https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/29/us/university-california-santa-cruz-strike-grad-students/index.html
Well, that’s what happens when you have a job but don’t go to work.
They signed a contract. They did not meet the requirements of the contract and decided to go against the contracts “no strike” clause.
It’s all about risk/reward. They decided the risk was worth it and they’ve suffered the consequences.
Always told my kids they could take a stand for whatever they believe in but they are not above any rules or laws. If you choose to take a stand you must also be ready to accept the consequences.
This doesn’t sound like a strike. It sounds like extortion. It probably violated the college’s honor code as well as their employment contract. It sounds like a good way to get expelled.
Very mixed feelings about this. On one hand, yes, the strike was risky. It put the university and students in an awkward, difficult, frustrating position. I understand the university had to act as the TAs were withholding student grades and effectively bringing the system to a halt.
On the other hand, as someone married to a former University of California TA, I can tell you that Teaching Assistants carry the brunt of A LOT of teaching duties at UC campuses. In some departments teaching was also a de facto requirement to getting a job once you finished your PhD. Students had to teach, sometimes having to give up more lucrative part-time jobs to be able to handle both their own studies and their required teaching duties. TA salaries, while modest, could help PhD students to get through their programs without significant debt. Clearly that is not the case today, it sounds like TA compensation at UCSC in no way meets grad students’ basic needs. This appears to be an exploitative situation, with the university getting much-needed (or required) labor for which it pays substandard wages for the area.
In the United States we’ve seen tremendous degradation of wages vis-a-vis the cost of living. Unions have been weakened if not broken up. The working class is suffering. The top echelon of administrative classes is richer than ever.
The scene as it played out at UCSC reflects the overall worker realities in America.
All I see is loss here. For the TAs, for the university and for the students. Because they’ve learned a hard American lesson: if you fight for your rights, you get crushed.
And people wonder why the young are so enthusiastic for Bernie Sanders.
The strikers violated their own collective bargaining agreement. This is called a “wildcat strike”.
The university offered additional concessions which the university was not obligated to do. The state of California has a budget crisis. What did the striking TAs expect ?
P.S. The state had little choice in its course of action as UC-Davis and another, maybe UC-SB, joined in the strike in support of the UC-Santa Cruz wildcat strikers.
Commonsense is an important & valuable attribute.
Yes, housing in CA is brutally expensive and has been for a long time; this is not something that just popped up.
The Grad Students voluntarily chose to join a union to represent them. They chose to unionize statewide (18k strong, across all UCs). Then a year or two into a four-year contract, they now don’t like the terms that their union negotiated on their behalf, and that they and their colleagues approved by majority vote. If it was a lousy deal offered, the time to 'fight for their rights" (strike) was during those contract negotiations.
“People are living in their cars. They don’t make enough money to buy food,” Cronin [an organizer] said. “For so many people, this was the culmination of months or years of continuing to slide into poverty. And something just broke.”
Washington Post
^^Other than San Francisco, Santa Cruz does appear to have the highest average housing rates in the UC system. But they knew that going in when they decided to join a union representing statewide pay and benefits. The sliding into poverty claim is a nice soundbite but makes no sense as all Grad Students can borrow the cost of attendance. So why are SC’s students sliding into poverty and not those at other UC campuses with high housing rates, such as SF & Berkeley?
https://www.ucop.edu/student-affairs/_files/housing-costs-near-campuses.pdf
This information came from a retired UCSC professor who is still very much connected with the university and lives in Santa Cruz. The TAs are paid $30/hour and they work 20 hours a week. They pay no tuition.
Seriously, why do they think the salary of working 20 hours a week and being a full time grad student should pay for all their expenses?
Because most grad students aren’t allowed to have real jobs outside of their TA/research jobs.
I’m not allowed to work more than 10 hrs/week outside of my teaching and/or research. If uni finds out I am, I can and will losing funding.
I know a lot of phd prospective students who have either decided not to apply or not to attend the UC system because of their continual problems with grad students. (Health care is another huge point of contention.)
OH and if you think any grad student is only working 20 hours/week, you’re severely out of touch with grad school reality. And yes, most profs are included in this group. They have no idea what the lived reality is for most of their TAs/students.
^^Romani: as an aside, what have you heard about the health care issues for grad students at UC?
(If I’m reading correctly, it appears that UCSC does include a stipend for medical insurance, but that may be new, or I may be missing something.)
They have the right to quit, but don’t have the right to withhold other students’ grades, students who are paying tuition and expect to get grades for the classes they take.
I worked at a government agency and we had a contract with a vendor for coffee where we took bids and granted this contract. About half way into the contract, the price of coffee soared and the contractor asked us to renegotiate. We did, and agreed to pay more for the remaining time on the contract, but we did not go back and pay more for the coffee we’d already received even though the contractor lost some money on that part of the contract.
If these TAs wanted to make more for NEXT year, they could have renegotiated but they wanted to be paid more for work they already DID (except for turning in the grades). The university was working off a budget from last year. There is no money to pay them retroactively. For next year, the school could decide to only hire half as many TAs and make them do twice the work, or get money from other parts of the budget to pay TAs, but they can’t really go back and fix the budget from last year.
“I know a lot of phd prospective students who have either decided not to apply or not to attend the UC system because of their continual problems with grad students. ”
I think that’s part of the point, in my opinion. The current TA’s chose to apply, then chose the TA position under the current contract which includes pay AND tuition waiver. They signed the contract. I’m sure no one forced them to sign the contract. As we tell many students on this site, they need to evaluate the costs associated with their decisions. If they can’t afford it on the current pay and no tuition then maybe they should have waited to attend grad school. Worked a little bit to save more money or accept the fact that they may need loans.
There will be a new contract in 2 years. That is the time for contract negotiations and strikes.
Can confirm that my department at UCLA regularly loses the majority of their admits to the wealthy private universities despite being ranked a #1 program by the NRC. I’ve heard similar things from my friends at Berkeley.
When option A is $22K a year in Los Angeles while having to TA every quarter and option B is $30K a year at Brown with little to no required teaching, it’s not a difficult decision.
This is going to vary widely by college and department. In a lot of places, 20 hours/week on TA duties would be about right. For some international students, working more than 20 hours a week could be a violation of their visa.
As a parent of a college student paying a lot of money in tuition, I would be livid if my kid’s grades were being purposefully withheld as leverage in a labor dispute. Getting graded assessments back in a timely manner is a key to learning what you did wrong and need to go back and relearn.
Does the same union represent other groups of campus workers ?
If so, then the TAs have the potential to shut down the university when the current contract expires or is being renegotiated. But it would be hypocritical for the union to do so after it negotiated a contract with the university & it is being adhered to by the university.
Most Ph.D.'s plan/hope to become university faculty. Why is a requirement to teach as a TA be seen as wrong and a burden? Maybe that explains why so many faculty are prominent researchers but awful teachers.
I don’t think anyone sees it as “wrong,” but it’s true that many graduate students view it as a burden, even those who enjoy teaching. Time spent on teaching is time that otherwise could be spent on research, and you get hired for your research background, not your teaching background. Additionally, TA funding at the UCs is evaluated on a yearly basis, so you do not know until around May whether you will have funding for the subsequent year. Unsurprisingly, students graduating from universities with 5 years of guaranteed funding and relatively lax teaching requirements tend to graduate with noticeably longer publication records and a great deal less stress about finances.
Teaching in the third year is especially dreaded, since students are also taking three or four classes per term, studying for PhD comprehensive exams, doing preliminary dissertation research for the proposal, completing research grant applications, etc.
Poor pay - and $21K per year in major metro areas like LA and the Bay Area qualifies as poor pay - is especially problematic in your later years of graduate school when you need to start attending conferences. By the time you pay the conference fee, the cost of a hotel, airfare, and other expenses, attending even a single conference can set you back at least $700-800 dollars – not easy to do on a tight budget.
I TAed most of my way through graduate school but count myself fortunate that I received relatively generous external fellowships for my final two years. Among other reasons, they freed me from campus obligations so that I could do field research.
The union involved specifically focuses on TAs across the UC system. Currently they are running a petition.
*Amidst the backdrop of California’s housing crisis, the cost of living for Academic Student Employees (ASEs) continues to increase at a rapid rate. With an average salary of $21,000 a year, ASEs at each and every UC campus are now considered rent-burdened, according to criteria laid out by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. Workers across the state have mobilized for a Cost of Living Adjustment. So far, UC has responded with intimidation, threatening to fire student-workers on a wildcat strike at UC Santa Cruz.
The time has come for UC to stop playing games and respond to UAW 2865’s—the union representing 19,000 UC ASEs—demand to bargain and meet to resolve the issues that have left so many student-workers economically insecure. It is clear that only the union can bargain a legally-binding contract that will make progress for ASEs and hold the University accountable, but yesterday, President Napolitano released a statement attempting to circumvent the union entirely, and bargain instead with the statewide graduate student government.
We, the undersigned, demand that UC President Janet Napolitano bargain immediately with the union that represents ASEs at UC, and not a third party, so that an equitable and contractually-binding solution on compensation and cost of living issues may be reached.*