UC Berkeley Will Bargain With Teaching Assistants

UC Berkeley has agreed to talk about pay and working conditions with an organization of teaching assistants and researchers in exchange for a promise that the graduate students will not repeat a strike that disrupted the campus for two days in May.

UC officials stressed that the agreement is not formal recognition of the Assn. of Graduate Student Employees as a union. However, Berkeley graduate students say their group now has de facto bargaining status, a boost for the small but growing national movement against what they claim is their exploitation by universities.

“We think it’s a very significant agreement and we think it’s a direct result of the strike last May,” association spokesman Michel Chaouli said Tuesday. “I think the university was somewhat dumbfounded by the strike and surprised by the breadth of it.”

Debora Harrington, UC Berkeley’s manager of labor relations, denied that the campus was pressured by fear of another strike, saying the school was used to all sorts of disruptions. But she also said the agreement was a major step.

“The university could have simply ignored or refused to deal with (the graduate student association),” Harrington said.

Graduate students last year taught about 38% of all undergraduate courses at UC Berkeley. The more than 5,000 teaching assistants, graders and researchers worked an average of 20 hours a week and were paid a maximum of $1,100 a month.

The agreement reached last week is to remain in effect as long as both sides believe that the talks are progressing or until the association’s lawsuit seeking union status is resolved. A week before the May strike, the state Public Employment Relations Board voted to support UC’s position that teaching assistants should be treated as scholars on stipends, not as unionized employees. The association, which is affiliated with the United Auto Workers’ District 65, is taking the case before the state Court of Appeal.

The strike was the first of its kind in California. Similar graduate student organizations have won bargaining status at only five other universities across the country, according to Mary Ann Massenburg, a UAW official. She said the union is trying to organize graduate students at four other UC campuses: Irvine, Santa Cruz, Davis and San Diego.