After months of negotiation, the University of California has agreed to increase teaching assistant and student employee wages by 2 percent over the next three years ““ an offer that has been met with mixed reactions by affected students.
The tentative contract, which must be ratified by members of the student union United Auto Workers, leaves open the possibility of an additional 2 percent increase if UC funding improves.
The tentative contract also guarantees that student fees will be covered for all teaching assistants, teaching associates, readers, graders and student employees who work for a certain period of time.
“For the first time, we’ve drawn up a contract that guarantees a partial remission of nonresident fees,” said Daraka Larimore-Hall, UAW Northern vice president of the region that represents more than 11,000 student workers across nine UC campuses. “This contract also nearly triples the child care benefit and guarantees full coverage of health care for student employees.”
UAW members have been negotiating since June 2010. There were roadblocks along the way ““ during bargaining, the UAW considered going on strike because of unfair labor practices, Larimore-Hall said.
“The university engaged in surface bargaining and stalling tactics and refused to provide the union with information crucial to productive bargaining,” Larimore-Hall said. “But the agreement we’ve come to is a really amazing contract. We think it’s going to be very popular and overwhelmingly ratified.”
UC spokesman Steve Montiel declined to provide any details about the negotiations, but he said the UC was negotiating in good faith throughout deliberations. Montiel said he hopes the tentative agreement will be ratified by UAW members.
“This is the best contract that could be reached in light of the recent budgetary problems,” he said.
Larimore-Hall said he believes the contract will be extremely popular and pass successfully, but Montiel was unsure how the vote would turn out.
“I hadn’t heard of any dissentient movements within the union,” Montiel said. “But that’s a problem the union needs to deal with.”
Some student employees affected by the UAW contract renewal said they are not as pleased as union officials about the outcome of the negotiations.
“It seemed like the union would really push for a strike and not back down in the face of the university’s bad bargaining tactics,” said Carolina Beltran, a graduate student in Hispanic literatures and culture. “I was ready to strike and take action as a way to indict the UC for fee increases, furloughs and precarious wages for TAs.”
Elise Youn, an urban planning doctoral student, echoed Beltran’s sentiments. She also said she felt UAW negotiators did not push enough for the original 5 percent wage increase that the union was demanding.
“Inflation is projected as increasing at the rate of 3 percent yearly,” Youn said. “So a 2 percent increase (in wages) is like a 1 percent decrease in real terms.”
Youn said a “reform movement” was underway because of the general feeling among some union members that the UAW was not acting on behalf of its members’ best interests.
Eli Friedman, a doctoral candidate in sociology at UC Berkeley, was one of the first members of the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, which aims to establish more democratic practices within the UAW system, he said.
Friedman said he believes the union does not want involvement from its members and is not keeping student employees informed about the happenings of the negotiations.
The grassroots organization recently e-mailed members, urging them to vote against the contract. The e-mail contained dissident opinions from members of the bargaining team.
“Members of the bargaining team that voted no on the issue weren’t present at a majority of the negotiation meetings and resurfaced in this reform movement that’s urging people to vote against the contract,” Larimore-Hall said. “If this contract isn’t ratified, we may either resume negotiations, or the university could impose an impasse on us and we could ultimately end up with a worse contract.”
He added that the reform movement is representative of a small dissenting opinion.
Youn, Beltran and Friedman stressed the importance of keeping UAW members informed. They said the more informed union members were, the more likely they would vote no to look out for their own interests.
Though UC officials said they did not know about the intra-union disputes, Beltran agreed with Friedman that the university was trying to quiet the controversy of the negotiations.
“I was completely unaware of the reform movement occurring within the UAW,” Montiel said. “But that is a problem for the union to handle.”
Students said they believe reform should be implemented to support the interests of student employees.
“Saying this contract is a victory is all propaganda. The UAW wants to make it seem like we should be happy with what we’ve got,” Beltran said.
UAW members will be voting on the contract from Nov. 30 to Dec. 4. If the contract is not ratified by majority vote, negotiations will resume.