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• 2007/LaborAtCal

Which union is that again?

Labor past and present at UC Berkeley

by Keith Brower Brown

• Almost all UC Berkeley employees - from cooks to clerical staff, police to librarians, groundskeepers to graduate students, and janitors to lecturers - are represented by one of the seven unions on campus. A new student at Berkeley might be confused by the many union acronyms. Given Berkeley's track record with its employees, these acronyms are likely to show up on t-shirts and signs at some point. Workers depend upon these unions to stand up for them in their struggles with the university. Despite its "liberal" reputation, Berkeley has a long history of struggles employees and management. Again and again, UC administrators have denied workers a basic living wage and fair work conditions, systematically hurt the quality of undergraduate education, and sought to divide and repress effective worker organizations.

Since a 1979 state law, all UC workers are entitled to organize themselves, elect a system wide union based on their type of work, and then bargain collectively with the administration. All workers, except for tenure-track faculty, must unionize all campuses at once, instead of one by one. At Berkeley, workers in 9 different categories of work have elected 7 different unions to represent them, as shown in the chart.

In fact, the only major category of UC Berkeley employee which elected not to bargain collectively was tenure-track professors, or faculty. Professors, given some representation in the Academic Senate, were lobbied heavily by UC administrators not to unionize, who claimed that professors already had a governance role and would not gain by collectively bargaining for their rights. Although the protections of tenure have provided some of these workers considerable security, many professors feel the decision not to organize has left their ranks in a weaker, more divided position.

As Cal students, labor decisions have a huge impact on the quality of our education. Many departments at Berkeley, due to constraints on the number of tenure-track faculty they are allowed to hire, have in the past decades increasingly hired lecturers — often professionals in fields like architecture or biology — to teach hands-on classes and standard lectures. Lecturers, along with the highly-educated librarians who organize and provide access to the school’s dense collections, deeply enrich the undergraduate experience. Nonetheless, the UC administration has repeatedly fought to undermine their job security and compensation.

In the early 1980’s, most lecturers were hired for 8 years and then laid off, regardless of job performance, and their positions filled anew. UC-AFT, in its very first negotiations, was able to put an end to this practice of “churning”, securing a review at the end of six year’s employment and the possibility to earn indefinite three year reappointments. The UC administration, continued to illegally “churn” its lecturers at Berkeley and Davis alike, and was found in violation of its contract and fair labor laws multiple times in the late 80s, 90’s, and early 2000’s. In its last contract negotiation, UC-AFT succeeded — after few-day strikes on many campuses and solidarity protests from many students — in winning a peer review component for performance evaluations, and replaced the 3-year reappointment system with a “continuing” appointment system, so that high quality teachers do not have to reapply for their jobs every three years.

The UC administration claims that librarians receive salaries similar or better to those at other major research libraries — callously ignoring the local cost of living. In fact, Berkeley librarians have long been paid considerably lower salaries than those in the California State University and community college system. Through UC-AFT, librarians have won biannual evaluations for raises, standardized advancement procedures, and peer evaluations. However, for their next contract, the administration has proposed “pay scales”, lowering minimum wages and giving management more power to arbitrarily set wages, and wants to reduce the power of librarian peer review councils. This has outraged many librarians and swelled the ranks of the union.

In the past few years, service workers at Berkeley have struggled hard for a livable wage, fair treatment, and a contribution to health care and pensions from their employer. Cal’s custodians and dining workers, among others in the AFSCME union, were getting paid $5 to $10 dollars less per hour on average than those at other East Bay campuses. After the UC administration claimed repeatedly it didn’t have the money for even a $1.75 an hour raise for all Berkeley service workers, AFSCME lobbied the state legislature and succeeded in having exact funding for this raise added to the UC 2006-7 budget. However, UC administrators then spent it elsewhere and claimed they still didn’t have the money. Only after months of massive worker and student protests, including a demonstration at Berkeley where 400 students slept overnight on the street to show solidarity against the administration’s homewrecking did the administration concede and provide the $1.75 raise.

Currently, AFSCME is negotiating a new contract with the administration. It aims to win another raise, of $1.58, gain a standardized advancement system for workers, and get health care for the workers it represents. However, the administration is fighting back hard, and has repeatedly kicked student observers out of the negotiations when it presents its offers. Many student groups, including Xinachtli, Students Organizing for Justice in the Americas, and organizations from Boalt Law and Goldman School of Public Policy are working currently to aid and show solidarity with UC’s worst-paid workers in this negotiation.

One of the recurring tactics of the UC administration, when faced with effective worker organizations, is to try and sow divisions amongst workers. Since the 1980s, management has pushed librarians to enter a non-bargaining professional council instead of UC-AFT, leading to a split between the groups that has often been tense. The administration has also pushed to contractually divide service workers at its medical centers from those at campuses, aiming to provide the latter with lower wages and causing competition between the groups. Another recent example is the wage differential between dining hall employees. Cal student workers earned $2/hour less than their fellow employees, including high school students, simply because of their status as Cal students. While the Student Worker Action Group (SWAG) was successful in winning a $2 raise after a 7 month struggle, Cal workers soon discovered that the university had simultaneously increased the wages of non-Cal employees, thus maintaining the unfair wage differential. The campaign continues.

Too many times has the UC worked against the interests of the employees who make its campuses work. The interests of the workers are also those of the students, as poor labor practices translate into poor education. No matter these obstacles, through strong organizing by workers and students, huge successes have — and will — be won.

IWW

The East Bay, and the city of Berkeley especially, have long had some of the most highly organized workforces in the country, with very high union membership rates. As far back as the 19th century, powerful unions in the area led campaigns against police and corporate brutality, against racial and gender discrimination, and for a peace-oriented American foreign policy. Today, the East Bay is serving as a major starting point for the national organizing efforts of the International Workers of the World, a progressive union based on direct worker democracy. In Berkeley, many workers have organized themselves in recent years through the IWW, including those at Metro Lighting, Landmark Shattuck Cinemas, Stonemountain and Daughter Fabrics, and both companies who pick up and transport recycling in Berkeley.

Graduate Student Organizing

Increasing corporatization of the university in the 1980's, manifesting in a decline in real wages, fewer tenure-track jobs and more reliance on temporary lecturers, led the graduate student instructors (GSIs) to organize. They recognized that as GSIs, they were doing much of the instruction work in the University, and yet recieved almost none of the benifits of University employees. In 1989, a 2-day strike of UC GSIs won them health insurance. In 1991 the Berkeley GSIs struck for, and won, a partial fee waiver, that to avoid further strikes, was extended to GSIs at all UC campuses. In 1998, GSIs at all eight UC campuses organized a union drive that culminated, after a several-day strike threatening to leave finals ungraded, in recognition of the UAW as the official union for all UC GSIs. The union continues to be a resource for graduate students working to improve the quality of education in the UC system.