Strike Repercussions: Let's Wait and See - Part 3 (Ripple Effects)

The LA Times reports on ripple effects, that is, impacts of the student-worker strike and settlement on other academic and research institutions:

The UC strike is over, culminating last month in significant improvements in wages and working conditions after 48,000 teaching assistants, tutors, researchers and postdoctoral scholars walked off their jobs in the nation’s largest labor action of academic workers. But the effects of the historic strike still reverberate across the nation, helping energize an unprecedented surge of union activism among academic workers that could reshape the teaching and research enterprise of American higher education...

In 2022 alone, graduate students representing 30,000 peers at nearly a dozen institutions filed documents with the National Labor Relations Board for a union election. They include USC, Northwestern, Yale, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, Boston University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Caltech plans to officially kick off its organizing campaign this month, and other academic researchers are working to form unions at the University of Alaska, Western Washington University, the National Institutes of Health and such influential think tanks as the Brookings Institution and Urban Institute...

“Once you see a university system this large come together and demand livable wages, better benefits ... then you’re going to see it across the nation,” said Melissa Atkins, a labor and employment partner at Obermayer Rebmann Maxwell & Hippel. “It’s going to be just a ripple effect of university grad students wanting what California obtained.” ...

Source: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-01-02/uc-strike-energizes-labor-surge.

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Just as at UC, we will have to wait and see what changes occur in the use of teaching assistants, research assistants, and postdocs at other institutions that are under organizing campaigns or feel they are potential targets for such campaigns.

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

https://ia904700.us.archive.org/34/items/new-year-outlook/ripple.mp3