UC, Teaching Assistants Still Far Apart as Truce Begins

Leaders of teaching assistants at University of California campuses on Monday hailed an agreement to end their strike as a success, crediting two state legislators with brokering a deal for the first talks with UC officials about union recognition.

UC officials though, downplayed the significance of Sunday’s agreement, saying the strike had “little impact.”

Although administrators agreed to talks, they are still firmly opposed to the idea of unions for teaching assistants, said Brad Hayward, spokesman for the UC system.

The teaching assistants--graduate students who teach undergraduates while obtaining degrees--went on strike last Tuesday at all eight general-education UC campuses, demanding recognition of their union.

After two days of phone calls between the two sides, university officials and striking teaching assistants agreed Sunday to a 45-day “cooling-off period” in which the students would come back on the job in time for exams as the two sides met to discuss their concerns.

“A cooling-off period does not indicate that either side has won or lost,” Hayward said. UC officials have always held that “responsive, respectful dialogue is the best way to address these issues,” he said.

State Senate President Pro Tem John Burton (D-San Francisco) and Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa (D-Los Angeles), who sided with students in the dispute, approached UC officials late last week after discussing a proposal for a temporary settlement with union organizers.

Burton did not want the situation to escalate and was in favor of “a good, safe effort on the part of the union not to disrupt finals,” said Bob Giroux, principal consultant for Burton, who helped forge the agreement.

By calling off the strike before final exams, organizers ended the action before it really started to hurt--when professors are flooded with papers and exams to grade, Giroux said.

A sticking point over the weekend, Giroux said, was the reluctance of UC officials to limit the talks to the issue of union recognition.

“It ended up with basically half a loaf to both,” Giroux said, with UC officials agreeing to discuss, as they put it, “issues related to the strike.”

Union organizers, who are affiliated with United Auto Workers, said they are optimistic. “This is the first time that the university has come to the table to talk about the issue of union recognition,” said Connie Razza, spokeswoman for the Student Assn. of Graduate Employees at UCLA.

Giroux said UC officials responded to Burton’s and Villaraigosa’s request for a rapprochement in part because “dynamics are changing” in labor’s favor because of the election of Democrat Gray Davis to the governor’s seat.

But “the union [organizers] have their work cut out for them,” he said. “I don’t believe at this point that the UC system is at a position of wanting to recognize them.”

Organizers have said they will resume the strike if their demands are not met.

There are about 6,700 teaching assistants and 2,300 tutors and readers in the UC system. Organizers say that over the past five years, two-thirds of them have signed union cards. They say that 87% voted to support the strike and walked out.

UC officials disagree, saying only 7% to 10% of teaching assistants joined the strike.

Organizers have been trying to win collective bargaining rights for teaching assistants for years, but had never staged a strike on the scale of last week’s.

Things had come to head with the perception that graduate students are shouldering more of the burden for teaching undergraduates, said Dan Rounds, a 28-year-old graduate student in political science at UCLA who joined the picket lines last week.

He said he typically spends 20 hours a week teaching undergraduate discussion sections. He is paid $1,400 a month and gets a $700 break on fees each quarter, he said.

“It pays my bills but I’m not living in luxury,” he said.

Among the concessions he hopes to eventually win are health insurance for his wife, and the right to have more say in decisions affecting class sizes.