Echoes of Ann Arbor in UC’s Fight With Graduate Students

With graduate students striking at the University of California system to win recognition as a union, it might be instructive to examine how another university handled a similar strike more than two decades ago. In 1975, I was a teaching fellow at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where I joined about 1,000 other graduate-student workers after negotiations for the first contract with the Graduate Employees Organization broke down. The strike lasted about a month.

Unlike the situation at UC, the independent Graduate Employees Organization had already won recognition as a bargaining unit. Medical-school interns had paved the way when they won the right, as a result of a 1971 ruling by the Michigan Supreme Court, to be legally treated as employees. It was just a matter of time before the ruling was extended to teaching assistants.

But negotiations between graduate students and the university’s administration stalled over wages, nondiscrimination on sexual orientation, affirmative action and agency shop, a step below a closed shop. Eventually, the union authorized a strike, which was overwhelmingly endorsed by its membership.

Starting on Feb. 11, 1975, students braved snowy weather, nasty cops and a seemingly intractable, antiunion university. Many classes were canceled. Strike rallies brought out as many as 2,000 supporters, and, as the strike geared up, the Teamsters union pledged to honor it. The truckers refused to cross picket lines, thereby preventing deliveries to campus. Graduate-union members used camcorders to record confrontations between students and police, which we showed to a sympathetic Ann Arbor city council. Without an international affiliate to pay strike benefits, we staffed our own soup kitchens. (The United Auto Workers has pledged to pay strike wages for UC grad students.) In total, 57 strikers were arrested for “trespassing” on university--i.e., public--property.

At Michigan, it seemed as if the student activism of the ‘60s had never ended. Shortly after the strike began, the university’s Third World students staged a surprise takeover of the administration building. I recall sleeping in the office of the university’s president, Robben W. Fleming. TV reporters marveled at how people of various colors worked together.

After a big noontime rally at which strikers demanded that the university not punish them, the administration caved in. There would be no reprisals for striking teaching fellows and research assistants, and we agreed to make up lost classes.

What did we win? Apart from a sense of solidarity and friendships that have lasted decades, the graduate-student union won concrete gains: agency shop, a written nondiscrimination policy protecting lesbians and gays and affirmative action for graduate-student employees.

The stakes are similarly high today. The strikers at UC are unlikely to occupy any buildings on any of the system’s eight campuses, but will the university act like just another union-busting corporation? After all, the UC system never agrees to any union contract unless it contains a no-strike clause. At UCLA and other campuses, administrators have authorized professors to replace strikers with scabs. But with exams around the corner, and with Christmas break near, who will want to be hired for only a few weeks’ work?

California’s largest employer can settle the TA strike by heeding the state Public Employment Relations Board’s suggestion to recognize voluntarily the student workers as employees. UC management, however, is playing hardball. UC Irvine Graduate Dean Frederic Wan was quoted in the Christian Science Monitor as comparing TAs seeking collective-bargaining rights to children negotiating with their parents over mowing the lawn. The statement has incensed strikers at all the UC campuses. Last Tuesday, a TA at UC Irvine carried a sign retorting, “Fred Wan: You’re Not My Dad!”

Such paternalistic attitudes as Wan’s are beneath a great university like UC. TAs are students, of course, but they are workers, too, as thousands of undergrads who flock to TA classes and sections can attest. To refuse to acknowledge this reality is to engage in wishful thinking.

The TA unions deserve recognition, and not because pro-union Democrats now dominate Sacramento. If the TAs’ statistics are accurate, and no administrator has challenged them, graduate students handle 60% of teaching duties at UC campuses. That is work, plain and simple, not just “financial aid,” as the university claims.

The change in political atmosphere set off by the midterm elections may leave UC President Richard C. Atkinson no choice but to do what Fleming did 23 years ago: grant amnesty and begin to negotiate with the university’s student workers. As one UC Irvine political science professor told me, all it would take is a one-line amendment to the state Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act to define student workers as employees. The wonder is why it has taken more than two decades for Californians to recognize what the Wolverine State has long accepted, that student workers are also employees.