Graduate Student Workers Reach Tentative Deal With UC to End 5-Week Strike

Update, 5:10 p.m. Sunday: After the University of California reached a tentative labor agreement on Friday with around 36,000 graduate student teaching assistants and academic workers for increased pay and benefits, some members of the bargaining team expressed their dissatisfaction that not all of their demands were met.

"The question in front of us, rather, is whether or not we have the strike power to improve upon these demands or whether or not it's time to settle this contract so we can have the protections of a contract again," said Jeremy Rud, a striking teacher’s assistant and Ph.D. candidate within the Department of Linguistics at UC Davis, during a virtual informational town hall meeting on Sunday. "Also, each day on strike delays the implementation of benefits we've won in a new contract, like family leave."

United Auto Workers Local 2865's recording secretary Janna Haider from UC Santa Barbara voted no against the tentative agreement and said what matters is the ability to withhold labor for the grade submission deadline when the university will feel the financial impact.

Original story, updated 7 p.m. Saturday: The University of California reached an agreement Friday with some 36,000 graduate student teaching assistants and other academic workers for increased pay and benefits that could potentially end a five-week strike at the prestigious state system.

The strike disrupted classes at all 10 of the university system’s campuses and was the largest strike of academic workers in the nation. The agreement still needs to be ratified before the strike officially ends.

The bargaining units said some workers will see raises of up to 66% in their two-and-a-half-year contracts.

The pay hikes and boost in benefits could have an impact beyond California. For several decades, colleges and universities have increasingly relied on faculty and graduate student employees to do teaching and research that had previously been handled by tenured track faculty — but without the same pay and benefits.

“These agreements will place our graduate student employees among the best supported in public higher education,” Michael V. Drake, president of the University of California, said in a news release Friday. “If approved, these contracts will honor their critical work and allow us to continue attracting the top academic talent from across California and around the world.”

At a media availability on Saturday morning, members of the United Auto Workers Local 2865 celebrated the agreement.

“This is a historic strike and we’ve won a historic agreement from the University of California that will result in teaching assistants getting raises between 55% and 80% over two years and student researchers seeing raises between 25% and 80% over that same time period,” said Rafael Jaime, president of UAW 2865. “This really goes a long way toward addressing the high cost of living, and it’s a major step toward building a more equitable UC that is accessible to workers from all backgrounds.”

“We are very, very proud of the work that we were able to achieve through our historic strike,” added Jaime.

But not everyone on the bargaining team agreed. In a statement released Saturday evening, bargaining team members who voted against the tentative agreement said "if workers continue holding together and our strike is able to withstand this, then we can move the employer even more than we already have."

"We are BT members and alternates who voted against this agreement based on our belief that the UC’s mediated proposals fail to deliver on the major demands of the strike," read the statement. "More importantly, our assessment is that our strike remains very strong, and has unfulfilled potential to extract a better offer from the UC."

The vote to ratify the tentative agreement is set for Monday, Dec. 19, with voting to open at 8 a.m. and close at 5 p.m.

"We have a democratic process that's going to go up to the members and it'll be up to each individual member to decide how to vote on this contract," said Rafael Jaime. "We are a very large union with 36,000 people that will be heading to the polls to make a decision on this contract."

The 32-day UC strike was being closely watched around the country, in part because it is the largest strike of academic workers in higher education, said William A. Herbert, executive director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College in New York.

The strike at UC, like the others, is “providing guidance to indicate that strikes are very forceful means of accomplishing goals,” he said.

The agreement comes weeks after the UC system reached a similar deal with postdoctoral employees and academic researchers who make up about 12,000 of the 48,000 union members who walked off the job and onto picket lines Nov. 14. That agreement will hike pay up to 29% and provide increased family leave, child care subsidies and lengthened appointments to ensure job security, according to a statement from United Auto Workers Local 5810.

The academic workers had argued they couldn’t afford to live in cities such as Los Angeles, San Diego and Berkeley — where housing costs are soaring — with the current salaries.

The strike came at a time of increased labor action nationwide, not just in higher education but among workers at Starbucks, Amazon and elsewhere and a groundswell of unionization efforts among graduate student employees at other universities.

Just this year, graduate student employees at MIT, Clark University, Fordham University, New Mexico State University, Washington State University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute all voted in favor of unionization.

This story includes reporting by KQED staff.