The 10th week teaching assistant strike will test the patience of students and professors alike – and will cause headaches for the administration.
But that’s the point.
The University of California simply does not take its TAs seriously enough, and the strike is necessary to show UC leaders just how central TAs are to the university’s educational process.
Since Sept. 30 the UC’s TA union has been operating without a contract. In that time, the union has filed 72 complaints of unfair labor practices. Still, the UC does not agree that there is a real problem. A UC statement said, “the mere filing of (unfair labor practices) does not represent actual wrongdoings.” Statements like this show that the UC does not take the union seriously.
And regardless of the specifics surrounding each complaint, there is no doubt that TAs have not been given enough respect for their hard work.
TAs – who must juggle their duties with graduate research and family obligations – receive a low level of compensation. With a base salary of about $14,000, TAs probably represent some of the best-educated and worst-paid people in the country. But because they are students – and they are young – they are expected to take what they can get.
The TA union, along with other prominent unions in the university community, also takes issue with the UC’s opposition to sympathy strikes – or the practice of unions’ supporting each other’s strikes. The UC’s policy presumably is designed to minimize the impact of strikes and help the university continue with normal operations during a strike. But it actually might make the occurrence of strikes more common and disruptive.
By disallowing unions to strike together – thus reducing the impact of individual strikes – the university forces unions to take more radical actions, such as the 10th week strike. An Oct. 3 TA strike went by almost unnoticed – neither students nor administrators seemed impressed.
Negotiations after that strike failed.
And now, in order to solve problems that could have been taken care of sooner, TAs must stop working when students and professors need them most.
For a long time TAs have been undercompensated. And the future looks bleak. The UC system is facing cuts in the hundreds of millions of dollars this year, and some of those cuts are sure to affect compensation levels for UC employees.
Knowing well that their situation won’t improve itself, TAs are taking dramatic action. It won’t be fun for anyone, but everyone – TAs, professors and administrators – must do their part to resolve the situation quickly and fairly.
And undergraduate students, perhaps upset they won’t get all the help they may need in preparing for finals, should not point the finger of blame at their TAs – who, like them, are students.
Instead, the blame goes to the administration. This university relies far too much on students to educate other students. The least it could do is treat them fairly as they pursue better compensation.