Monday, 5/19/97 SAGE strikes for rights against corporate UCs
Administration behaves more like a hard-line business instead of
learning institution
This week, hundreds of UCLA academic student employees (ASEs)
will go on strike as part of a continued campaign to force the
administration to recognize their collective bargaining rights.
Echoing last fall’s walkout, teaching assistants, readers and
tutors organized in the Student Academic Graduate Employees/United
Auto Workers union (SAGE/UAW) will not report to work for three
days in protest of the university’s continued blockade of their
legal rights as employees. In support of their actions, SAGE is
asking faculty, staff and students to respect their picket line and
not come to campus on those days. They have also scheduled a rally
at the top of Bruin Walk on Wednesday at noon for the university
community to show their support. The arguments for SAGE and
graduate student unions in general have been debated in these pages
before, but some principal points bear repeating. First, as
employees, ASEs have the right to collective bargaining, and last
fall’s legal victory over the administration supported that right.
Other legal decisions across the country have also recognized that
fact, and ASEs on more than a dozen campuses are now benefiting
from working under union-negotiated contracts. Second, concrete
issues regarding working environment and compensation abound across
the UCLA campus. TA workload, benefits packages, falling wages and
grievance procedures are just a few of the issues that a union
could address in ways that individual students and departments
cannot. Without collective bargaining, ASEs are denied the
opportunity to participate in the decision-making processes that
determine their working conditions. Third, in an era of unstable
government funding for education and the consequent privatization
of public universities, unions give students a powerful voice that
can be heard on an economic level no amount of protest can match.
SAGE/UAW presents students not just as consumers, but also as
producers in the university system; it is a distinction which
should, and could, be significant in determining the future of our
institutions and our education. The administration would have you
believe that its opposition to unionization is that it would
threaten student-professor relationships and would violate the
collegial atmosphere of learning that this constitutes being a TA.
This assertion that TAs, readers and tutors are exclusively
students and do not "work" is beyond response. But beyond the
administration’s pious claims to support education may lie other,
more compelling reasons for their opposition to graduate student
unionization. The trend to run universities like corporations,
already well in place at some private universities, is spreading to
our public institutions as well. Projects like Responsibility
Center Management (RCM – an issue in need of a separate column)
here at UCLA should send up red flags to all people leery of
current trends in the corporate world. While big businesses are
busy firing off their full-time employees and replacing them (or
worse, hiring the same people back) as temporary workers with lower
wages and no benefits, some universities are finding parallels by
getting rid of full-time faculty and hiring lower-wage, no-benefits
lecturers, adjunct professors and TAs to teach classes. If those
employees are represented by a union, it undermines the economic
goal of having a cheap and exploitable labor pool. Why should the
administration oppose the union? For the same reasons Nike makes
its shoes in Indonesia. Having a union is about workplace
democracy, and that kind of egalitarian environment is not
conducive to the Administration, Inc.’s vision of the university’s
future. Regarding this week’s action, many on campus, including
TAs, have voiced their concerns regarding the walkout strategy. Why
strikes? The point is frequently made that striking only hurts
those whom graduate students teach, i.e. the undergraduates, and
not the administration they are trying to pressure. It is the
age-old question of justifying means with ends. First, and most
importantly, teaching (labor) is exactly the issue here. If TAs,
readers and tutors do not teach, students do not learn. A strike,
more than any other action, emphatically displays that graduate
student labor is integral to the mission of this university – a
reality that the administration would like for us to ignore.
Furthermore, it denies administration claims that ASEs are
"primarily students" and not employees. While regrettable, the loss
of three days now must be viewed in the context of the long-term
goal of creating a better learning environment for everyone.
Second, twelve of the fourteen recognized ASE unions across the
country only won after strike action. The fee remission and health
care waiver some ASEs have right now here at UCLA is a direct
result of the interim agreement worked out at Berkeley as a result
of their 1989 strike. Strikes also benefit our legal case, as the
Public Employee Relations Board has a mandate to prevent labor
strife. Why strike? It works. Third, striking has not been SAGE’s
only strategy and has, in fact, come after significant efforts in
many other arenas. In the last three years, SAGE has held
teach-ins, sent letters, circulated petitions, garnered support
from faculty and undergrads, met with administrators and taken
their case to court. Every avenue has been successful except for
one component – the administration still refuses to recognize the
union. After ignoring and appealing their loss in the court case
last fall, Murphy Hall has clammed up even more; of the 10
administrators SAGE contacted this quarter, only two agreed to meet
with a delegation of students from the union. Given the continued
intransigence of the UC administration, SAGE/UAW’s actions could
become a quarterly ritual. The tide is growing across the UC
system, with five campuses going on strike this time, and
organizing is under way for more. Far from going away, the student
labor movement is growing as never before. Rather than spending
millions of dollars fighting a legal battle they have already lost
once, the administration would do better to recognize SAGE now.
Ultimately, a protracted battle will not only result in lost
dollars but also lost faith by students in the institutions that
are supposed to be here to serve them. Ritter is a graduate student
in ethnomusicology. You can find him on a picket line later this
week, or you can just contact him at jlritter@ucla.edu.