[ The University of California is trying to divide and conquer the
48,000 workers on strike by acceding to the demands of some groups but
not others.]
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THE CALIFORNIA ACADEMIC STRIKE IS THE MOST IMPORTANT IN US HIGHER
EDUCATION HISTORY  
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Nelson Lichtenstein
December 5, 2022
Guardian
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_ The University of California is trying to divide and conquer the
48,000 workers on strike by acceding to the demands of some groups but
not others. _

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The strike by unions representing 48,000 academic workers at the
University of California
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crossroads. It is by far the largest and most important strike in the
history of American higher education, with the potential to transform
both the status and income of those who work in an “industry” that
now employs more workers than the federal government.

Despite all the disruption, the strike has generated virtually no
opposition from either the faculty or from most undergraduates.
Indeed, student leaders at all nine University of California campuses
have endorsed the demand by their graduate student teaching assistants
and other academic workers for a substantial wage increase designed to
offset the soaring cost of California housing as well as the larger
inflationary riptide that has eroded even the paltry salaries, grants
and fellowships upon which so many of them rely.

Most faculty are sympathetic as well, with many joining the picket
lines put up each day by the United Automobile Workers, the union
representing the separate locals composed of teaching assistants,
tutors and readers; postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers.
Many of the UC strikers hold that the “A” in UAW really stands for
“academic,” certainly in California, where most UAW members are
now employed in a university setting.

After three weeks, however, the strike has reached a moment of danger.
UC administrators have offered the postdocs and the academic
researchers, about 12,000 in number, a set of five-year contracts that
modestly increase wages in year one and also provide a set of
additional enhancements, including more money for parental leave,
childcare benefit and longer appointments. But the graduate student
teaching assistants, who compose a large majority of those on strike
and who constitute the most militant and activist element among the
unionists, have thus far been unable to persuade UC administrators to
increase an initial wage offer – 7% now followed by smaller annual
increases later on – that barely compensated them for the
inflationary erosion of their real incomes.

It’s a divide-and-conquer strategy. Because the federal government
pays the salaries of most postdocs and academic researchers –
through grants from the National Science Foundation and other funding
entities – UC can more easily accede to a wage enhancement, in the
case of the postdoctoral students, for more than 20% in the first
year, although only 3.5% in subsequent years. But since the teaching
assistants, whose current pay is the lowest of all those on strike,
are funded directly out of the University budget, school negotiators
have taken a hard line.

Adding insult to injury, UC insists upon long contracts for all those
now on strike, with relatively paltry wage increments in the out
years. Most of the teaching assistants – who have made Cola, a
guaranteed cost of living adjustment each year, a key demand – see
such a long-duration contract as a recipe for more inflationary wage
erosion.

For the moment, all UAW members at UC remain on strike, but some union
leaders seem inclined to encourage ratification of contracts covering
the postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers, leaving the
graduate student TAs to fend for themselves. This would be a disaster,
generating recrimination, division and disaffection within the ranks
of the more active grad student strikers.

There is still time to avoid such a debacle and instead carry the
strike to victory. UC administrators plead that budget constraints
foreclose the possibility of any large wage boost for the school’s
36,000 graduate student workers. Yet California remains an immensely
wealthy state, with a budget surplus that almost reached $100bn this
year. Over the last several decades, however, state funding for UC, as
well as the even larger state university system, has steadily
declined. Today just over 10% of UC’s $44bn budget is funded by
California itself, down from more than half when in 1963 UC president
Clark Kerr famously declared that the institution he led was a
“multiversity”, the world-class model for the creation of a
knowledge-based society.

The UC strike is therefore not just an effort to raise thousands of
academic workers out of near poverty, but a movement whose success
will require a reversal of the austerity that has subverted the higher
education promise in California and elsewhere. That is a cause that
deserves our hearty endorsement.

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Nelson Lichtenstein is research professor at the University of
California, Santa Barbara

* University of California workers strike
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* United Auto Workers union.
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