San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
To striking UC employees, living wage remains elusive
As labor action gets wide attention, university says demands aren’t feasible
Robin López is the kind of byyour-bootstraps student that the University of California, with its mission to reflect all the state’s population, says it’s especially proud of.
He grew up in Richmond, barely graduated from high school, dropped out of community college three times — yet found such inspiration in local efforts to restore neglected creeks to good health that he is now a doctoral candidate in UC Berkeley’s Department of Environmental Policy and Management,
as well as a graduate student instructor.
López, 33, is also one of 48,000 academic workers — researchers, postdocs, teaching assistants, tutors and graders — who walked off the job Monday in a huge strike for higher pay and improved working conditions at UC campuses up and down the state.
The United Auto Workers union, which represents the employees, is calling it the largest academic strike in history. Timed to hit just ahead of final exams in the coming weeks, the
labor action had gotten nationwide attention and raised the visibility of similar employees at research universities everywhere.
Like many doctoral candidates, López supports a family. His wife, a bank analyst, is on disability after an accident. They have a 12year-old daughter and a 7week-old son who just emerged from neonatal intensive care after complicated surgery.
López earns $32,000 a year as a half-time teaching assistant working 20 hours a week. His department kicks in $9,000 of his pay, as it does for all its student instructors, and his base salary over 10 months is $23,000. UC is proposing to raise the base pay by 7%, which for López would be an additional $1,610 a year.
He gave a rueful laugh the other day as he considered the offer. “That’s not a livable wage,” he said, cradling his infant son at home. Nearly all of his income, 89%, goes for rent in University Village, a complex in Albany that UC Berkeley reserves for families. López, who is living off savings, recently took out a $10,000 loan to make ends meet.
The union is asking UC to pay student instructors $54,000 a year — a figure based on the state’s median cost of housing — with future raises tied to housing costs.
That’s a no-go, UC says. Tying compensation to housing costs “could have overwhelming financial impacts on the university,” UC’s provost, Michael Brown, wrote campus leaders on Tuesday. He said the union’s proposal would put UC on the hook for “at least several hundred million dollars” and no way to pay for it.
Union officials say the cost is likely to be as much as $2 billion — but still say that is “just 4.5% of UC’s total budget” of $46.4 billion. All four contracts under negotiation for the academic groups on strike include:
• 19,000 teaching assistants, tutors and graduate students who teach and grade papers.
• 17,000 student researchers who joined the union last year.
• 7,000 postdoctoral researchers who have been negotiating with UC the longest, about a year.
• 5,000 academic researchers, such as those at UCSF who study diseases.
Not all of the employees work full time. But many of the half-timers and say they could not do everything they’re required to do if they worked only to contract. Others are able to limit work to their contractual 20 hours and use the rest of the week to study.
On Wednesday, UC President Michael Drake opened the November meeting of the regents in San Francisco by acknowledging the student employees’ right to strike — but defending the university’s stance.
“The offers that we have made are generous and fair,” Drake said. The proposed compensation “would exceed that of other research universities across the country and keep us on par with the top private research universities, as well.”
Not surprisingly, the union disagreed. One reason, they said, was that California’s cost of living is far higher than in many other parts of the country.
Lexie McIsaac, 28, a chemistry postdoc who works about 50 hours a week researching new ways of storing fuel, as well as mentoring graduate students at UC Berkeley, makes $56,000 a year. She feels acutely the Bay Area’s high cost of living.
If you pay at least 30% of income on rent, the federal government says you are “rent burdened.” McIsaac pays 50% of her take-home pay on rent for a shared apartment in Oakland, or $1,700 a month. That makes her “severely rent burdened,” according to the federal definition.
McIsaac also hopes to start a family after marrying her fiance, also a postdoc. But campus childcare costs $2,700 a month, or “60% of a postdoc’s salary!” she said.
In its contract proposal for postdocs, UC is touting a new childcare subsidy of $2,500 a year. McIsaac notes that that’s less than a month’s care. The union is proposing that UC provide subsidies of $2,000 a month.
McIsaac has taken to eating more vegetables and lentils to save money and said the union is pushing for a 25% raise for postdocs, to $70,000. The current salary level harms UC, too, she said.
“It’s costing them talent — students and postdocs that would come here if it weren’t for the crazy cost of living and uncompetitive pay,” she said.
Another area of contention involves the extra tuition UC charges to students who live out of state or overseas. While no one disputes that “non-resident supplemental tuition” is a substantial source of revenue for the public university, the union says the extra charges should be waived for international student employees.
“No one should have to pay to work at the University of California,” the union declared.
Brown, the provost, called this a “particularly challenging proposal” from the union.
Waiving out-of-state supplemental tuition would be unfair to state residents because nonresidents would get “a larger compensation package than California resident student employees for doing the same work,” he said in his letter to campus leaders. He reminded them that UC already reduces tuition and fees for teaching assistants and graduate student researchers.
Again, the union scoffed, noting that UC waives the extra out-ofstate tuition for 60% of its international workers. The union said it just wants that benefit for all of them.
Galen Liang of China, a second-year doctoral student in math at UC Berkeley, is among the lucky 60%. His department waives that supplemental tuition for five years: $75,000 in all.
If it didn’t, it would cost Liang another $15,000 a year, cutting his paycheck in half. He works 20 hours a week teaching calculus to 1,100 undergraduates, grading exams and projects, and leading discussions.
Without that benefit, “I’d have to drop out,” he said. “I’d have no option.”
UC wants to bring in a mediator to facilitate the fractious negotiations. The union has rejected that and said the sides just need to keep going.
The university’s wage proposals are “unacceptable,” according to the union. But on Thursday it said progress had been made in other areas, including paid time off and parking and transit benefits.