But, not yet.
Last week, when the University of California and negotiators for striking academic workers announced a tentative agreement to end the work stoppage that began on Nov. 14, union representatives praised the proposed contract. |
It was “a huge deal,” they said, with “incredible wage increases” that would finally give starving students a shot at paying the notoriously high rents, from San Diego to Berkeley. |
Starting pay for graduate student researchers would leap nearly 57 percent to about $35,500 annually from about $22,000 over the next two years. The lowest-paid teaching assistants would start at about $34,000, far more than the current $23,000 or so. Pay for more experienced academic workers and those in particularly expensive areas would be substantially higher and come with broader workplace protections and greater benefits for health care, transportation and child care. |
Not everyone on the 40-member bargaining team was on board, though. |
Fifteen members voted against the deal, contending, among other issues, that the pay bumps and cost-of-living provisions were insufficient. They also felt that workers could win more given that they were part of the largest university-based walkout in national history. This week, as 36,000 rank-and-file teaching assistants, researchers and tutors voted on ratification, an opposition campaign emerged. |
A Zoom call assembling critics drew several hundred participants. Calls to prolong the work stoppage went out across the 10-campus system. “I am part of hundreds of rank-and-file workers at Davis, and thousands across the U.C. system, who are fighting for something more — a truly fair contract,” Cole Manley, a doctoral candidate at U.C. Davis, wrote to me in an email. |
Significant opposition appeared to arise from U.C. Santa Cruz, where a “wildcat” strike — one conducted without the backing of the union — representing the workers statewide ended three years ago with the firing of more than 70 graduate students who had refused to turn in fall grades as part of the labor action. (Most were eventually reinstated.) |
But pushback also materialized on high-cost campuses such as Santa Barbara and newer campuses such as Merced, where a substantial number of students are the first in their families to attend college. |
“Now is not the time to settle — we must keep fighting and leverage our full might to win our demands!” a group of Berkeley students opposing ratification recently exhorted on a website under the logo “Strike to Win.” |
Initial demands by the striking workers included cost-of-living agreements explicitly tied to housing costs in California and a base pay of $54,000 a year for graduate students. Base pay in the current proposal is much lower. Opponents of the deal also complain that too few of the benefits take effect in the first year of the agreement. From. NYT. California Today |
