College and University Labor Militancy Grows

By SETH SANDRONSKY

Progressive change happens many ways. One way is through workers winning union recognition from an employer. It is an uphill struggle, with labor law allowing employers to run roughshod over employees.

Consider University of California Graduate Student Researchers United (SRU) from all 10 campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. After voting yes, 10,622 out of 10,890, to authorize a recognition strike to form a labor union local with the United Auto Workers (UAW in mid-November 2021, they won the right to bargain collectively with their employer. This was no overnight victory.

A supermajority of SRU had filed cards with the state Public Employment Relations Board to join the UAW on May 24. However, UC had a problem with some of the 17,000 SRU members seeking to unionize.

UC’s interpretation of the California Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act excluded about 6,000 SRU members (some of whom did vote in the strike authorization ballot), called fellows and trainees, from joining the UAW. Fellows and trainees receive their pay from non-UC funds, such as the National Institutes of Health. 

On Sept. 8, the PERB disputed UC’s definition of the 6,000 SRU members as non-UC employees. This was a sticking point for UC until Dec. 8, when it agreed to recognize SRU/UAW.

Laura Beebe is a fifth year Ph.D. student in biological sciences and represents UC San Diego on the SRU strike committee. “After relentless organizing and the collective efforts of thousands of student researchers,” she said in an email, “we’re proud to say that UC finally did the right thing. The sheer size of our unit — 17,000 workers — is historic: we are the largest academic student employee union ever formed in the US. UAW now represents 48,000 workers at UC, which is California’s largest employer. We hope to use our voice to make the university a more equitable place to work.”

Earlier in 2021, UC’s 6,500 part-time professors had threatened a two-day strike then got a new five-year contract that hikes their pay, on average, 6% annually. The UC-American Federation of Teachers represents these non-tenured, part-time professors.

At press time, 3,000 Student Workers of Columbia in New York City, a union for research and teaching assistants in UAW Local 2110, have been on strike since Nov. 3, seeking higher pay and expanded health-care coverage. Bread-and-butter issues matter to workers.

Back in the Golden State, after UC sidestepped two worker strikes, 97% of staff at the California College of Arts (CCA) campuses in Oakland and San Francisco in early December 2021, voted to authorize their contract negotiating team to call a strike. The slow pace of contract talks begun in fall 2019, according to the Service Employees International Union Local 1021, drove the rank-and-file strike vote. The union represents 110 CCA workers. Some of them had spoken at UC SRU/UAW rallies before December 8. Bread-and-butter issues loomed large.

“Meanwhile, 40% of CCA staff make less than $55,000, what’s been defined as the minimum “self-sufficiency wage” needed to live in the Bay Area,” a union statement reads. The San Francisco Bay Area has one of the highest priced rent markets in the US.

Recent public school teacher strikes in part helped to lay the 2021 groundwork for labor militancy in the pandemic economy, according to author Kim Moody. “Workers learn from the victories of other workers and from the perception that their own conditions are shared by others across society,” he writes. “The education workers of 2018 and 2019 were, indeed, teaching others that when the conditions are right, the time to strike and win has come.” The social conditions now are more urgent, with a festering pandemic, widening income and wealth gap, and warming planet.

Is labor militancy the new normal in higher education? Time will tell as 2022 begins.

Seth Sandronsky lives and works in Sacramento. He is a journalist and member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild. Email sethsandronsky@gmail.com.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2022

Populist.com