Berkeley Student Workers Defy Order to End Strike

Striking UC Berkeley graduate student employees, in the third week of a campuswide walkout, defied an administration deadline to return to work Thursday or lose pay and benefits.

With three days of classes remaining before final examinations, the students showed no sign of backing down.

Negotiations broke down Wednesday when about 500 members of the Assn. of Graduate Student Employees overwhelmingly turned down an administration proposal that did not recognize students’ right to collective bargaining through the union.

“It still doesn’t have the key phrase: ‘We recognize AGSE as a representative of its membership,’ ” union spokesman Russ Paulsen said. “No one even made a motion to vote on it.”

University officials expressed regret that the union rejected the proposal, which was made after a five-hour negotiating session.

The officials had agreed not to dock the strikers’ pay or bill them for benefits received if they returned to work by Thursday and taught for the semester’s remaining four days.

“I am deeply disheartened by our inability to find some common ground,” UC Berkeley Chancellor Chang-Lin Tien was quoted as saying in the statement. “It is in everyone’s best interest that the graduate students still on strike return to teach their classes.”

The campus’s 3,900 graduate student instructors and researchers went on strike Nov. 19. The union, which has about 1,300 dues-paying members, says that the strike has disrupted about 60% of undergraduate classes, but university officials disagree, contending that much education is going on in informal classes held off campus.

No date has been set for new talks, but Paulsen said he was hopeful they would resume in the near future.

The administration believes the university is exempted by state labor laws from any requirement to negotiate with students through a collective bargaining agent. State law classifies the graduate student employees as students first and employees second, the university says.