For the past month, 48,000 graduate students, researchers, and assistants throughout the University of California system have been on strike for better work conditions. We examine what's next.
The workload for graduate students, researchers and assistants who take on-campus jobs for their discipline is notoriously underpaid and endless. That’s why 48,000 of those workers throughout the University of California system have gone on strike, demanding better pay and conditions. The strike is happening even as finals loom.
Today, we examine the background and what’s next. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times education reporter Teresa Watanabe
More reading:
Nearly 48,000 UC graduate students poised to shut down many classes, labs and research with strike
UC postdoctoral scholars and researchers reach tentative deal but strike continues
Chaos over grades, finals and ongoing classes erupts as UC strike continues
Gustavo Arellano: I've had a lot of friends who've worked as graduate assistants on the way to becoming professors and they'll all tell you the same thing. The hours for the work are long, it’s hard… and the pay is nothing. It's sadly been a part of graduate life for a long time, but at University of California campuses across the state, those workers are saying… enough.
Ambient sound from UC protests: Union makes us strong.
Jamie Mandello: We are out here fighting for better working conditions. We are overworked and underpaid and we are fed up. And so today we strike.
Gustavo Arellano: Last week, some of the workers on strike reached a tentative deal that’s going to elevate their pay to among the highest in the nation … but more than 35,000 people at UCs are still refusing to work.
This stoppage has canceled classes, shuttered labs and caused other academic disruptions.
And it's all gone down as finals for students are just days away.
Ambient sound from UC protests: I believe that we will win!
Gustavo Arellano: UC administrators are claiming that there can be long-lasting and unintended consequences if a widespread pay hike does go through. But those on strike say this is the only way to change the well-documented shortcomings when it comes to grad student life.
Lavanya Nott: We are always thinking about how little money we have and how constrained we are financially, and I think it would give us some peace of mind and freedom to sort of focus on our work and live with some dignity.
Gustavo Arellano: I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to “The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times.” It's Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2022.
Today, how the nation's biggest-ever college strike — and possibly the biggest-ever pay hike for some of these UC workers — is already changing long-held notions of pay equity in college.
And not just at universities in California, but across the rest of the country.
Gustavo Arellano: Teresa Watanabe covers education for the Los Angeles Times. Teresa, welcome to “The Times.”
Teresa Watanabe: Hey, Gustavo. Glad to be here.
Gustavo Arellano: So who exactly are the people on strike and what do they want?
Teresa Watanabe: Well, there's actually four different groups of strikers. The biggest are the graduate students who work as teaching assistants, tutors and researchers. They make up about 36,000 of the 48,000 on strike. There are also postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers who are no longer students, but they work full time on UC research. And all of them have banded together in this collective strike with common asks for higher pay, better benefits like healthcare for dependents, and subsidies for childcare and transportation. Uh, the grad students want to raise their minimum pay from about $22,000 to $54,000, so that's more than doubling. The postdocs and academic researchers and UC just announced a tentative deal that would give them the biggest wage increases ever in their history, so they're super happy about that, and it would increase their minimums from about $55,000 to more than $70,000 by the end of their five-year contract.
Gustavo Arellano: That payscale does really sound low, especially in California, where rent, gas, everything really, is always more expensive than other states. So how have these workers been making things work for themselves and their families all this time?
Teresa Watanabe: Yeah, it's been really hard for so many of them. And as you know, the UC campuses are located in some of the priciest real estate markets in the country. I mean, you're talking places like San Francisco and Berkeley, Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara.
Gustavo Arellano: UCLA.
Teresa Watanabe: UCLA, West L.A. Yeah, it's really tough. And these rents are outrageous. And so the grad students say, uh, that they just are having such a hard time making ends meet.
Jessie Altieri: I'm out here because more than half of my monthly pay goes to paying my rent. It's subsidized, but it's not subsidized enough that I have enough money left over after rent to pay my bills. I'm scraping by to be able to live most months.
Teresa Watanabe: Some of them are actually living in their cars or they’re couch surfing, or they have to live far from campus, so it will take them hours to commute. And then of course that makes them spend hundreds of dollars on gas every month. And a lot of them are living paycheck to paycheck.
Jessie Altieri: Because we have to be living in these, like, situations that can be uncomfortable. So there are ways to afford housing, but it's cramped and uncomfortable and not very fair.
Teresa Watanabe: They can't afford cars. And so they have to rely on public transportation, which, you know, in L.A. is not very good.
Jamie Mandello: Coming into graduate school, we didn't have great pay and now it's just getting harder and harder and we're asked to push our money further and further.
Teresa Watanabe: And some of the workers have even described having to send their kids away. One of them said she had to send her child to relatives in India to take care of because she could not afford the child care, which can run $2,000 a month and sometimes eat up 90% of these workers’ pay.
Lavanya Nott: I can't even imagine having kids at this stage because I don't, I can barely sustain myself.
Teresa Watanabe: I did interview a researcher up at UC Davis. She's about to have her baby this month, actually. And she said, “I don't know what I'm going to do, because there's a one-year waiting list for childcare and it's going to cost me $2,000 a month.” So it's pretty dire. And they are just saying enough is enough and it's time for them to get the pay that they deserve.
Gustavo Arellano: So… how and why did this become a thing? Why have grad students long been expected to struggle financially and just take it?
Teresa Watanabe: This problem has been brewing for literally more than two decades. Since 2000, there have been five university task forces to look at the problem of graduate student funding. In 2012, there was a joint faculty administrative group that found that University of California was not paying enough to be competitive to attract top graduate student talent. In June 2019, just before the UC Santa Cruz wildcat strike, where graduate students demanded cost-of-living increases, there was another faculty study that found that there had been chronic underinvestment in doctoral education. And even in July, UC Academic Senate leaders urge the university to form a joint working group to analyze what they say is a fundamentally broken model of funding graduate education. But the problem is that there just hasn't really been anything substantive done to solve the problem. So the widespread belief among, especially a lot of UC people, is that the state legislators, who are the ones who can fund a lot of this stuff, haven't really been that interested in graduate education. They are so much more concerned about undergraduates and getting seats expanded for undergraduates because they are always hammered by their constituents complaining that their children can't get into UC. So there's been a huge focus on expanding undergraduate enrollment and not enough attention paid to the really valuable work that graduate students do.
Gustavo Arellano: If these workers have it so hard because they're not making enough money, then why can't the UC system, you know, just pay them more money. Why have they allowed this to go on as long as it has?
Teresa Watanabe: Well, the UC system can definitely pay them more money, but the big question is how much more money they're willing to pay. And it's also complicated because more than 60% of these striking workers, the graduate student researchers, the academic researchers and the postdoctoral employees, are primarily paid, not with state funding and tuition revenue, but federal grants that are secured by their faculty supervisors. And so these grants have remained flat for decades. They don't go as far as they once did due to rising costs. I spoke with some faculty members who said that their federal grants used to pay for three graduate students and now it will only pay for one graduate student. So even though they, of course, support better pay and working conditions for their graduate students and researchers, they are really concerned about how they're going to be able to meet those salary demands within the restrictions of federal grants. For the teaching assistants, the TAs and the ones who actually do a lot of the hands-on work with students, the undergraduate students, they are paid through state revenue and, uh, tuition dollars. So that is an area where the state could definitely kick in more money and the UC, if they wanted to, they could shift around their budget allocations.
Teresa Watanabe: They have long been criticized, for instance, for spending too much money on increasing administrative bloat as one faculty member put it, you know, versus actually investing in the students and the faculty and the ones who actually drive the teaching and research engine of the University of California.
More after the break.
Gustavo Arellano: So Teresa, what do UC campuses stand to lose if graduate students walk? Like… how crucial are they when it comes to making the University of California system work?
Teresa Watanabe: They're invaluable. I mean, one professor that I interviewed said she cannot even imagine UC without these graduate students, because these are the ones who do the hands-on work. They lead discussion sessions, you know, for those 200-, 300-, 1,500-student lecture halls. It's the TAs, the graduate students, who will take those students into their smaller discussion groups who will explain these difficult concepts to them. Who will grade their assignments, who will administer their exams. And they're also the ones who do a lot of the research.
Teresa Watanabe: Not only running labs for undergraduates and teaching them how to research, but also doing their own research. You know, the kind of stuff that pushes the UC system into its global prominence, really for the research they do.
Jessie Altieri: I spend most of my day at the bench running experiments. I'm generating the data for my boss, my principal investigator's grants. I'm the reason why he's able to get funding. So I'm spending all this time at the bench and I don't have enough money at the end of the month to be able to live here in California.
Teresa Watanabe: So you just can't even imagine a University of California or a university in general across the nation without these really, really, really important graduate students and the postdoctoral employees as well as the academic researchers.
Gustavo Arellano: What has been the reaction so far to the strike, either from students or faculty or even the public?
Teresa Watanabe: Well, I think there's been widespread support for these students. There are hundreds of faculty who have pledged to join the strike and stop teaching and stop doing their own research as well until there's a settlement. The University of California Student Body Assn., all nine campus presidents have pledged solidarity, and lawmakers, several of them, have signed letters urging UC to negotiate in good faith and come to an agreement. Now, UC, for their part, say they are really working hard to try to come to a resolution. They did actually conclude a tentative deal with the postdoctoral employees and the academic researchers, giving what the union says is a historic bump in salary and wages and working conditions. And so UC says that they're working hard. They really recognize the value that these employees bring, and they do want to come to an agreement. So everyone says that grad students deserve more, they need more. But it's just a question of how much more and where is the money going to come from.
Gustavo Arellano: These tentative agreements for postdoc scholars and researchers, they just affect folks at UCs. But how might that agreement change the game for other academic workers in California and outside, and in both public and private institutions?
Teresa Watanabe: One of the reasons that this strike is drawing national attention is because grad students across the country are in similar straits, so they are working really closely to follow what is happening at UC. I was just told by the postdoctoral union leaders at the University of Washington that the University of Washington came in with an initial offer of $65,000. I mean, UDub postdocs right now make $50,000. So for UDub to come in and give them a huge bump from 50 to 65 as an opening offer is huge. And although the University of Washington says they haven't been influenced by what's going on at UC, the union leaders are saying they don't think it's any coincidence that as people see what's happening with UC, they look at the strike, they look at the demands, they look at how graduate students across the country are saying, you know, “We're not gonna take this anymore.” You know, “Give us what we need.”
Lavanya Nott: It would really improve the lives of many of my friends. And yeah, generally, you know, I think it would give us a more dignified life.
Teresa Watanabe: They think this will have a ripple effect across the country and raise the pay and working conditions of these valuable workers across the nation.
Gustavo Arellano: Teresa, thank you so much for this conversation.
Teresa Watanabe: Thank you so much for having me.
Gustavo Arellano: And that's it for this episode of “The Times: Essential News from the L.A. Times.”
Kinsee Morlan was the jefa on this episode, Mark Nieto mixed and mastered it and Heba Elorbany edited it. Big thanks to Summer Lin, and Gabriel San Román for sharing their recordings of the UC workers who are out there right now on strike.
Our show is produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistants are Roberto Reyes and Nicolas Perez. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin. Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmín Aguilera, Shani Hilton and Heba Elorbany. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
I'm Gustavo Arellano. We'll be back Friday with all the news and desmadre. Gracias.