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University of California Graduate Employees: How We Organized and Struck
April 11, 2023 @ 7:00 pm - 8:30 pm CDT
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Join event moderator Professor Ruth Milkman and a panel of academic worker acitivest for this important conversation.
This event will be held on zoom. To register and receive a link to attend click HERE.
On November 14, some 48,000 unionized academic workers across the University of California’s 10 campuses went on strike. The workers include teaching assistants, postdoctoral scholars, graduate student researchers, tutors and fellows and they perform much of the teaching and research at the state’s premier higher education system. Organized in the United Automobile Workers (UAW) union, they demanded significant pay increases to afford housing in the high-cost areas where most UC campuses are located, child-care subsidies, enhanced healthcare for dependents, longer family leave, public transit passes and lower tuition costs for international scholars. They remained solid for five weeks, with the support of faculty, other university workers, undergraduate students, and unions in the public and private sectors across the country, and they reached a first contract in mid-December.
This was the largest strike in the history of American higher education. Its breadth — across ten campuses from one end of California to the other, across the disciplines from math and science to history and art. This strike was a new chapter in the fifty year struggle over the affordability of public education in California, and it was a new chapter in the upsurge of graduate employee organizing across the country, including the University of Minnesota.
Learn from graduate employees about why they organized, how they organized, how they struck, how their organizing and striking has changed power relationships in their workplaces, and how they envision their future. Explore what their experiences can teach other workers who are organizing now, across the economy and across the country. ESFL will convene a panel drawn from diverse disciplines and different campuses, moderated by Ruth Milkman, labor scholar-activist and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center and Director of Research at the School of Labor and Urban Studies.