Graduate Unions: Why Student Workers at University of California, Temple, More Are Striking

The surge in campus organizing is an expression of – and response to – an ongoing austerity campaign against public higher education dating back half a century.
Part time faculty walk a picket line on the first day of a strike at the New School
Andrew Lichtenstein/Getty Images

Academic workers are having a moment. This past year,2,500 NLRB petitions were filed for union elections and graduate workers at MITYaleNorthwesternJohns HopkinsBoston University, and the University of Chicago represented the six largest. And graduate workers weren’t the only ones organizing: Non-tenure contingent faculty mobilized at HowardNYUThe New SchoolFordham, and Rutgers. Union organizing has also spread to the University of Southern CaliforniaSyracuse University, the University of Illinois ChicagoWashington StateBarnardDartmouthWesleyan, and the University of Alaska, among other campuses. 

Outside of academia, last year saw growing union momentum across industries, attributed partly to inflation, Covid-19, and high approval ratings for unions. But the surge in campus organizing is also an expression of – and response to – an ongoing austerity campaign against public higher education that dates back half a century. By challenging corporate business models and articulating the connection between privatization and deteriorating working conditions, academic workers have aimed their sights at reclaiming higher education as a public good, and they see unions as the primary vehicle with which to do so.

Nowhere is this clearer than at the University of California (UC), where 48,000 United Auto Workers (UAW) members waged the largest labor strike of 2022. In mid-November, teaching assistants, tutors, researchers, and postdocs represented by four bargaining units across all ten UC campuses were able to pull off what was also the largest higher ed strike in the nation’s history by coordinating when each contract expired. After six weeks, the union secured wage increases of up to 80 percent over the life of the contract, and expanded benefits like childcare subsidies and dependent healthcare. 

Rafael Jaime, president of UAW Local 2865, representing the UC system, tells Teen Vogue, “The reason we’re seeing a growing movement of unionization across the country is that many of us see what’s happening in academia and want to fight back and reclaim higher education as an engine of economic opportunity.” 

Once a model for quality, tuition-free higher education, Ronald Reagan seized on the militancy of student movements on campus to turn the University of California into a political foil for his right-wing agenda. During the 1966 governor’s race, Reagan campaigned on “clean[ing] up the mess at Berkeley” and suggested cutting the budget and charging tuition. The UC system became the center of reframing higher education as a “private investment” to prepare future workers for the labor market. The Board of Regents imposed a yearly $150 “student fee” in 1970. Since then, tuition has ballooned to $13,752 a year for California residents and $46,326 a year for nonresidents. 

“This country hasn’t come to grips with what divestment [in higher education] has meant,” says Todd Wolfson, general vice president of Rutgers’s union, Rutgers AAUP-AFT, and interim chair of Higher Education Labor United (HELU), a coalition of academic workers strengthening campus unions “wall to wall and coast to coast.” “The fact that the University of California is now one of the places where over 45,000 workers went on strike really shows how we’ve come full circle,” Wolfson adds. 

But, while this connection has been clearly articulated at the campus and state level, Wolfson worries the narrative isn’t coming across as clearly at the national level. This is largely due to the fragmentation of the academic labor movement, which is scattered across nearly a dozen parent unions, including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME); United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE); the Communications Workers of America (CWA); and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which formally affiliated with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) last July to form an alliance of over 300,000 academic workers. 

“What it ends up leading to is a lack of a coherent vision and organized voice of what needs to be done given the very long crisis in public higher education,” says Wolfson. 

HELU was founded in 2021 in an effort to fill those shoes. At a digital summit that July, members of 75 unions and labor organizations convened to draft a “vision platform” laying out everything from their legislative commitments (like Sen. Bernie Sanders’s College for All Act) to their support of student debt cancelation. The endgame is a unified academic labor movement capable of securing public investment and reorienting higher ed to “prioritize people and the common good over profit and prestige.”

To date, 130 unions and affiliated groups representing over half a million workers have endorsed the platform.

The first step in realizing this vision, says Jaime, who attended the 2021 summit, is to build union density. “Transforming academia is not going to happen in one single contract campaign. We have to organize workers in every single university in order to achieve real change,” he says. 

Union density on campus has also meant welcoming a new generation of young organizers, many of them grad students, who are leading efforts to reform and democratize their unions. 

Brandon Mancilla decided to dedicate his life to the labor movement after helping coordinate a 2019 strike with Harvard’s grad union (UAW Local 5118). In December, Mancilla was elected to UAW’s International Executive Board as part of a slate of reform candidates in the first direct election in the union’s history. “We’re like the United Auto and Academic Workers,” he jokes, adding that higher ed now accounts for roughly a quarter of the UAW’s 400,000 members. “That’s not unconnected from the fact that [the auto industry] has seen a huge decline in the last [50 years] because of offshoring and non-union labor in the south” – a trend that coincides with the privatization of public higher ed.

But “even though we’re growing as a sector,” he continues, “we are 100,000 members in silo, meaning there’s no real strategy as to what we’re doing.”

Mancilla campaigned on a vision of “rank-and-file unionism at the regional level.” He’s proposed establishing an “Organizing Committee” for his region, divided into sectoral subcommittees, to coordinate bargaining, organizing, and strike strategies. He also supports a “bargaining for the common good” organizing model, in which workers leverage the importance of their labor in strategic industries to win victories that benefit their wider community. “Imagine if we were doing what the UCs were doing across the board with all UAW higher ed locals,” says Mancilla. 

HELU hopes to facilitate “bargaining for the common good” strategies at the national level for issues like student debt cancellation and tuition-free college. This approach was also a distinguishing feature of the University of California’s historic strike. In addition to fighting for greater disability accommodations on campus and tuition equity for international scholars, the UC campaign made a cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, central to their contract negotiations, attempting to link wage increases with median rents on a campus-by-campus basis. 

 The UC’s real estate portfolio is arguably the clearest manifestation of the university’s turn toward the market, and it’s contributed to acute housing insecurity in surrounding areas even as UC remains one of the state’s largest landlords."

L.A. Tenants Union co-founder Tracy Rosenthal wrote in The New Republic, “The U.C. system generates revenue not only by depressing wages in its role as the state’s third-largest employer but by extracting rents as a landlord to some 106,000 students... If McDonald’s is a real estate company that sells hamburgers, the U.C. system is a real estate company and hospital administrator that sells degrees.” 

Less than two weeks after UAW ratified their last contracts, the UC added a $4 billion  investment in the private equity firm Blackstone’s real estate trust to the school’s investment portfolio, which includes its endowment–you know, that little thing that helps pay for stuff like scholarships, academic departments, and faculty salaries. A coalition representing over 100,000 UC workers swiftly responded with a letter calling on the university to divest from Blackstone due to a history of “acquiring residential properties at unprecedented rates, converting them into rental units, raising rents, and evicting and displacing residents in the process.”

From Wall Street’s end of the equation, credit rating agencies’ assessments apply pressure on university administrators. In 2014, for instance, the financial giant Moody’s modestly lowered the UC’s credit rating, making it more expensive for the university to borrow money for things like construction projects. In the decision, Moody’s cited “public policy and faculty and staff that is 40% unionized” for limiting the university’s ability to “improve operations.” More recently, Fitch Ratings anticipated a “deteriorating credit environment” in higher education for 2023 due, in part, to “labor and wage pressure.” 

On the one hand, these warnings from credit agencies indicate just how powerful coordinated labor action can be in the face of billion-dollar corporate colleges. Following the UC strike, administrators raised graduate stipends at PrincetonCaltechCornell, and the universities of Washington and Pennsylvania by thousands of dollars. It doesn’t take a vast stretch of the imagination for one to conclude that this was possibly an effort to prevent potential strikes. 

But if UAW’s strategy at the University of California shows the inspiring potential inherent in labor organizing at scale, it shows the profound challenges, too, of getting thousands of workers across campuses and job categories to agree on everything from strike strategy to wages and broader community goals. A number of the union’s core demands, including COLA, were dropped from the final contract despite vocal opposition from rank-and-file members. 

Roughly 68 percent of graduate student researchers and 62 percent of teaching assistants, and other academic student employees voted to ratify a 2.5-year contract. Some workers expressed frustration with what they saw as “two-tiered” contracts, with more prestigious campuses like UCLA and Berkeley making an additional $2,500 more than others like UC Santa Cruz and UC Merced. The latter two voted “no” by 80 and 73 percent, respectively.

Two weeks earlier, postdocs and academic researchers, who make significantly more than grad students, ratified contracts by nearly 90 percent and 80 percent margins, respectively, and returned to work before the end of the strike with a five-year contract that secured base salaries of over $70,000 by the end of the contract. The different contract expiration dates may pose challenges going forward should UC workers decide to coordinate strike strategies again.  

But Wolfson says, “regardless of whether we are a fully organized sector and how well aligned we are, my position is that somebody has to plant a flag in the ground, talk about this crisis, and lift our eyes to the future of what a fully funded, beautiful, robust public higher education system could mean to this country.”

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