UC Graduate Students Stage a Protest

The shores of Lake Sherwood became the site of a demonstration Sunday as hundreds of University of California graduate student employees protested outside the gates of the exclusive community where UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young lives.

Carrying signs and chanting, nearly 300 demonstrators handed fliers to passing drivers and protested peacefully against the university’s refusal to recognize their union.

“We are protesting near the home of Chancellor Young because he won’t recognize our union as the agent for collective bargaining for academic student employees,” said Tim Hall, president of the Student Assn. of Graduate Employees at UCLA. “He wants to hold on to power and control our working conditions.”

The graduate student employees, who have staged strikes at individual campuses in the past, are threatening a systemwide walkout if the union does not receive official recognition by the end of April.

Sunday’s protest capped a weekend convention at UCLA where graduate student employees from the UC campuses in Santa Barbara, Santa Cruz, San Diego and Berkeley met with their counterparts from Los Angeles to discuss strategies in their efforts to become recognized as a legitimate union.

Hall, a graduate student in philosophy, said the graduate student employees--who include research assistants, teaching assistants, readers and tutors--do the bulk of the work involved in educating undergraduates in lower-level courses.

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The organizing efforts at UCLA began in 1993. The following year, a majority of UCLA’s graduate student employees signed cards agreeing to union representation.

But the university’s chancellors have opposed the unionizing drive.

“UCLA believes that, given the nature of this [the graduate students’] work and the close interaction between faculty and students it necessitates, a collective bargaining agreement is not desirable,” said a printed statement handed out by Kay Cooperman of the university’s public information office. “Such an agreement would replace collegial and consultative relationships with an adversarial environment, interfere with the graduate students’ educational experience and run contrary to the promotion of the academic excellence in the university’s graduate program.”