,000 for the semester. It is averaging out to about 5 hours a week of work, which isn't a lot, but that averages out to 12.5 dollars an hour to teach a 16 week semester. That is literally less than the Chicago minimum wage. I would do better financially working or doing pretty much anything else. I'm enjoying it, but it's not something I will be able to continue or pursue seriously as a career.
posted by AlexiaSky at 10:56 AM on November 11, 2022 [6 favorites]

The grad student TAs at my son's university joined the Teamsters and went on strike for five days in October. And got the pay raises (90% increase) and subsidized health care they wanted. They couldn't afford apartments in Worcester, MA and were struggling to eat. I supported them 100% and I hope these students get what they need.
posted by ceejaytee at 10:59 AM on November 11, 2022 [18 favorites]

I hope this works out and actually gets results. The last big strike that I recall unfortunately started winter 2020 and basically failed for that, plus people being unapologetically fired at the start of a pandemic. It's disgusting how the people working at the big city schools in particular can't even afford housing.
posted by jenfullmoon at 11:07 AM on November 11, 2022 [6 favorites]

As secretary to my (non-California) faculty/staff union local, let me say: SOLIDARITY.
posted by humbug at 11:30 AM on November 11, 2022 [5 favorites]

Strike! Strike! Strike!

Shout out to my friends in the UC labor movement past and present (mostly past, at this point, since folks have graduated and moved and made other career choices, some in the labor field). Many hard lessons learned in Santa Cruz and Davis in the 2008-2012 period.
posted by Lawn Beaver at 12:25 PM on November 11, 2022 [6 favorites]

Anyone heading to Cal Berkeley campus to join the picket line HMU! I'm working but will squeeze in a couple visits for sure would love to meet up!
posted by latkes at 1:39 PM on November 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Oh hey! One of my students will be in this strike. UC-AFT did such a nice job negotiating a contract for lecturers etc. last year, I hope this has a similar result.
posted by feckless at 1:58 PM on November 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

Excellent! I wish we had organized like this when I was a TA.
posted by k8bot at 3:09 PM on November 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Good luck, UC people!

(Where's the Inside Higher Ed and Chronicle coverage?)
posted by doctornemo at 3:13 PM on November 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

Hell yeah. Solidarity forever!
posted by biogeo at 3:36 PM on November 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

It is boggling to me that anyone who ever was a TA, RA, or post-doc can look at the current system and say "This is fine". And as an associate professor in GA I get paid less than some UC post-docs. Solidarity.
posted by hydropsyche at 4:10 PM on November 11, 2022 [6 favorites]

As a former UC grad student and lecturer and veteran of past UC strikes: solidarity forever.
posted by socialjusticeworrier at 4:41 PM on November 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

I am so thrilled to strike on Monday at Davis!!!!!! It has been a financial nightmare to be a graduate student at the UC level.
posted by yueliang at 4:53 PM on November 11, 2022 [17 favorites]

(Where's the Inside Higher Ed and Chronicle coverage?)

....you mean, the publications that are functionally the same pseudo liberal, functionally conservative types of outlets as the NYT or WaPo? I'm sure they're shaking their heads and tut-tutting about the presumptions of the youth behind their editorial columns.

Seriously, I would be very surprised (and gratified!) to see them commenting positively on a student-led strike. Graduate students are not and have never been their constituent audience, you know?
posted by sciatrix at 5:38 PM on November 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

Hell yeah yueliang!!
posted by latkes at 5:48 PM on November 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

social justice agenda

Good for them. That’s what all unions should strive for, in my opinion (as a faculty union member and rep).

Solidarity, yueliang! Give ‘em hell!
posted by hurdy gurdy girl at 6:25 PM on November 11, 2022 [4 favorites]

I was a TA at Berkeley about 20 years ago, and at that time my salary was around 18K. Making ends meet was certainly tough. It's mind-boggling that 20 years later, and after all the rent inflation in California, the average TA salary is currently only 24K!

Still, the union's request for salaries of 54K is wildly out of touch with what can be considered realistic in this universe. Even fancy private universities, which attract graduate students partly on the basis of offering cushy accommodations, don't pay that much, even after adjusting for cost of living. Maybe graduate students actually deserve 54K a year for part-time work, but by asking for that kind of pay in the current environment, the union is making itself look unreasonable. Having their representatives sprinkle in quotes like "we do basically all of the research" also does not help them look non-oblivious. I'm saying this as someone who belonged to that union, back in the day, and participated in strikes of my own.
posted by epimorph at 6:51 PM on November 11, 2022

They do perform almost all of the research. The exceptions are mostly postdocs and techs, which are far less common and even more precarious. Look, when was the last time you saw a PI actually engaging in data collection or running an experiment personally?

Also, LOL at the notion that the research I performed in grad school wasn't labor, or even that it wasn't labor that materially benefited the career of my advisor and my university. Graduate students are not part time workers, and the labor they perform goes above and beyond teaching assistantship duties. I don't care what bullshit the university uses to treat graduate students like undergraduates in classes rather than skilled workers the moment it's convenient: in terms of the expectations of work and in terms of what is actually expected out of a graduate student worker, they are in no way meaningfully "part-time."

If grants or departments can't pay salaries that acknowledge that graduate student research is labor, they should be petitioning funding bodies to consider funding positions that aren't inherently temporary at wages that a person could reasonably expect to live on for an extended period of time. As it is, institutions are exploiting graduate student workers by pretending that data collection and experiment execution isn't labor, often hard labor.

Someone has to force change, and it damn sure isn't coming from above without a fight. Those students aren't the people who are oblivious to the realities of academic research labor, I can tell you that.
posted by sciatrix at 7:00 PM on November 11, 2022 [15 favorites]

Epimorph, the average rent for a studio in Davis in 2022 is $1800. My friend has been homeless for six months and was recently offered to pay $1200 for a single room with no access to the kitchen, and was given a hot plate. For us doing 20 hours a week as a TA, we are only allowed to get paid $2000 BEFORE taxes a month, and graduate students do not qualify for most emergency aid in UCs bc it's earmarked for undergrad students. Also the current demands of being a graduate student are so extreme that 20 years ago, a graduate student would be considered a washout to what is currently required.

It's even worse and nearing $3k in other areas. You being a TA 20 years ago seriously is so out of touch with how dire it is to be a graduate student right now...even our staff and lower ladder admins can't afford to live here with current wages either.
posted by yueliang at 7:12 PM on November 11, 2022 [11 favorites]

Also to contrast, in 2006, a 2 bedroom in Davis was $800. My 2 bedroom in 2011 was $1100, what is it today? It's $2400.
posted by yueliang at 7:26 PM on November 11, 2022 [7 favorites]

Have y'all gotten any cost of living increase? We got exactly one during my eight years in Austin, during which my one bedroom apartment rent went from $550/mo to about $950 when I moved away. I see it's $1100 now. The rent would go up every year by about $100/mo without fail; the one COLA increase we got when I was in third or fourth year was iirc about enough to pay one of those rent hikes.

I applied to Davis during grad school applications and wound up going "no" because I was horrified by the financial instability in the UC system even then, and that was ten years ago now! Not surprised to hear it's worse now. Depressed, but not surprised.
posted by sciatrix at 7:31 PM on November 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

I do not believe so. Our COLA protest, which I was involved with a little bit, collapsed when the pandemic hit because it was literally the same quarter in 2020. 54 brave souls at UCSC also got fired when they withheld student grades as a COLA protest, but it's been brewing for years.
posted by yueliang at 7:37 PM on November 11, 2022 [1 favorite]

"Tell me your university doesn’t pay a liveable wage without telling me..I’ll go first: they offered free Thanksgiving meals to grad students and so many ppl signed up now they are lotterying the meals bc they don’t have enough for everyone
@UCRiverside @AcademicChatter" https://twitter.com/JohannaNajera/status/1590853268661731328
posted by yueliang at 7:39 PM on November 11, 2022 [3 favorites]

UC Berkeley’s own average student budget estimate has more than doubled compared to twenty years ago.
posted by mbrubeck at 7:46 PM on November 11, 2022

I think the issue with "social justice agenda" in this context is that it's intended as dismissive. While the negotiating agenda of a union could have a social justice value, it's fundamentally about labor rights and it's more particular to the relationship between management and labour. Social justice as a term, I'd suggest, generally refers to broader societal moral obligations, rather than the obligations that are particular to a labor relationship. In describing it as a social justice agenda, it seems to me that management is trying to undermine the idea that these are legitimate demands in the context of this employment relationship. It's like they're trying to say that the union has just adopted tenets of a broader societal agenda that are not legitimate or relevant demands in the employment relationship. Just based on the description of those demands here, it really doesn't seem as though that is the case.
posted by lookoutbelow at 7:55 PM on November 11, 2022 [2 favorites]

They do perform almost all of the research.

Research is about more than lab work and data collection. You shouldn't discount the work that goes into building up the knowledge to set an effective research agenda, advising grad students, writing grant proposals, building out researcher networks, dealing with the administrative overhead all that creates, etc.

yueliang: I do sympathize, very much. All I'm saying is that the union might have gotten farther by asking for something that was even theoretically achievable, however inadequate that might have been.
posted by epimorph at 11:03 PM on November 11, 2022

Another perspective to park at UCLA (I mention this because I went there and ended up leaving) currently costs $266.30 per quarter. To pay for parking for a school year on 24,000 a year salary is literally over 3 percent of their wages.

And that doesn't include having a place to live off course... or a car. But the fact is that wages are so out of step with prices that being able to do normal everyday things is absolutely out of reach. PLUS playing for the privilege of just being in school.
posted by AlexiaSky at 7:23 AM on November 12, 2022

@epimorph :

I am biased as a current graduate student at UCLA but I think the wage increase is more reasonable than it seems at first glance. Academic student employees make up 30% of the uc workforce but 1% of its budget. 54k would bring it to 3% of their budget. Obviously there will be some negotiation between the two sides.

My department, and many other departments, are for the union wage increases because the cost for student researchers would be passed onto funding agencies. As it’s been explained to me by faculty, grants are based on merit not cost so our advisors just tell nsf the cost of employing a graduate student and they receive that. Plus, the UC takes 30% of all grant money so they will receive more grant money if our salaries result in grant budgets being higher.

We will see how it plays out though! It’s a bit nerve wracking to ask for so much but hopefully it makes our workplace a better place.
posted by dreyfusfinucane at 7:52 AM on November 12, 2022 [10 favorites]

I think it's very strange to be concerned about asking for a "reasonable demand" when the UC has been offering us really pathetic things like a 3-7% increase on our current wage suppressed pay during the most recent negotiation. The UC is not reasonable and clearly is banking off obfuscating its own financial position.

There are lots of strong cases for why asking for 54k is reasonable, especially if you look at the union efforts of other universities over the past year, I respectfully ask for you to do a little more research and ask some more questions that could better help us on the Blue explain why and what we are asking for this, rather than just insisting it isn't a good ask.
posted by yueliang at 8:08 AM on November 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

Glad to see the research assistants (generally sciences) and teaching assistants (generally humanities) have joined forces, there was always a weird tension there.

When I was TAing at UCLA the university consistently reported my health insurance as a "scholarship" / 1099-T and not a regular employment benefit from a UAW contract, literally the only time I had to pay taxes on my health insurance. The administration didn't care.
posted by nfultz at 8:16 AM on November 12, 2022 [3 favorites]

Additionally, being more sympathetic to the duties of tenure track faculty is all fine and good, but actually my professors are crushed by how mistreated we are as graduate students bc it also hurts their own research and teaching productivity, and it makes it more difficult to recruit students to the UCs and to their programs, hurts retention and also hurts the overall quality and reputation of the programs. They try to find other ways of increasing funding, but it's a rotten system all the way down and it's so founded on our exploitation.

Also, there are so many hidden fees on us because the UC conveniently determines whether we are labor or students, depending on whatever squeezes more money and labor out of us. I'm not really sure you understand what it is like to be here currently, despite you saying you are sympathetic.
posted by yueliang at 8:16 AM on November 12, 2022 [8 favorites]

"It is boggling to me that anyone who ever was a TA, RA, or post-doc can look at the current system and say "This is fine""

I agree. I had similar thoughts when I was a grad student at Michigan, and participated in two big job actions, including a strike. We heard horror stories about how Yale quashed their TA union and punished its leaders.

As a prof, labor around me has always been important to me - TAs, student assistants, office support, ed tech teams, etc.

But for others?

Part of it is an unwillingness to rock the boat.

Part seems to be the hyperfocus on one's research. This rapidly imposes blinders, including on how one's institution works.

Some seems to be a mix of hazing and Stockholm Syndrome, plus the old, unkillable, medieval idea of academia as a punishing calling.

And some academics - including staff - don't identify much with their campus. Instead, they see themselves as members of a global profession (French instructors, etc), and look to labor issues there.
posted by doctornemo at 10:35 AM on November 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

....you mean, the publications that are functionally the same pseudo liberal, functionally conservative types of outlets as the NYT or WaPo? I'm sure they're shaking their heads and tut-tutting about the presumptions of the youth behind their editorial columns.

Seriously, I would be very surprised (and gratified!) to see them commenting positively on a student-led strike. Graduate students are not and have never been their constituent audience, you know?

I agree about grad students never being their core audience.

I'm not sure I agree about IHE on this front, at least not based on my conversations with the editors and many reporters.

But I'm surprised they haven't covered it yet at all, beyond potential tone of coverage. IHE does cover labor actions of all kinds. Heck, they could at least do one of their Quick Takes or Live Updates. I'm not sure about the Chronicle lately on this.

If things do kick off in two days, I bet both will write something.

NB: I haven't checked IHE and Chronicle reporters' Twitter feeds, where they might have said or shared something.
posted by doctornemo at 10:39 AM on November 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

All I'm saying is that the union might have gotten farther by asking for something that was even theoretically achievable, however inadequate that might have been.

This is a common and understandable perspective! But 40 years of union decline has some lessons for us. You can divide the US labor movement into 3 phases IMHO:

1) Initial militant periods - extremely radical, creative, confrontational. Production-stopping strikes, dept. level work stoppages to demand resolution to immediate disagreements were the methods utilized to exert power and win huge gains (amid lots of contention and frequent violence!). Demands were 'extreme' and 'radical' by the measure of the day. Literally no one would have believed the 8 hour day was possible - won only through decades of struggle and deaths of dozens of labor martyrs. Period basically ends with the New Deal: The government steps in to enforce "labor peace" and reduce the utter chaos and class war.
2) The war and post-war boom periods of labor peace, enforced by federal regulation. In this period of enormous spending and growth, employers are willing to play ball, and allow annual raises etc knowing that profits will still increase. Strikes and workplace action are still the way we win things. Even union leaders with 'conservative' politics universally understand the need for militant, workplace action and for bold demands. We ask big, and then we sometimes compromise for a more modest win. Things are pretty cool till the 70s.
3) the Labor contraction/the age of labor compromise. As federal regulations steadily weaken, employers get bolder and flex THIER power, and manufacturing is moved to unregulated overseas markets, union power precipitously declines. A new set of leaders decide that the only way we can survive is compromise. Unions negotiate concessionary contracts, 'two-tier' contracts where new hires lose, unions increasingly describe themselves as 'partners' in the public sector and back away from confrontational tactics and strong demands. We lose accordingin to all measures - less money, less benefits, less rights, less power over our working conditions.

At no point in ANY of these stages were our rights won in the court of public opinion: Our biggest wins come when we muster power- traditionally by stopping production at work, less effectively, by mobilizing government intervention.

We have forgotten our biggest winning periods - stage 1 - and come to see the possibilities for our lives at work as small, constrained. We have internalized the idea we should be quiet and polite and dream small. But our strategy during stage 3 has completely failed. We are losing. There's no evidence that asking for less from the start would help us win. We need to demand big. If you start from compromise, you end with nothing. If you demand big (but have some realism in your mind you know that big demand will often end somewhere in the middle. The amount we can win depends not on our style or affect, but on how much real power we can build.
posted by latkes at 11:01 AM on November 12, 2022 [10 favorites]

In all negotiating, if one side shows up with a low offer, to the extent of being insulting, you can't respond with conciliation and compromise, or you will get trampled on. Sometimes you need to highlight your strength, value and leverage (strike). Only then can the real compromising began.
posted by lookoutbelow at 3:31 PM on November 12, 2022 [4 favorites]

> My department, and many other departments, are for the union wage increases because the cost for student researchers would be passed onto funding agencies. As it’s been explained to me by faculty, grants are based on merit not cost so our advisors just tell nsf the cost of employing a graduate student and they receive that.

That's absolutely not correct for the NIH, the biggest source of science funding in the US. There are a bunch of institute-specific differences, and differences related to specific funding types, but broadly, the bread-and-butter NIH grant is an R01, and those have specific budget ranges (for a standard "modular" R01: ~$250k/year) that do not increase with inflation, meaning their effective funding level has been dropping annually for decades now. (A post by the pseudonymous Drug Monkey, who's been discussing this for ages; more discussion by Datahound, highlighting that the norm in some institutes is actually more like $200k/year.) There is no post hoc mechanism I am aware of that allows for grant size increases on an existing grant due to increased grad student and postdoc salaries/stipends; that money will thus come from everything else the grant funds (i.e. research.) In some cases NIH funding cannot be used to top up trainee stipends above NRSA levels when the trainees are funded by NIH fellowships. Here's a Drug Monkey thread with PIs discussing this in the context of a recent UW funding push. There are some possible workarounds, but they are complicated and not guaranteed. So no, some of the most common types of grants are cost-limited (and getting more limited every year), and there can be are additional complications in paying trainees above certain levels at all.

I'm a little less familiar with the full range of NSF and DOE funding mechanisms, but I know, for example, that the NSF CAREER awards for new faculty in many directorates tend to be awarded near the minimum budget ($400-500k for 5 years), and applicants are instructed to discuss potential budgets with program officers before applying to make sure their budget is "realistic", both of which suggest there is pressure towards cost-aware apps (i.e. it's not just merit, entirely independent of cost) - while the stipend limits may not be as explicit as the NIH's, that implies that increasing budget requests may nevertheless affect the chances of receiving an award. Many other funding sources (foundations, etc.) also have specific award amounts, whether or not they have stipend limits, so they are likely to face the same "same budget, more money needed for researchers, less available for science" problem that the NIH grants do.

In other words, it's actually going to be a major challenge for many PIs to fund this, because their current and future grants are unlikely to do an adequate job of accommodating significant jumps in trainee compensation unless there are major changes on the funding agency side. (And without more congressional funding for federal agencies, those changes might end up meaning larger grants going to fewer people, which will not help the lack of academic jobs for grad students and postdocs.) Don't get me wrong, I'm a postdoc at an institution where the grad students are unionized and the postdocs are looking into it, and I'm absolutely in support of both unionization and improved compensation and benefits! The weird student/employee and trainee/employee gray areas that grad students and postdocs inhabit are exploitative and untenable, and in high cost of living areas, things get utterly nuts. But it's also important to be realistic about the effects this will have, and the answer is not "funding agencies will cover the difference because they fund things based on merit not cost, so it won't be a problem." They won't cover the difference, particularly in the short term, and it will be a problem, likely one that hits the younger and/or less well-off labs first and worst. (I'd personally be in favor of a push to make universities themselves cover the difference, but that's an even bigger lift than making them agree to an increase they can make their faculty figure out how to cover. And on top of that, I'd really love to figure out how to support pushes for reform at the NIH and NSF and DOE and increased funding at the congressional level (and while I'm making congressional-level requests, I'd like fellowships to count as earned income for social security etc., and also a pony). But those are all going to be even longer battles, I'm afraid.)
posted by ASF Tod und Schwerkraft at 4:16 PM on November 12, 2022 [2 favorites]

I am biased as a current graduate student at UCLA but I think the wage increase is more reasonable than it seems at first glance. Academic student employees make up 30% of the uc workforce but 1% of its budget. 54k would bring it to 3% of their budget.

Solidarity!

Another perspective: the CA state budget was running a nearly $100B surplus of a $300B total budget.

$100B is just a ridiculous amount of money (2.7 twitters!) and enough that one could, for each of the 50,000 graduate students, set up a $2M endowment, put that money in the bank, and use the interest alone to pay them the $54k.


Another comparison:

Many of these UC graduate students have Masters degrees (or equivalent - they could drop out of their Ph.D. program with a "terminal masters").

With a Masters you could go teach at a "lesser" school such as one of the 23 CSU (California State University) campuses as an Adjunct. Minimum adjunct pay is $4530/month for full-time work, but this is on a 9 month AY scehedule, so is really worth more like $72k annualized.

Why should a masters-level having UC graduate student make $24k teaching at UC when they could drive across town (ok, more likely walk, or take the bus, given their precarious situation) and make about 3x as much teaching at Cal State?
posted by soylent00FF00 at 5:31 PM on November 12, 2022 [6 favorites]

Editorial: A strike by UC academic workers would tarnish the prestigious university system

(In spite of the ambiguous title, the OpEd is basically supportive of the students)
posted by soylent00FF00 at 7:02 PM on November 12, 2022 [1 favorite]

Solidarity to yueliang and everyone else taking industrial action at UC. Will be wishing you luck from our own university picket lines very soon. For institutions ostensibly committed to literal facts and honest arguments, universities sure are creative with their bullshit. All the best to all y'all.
posted by busted_crayons at 5:43 AM on November 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

I know I'm late to the conversation but I have found this attitude of administrators baffling for all of the 20+ years I've worked in academia. I really, really want to pay the maximum amount to my students. Why? Because the whole proposition of the university is that my work as teacher, advisor, etc, is reflected in their self-improvement, which includes making them more attractive workers. By diminishing their value I'm undercutting the value of my own work and of the entire enterprise I thought we were engaged in. Rather than save myself a few bucks, I want to set the market for my students' skills.

Best of luck to everyone striking at UC -- I hope you get everything you have deserved for so long.
posted by range at 9:54 AM on November 14, 2022 [6 favorites]

If anyone knows of any sites to check what drama is going on, post them here. All I found was a Cops Off Campus Twitter, but who knows how long that will last :P
I'm not near any protests today, but I hear one of the bus stations is shut down due to protesting today. And that UPS is likely to stop delivering packages, which is definitely gonna cause drama here.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:42 PM on November 14, 2022 [2 favorites]

@berkeleyrankandfile and @payusmoreucsc on insta have good photos of today!

Yueliang, how did it go at Davis today??
posted by latkes at 4:27 PM on November 14, 2022 [3 favorites]

I can't speak for yueliang, but this (possible paywall) gives a rundown of this week on strike. A friend of mine is on strike and she's said it's pretty fun, she was joining in the cooking and whatnot. I saw some marching going on one day, but virtually nobody was at the barricade. I have heard that all the bus stops are being shut down (one of them being barricaded, I haven't gone over to the other one). And the UPS ban is definitely happening, sigh. I did hear that the business buildings were being shut down to the public on Friday after they heard a rumor of a sit-in happening.

This is a letter from the UC president on the whole thing. Notable sentence from this: "Tying compensation directly to housing costs, however, could have overwhelming financial impacts on the University. One review of the Union’s proposal predicts an annual unfunded obligation of at least several hundred million dollars, with inflationary pressure and no cap."

This frankly sounds like it's in wicked problem territory and will never be solved, sadly. I am rooting for the strikers, but hell if I know how you solve this. The university either needs to come up with housing for this population (unsure how likely that is) or, well, how do they expect people to live? Or how do they expect to keep employees?
posted by jenfullmoon at 10:18 AM on November 19, 2022

When I was a kid and we were living in family student housing while my mother was a student, campus housing (especially for students with families, but also in general), at least at state universities, was still at least partly viewed as a service provided to students to enable educational access, not as an income stream for the university.

Meanwhile, a number of expensive private liberal arts colleges I know of have a long history of providing subsidized housing for at least new faculty.

The ongoing, getting worse and worse every few years, underfunding of public education, especially at the post-secondary level, in all states in the US is of course the culprit and main obstacle here, but “oh, we can’t do anything about inflation and housing costs” is a fascile statement on the part of university administrators.

(There are other issues with one’s educational institution or employer also being one’s landlord, of course; but none of those issues are at all helped by universities viewing student or employee housing as an income stream either.)
posted by eviemath at 10:36 AM on November 19, 2022 [1 favorite]

Been trying to find any news on this and found this:

"Anger is mounting as workers continue to be left in the dark about bargaining. On Sunday night, UAW bargainers canceled a planned livestream bargaining session for student researchers at the last minute. The bargaining committee arrogantly justified its secret talks with management by declaring, “We had to close the zoom room because the university wanted to have a chat with our bargaining team before writing an on-the-record proposal. "
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:53 PM on November 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Hi all! It's been super busy but the strike is still going strong -- if y'all have any questions, please comment and I will try to communicate what I know or with what I could try to answer. I'm not a UAW organizer and just a participant this time around (don't really have the desire to be a strike captain at this moment for various reasons.)
posted by yueliang at 4:07 AM on November 23, 2022 [4 favorites]

I did find this article and I read it and...I guess I'm not sure how you judge how a strike is going?

Brown said that the university has reached tentative agreements with the UAW on areas such as work environment and health and safety matters, but there are still areas that separate them from the union’s proposal. Areas of separation include the proposal to tie compensation directly to local housing costs and waiving out-of-state tuition for international and other non-resident graduate students.
“Tying compensation directly to housing costs […] could have overwhelming financial impacts on the University,” the letter from Brown reads. “One review of the Union’s proposal predicts an annual unfunded obligation of at least several hundred million dollars, with inflationary pressure and no cap.”
On Nov. 17, the union representing academic workers said there was progress made in negotiations with UC officials on issues of parking and transit, job security provisions and paid time off, but the UC’s slight increase in terms of compensation does not meet their demands, according to an article from the Los Angeles Times.
The new offer indicates a raise of around $132 per month for student researchers, which would result in the average worker paying 56% of their income on rent.

I'm glad it sounds like they've managed to do a few things in negotiations, but if it's incredibly too expensive to pay people enough that they can pay their rent in any UC town/city...like, what are they gonna do?
posted by jenfullmoon at 7:31 AM on November 23, 2022

That's the UC argument that it's "too expensive" but it clearly is not true because they take a huge amount of our external grants and underpay all of us, considering we produce a huge amount of research for the university, to the point where professors are threatening graduate student workers with retaliation because they know the money generation cannot continue if we all walk off the job. Additionally, international students pay a huge non resident fee to be here, so they make money off of vulnerable students for the "prestige" at being at the UC. That is a UC line and creative accounting, and I have no doubt they would have enough to pay all of us, they just don't want to give it up because it means less money for higher admin and for purchasing real estate and bonds.

Regarding COLA, I'm waiting to see how UAW handles the negotiations...
posted by yueliang at 10:34 AM on November 23, 2022 [2 favorites]

Also, I have huge critiques of the idea that Wicked Problems are inherently futureless and have no solution because I'm a designer and design academic who is working on community engaged design, so I disagree with that and critique defeatist futuring thinking, we already struggle with that enough in leftist organizing. If you check the Wikipedia definition of the link you listed, it discusses how to not be defeatist about facing wicked problems. Also, the problems are honestly pretty clear, it just gets obfuscated by power dynamics and who is interested in setting the agenda, like how the UC is trying to do backdoor and unrecorded negotiations with the UAW...it's really ridiculous.
posted by yueliang at 11:04 AM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Also to provide additional context if folks are more sympathetic to prestigious tenure track faculty rather than the lowly peons of graduate students (I say this with a bitter sarcasm) - the UC no longer offers money help to new faculty to help purchase homes, so like....UC....
posted by yueliang at 12:22 PM on November 23, 2022 [1 favorite]

Some developments have happened in the strike. Sounds possibly good for postdocs, but no mention of the RA's and TA's? Can someone tell me if this is actually good or not? I can't tell.
posted by jenfullmoon at 6:49 PM on November 29, 2022

NYT: University of California Academic Workers Partly End Strike
Postdoctoral students and academic researchers said they will return to work on Monday after ratifying a new contract, but workers who help teach undergraduates and assign grades remain on strike.
The surprise results released Friday of the ratification vote by about 12,000 of the senior-most striking workers cemented a tentative agreement to boost salaries and secure additional benefits, including eight weeks of family leave at full pay for researchers.

But the agreement, announced last week with two of the four bargaining units involved in the walkout, left some 36,000 workers still on strike. Graduate students who help teach classes and assign grades for undergraduates will continue their work stoppage, and campuses are still figuring out how to assess final grades and modify the end of their academic quarters and semesters.
Postdoctoral students and academic researchers had said last week they would remain on strike because U.C. had not struck deals with the rest of the employees who remained without a contract. But by ratifying the contracts on Friday, workers obligated themselves to return to work on Monday.
posted by jenfullmoon at 2:56 PM on December 10, 2022 [2 favorites]