About 48,000 unionized academic workers across the University of California’s 10 campuses — who perform much of the teaching and research at the state’s premier higher education system — walked off the job Monday morning, calling for better pay and benefits.
In the nation’s largest strike of the year, teaching assistants, postdoctoral scholars, graduate student researchers, tutors and fellows across the UC system took to the picket line, prompting canceled classes, shuttered labs and other academic disruptions just weeks before final exams. The strike, which union leaders said was the largest at any academic institution in history, also included workers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
The massive work stoppage will continue Tuesday.
“UAW members at UC remain on strike, and we will be walking picket lines tomorrow,” Rafael Jaime, president of United Auto Workers Local 2865, which represents 19,000 of the 48,000 workers, said Monday night.
After negotiations with the UAW continued throughout the weekend and Monday, UC officials are calling for a third-party mediator to be brought in.
“At this time, we believe that the best path to an agreement is with the aid of a third-party mediator,” Ryan King, a UC spokesperson, said in a statement Monday afternoon. “We continue to encourage the union’s partnership in pursuing mediation.”
Union bargaining team members met with UC officials on Monday for two hours and reached tentative agreements on three points, Jaime said.
“At this point, the priority should be round-the-clock bargaining in good faith as opposed to switching to a mediation process,” he said.
The workers are demanding significant pay increases, child-care subsidies, enhanced healthcare for dependents, longer family leave, public transit passes and lower tuition costs for international scholars.
While the two sides recently agreed on stronger protections against workplace bullying and abuse, UC’s proposals on wages remain far from the $54,000 base salary that union leaders say would be fair for graduate student workers — and would amount to more than double the workers’ average current pay of about $24,000 annually.
Under the university proposals, graduate student pay would be “among the top of the pay scale” for top public research universities and comparable to private universities such as Harvard, MIT and USC, King said.
“UC believes its offers are generous, responsive to union priorities, and recognize the many valuable contributions of these employees,” university officials wrote in an earlier statement about the negotiations, which have been ongoing since spring 2021.
The biggest sticking point in negotiations has remained compensation, Jaime said, adding that the university’s proposals don’t do enough to address affordable housing needs for graduate students and others fighting for higher pay.
“UC also wants to limit and control our earnings by calling some of it ‘student support,’ which would block a portion of our pay from being covered by our union contract,” he said.
UC has offered a salary scale increase of 7% in the first year and 3% in each subsequent year for teaching assistants and tutors, but workers have said that’s not sufficient.
“We are overworked and underpaid, and we are fed up,” said Jamie Mondello, a 27-year-old psychology graduate student worker at UCLA and member of UAW Local 2865 and Student Researchers United. “Our proposals bring everyone into a livable wage. We’re, as a whole, just asking to be treated with dignity. We really keep the UC running.”
Mondello said she makes about $37,000 a year as a fellow and is planning to add a teaching assistantship next quarter to help supplement her income. She was on the picket line at UCLA on Monday morning, along with hundreds of other academic workers, many holding signs that read, “UAW on strike. Unfair labor practice.”
“Forty-eight thousand strong,” they chanted. “We can fight all day long.”
Lavanya Nott, 30, a third-year graduate student in the geography department and a student researcher, said she makes $24,000 a year from her job and about $2,000 a year from her second job as an on-campus grader for teaching assistants who don’t speak English as their first language.
“It’s almost impossible to live in L.A. or most cities in California,” she said. “Many of us have second or third jobs.”
Nott called her income “poverty-level wages” and said 92% of graduate students are rent-burdened, meaning they spend 30% or more of their income on rent.
She lives in a one-bedroom apartment provided by UC housing with her partner, paying $1,500 a month combined. Though she doesn’t have a child, she said she knows parents are struggling because the UC child-care subsidies aren’t enough for care on UC campuses.
International students, the strikers said, have to pay non-residential tuition fees, which puts them on a “treadmill” to complete their degrees in five years because the university won’t cover their fees beyond that time.
“Postdocs, researchers, graduate student teaching assistants basically run the university in many ways,” Nott said. “We teach the majority of the classes. We grade more papers than any faculty member there is. We do cutting-edge research that brings in a huge amount of funding to the UC system. The demands that we’re asking for only make up 3% of the UC’s annual budget. It’s a really minuscule ask in terms of what UC can afford.”
It wasn’t immediately clear how many classes, labs or scheduled academic activities were interrupted Monday, but students at UCLA and at campuses across the state reported many classes canceled.
UC Irvine spokesperson Tom Vasich said campus leaders were “committed to instructional and research continuity,” including alternate forms of instruction such as hybrid classes.
