One Year Later, Massive University Of California Strike Leaves Complicated Legacy For Some

UC Irvine doctoral student Tia Chung-Swanson didn't miss the reminder of how her life changed a year ago.

“I get… memories on my photos,” she said, alluding to how smartphones can generate collections from years past.

One photo shows her on the first day of the UC graduate student strike on Nov. 14, 2022. She’s holding a megaphone. She was one of nearly 50,000 graduate students across 10 University of California campuses whose United Auto Workers-affiliated locals went on strike for higher pay and better working conditions.

The UAW called it the largest strike in higher education in U.S. history.

Chung-Swanson says she didn’t get involved because it would be historic. She and other graduate students worked full-time hours on research, helping teach, or tutor, and were paid wages they could not live on.

“I really only got involved [because] I don't think I want to work in a department where we're not supporting each other and we're not fighting for more,” she said.

And the contract that finally ended the six-week strike gave workers more. The UC graduate students were represented in multiple units that negotiated for postdocs, graduate student workers, and student researchers.

Chung-Swanson is happy with the wage increases and so are her union colleagues on campus. They celebrated the anniversary last Tuesday grilling some burgers and hot dogs at the community center in campus graduate housing.

Still, many of the concerns and divisions that were apparent in the final vote to ratify those agreements linger a year later.

Employees and employers

Chung-Swanson thinks about some of the personal costs of the strike.

“I've seen [students] facing retaliation. I've definitely felt that relationships are changed,” Chung-Swanson said.

She’s talking about relationships with faculty.

The field many of these students work in doesn't have the long history of organized labor that other parts of the economy do.

“[In science] you're asking hard questions that people don't know the answer to, you have to constantly devise experiments to try to prove yourself wrong, and [it] just involves so much and back and forth between the mentor and the mentee … counting hours is something that's never been on our radar," said Elliot Botvinick, a UC Irvine professor in the departments of surgery and biomedical engineering.

He supervises a half dozen doctoral students in research involving the physics of cancer and the making of devices to treat type 1 diabetes.

“Now I feel like an employer, which is an absolute catastrophe from the point of view of doing science,” he said.

The contract and its rules, he said, are affecting his lab’s productivity. But the previous arrangement of low pay for full time-plus work had to change, he added.

Tiers for union workers

The strike attracted national attention because of how many workers the union represented, the non-traditional aspect of those workers, and that pickets were going on across California.

“Once the UAW got that particular feather in its cap, it was no longer really interested in us,” said Janna Haider, a fifth year doctoral student in the history department at UC Santa Barbara.

She voted against ratification of the contract after the strike.

The strike’s legacy, she said, is that it created a two-tier pay increase, giving higher raises to some union members at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and UC San Francisco.

“Sixty-seven percent of academic student employees on the Santa Barbara campus voted no on the contract because it leaves so many of us in poverty,” she said.

Her wages went up $8,000 to $29,000 for the work she does, but Santa Barbara’s cost of living remains high for many grad students, even with the increased pay.

LAist reached out to UAW leadership for response to the criticisms.

“The new GSR contract has made a huge difference in my life. My annual salary has increased by $6,800 since last winter and I now have paid PTO and days off for bereavement leave,” said Madeline Vailhe, a UC Santa Barbara graduate student, in an email response to the inquiry.

Vailhe also said she has not felt relationships change since the strike’s end.

Sharing experience

UC grad students’ experience during and after their strike could inform USC unionized grad students who gave their leaders the green light to strike last month.

“I’ve had the privilege of having some conversations with rank-and-file union members at USC,” UCSB's Haider said.

She urged them to keep decision-making with the local members.

“Lean in to your grassroots organizing, lean in to the rank-and-file movement," she said. "Remember that the statewide power structure is there to support you, not to dictate to you."