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Wednesday, December 21, 2022

Strike News: Additional Developments - Part 11 (Intercampus Frictions)

We are in the midst of the ratification vote on the proposed contract to settle the student-worker strike. The voting will conclude this week. If ratified, the strike will end. If not, bargaining would resume, although there is no guarantee that such bargaining would lead to a settlement. Since the bargaining team for the union is strongly recommending a "yes" vote, a rejection by the membership would undermine that team. 

However, there is some dissent, apparently based on intercampus tensions. From the Santa Cruz Lookout:

UC Santa Cruz academic worker union leadership is urging members to reject a tentative agreement between the University of California and the union representing 36,000 academic workers systemwide. The majority of bargaining team members of two units (teaching assistants/graders/tutors and student researchers) represented by the United Auto Workers (UAW) voted Friday to accept the UC’s offer — one week into mediation coordinated by Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg. However, all of the members and alternates of the bargaining teams from UC Santa Cruz, as well as the UC Merced and UC Santa Barbara campuses, in addition to members from UC San Diego and UC Riverside, voted against the deal.

Those members and team alternates, who are launching a campaign to vote “no,” wrote in a statement that they oppose the agreement because the base pay and child care subsidies aren’t enough for all workers and a long-haul strike is still needed... UCSC union leaders say another concern is that the agreement includes higher pay for union members at UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Francisco than those at UCSC and other campuses...

The base wage proposals for UAW 2865 apply to all 10 campuses but Berkeley, Los Angeles and San Francisco... were offered slightly higher increases... 

(Jess) Fournier (an alternate bargaining-team member of UAW 2865) said the disparity is concerning and that Steinberg didn’t provide clarity as to why those campuses received higher pay. “It’s not linked to the cost of living and I think that’s very important to know — clearly Santa Cruz should be there if this is about being a high-cost campus,”... “Ultimately what we feel is that this is the UC trying to offer unequal pay for equal work to the higher-prestige, flagship campuses of S.F., Berkeley and L.A.” ...

Full story at https://lookout.co/santacruz/ucsc-cabrillo/story/2022-12-20/university-california-strike-following-tentative-agreement-between-academic-workers-and-uc-uc-santa-cruz-union-leaders-encourage-no-vote.

We will see...

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To hear the text above, click on the link below:

https://ia801402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/frictions.mp3

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