Stand in Solidarity with UC Academic Workers!

By Jim Miller

This week, my son, who attends UC Santa Cruz, got a real-life lesson in labor unity as he saw his professors cancel classes out of solidarity with striking UC workers and experienced campus life as he knew it halted in its tracks by the action.  

He and many of his fellow students attended classes on the picket line and made extraordinary efforts to get to town for food, medicine, and other supplies, all to show solidarity with the strikers.  Being raised in a union household, he knew that it was his obligation not just to honor the strike but to demonstrate his support as well.  

The UC Strike is not just a run of the mill labor dispute; it’s a very big deal.  As union activists Levin Kim and Mia McIver pointed out in the Sacramento Bee 

• Forty-eight thousand academic workers across the University of California system hit the picket lines this week in the largest higher education strike in U.S. history. These graduate student instructors, undergraduate peer tutors and postdoctoral scholars walked out of their classrooms and labs to protest poverty wages, a lack of respect and an employer that repeatedly breaks state labor laws. Universities across the country rely on low-wage, part-time, temporary workers, often construing student workers and postdocs as trainees or apprentices to justify low-quality employment. But the system these workers are supposedly being apprenticed into is broken. Despite their hard-won expertise, graduate students and postdocs look forward to a market made up mostly of adjunct faculty gigs that don’t provide health benefits or enough pay to cover their student loans. American colleges and universities are failing their workers.

As Kim and McIver note, full-time professors now teach only a quarter of the classes in the UC system leaving the rest of the work to underpaid lecturers (who almost struck last year) and graduate assistants and postdoctoral scholars.  Thus, the prestigious UC system is run on the backs of heavily exploited contingent workers who don’t earn enough money to live on in the expensive California cities and towns that are home to the UC campuses.  

Given the lofty ideals that the jewel of California’s system of higher education is supposed to embody, its embrace of the worst kind of lowest common denominator corporate business model is a shame on our state.  

The UAW-represented academic workers note that the UC has engaged in unlawful conduct:

Under the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (HEERA), employers must meet a variety of legal obligations when bargaining with unions. The University has failed to meet its obligations by: 

• Unilaterally implementing changes regarding compensation, appointments, transit, bullying protections, and more. 

• Bypassing the bargaining process by announcing changes and instituting policies outside of bargaining

• Refusing to provide necessary and relevant information regarding bargaining topics and bargaining unit members

• Directly surveying bargaining unit members about bargaining topics 

The academic workers’ demands are that the UC address what they call the “equity crisis of low wages and expensive housing'' by providing a living wage to a workforce where 70% of them meet the HUD definition of “rent burdened,” meaning that over 30% of their income goes to rent.  

They are also calling on the UC to fight climate change and help their workers at the same time by providing free public transit passes and cash incentives for sustainable commuting.  

Finally, the workers are demanding that the UC help retain “parent-workers'' and promote gender equity by giving them child care reimbursements and/or full subsidies at UC-affiliated child care programs as well as expanded paid parental/family leave.  

All these items, if implemented, would comprise less than 3% of the UC’s $46 billion annual budget.  In an era when talk of “equity” is all the rage on campus, the UC’s recalcitrance in the face of these demands is a clear demonstration of the inexcusable gap between their professed creed and their inequitable deeds.  

Given the fact that the UC is the third largest employer in a state that boasts the fourth largest economy in the world, the UC workers' struggle is about much more than the fate of these academic employees.  It is emblematic of the crisis of economic inequality in our country and the increasing precarity of all American workers, many of whom, if they are not already contingent, are at risk of being pushed into that status by the churn and burn corporate business model that has become hegemonic.  

The UC workers’ strike is also an encouraging sign that the recent rise of worker activism and the push to unionize is continuing unabated from Starbucks and Amazon to the UC, despite many obstacles and occasional setbacks.  This kind of fightback is the single most encouraging trend in American politics today.

Solidarity in the service of equity and social justice is the perfect antidote to the greed, fear and division that seeks to undermine American democracy.  

Want to support the UAW Academic Workers Strike?  Go here to find out how: https://www.fairucnow.org/support/