Thousands of California Academic Workers Strike Amid Demands for Higher Salaries, Forcing Some Classes to be Cancelled

Some 48,000 academic workers from California joined a strike on Monday where they demanded higher salaries, forcing some classes in the region to be canceled.

The tens of thousands of academic employees joined what is considered one of the largest strikes in the United States in recent years. The protesters include teaching assistants, researchers, and other university employees who want significant pay increases to address the rising housing costs.

Academic Workers' Strike

The walkout is the latest in a series of union activities across a booming labor market and encompasses nearly 48,000 unionized campus employees at the prestigious public university system. The strike disrupted classes, slowed research, and canceled office hours as the employees picketed at campuses from San Diego to Berkeley.

Some of the faculty members also canceled lectures in sympathy with the strikers or shifted instruction to Zoom to avoid crossing picket lines in the primarily pro-labor state. The university system noted that its 10 campuses, which have roughly 300,000 students in total, would still be open, adding that instruction and operations would continue, as per the New York Times.

However, the students and employees involved in the strike are represented by the United Automobile Workers and make up a core workforce in classrooms and laboratories throughout the university system. With many campuses only a few weeks away from final examinations, the strike could significantly affect operations.

A doctoral candidate at the University of California, Los Angeles, Rafael Jaime, is also the president of U.A.W. Local 2865, which represents roughly 19,000 teaching assistants, tutors, and other classroom workers. He said that they were the ones who perform the majority of teaching and research.

According to the Washington Post, the academic workers are demanding a minimum annual salary of $54,000 and increased child-care benefits. They argued that they do not earn enough money to afford to live in the state. Furthermore, the protesters accused the university system of not bargaining in good faith with their union.

California Workers Demand For Higher Salaries

The president of U.A.W. Local 5810, Neal Sweeney, said that the university has, at every turn, sought to act unlawfully at the bargaining table, preventing them from reaching an agreement. The university leadership allegedly made changes, illegally, to pay and transit benefits without consulting the union.

Furthermore, the union accused the university of refusing to provide necessary information on who was in the bargaining unit and obstructed the process. For more than a year, negotiations have been under discussion.

However, university officials have denied the union's allegations that their negotiators broke the law during the bargaining process. They argued that they conducted good-faith efforts to bargain as shown by a number of tentative agreements that the parties involved have already reached.

A graduate student in the history department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Janna Haider, said that the United Automobile Workers' union's material conditions have been so bad for such a long time that many workers have run out of patience with the university, Al Jazeera reported.