UC Teaching Assistants Strike on 8 Campuses

In the nation’s largest labor strike by graduate students, hundreds of teaching assistants walked off the job at eight University of California campuses Tuesday.

Unlike sporadic strikes on individual campuses in previous years, this one was orchestrated throughout the UC system to hit when the university is most vulnerable: just before final exams.

The strike, part of a 15-year effort by UC graduate students to win recognition as a union, forced the cancellation of hundreds of classes, catching some students by surprise.

James Burnett, a UC Irvine junior, arrived at a discussion group Tuesday hoping for some guidance from his teaching assistant before writing his term paper. But no one else showed. “I would’ve liked to have talked to the TA about some things,” Burnett said.

The UC administration instructed professors that it is their responsibility to ensure that classes continue without disruption.

Yet professors in the most heavily hit academic departments said they cannot possibly shoulder the grad students’ hefty teaching loads. Furthermore, they recoiled at the notion of grading the mountain of term papers and essay exams that pile up this time of year.

“Even if I wanted to read 340 essays,” said UCLA sociology professor Ruth Milkman, “I’m not really in a position to do that. There’s going to be a lot of noise when students don’t get their grades on time.”

The strike is being carefully watched across the country, where college and university campuses have become increasingly hot battlegrounds for the labor movement.

Nationwide, graduate students have won collective bargaining rights at 18 universities.

But the strike called by student associations representing 9,000 UC teaching assistants, readers and tutors is by far the largest.

“There has never been anything of this magnitude,” said Neil Bucklew, an industrial relations professor who has tracked the TAs’ union movement nationwide for 30 years.

Bucklew, former president of West Virginia University where he now teaches, predicts that UC will ultimately join the universities of Michigan, Florida, Oregon, Massachusetts and other institutions that recognize graduate student unions.

“It’s not a question if the TAs are successful in the strike or cannot pull it off,” Bucklew said. “Labor history says once these things get started, they don’t tend to go away.”

Union, UC Positions

UC administrators were hanging tough Tuesday, sticking by UC President Richard C. Atkinson’s statement that graduate student teaching duties are in effect an apprenticeship--part of their education for master’s or doctoral degrees--rather than a traditional labor relationship.

“We believe that teaching assistants are principally students rather than employees, and thus are not eligible for collective bargaining,” he said.

The administration also says that the appropriate state labor law--the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act--does not recognize graduate students as employees and that the university thus has no legal obligation to do so.

But rulings have chipped away at that position in recent years regarding tutors and readers (those students who grade papers) and so the university has decided that it will recognize unions for those two groups, about 2,300 workers. Nonetheless, some tutors and readers joined the strike called by associations representing 6,700 teaching assistants.

Some administrators have suggested that instead of striking, the grad students should go to the Legislature to change the law.

But union activists consider that suggestion another stall tactic by the university.

“We want the same rights as any other workers in California,” said Connie Razza, a UCLA English grad student and union activist. “The university doesn’t want to recognize us as employees, but it couldn’t function without our labor.”

Teaching assistants do the bulk of hands-on, small-group teaching to freshmen and sophomores on UC campuses, often leading discussion or laboratory sections that supplement large lecture courses. In addition, readers along with TAs do much of the grading of students’ papers and exams, even in courses taught by full professors.

According to UC official figures, TAs teach about 15% of courses. But the graduate students say that figures diminishes their true interaction with undergraduates. They cite another university figure that grad student instructors account for 60% of the “contact hours” with undergraduates.

UC’s teaching assistants generally work about 20 hours a week for a nine-month academic year and receive an average stipend of $13,600 as well as health insurance and a discount on graduate student fees. UC administrators say these are among the most generous packages offered by any university.

No one knows exactly how many graduate students are participating in the walkout. UC administrators estimated that only about 5% of the TAs walked out Tuesday, while graduate student organizers say that it will become apparent that a majority have joined the strike by the end of the week.

Only a fraction of classes meet Tuesdays and therefore neither side had a way of counting no-shows.

To demonstrate their strength, union organizers point out that 87% of 4,700 participating graduate students voted earlier this year to authorize the strike at all UC campuses, except for the medical school at UC San Francisco. The graduate student associations are affiliated with the United Auto Workers, which has agreed to pay the students strike benefits.

Picket lines were relatively small Tuesday. Only 120 braved the rain at the edge of the UCLA campus. UC Berkeley and other campuses saw similarly light turnouts.

UC administrators downplayed any disruption, emphasizing that it was business as usual in most quarters of campus.

Indeed, the effects of the strike seemed to hopscotch among different departments, skipping engineering and hard science departments and concentrating in social sciences, arts and humanities.

At UC Santa Barbara, the strike had considerable impact in the sociology department, which has eight professors on sabbaticals. Eighteen others signed a statement vowing not to “perform the work of teaching assistants . . . in support of their legal right to unionize.”

The two largest lecture courses, Sociology 1 with 500 students and Sociology 2 with 450, are being taught this term by advanced graduate students, who joined the strike, as did their 13 teaching assistants.

“I’ve got 450 students and seven TAs and they’re telling me I’m not an employee,” said Phil McCarty, who was teaching social psychology. He figures that 450 term papers due shortly will sit ungraded in the department office until the strike is resolved.

At UCLA, the English department was eerily quiet because most TAs were on strike. But the graduate students who teach French decided collectively to say non to union organizers.

Most TAs in Spanish classes also declined to join, saying that they were disappointed by the lack of results from previous strikes and put off by aggressive organizers. ‘They’ve been very pushy,” said Anna Relano-Pastor, who teaches Spanish. “They’ve been calling me and waiting for me after class.”

That came as a relief to the Spanish department. “We could be potentially devastated if they all walked out,” said department manager Todd S. August. “Spanish 1 through Spanish 6 . . . are all taught by TAs.”

Arranging Backup Plans

Administrators, meanwhile, have been busy arranging backup plans to keep the university operating on schedule.

Besides reminding professors of their overriding responsibilities, they have arranged for money to pay replacement workers and even suggested that professors replace essay exams with multiple-choice tests that can be graded by machine.

One memo circulated at UCLA suggested that professors “in extraordinary cases” can award grades based on the first eight weeks of work--papers, quizzes and tests--and thus forgo final exams or other work completed in the last two weeks.

The UC faculty has mixed views on the strike, but the undergraduate students have been generally supportive.

Student governments on all UC campuses have passed resolutions in support of the striking TAs--a sentiment echoed on campuses Tuesday. Yet undergraduates were concerned about any personal toll.

Indrahil Sinha, a sophomore and premed major at Berkeley, said he and his colleagues were worried about the final exam since their striking TAs had canceled review sessions. “We’re not too happy that we can’t discuss the material with our instructors,” Sinha said.

But Dan Silverstein, 19, seemed unconcerned. Sure, his TA in a psychology class had canceled a discussion session, but most of his classes are in math and science where far fewer graduate students have joined the picket lines.

“If I were in more humanities classes, I’d be worried,” he said.

Courtney Arrigo, a UCLA freshman, said she was disturbed that her TA had gone on strike because she relies on the small-group discussion to unravel mysteries presented by the professor in a “really hard philosophy class.”

On the other hand, she said, “A lot of people are stoked because they don’t have to turn in their papers.”

Times staff writer Liz Seymour and correspondent Edward Wong contributed to this article.