California Grad Students Vote to Unionize

Nature

June 3, 1999

 

[SAN DIEGO] Graduate students at the Berkeley and Los Angeles campuses of the University of California have voted overwhelmingly for union representation as part of a statewide bid for better pay, benefits and working conditions for teaching assistants.

Elections at the remaining six of the universityâs campuses are due to be completed next week. A state agency will then count the votes to determine whether other campuses will also be represented by affiliates of the United Auto Workers union.

The elections follow a 16-year campaign by graduate students at the university to secure union recognition for teaching assistants, who have increasingly played a vital role in academic education, in science, engineering and mathematics. They typically manage laboratory sessions, grade papers and staff office for professors, who limit their involvement to giving lectures.

During this period, Californiaâs two Republican governors contested unionization at every opportunity. But the recent election of Gray Davis, a Democrat supported by unions, whose position gives him direct involvement in the administration of the University of California system, is seen as prompting a change in philosophy.

There has long been discontent among teaching assistants at the university, who complain of excessive workloads and a lack of benefits, such as adequate health insurance and dental and optical coverage.

The campus elections have been allowed to proceed in recent weeks when the universityâs attorneys stopped fighting attempts to organize them, after spending about $1.7 million on legal fees in the past four years alone to block teaching assistant unions.

Similar concerns by teaching assistants have emerged at other campuses around the country. There are unions graduate students at some 20 institutions.

Teaching assistants at New York University last month filed a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to hold an election for representation by the United Auto Workers.

The petition is believed to be the first such request for union representation at a private university. For the past twenty five years, the National Labor Relations Board has held that graduate students who perform teaching and research duties are primarily students, and so do not have collective bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act.		 At New York University, housing and fee reductions are major issues of concern for the teaching assistants, says Sivan Rottenstreich, who is in his third year of a mathematics doctoral program at the university's Courant Institute. "The big issue is to have a voice; we can improve the university."

University of California graduate students from San Diego to Berkeley voice wide-spread displeasure with the workload and lack of input in the workplace. For example, Jenny N. Hyatt, a first-year doctoral student in material science at San Diego, says that as a teaching assistant she was assigned at times to eight three-hour lab sessions a week, but was being paid to work only 20 hours. "I was being overworked," says Hyatt. "When I complained, they ignored me."

Most teaching assistants say that faculty members largely remained estranged from the graduate student organizing effort, with some supportive and some opposed.

The University of California administration has "stalled for a long time in the face of evident student demand for a union," says Michael Watts, director of the Institute for International Studies at Berkeley, who was involved in organizing assistants as a graduate student at the University of Michigan. "There is a need to have a systematic way to regulate workload, pay and benefits."

Teaching Assistants voted by 833 to 293 to unionize at Berkeley. At Los Angeles, there was a similar turnout in March among the 1,700 teaching assistants, who voted 718 to 269 to unionize. Voting took place last month at San Diego, Irvine, Davis, and Santa Cruz, and teaching assistants at Riverside and Santa Barbara will vote in the next week.

Contract negotiations are to begin this summer between the University of California and student groups that vote for a union. There is "absolutely genuine sentiment" to bargain with the teaching assistants, says Joseph Duggan, associate dean of the graduate division at Berkeley.