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Wednesday, November 27, 1996

SUCCESS:

SAGE/UAW president sets the record straight about the issuesBy Timothy Hall

SAGE's walkout last week was a momentous step in our long struggle with the intransigent UCLA administration. A large majority of academic student employees at UCLA, in concert with majorities of academic student employees (ASEs) at Berkeley and San Diego, participated. We had wide support from faculty: many canceled classes outright, many more moved classes off campus, and faculty have now given over $1000 toward our efforts. Undergraduates respected the picket line in huge numbers, and those who had to cross for exams or mandatory lectures expressed support by wearing stickers and in other ways. I would like now to remind the UCLA community of the much-discussed details of our struggle behind our walkout.

Of course, it would be nice to send this message out to all of you through the campus e-mail, as Chancellor Young does, but he monopolizes address lists in his attacks on SAGE. It would be nice to send a mailing out to all of your homes just as Chancellor Young did last week when he mailed a threatening letter to many academic employees who are protected by law from such intimidating tactics. The administration will not share access to its mailing lists, either. It would have been nice to use the campus mail, but when a group of concerned faculty tried to send a letter on our behalf through their normal administrative sponsor, the administration prevented it. This caused a delay of a week as we scrambled to find another channel to distribute the letter.

So, as the supposed advocates of the "free exchange of ideas" monopolize ­ indeed, interfere with ­ various modes of campus communication, we have to hope to reach you all through means such as this Viewpoint article.

Let's try to set the record straight. Over the past several years, academic student employees have faced several serious problems:

1. Student-to-TA ratios increasing throughout the university.

2. Pay cuts of 15 percent against inflation for all academic student employees over the last five years.

3. Inadequate health care. TAs, unlike most other campus employees, have no spousal or dependent coverage, and no optical or dental plans. All tutors and readers working 25 percent time or less (which is most readers at UCLA), have no health care at all.

4. Cuts in paid preparation time for tutors. Many tutors are not now paid for both class attendance and course reading.

5. A closed door grievance procedure in which the university is the final arbiter in any dispute.

Problems like these have convinced academic student employees that we need a legally recognized voice in negotiating our working conditions. So, in 1994, a majority of academic student employees selected ­ in a state-verified count ­ SAGE to represent them in collective bargaining with the university. The university should have just recognized SAGE then and begun negotiations. Instead, they refused and began spending millions of university dollars fighting the right of academic student employees to collective bargaining. From then until this very day, the conflict has been starkly simple: SAGE is fighting to see that academic student employees have a real voice over our working conditions, and the university is fighting to see that we do not.

SAGE has tried over and over again to bring the university to the bargaining table. We have tried to remind the university of the democratically expressed wishes of its academic student employees through letters, petitions, demonstrations, teach-outs, informational pickets and other actions. The university has consistently and categorically refused our offers to negotiate. Finally, because all other efforts at the time failed, we held a two-day walkout in the Spring of 1995, and again the university would not even begin the process of negotiation with us.

Since then, we have tried again to bargain with the university. For example, in September of this year, an administrative judge ruled in our legal case. Judge Tamm ruled that the university must recognize TAs, readers and tutors as workers with collective bargaining rights. Research assistants, however, need not be so recognized, he concluded. We offered not to exercise any appeals concerning research assistants, and asked that the university abide by the judge's decision. Let me emphasize that we were willing not to strike if the university accepted this reasonable offer. Chancellor Young flatly refused, and we had no choice but to go ahead with our plans for the Fall walkout which ended last Friday. Again, all we are asking for is the opportunity to negotiate our working conditions. If the university had just granted us that ­ had been willing to bargain ­ there would have been no strikes, no picket lines, no canceled classes.

Here are some notes about this legal decision. In his startlingly misleading communique last week, Chancellor Young called Judge Tamm's decision "provisional." On other occasions, administrators have called the ruling "advisory." Let's be clear ­ Judge Tamm's ruling was a complete and valid decision. It is not more provisional because the university is appealing than a criminal conviction is provisional because the convict appeals. If the university is going to monopolize e-mail listings and direct mailing, they ought to at least not be disingenuous.

The university also claims in their legal brief, and elsewhere, that when academic student employees teach sections, grade papers, tutor, hold office hours, or lecture, we do it primarily as an educational benefit to ourselves, not as the necessary work of the university, and so it is not really work. How absurd! Anyone who has taken courses at UCLA, had a paper graded by a reader, or come to a tutoring session knows that TAs, readers and tutors perform work essential to the day-to-day functioning of the university. That's why they hire us to do it. Indeed, it was exactly this conclusion that Judge Tamm came to in his ruling. Furthermore, the university's own response belies their claims ­ if the work that student employees do is primarily for our educational benefit, why does it anger the administration so, and why do they send threatening letters to our homes when we call a strike?

Any worries the university claims to have about academic relationships suffering under collective bargaining are unfounded as well. Collective bargaining already works at many universities across the country, including large public universities like the University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst ­ and the administration knows it.

In any event, the legal case is just an attempt by the university to drag matters out as long as they can, in the hopes that we will simply become discouraged and quit. In their past disputes, the administration has stalled collective bargaining through interminable appeals that have stretched for a decade or more. We academic student employees have already seen, however, the clear link between our lack of a clear voice and our working conditions. We're going to continue fighting and escalating the pressure in the face of their indefensible intransigence.

It's important to remember that what SAGE fights for is not only the interests of its members, but also the interests of all members of the academic community. Student-to-TA ratios, for example, affect not just academic student employees, but students. Whether tutors are paid to do adequate preparation for their sessions is a matter of concern not just to tutors, but those who use their services.

Whether academic student employees have a voice in negotiating our working conditions and benefits is important not just to ourselves, but to anyone concerned with administration accountability in its budgeting process. SAGE's members are only graduate students and those undergraduates with academic student positions. In the era of increasing privatization of the UC system, however, and pressures to run the UC like a "business" instead of an institution of public education, SAGE's fight is important to anyone who values public higher education. Indeed, we have received support from many public figures, including Maxine Waters, Lt. Gov. Gray Davis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson in a letter to Chancellor Young this week, for exactly this reason.

The pressure to give academic student employees a voice will not go away. The support for it is too strong, and the reasons it is important to all of us in the campus community are too compelling. We ask all of you to urge the university to stop its unreasonable stonewalling, and to stop squandering millions of university dollars fighting SAGE. It's time to sit down at the table and negotiate.