Unions representing students, postdocs, and academic researchers allege repeated contract violations
The deals were hailed as historic wins. But the road to implementation has been bumpy, particularly when it comes to the salaries of graduate student researchers. “The UC has chosen to not centrally fund the raises in our contracts,” says Samantha Abbott, a physics Ph.D. student and union representative at UC Davis. That means departments and lab leaders have largely been left to themselves in figuring out how to foot the bill, leading to a patchwork of budgetary approaches and policies.
The contract doesn’t explicitly require 50% appointments, but it specifies that student researchers should be paid an amount that’s commensurate with their workload. “Many departments in the past arbitrarily underemployed workers to pay them less,” notes Rafael Jaime, president of the union that represents graduate teaching assistants. “The point of the contract was to fix that and make sure that people are actually being fairly compensated.
Union leaders have filed more than 100 formal grievances with individual universities to dispute what they see as contract violations related to pay, workplace harassment policies, and other issues. Some resulted in outcomes that satisfied union leaders. In July, for instance, UC Berkeley agreed to bring graduate students up to a 50% appointment level and to give $600,000 in backpay to those who were paid at lower percentages earlier in the year.
Larger legal disputes are playing out at UCSD, where two graduate students and a postdoc were arrested in June for felony vandalism for allegedly writing “Living Wage Now” and other messages on concrete surfaces. The university says the writing could not be removed by power washing or abrasive buffing and caused more than $12,000 in damage. Around the same time,
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