Teaching Assistants Call Strike at UCLA

Joining a national labor movement that has engulfed campuses from Yale to the University of Michigan, UCLA graduate student teaching assistants called a strike starting today to protest the administration’s refusal to give them collective bargaining rights.

A five-day strike was called late Sunday by the Student Assn. of Graduate Employees, an affiliate of the United Auto Workers that represents about 4,000 teaching assistants, research assistants, readers and tutors at UCLA.

Organizers said they expected more than 1,000 student employees to participate in the labor action, canceling the classes they teach and encouraging undergraduate students and professors not to cross their picket lines.

This is not the first strike that SAGE has called at UCLA; last year, graduate student employees walked off their jobs for two days to draw attention to their cause. But this time, the students have more ambitious plans: a series of coordinated actions on three UC campuses, or a so-called “rolling” strike.

If the UCLA strikers’ demands are not met by 5 p.m. today, their sister organization at UC San Diego--also seeking recognition--will strike Tuesday, organizers say. And if administrators still refuse to budge, UC Berkeley’s graduate teaching assistants will strike Wednesday, they say.

“We hope that we can win recognition without any more disruption to education than is necessary,” said John Medearis, a UCLA graduate student who sits on SAGE’s executive board. “That’s why we’ve made it very clear that we are escalating over time to give the university the opportunity to respond.”

Teaching assistants--or “TA’s”--and tutors do the bulk of hands-on, small-group teaching at UCLA, often leading discussion or laboratory sections that supplement large lecture courses. In addition, readers, along with TA’s, do much of the grading of students’ papers and exams, even in courses that are taught by full professors.

According to UCLA spokeswoman Linda Steiner Lee, the average teaching or research assistant is paid $14,000 for half-time work over nine months and the equivalent of $4,000 more in benefits, including student fees and health insurance. The maximum they work is 20 hours a week, she said.

Since 1993, the graduate students who perform these jobs as they pursue their advanced degrees have sought to unionize at UCLA. And in September, an administrative law judge in San Francisco ruled that they should have that right.

But UCLA administrators, who are appealing that ruling, maintain that the teaching and research that students perform under faculty direction is primarily for their own educational benefit and does not qualify as work. Moreover, they say that by unionizing, graduate student workers would compromise the essential “mentoring” relationship with their professors.

“We believe that unionization would seriously harm the flexibility, collegiality and harmony the university strives to foster between our students and their academic mentors,” UCLA Chancellor Charles E. Young wrote this week in a letter to deans and department chairs.

Or, as UCLA Executive Vice Chancellor Charles Kennel put it, “We like the system we have. If the system ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Added Kennel: “It is to the university’s entire interest to make sure our graduate student body is strong and well supported. We’re not out to persecute them. They’re our students. They’re our product. They’re our future.”

The graduate students say they are concerned about more than wages. As budget constraints have forced cutbacks at UCLA, they say, students have been harmed because teaching assistants lack a voice in shaping how undergraduate education is delivered.

“We often say to undergrads, ‘Our working conditions are your learning conditions,’ ” Medearis said. “For example, the administration recently cut the amount of paid preparation time for tutors, who must often prepare for classes they haven’t taken themselves. When you cut that amount . . . students are getting a less prepared tutor when they go in for help.”

Partly for that reason, UCLA’s undergraduate student government has lent its unanimous support to the strike, said Max Espinoza, a senior who is that body’s academic affairs commissioner.

“Whether our teaching assistants or tutors have adequate working conditions directly affects the type of service that they provide to undergrads, which in turn affects the type of education we receive,” said Espinoza, who expects the strike to have “a dramatic effect because most of our undergraduate education is provided by teaching assistants at this university.”

Kennel said 50 of UCLA’s about 3,200 faculty members have signed a petition in support of the strike, though it was not clear whether they were planning to show their solidarity by canceling classes.

“We can’t estimate the impact yet,” he said, though he predicted that classes in the social sciences and humanities departments would probably be more disrupted than in other areas, such as at the School of Medicine.

Officials said it was highly unlikely that the university--which views the strike as an inappropriate effort to circumvent the legal process--would yield to the students’ demands today.

“I can guarantee you that the chancellor won’t budge,” said Lee, the UCLA spokeswoman. “He feels based on California law that we will prevail.”