Graduate Students at UCLA Begin 2-Day Strike : Education: Teaching and research assistants seek union status to get more money, better health care and reduced workloads. School officials strongly oppose effort to organize.

Carrying signs, shouting into megaphones and blowing whistles, hundreds of graduate student employees at UCLA began a two-day campuswide strike Wednesday, the first such action ever taken at the university.

The demonstrators, who work as teaching and research assistants, readers and tutors, picketed campus entrances and urged passersby to support their drive to begin collective bargaining with the university to resolve wage, workload and health care issues.

Wearing buttons that read “The University Works Because We Do,” demonstrators said their walkout forced the cancellation of numerous classes in several departments including history, political science and urban planning.

University officials said they could not estimate the extent of the strike and its impact on campus operations.

The strike represents the most drastic action yet by the 3,300-member Student Assn. of Graduate Employees at UCLA, which is leading the effort to gain union status for student workers.

Graduate student employees say they do the bulk of the university’s teaching and research--instructing students, monitoring laboratory experiments, devising courses and tests. They say university budget cuts have subjected them to larger classes, less departmental supervision and greater financial hardship.

“Professors are pressured to publish and do research, which brings more money to the university, and graduate student employees are left to bear the brunt of teaching the undergraduates,” said strike coordinator Christopher Isett, 31, a graduate student in history and a former teaching assistant. “We need some say about our working conditions.”

The unionizing efforts of UCLA’s graduate student employees, begun in 1993, comes amid a nationwide movement by student workers at other universities to seek collective bargaining rights.

Student employees at Yale staged a one-week walkout earlier this month, and last week teaching assistants at the University of Kansas voted to form a union. In recent years, student researchers and teachers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the State University of New York have won contracts through collective bargaining. Other institutions, including the University of Florida, the University of Michigan, the University of Oregon and the University of Wisconsin, have operated for years under union agreements with their graduate student employees.

Last year, a majority of UCLA’s graduate employees signed cards agreeing to union representation. After reviewing the list of signatures, California’s Public Employment Relations Board, which interprets the state’s education and labor laws, notified the university that it could voluntarily begin negotiating with the union. But the university refused, and the state board is considering whether UCLA can be forced to recognize the graduate student union under state law. Years of litigation could lie ahead.

The student employees, most of whom make $13 to $14 an hour, want a contract containing detailed job descriptions, improved grievance procedures and safeguards against discrimination, harassment and unfair labor practices.

But despite the students’ efforts--past activities have included a letter-writing campaign, a sit-in at the chancellor’s office and one week of classes held outside school buildings--university administrators have steadfastly opposed the unionization drive.

Administrators say they have gone out of their way to help graduate student employees. They cite a 3% raise in January for graduate student workers, exclusion from a 5% faculty pay cut in 1994, a $2,155 annual school fee credit initiated in the fall of 1991 and a yearly $560 medical insurance exemption that began in 1990.

The students, administrators say, have no need for a union, do not qualify as a union and have unrealistic expectations of what a union will bring them. School officials say the teaching and research performed under faculty supervision qualifies as education, not work. They also argue that by unionizing, graduate student workers will upset the delicate mentoring relationship with their professors, making the academic environment inflexible and adversarial.

“Unions are effective when there is abuse or for protecting jobs that involve an entire lifetime,” said Kathleen Komar, associate dean of UCLA’s graduate division. “Our students are in apprentice training for an academic career with a turnover rate of five to six years. They are here because they are students, that is their primary goal at the university.”

Not all graduate students disagree. Larry Dewell, a teaching assistant pursuing a graduate degree in engineering, said: “The life of a graduate student is not parallel to a life in industry. You’re learning to be a teacher and also a researcher. The reward for being at the university is not the compensation, but the degree.”

Some professors, however, say they are sympathetic to the graduate students’ complaints.

“Are grad students being forced to work more than the specified number of hours? Are they being forced . . . to do tasks that have nothing to do with teaching?” said Bruce P. Hayes, a professor of linguistics. “I’d like to see the UCLA administration showing its intentions to respond to the graduate students’ concerns, going beyond a mere effort to make sure that there won’t be a union.”