UC avoided one big strike, but more are in the works at California colleges. Here’s why

Workers at California’s universities are frustrated.

Days after the University of California reached a contract with its lecturers in mid-November, two more of its unions authorized a strike. California State University faculty is at an “impasse” in its negotiation with the system for a new contract.

Resident assistants at the University of Southern California and Stanford, two of California’s top private colleges, have gone on strike or plan to do so. Altogether, those groups make up some 50,000 California’s higher education workers.

Labor actions in California’s higher education aren’t unusual. A union representing the UC’s service and patient care employees alone has gone on strikes six times between 2017 and 2019. Unions also call off many strikes at the last minute, just like the case with the UC’s lecturers last month.

But collectively the number of higher education workers considering strikes is among the highest California has seen in years. The figure represents workers’ dissatisfaction, but also the growing power of organized labor in higher education, union leaders and experts said.

“At a generational level, you have people coming of age with many having high student debt, taking or seeking degrees in which the scope of available good paying jobs has decreased,” said William A. Herbert, the executive director at the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College of the City University of New York. “There’s a certain degree of people wanting to take action to improve their livelihood.”

Why UC, CSU workers are considering strikes

For some unions, today’s labor actions have been years in the making.

The California Faculty Association, which represents 29,000 faculty at the CSU, has been negotiating its contract for more than a year and a half. It’s proposing a salary increase of 4% a year, as well as more job stability for lecturers, said Kevin Wehr, the group’s vice president and bargaining team chair.

The union is also asking the university system to “re-envision” its campus safety, in light of a discussion on racial justice sparked by the death of George Floyd.

“Racism and patriarchy are our working conditions for our faculty,” Wehr said. “Our demands are not currently that campus police be dissolved. Our proposal in bargaining is to have an alternative when there is noncriminal, nonviolent disputes.”

The CSU has said it proposed a “significant enhancement” in job security for many lecturers and that there is “potential for both parties to continue negotiating to find common ground on issues of mutual interest.”

Gov. Jerry Brown in 2017 signed a law to extend collective bargaining rights to some 17,000 UC student researchers. Now, they plan to unionize. Student Researchers United, a part of the United Auto Workers, is the largest union formed this year in the country.

Members of the union in November voted to authorize a strike. The UC has not recognized the group. The university has argued fellows and trainees should not be a part of the union, saying they should not be considered employees under a different law that governs labor relations in higher education.

“UC has left us but with no choice to go on a strike if necessary,” said Tarini Hardikar, a graduate research assistant at UC Berkeley. “Fellows and trainees do critical work and contribute heavily to the UC research mission, and they’re just as much part of the UC’s missions as students who are not on trainee or fellowship programs.”

The challenges of the last two years — the escalating cost of living, the pandemic, campus shutdowns and distance learning and the racial justice movement — heightened workers’ call for changes, union leaders said.

UC lecturers, for instance, have had to do more work adopting to the pandemic and distance learning, while not being reimbursed for the cost of working from home, said Mia McIver, president of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers, which represents those workers. Those lecturers on average make less than $33,000 a year, according to a CalMatters analysis of the salary data.

Unions gain foothold in higher education

Union membership has been decreasing for the last few decades, both in California and the country. But higher education has been among the few bright spots for the organized labor movement. Between 2013 and 2019, more than 60,000 faculty, researchers and graduate students in higher education became a part of a union nationwide, according to the Hunter College center’s analysis.

“Everyone except for us was currently unionized. We had postdocs, academic workers who are unionized,” Hardikar, a graduate student assistant, said. “Only folks in the lab setting who were not unionized were us.”

Over the last few decades, states have reduced funding for colleges and universities. Those cuts made schools more reliant on lower-paid lecturers and graduate students, who are increasingly seeking to unionize, Herbert said. The effort has gotten a boost from the coming of a younger generation who has been more open to unionizing, he said.

“The least secure people, who have the lowest amount of involvement in the university system in terms of decision making,... are the most likely to organize,” he said. “We’re at a reckoning point with the economy and people realizing that without having a collective voice at work and without having a union, their salaries and benefits are going to be lower.”

The movement has also gotten a boost from state policymakers. Some 30 California members of Congress signed a letter to UC President Michael Drake calling on him to recognize Student Researchers United.

Stronger labor power in higher education could bolster organizing efforts elsewhere, Herbert said. Graduate assistants, for instance, have been fighting against misclassification, something that could be relevant when it comes to gig workers, he said.

“There’s a lot to learn from the graduate assistant unionization effort among workers who are currently misclassified as independent contractors to see the strategy that led to overcoming that challenge among graduate assistants in the private sectors,” he said. “It’s not a perfect analogy. There are obvious differences, but the historical narrative should be looked at.”