The student-worker strike is now officially over after the ratification vote that took place this week. From the LA Times:
University of California graduate student workers on Friday ratified a new labor agreement with big wage gains, support for child care and new protections against bullying and harassment, ending a historic strike that upended fall term finals and has reverberated nationally. In separate votes, two bargaining units of United Auto Workers approved the tentative agreement reached last week with the 10-campus university system — six weeks after 48,000 teaching assistants, tutors, researchers and postdoctoral scholars collectively walked off their jobs in the nation’s largest strike of academic workers.
SRU-UAW’s 17,000 graduate student researchers backed the agreement with 68.4% on a vote of 10,057 to 4,640, securing their first UC contract after forming a union last year. UAW 2865, which represents 19,000 teaching assistants, tutors and other student academic workers, approved the agreement with 61.6% of the votes, 11,386 to 7,097...
Note that these figures indicate a participation rate in the voting of about 92%.
The official announcement from UC reads in part:
Graduate student researchers and academic student workers at the University of California voted this week to approve new contracts, ending their six-week strike today (Dec. 23). Under the terms of the new contracts, these workers will be among the best supported in public higher education in the country.
“The University of California welcomes the ratification of these agreements with our valued graduate student employees. The University believed that the assistance of a third-party mediator would help the parties reach agreement, which is why we are so grateful that the union accepted our invitation to mediation and partnered with us in selecting Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg to serve as the mediator,” said Letitia Silas, executive director of systemwide labor relations. “As a result of this collaboration, the parties were ultimately able to reach tentative agreements on the contracts as a whole in just a few days following months of negotiations. The University of California has negotiated several fair labor agreements over the last year with our represented employees. Today’s ratification demonstrates yet again the University’s strong commitment to providing every one of our hardworking employees with competitive compensation and benefit packages that honor their many contributions to our institution, to our community, and to the state of California.”
The new contracts go into effect immediately and will be in place through May 31, 2025...
Full news release at https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/press-room/university-california-graduate-student-workers-end-strike-ratify-three-year-contracts.
Events such as the strike have repercussions. Yours truly has been told that there has been renewed interest in faculty representation. You can join the UCLA Faculty Association at https://uclafa.org/join/. Note that state labor law - following private sector labor law - protects all forms of concerted activity, even apart from formal collective bargaining. Advocacy by faculty groups on behalf of faculty is legally protected. In addition, the longstanding issue of having a faculty regent rather than just an Academic Senate representative also may be raised.
As we have noted in prior posts, the Regents at recent meetings generally avoided mention of the strike, particularly when informed of the dollar costs of the original demands by the UC president, estimates that were not out of line with numbers from the union side. At the forthcoming January meetings, there may be a fuller discussion of the costs of the actual settlement, particularly because the governor's budget will be out in early January. The governor was apparently instrumental in having Sacramento Mayor Steinberg act as mediator. What he may have said to Steinberg about the state budget outlook for UC is, of course, unknown. It is doubtful, however, that he suggested that the budget for 2023-24 would be bountiful, given the uncertain economic outlook.
The budgetary costs of the strike settlement fall both on the state portion of the UC budget and on funding coming from research grants raised by faculty, particularly on campuses such as UCLA with medical schools. Grant funding does not automatically adjust to higher salary costs. In addition, delays in meeting timelines specified within such grants that the strike may have caused can be problematic for faculty with major grants. In short, the impact of the strike has what might loosely be described as a north campus/south campus divide.
Unlike the previous settlement with postdocs and researchers, the vote in favor of ratification was not overwhelming. There are significant minorities within both local unions who feel the settlement was inadequate. Thus, frictions within the unions may have internal political consequences.
Finally, faculty pay increases in the coming academic and fiscal year will inevitably be compared with increases achieved for student workers by the strike as well as the general rates of inflation. The bottom line is that the strike and its settlement will have ongoing repercussions.
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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2022/11/student-worker-strike-drags-on.html.
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https://ia601402.us.archive.org/25/items/big-ten/end%20of%20strike.mp3
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