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| Scene from "American Dream." (See text.) |
Sometimes, when big events occur, it's a good idea to take a deep breath before making an instant analysis. Shortly after the student worker contract was ratified, a number of articles appeared emphasizing division within the union locals. Unlike the earlier settlement covering postdocs and researchers, the larger remaining contracts were not ratified with overwhelming votes. Reports appeared in the news media noting dissent on some campuses. Excerpt from SFGATE:
As University of California graduate student union leaders and supporters celebrated... the ratification of a new labor agreement that ended a historic strike, the vote also exposed a sharp divide among campuses. The agreement was approved by separate units of United Auto Workers — with SRU-UAW representing graduate student researchers and UAW 2865 representing teaching assistants, tutors and other student academic workers. Overall, about 68% of graduate student researchers voted in favor of the agreement to secure their first UC contract while about 61% of teaching assistants and other student academic workers voted to approve the agreement.
But teaching assistants and other academic workers at the University of California, Merced, the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of California, Santa Barbara overwhelmingly rejected the proposed contract while majorities at the UC system’s other campuses voted to approve it. Graduate student researchers at Santa Cruz and Merced also voted against the agreement. At UC Santa Cruz, only about 20% of workers voted in favor of the contracts. At Merced, it was about a quarter of workers...
Full story at https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Vote-by-UC-graduate-student-workers-to-ratify-17676372.php.
Exactly how the internal dissent within the union will play out simply remains to be seen. Yours truly was reminded, however, of tensions within a union back in the 1980s where dissenters split off and went their own way, figuring that they could do better than what their bargaining team had proposed. At a Hormel meatpacking plant where SPAM - the stuff that comes in cans, not computers - was produced, the local there separated from the parent union and went its own way with ultimately unhappy results.
You can see the split occurring the first link below. Below that you can see the full story in the documentary American Dream:
https://archive.org/details/americandream_201908
Assuming that the strike in fact fully ends at the dissenting campuses - and there are no signs at this point of some kind of wildcat action occurring on those campuses - the differing views will be mediated through internal union political processes. We will have to wait and see how those processes work out. We also don't know how UC or the campuses will respond in terms of the hiring of TAs in the future from state budget funds. We don't know how faculty who raise research grants will respond in terms of the hiring of RAs. We don't know what the general climate of day-to-day labor relations will now be within UC as contract disputes and grievances arise.
In short, the contract is ratified; the repercussions have yet to be felt. Collective bargaining is an ongoing relationship. It doesn't end with a settlement.
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