Berkeley Teaching Aides on Strike to Push Union

With final exams just two weeks away, a union of 3,200 teaching and research assistants walked out of classrooms and onto picket lines at UC Berkeley today to press a demand for recognition as employees.

The Assn. for Graduate Student Employees here is the vanguard of a burgeoning movement on the nation’s campuses that is challenging the traditional view of them as scholars living off stipends.

“This is not a question of mainly getting more money for me, it’s a matter of justice,” said James Martel, a 24-year-old teaching assistant in the political science department.

“We’re not a bunch of Berkeley radicals demanding a change in foreign policy; we just want to exercise a basic American right to join a union and have our concern represented at a bargaining table,” added Martel, who joined about 200 pickets as classes were scheduled to begin.

Union representatives claimed that hundreds of classes were canceled for the two-day strike. University officials called the labor protest largely symbolic, although they did not check the number of canceled classes.