UC Assistants Are Hoping to Form Union

UC San Diego graduate student John Sullivan shudders when people call him a teacher’s assistant.

“Teacher’s assistant is really a misnomer,” said Sullivan, who teaches undergraduate classes at the university while he pursues a doctorate in literature. “We’re not listed in the program as teachers for the class, but we’re the only teacher that undergraduates come in contact with while taking the class.”

Sullivan and other graduate students who work for the University of California as teacher and research assistants are demanding to be recognized as employees. Long a source of cheap labor in the university’s classrooms and laboratories, they now are taking steps to organize labor unions and demand higher pay, benefits and limits on class size.

UC administrators say a union of graduate students would force the university system to hire more instructors or force senior faculty members to assume routine duties now assigned to assistants. That, they add, would mean higher fees and tuition.

The university’s position is that the assistants are students, not employees, and administrators succeeded in temporarily blocking any attempts to categorize them as UC employees.

“They are employees because they are students. They wouldn’t be working as teacher or research assistants if they weren’t pursuing a graduate degree,” said Mike Melman, director of labor relations at UC San Diego.

The students contend--and the university doesn’t disagree--that they are the backbone of the university’s teaching and research efforts.

“The entire UC system would shut down if we decided to walk off our jobs,” Sullivan said. “There would be nobody around to teach underclassmen. We are exploited workers in a peonage system. It’s time that the university recognized this and did something about our low pay and working conditions.”

Union organizer Mary Ann Massenburg agrees with Sullivan and is directing an effort by the United Auto Workers, District 65 to unionize about 20,000 graduate students who work throughout the UC system. The UAW began organizing graduate students at Berkeley in 1987.

The labor movement since has made its way through the UC system to UCSD and the issue eventually is expected to be settled in a courtroom.

The students lost the first round with the state when the State Public Employees Relations Board sided with the university and ruled that teacher and research assistants are students, not employees, because their jobs are considered part of their education.

The UAW is preparing an appeal to the state appellate court and continues to organize. District 65 is organizing at campuses in Davis, Santa Cruz, Irvine and San Diego. Local organizers said that efforts in Irvine and San Diego “are in the embryonic stage,” while Santa Cruz, Davis and Berkeley are further along. The other campuses, including UCLA, are behind the rest of the pack.

Berkeley recognized the Assn. of Graduate Student Employees (AGSE) in August as the representative of graduate student workers. However, UC officials stressed that they are not recognizing the association as a labor union and said they will not bargain with the group. This was contested by the association’s officers, who said that recognition of the group gave them de facto bargaining status.

UAW officials estimate there are about 3,500 graduate student assistants at Berkeley.

No one disputes the important role that graduate students play in a university’s academic program. At UC Berkeley last year, graduate students taught about 38% of all undergraduate courses, and about 60% of all freshmen and sophomore students had graduate students for instructors, Jeanne Bergman said.

Bergman, who is pursuing a doctorate in cultural anthropology, has been a graduate student since 1982 and previously worked as a teacher and research assistant. She is an executive board member of the graduate students’ association and said that problems faced by graduate students at Berkeley are typical of those faced by graduate students at other UC campuses.

“There are a variety of reasons, big and small, why we felt it was necessary to organize into a bargaining unit,” Bergman said. “Exploitation was one of them.”

Graduate students get paid for a 20-hour week, earning about $1,200 a month. But student instructors, research assistants and graders (who grade professors’ test papers) commonly are required to work up to 35 hours a week, while getting paid for 20 hours, Sullivan said.

In addition to the class that he teaches, Sullivan said he is also required to take two classes per quarter.

“Even if I only worked the 20 hours, that doesn’t leave much time to devote to my studies,” he said. “But the reality is that arranging a lesson plan and correcting papers takes up more than 20 hours per week and we should be compensated for that.”

He pays about $1,800 per year in fees and is paid only during the 10-month academic year. He lives in campus housing, paying $528 rent a month, and said that he also pays $1,200 a year in health insurance for his wife and two young children.

According to figures obtained from the university, Sullivan estimated that there are about 1,500 working graduate students at UC San Diego. A UAW organizer came to San Diego last week to work with the student group, called the Graduate Students Assn. The group has registered with the university as a student organization, but has not been recognized as a representative of graduate students who are employed at UC San Diego.

Despite the ruling by the state agency denying students employee status, Berkeley’s decision to recognize the association there gave a boost to student groups struggling for recognition at other UC campuses.

The members of that student group said that Berkeley agreed to recognize them in exchange for a guarantee that they would not call another strike of graduate students, like the one that disrupted the campus for two days in May. The strike was the first of its kind in California.

“We had no obligation to even work with them in any manner,” said Deborah Harrington, labor relations manager at Berkeley. “Because the case is under appeal, the university indicated a willingness to listen to their concerns but not to negotiate or bargain collectively with them.”

Graduate students at several UC schools said the May strike emphasized the main issues they want to negotiate with university officials: fee and tuition waivers and salary increases.

“Our main demand is for fee and tuition waivers,” Bergman said. “Fees and tuition are currently about $1,000 per semester. We get paid about $1,000 a month, that means we give up a month’s salary for fees and tuition.”

The UC system has no policy on fee and tuition waivers, so benefits for the grad students are uneven from campus to campus. Some, including San Diego, grant their research assistants waivers, but not the teaching assistants; others, such as Berkeley, grant no waivers.

In addition, Bergman said, salaries paid to teacher assistants always were taxed, while research assistants’ earnings were not taxed until 1987.

“This was especially difficult for research assistants. When you add up the fees, tuition and taxes that are taken from us, you’ll find that our earning power has regressed considerably in comparison to our pay increases,” Bergman said.

Massenburg said that UAW studies have shown that many graduate students work for minimum wage after fees and tuition are deducted.

Graduate students have won collective bargaining rights at the University of Michigan, Oregon University, Rutgers University in New Jersey, the University of Florida and the University of Wisconsin, Massenburg said.

Ellen Switkes,director of academic personnel for the UC system, agreed that salaries paid to graduate students could stand to be increased but are still “quite competitive with those offered at other institutions.”

According to Switkes, graduate students receive the same percentage pay increases given to the faculty. But graduate student salaries in the UC system are set through the use of a complicated process that involves a comparison of salaries paid to graduate students by other universities, she added.

She said some campuses have offered graduate students waivers of their health insurance fees, which range from $300 to $500 per year, and wishes the campuses could waive all their fees. But even without those waivers, she said, the assistantships are a financial help to students, not an onus.