Teaching Assistants Fight for Workload Protections at UC Campuses

"GRADE-IN TO BE HELD JUNE 12th, 13th THROUGHOUT UC SYSTEM
EMPLOYEES TAKE A STAND ON QUALITY OF EDUCATION

June 12 , 2007

Contact: Scott Bailey Clifthorne, President [phone # removed]

(CALIFORNIA) – Today and Tomorrow, Teaching Assistants, Tutors, and Readers throughout the University of California (UC) system will be doing their work out in the open. They are calling it a “Grade-In/Tutor-In”, and they hope the action will demonstrate to the University of California just how much work it takes to ensure the students at the UC get the quality education that they deserve. The action is organized by UAW Local 2865, the union representing Academic Student Employees at the University of California. The UAW and the UC are currently negotiating a fourth union contract. Workload protection is a critical issue for the union at the bargaining table.

Over the past decade, the University of California has steadily increased enrollment by more than ten thousand students statewide. As a result, many class and section sizes have ballooned. In one example, the UC’s own Committee on Preparatory Education has argued that writing classes are often 10% to 25% larger than the national standard. Education experts are in wide agreement that larger classes have a negative effect on the quality of education.

Danielle Hidalgo, a TA in Sociology at UC Santa Barbara, says that she is responsible for between 75 – 90 students each quarter. “When you have that many papers to grade every three weeks, you just can’t give every student the type of attention that they need to continually improve their writing.”

Increased class and section size equals more work for Academic Student Employees (ASE’s). Employees want increased workload protections that would give the union a say over class and section size. ”We do a lot of the heavy lifting of education at the University. We lead thousands of discussion sections, grade a vast majority of student work, teach over 15 percent of the classes and work one-on-one with students to improve their academic skills.” Says Megan Chadwick, a tutor at UC Merced. “Overworking us is bad for education.”

In addition to negotiating with UC administration over class and section sizes, employees are also pressing to have workload complaints hear by a neutral arbitrator. Under the current contract, ASE’s cannot take workload grievances to arbitration, which means any workload disputes are settled by an internal university board.

UAW Local 2865 represents over 11,000 Teaching Assistants, Readers and Tutors at the nine undergraduate teaching campuses of the University of California. The UAW's contract with the University of California expires at midnight on September 30.

“Our working conditions are students’ learning conditions” says Scott Bailey Clifthorne, President of Local UAW 2865.

http://www.uaw2865.org

Our organizing over the summer is really important because we need to prepare ourselves for the expiration of our contraction on September 30.

Thanks for covering this issue. TAs are often abused in the UC system.

The grievance meeting for the Physics TAs was Thursday, July 12, and it went about as well as could be expected. The end result was an agreement to receive a response from the department chair by next Friday, July 20, and we are cautiously optimistic that we will get the 50% appointments for the students. Should the department not arrive at the conclusion that these TAs are indeed overworked and in need of compensation for the time that they are dedicating to their labs, discussion sections, and (especially) their students, we will most likely take the next step in the grievance process, should the student employees decide that this is the proper course.*

But the real purpose of this email is to applaud the student employees who attended the meeting, and nearly 40 people in the Physics department who signed the petition in support of 50% appointments for all Physics grad students, this summer and in future summers.. The department is clearly taking this mater seriously, and this is due in no small part to the work of grads like Lorenzo, John, Jean, George, and Mike. While the meeting itself was at times contentious, they maintained a professional posture that was both respectful and fearless, and as a union activist, I was proud to have them by my side, and I hope to work with them in the future.

Be on the look out for future updates. We hope that the Physics Department will do the right thing. If not, the union is prepared to help the Physics graduate students continue the fight.

Sara also worked tremendously hard at keeping the faculty and staff on task during the meeting, and she never backed down for a second. Yeah, they tried to intimidate her, but she wasn't having it. Great job, Sara!

The spring quarter was eventful. At the Santa Cruz campus, we organized two successful actions. The first was a campaign to resist cuts to the Graduate Student Healthcare Plan. After an email campaign and a "sick-in" rally, the office of the Executive Vice Chancellor announced that the potential cuts would be no more. It is no coincidence that this happened – never did the EVC's office indicate to the GSA's representative on the healthcare committee that the cuts might not happen. Our campaign showed that organizing works.

Next, the UAW Local 2865 organized statewide coordinated "grade-in" for finals week. This grade-in, which happened at all UC campuses save UC Merced and UC Berkeley (their semesters had ended already), sent a strong message to the University's bargaining team that the union's proposals around workload should be taken seriously. As a reminder, these proposals include: stronger class size protections, full arbitrability for workload grievances, and union standing to grieve. With these actions, we also sent a loud and clear message that our workloads as Teaching Assistants, Readers, and Tutors are inextricably tied to improving the quality of education for undergraduates.

During the Spring quarter organizers (mainly volunteer activists) held a successful union pub night, increased the number of union departmental contacts across campus, enforced our union contract, and worked hard to sign more people up as members of the union. Overall, we effectively made the presence of the union felt at UC Santa Cruz.

Bargaining:

The start of bargaining in the Spring quarter (it officially started March 1) meant that the UAW Local 2865 Bargaining Team worked hard every day to draft proposals, do research around those proposals, and sit down and bargain for a much stronger contract with the University. Right now the bargaining focus are the non-economic proposals (e.g. workload), but soon economic proposals will be negotiated (e.g. wages, healthcare).

The Bargaining Team bargains the statewide contract covering the rights of benefits of working TA's, readers, and tutors at all UC campuses (readers and tutors are not officially represented at UC Santa Cruz). The Bargaining Team consists of two representatives from each UC campus. Adam Hefty (History of Consciousness) and Sara Smith (History) are the two representatives for UC Santa Cruz.

The current union contract expires September 30, 2007. (Past email report backs about bargaining are at http://www.uaw2865.org). Upcoming bargaining dates are July 26-27. Bargaining continues throughout the summer and increases in frequency and intensity at the end of the summer and in the fall quarter.

Upcoming:

Although the regular academic year has ceased, organizing and bargaining continue:

(1) Joint Council Meeting, July 21-22, Los Angeles. The Joint Council consists of the top leadership from each campus (Unit Chair, Recording Secretary, and Head Stewards). To see a full list, go to http://www.uaw2865.org. The Joint Council is one main body charged with making decisions for all UC campuses (the other two are the Executive Board and the annual General Membership meeting. Although only the elected leadership can vote, all members have a voice at the Joint Council and are highly encouraged to attend. They rotate between northern and southern California.

(2) Fall, 2007 Orientation for new grad students. We need as many union activists as possible to help organize the union's outreach plan for the Fall, 2007 orientation. At this year's orientations we (among other things) need to sign up new union members and inform people about bargaining, as well as encourage people to get involved in the union. There are going to be individual departmental orientations as well as a campus-wide orientation in September.

I think there are a lot of sympathetic faculty who would either turn out for these things or otherwise be supportive, but don't know about it until it is too late or worry that they may be intruding. So please let us know. Many things that harm TAs harm us as well, like class sizes that are way too big and have too few TAs. My first year here, I had 2 TAs for a class of 80. Last winter I had 2.5 TAs for a class of nearly 300. Everyone loses if this is permitted to happen.

Hi everyone,

Last week we officially received from Dave Belanger, the chair of the Physics Department, a proposed resolution to the workload dispute involving summer TAs. Here is a brief summary of what has happened so far:

Five current TAs (Lorenzo, John, Mike, Jean, and George) filed grievances with the department about the summer appointments. We basically asked for workloads (maximum hours) consistent with the regular quarter. The petition that 36 of us signed indicated that the majority of the grad students were concerned about it, and we think it played an important role in Dave's decision.

GOOD NEWS! We got most of what we were asking for, namely 100 hour appointments instead of the 75 it used to be - not just for the five people who filed grievances, but for all currently working Teaching Assistants in Physics! This is an important change: after years the Physics department aligned with other departments, like Chemistry, where the TAs have similar duties. We want to thank you all for the solidarity and support. We are especially grateful to Sara and Jeff, from the TA union, who helped a lot with their tireless work and useful advice. This result shows that organizing works.

However, the resolution did not include everything we thought was necessary. The discussion TAs for 7A and 7B only got 50 hour appointments, instead of the 100 that we asked for. This is of course better than 37.5 hours we had before, but is still controversial. We will try to address this individually with Dave and the instructor, even though Mike, the discussion TA for 7A, is already done with his job and has worked more than 50 hours.

One more thing: even if Dave agreed for new appointments, in his resolution he clearly states that he does not agree with most of the grievances (namely the breakdown of the hours) and that this resolution only applies this summer. It is his intention to review the whole summer TA business before next year. This is worrying. He states that "it is the sole purview of the university to set the expectations for the positions for which TAs are hired: the contract does not give TAs the right to define their jobs." This means that technically they do not have to listen to our opinion, but obviously it would be more reasonable if they did. There needs to be a clear understanding and partnership between the graduate student TAs and the department. After all, our contribution to the undergraduate education is very important and we take our responsibilities seriously.

We feel that we have accomplished several important things - not only earning workloads more consistent with the same classes during the quarter, but putting on record how graduate students feel about this issue. We hope this will help as the summer session is reviewed in the coming year and that all the physics graduate students will keep paying attention to this issue in the future.

Thanks again for your support, and as always we appreciate feedback and thoughts on the situation.

Lorenzo, John, Michael, Jean, George