Graduate Assistants, Researchers at UC Berkeley Slate 2-Day Strike

In what organizers say would be the first such job action in California, UC Berkeley’s graduate students who work as teaching assistants and researchers plan a two-day strike starting today to protest the university’s refusal to recognize their union.

The action represents a small but growing national movement by graduate students against what they claim is exploitation by institutions of higher education. It comes six days after a ruling by the state Public Employment Relations Board supporting UC’s position that teaching assistants should be treated as scholars on stipends, not as organized employees.

Cause for Concern

“The idea is to have a limited show of our strength,” said John Talbot, a member of the Executive Board of the Assn. of Graduate Student Employees, which is affiliated with District 65 of the United Auto Workers. He said the association will set up picket lines at entrances to the Berkeley campus and ask students and professors not to cross.

The association claims to represent more than half of UC Berkeley’s 3,500 graduate students who teach, grade undergraduates’ papers and help with professors’ research. Graduate students teach about 38% of undergraduate classes, according to campus spokesman Tom Debley.

Because the planned strike comes two weeks before the start of final exams, administrators are concerned about possible effects on course work. However, Debley said the university “by and large is taking a wait-and-see attitude to see if this is more than a symbolic action.” He predicted that the strike will have little support in some departments.

In a 2-1 ruling last week on a UC appeal, the Public Employment Relations Board said that a 1979 state law forbids graduate students from being treated as employees because their work duties are part of scholarly training. That reversed a decision two years ago by a board administrative law judge that the graduate students association could be recognized as a bargaining unit.

Deborah Harrington, manager of labor relations at UC Berkeley, said she was pleased with the latest board ruling but stressed that the university wants to work with graduate students outside of formal collective bargaining on issues of teaching loads and the costs of medical insurance. The graduate students, she said, “are very important to the University of California.”

However, Mary Ann Massenburg, a United Auto Workers representative, said the association would appeal the Public Employment Relations Board ruling in state appellate court. She said she is hopeful of victory because the state Supreme Court has recognized the right of medical student interns to organize unions at UC hospitals.

Pay Scale

According to Massenburg, the legal debate centers on which side benefits more academically and economically from the graduate students’ teaching and research work--the university or the graduate students themselves. Some of the work is related to the graduate students’ dissertations and possible future careers as professors, but much of it involves elementary undergraduate material disdained by some full professors, she said. “It is repetitive work on material they have long since mastered,” she said.

Depending on their assignments, which change each semester, teaching assistants and researchers are paid between $300 and $1,100 a month, according to Talbot, the association’s board member. He said he works between 25 and 30 hours a week as a research assistant and grader in the sociology department and earns $1,100 a month.

Clerical employees of the university who are forbidden by contract to strike will be asked to show support for the graduate students by wearing yellow armbands today and Thursday, Talbot said. The association will ask the same of graduate students who are conducting scientific experiments that will collapse without daily attention.

Talbot said the association timed the strike to be close to final exams. “This is the time of year when our labor is most essential,” he said. But he added that a two-day strike will not “seriously impair anybody’s education.”

Over the last 15 years or so, graduate students have successfully organized into bargaining units on at least five campuses--state universities in Florida, Wisconsin, Michigan, Oregon and New Jersey--according to experts in the field. However, the issue has picked up steam nationally in the last few years and more campuses are starting to debate union organizing of graduate students.