Landmark agreement ends union’s struggle

Last week, union organizers and university officials reached a
historic contract agreement, mandating increased wages, fees
remissions and workplace rights for academic student employees at
UCLA and seven other UC campuses.

The long-overdue pact marks the culmination of a 17-year
struggle for economic justice by teaching assistants, readers and
tutors in the UC system. And it proves that with tenacity and
dedication, students and workers can achieve the rights they are
entitled to, even in the face of a powerful bureaucracy like the
University of California.

Aside from affirmative action, the debate over the unionization
rights of academic student employees has been the biggest issue at
this university over the last several years. For too long, UC
officials denied graduate student instructors the right to
unionize, saying that it would threaten the “collegial
relationship” between TAs and the professors they work
for.

Such an argument ignores the simple fact that TAs account for
the vast majority of undergraduate teaching in lower-division
classes. Without them, this university would cease to operate
efficiently. To deny academic student employees the same rights
accorded to other workers is not only unfair, but it is an insult
to the important work that they do.

Less than two years ago, California’s Public Employment
Relations Board put an end to the university’s intransigence
by requiring UC President Richard Atkinson to allow union elections
on all eight undergraduate campuses. Across the UC system, graduate
students voted overwhelmingly to be represented by unions
affiliated with the United Auto Workers; at long last, the
university was forced to sit down at the bargaining table.

This contract is a well-earned resolution that addresses the
needs of academic student employees. It also proves once and for
all that workplace rights and the academic authority of professors
are not mutually exclusive, as the university has claimed for so
many years.

The agreement, which will almost assuredly be approved in
elections this week, will grant TAs, readers and tutors a 9.5
percent pay raise over the next three years, with an immediate
raise of 1.5 percent. The contract will also grant academic student
employees a full fee remission by the fall of 2002 and it will
establish a system for resolving workload disputes.

Student employees have earned the money and benefits offered by
this agreement with the long hours and dedication they put into
teaching undergraduates. But they achieved the contract itself by
refusing to compromise their principles. For 17 years, union
activists worked tirelessly and selflessly, in many cases knowing
that they themselves would never see the fruits of their
sacrifices.

For undergraduates, many of whom will soon enter UC graduate
schools and become TAs themselves, the pact should represent the
collective work of a labor activists who refused to give up.

After scores of strikes and demonstrations, endless legal
maneuvering and the high-profile support of powerful state
legislators, academic student employees have won the battle for
dignity and recognition.

Now, the university must reject the legacy of insult that has
characterized the last 17 years. After this contract expires in
three years, it should bargain in good faith with UCLA’s
Student Association of Graduate Employees and the other campus
unions in order to avoid the strikes and discord that marred the
working conditions of academic student employees for so long.

SAGE and its counterparts have proven themselves to be the
little unions that could. Undergraduate students, and the academic
student employees who teach them, are the lucky beneficiaries of
their 17 years of hard work and tireless dedication.