Wednesday, November 27, 1996
SUCCESS:
SAGE/UAW president sets the record straight about the issuesBy
Timothy Hall
SAGE’s walkout last week was a momentous step in our long
struggle with the intransigent UCLA administration. A large
majority of academic student employees at UCLA, in concert with
majorities of academic student employees (ASEs) at Berkeley and San
Diego, participated. We had wide support from faculty: many
canceled classes outright, many more moved classes off campus, and
faculty have now given over $1000 toward our efforts.
Undergraduates respected the picket line in huge numbers, and those
who had to cross for exams or mandatory lectures expressed support
by wearing stickers and in other ways. I would like now to remind
the UCLA community of the much-discussed details of our struggle
behind our walkout.
Of course, it would be nice to send this message out to all of
you through the campus e-mail, as Chancellor Young does, but he
monopolizes address lists in his attacks on SAGE. It would be nice
to send a mailing out to all of your homes just as Chancellor Young
did last week when he mailed a threatening letter to many academic
employees who are protected by law from such intimidating tactics.
The administration will not share access to its mailing lists,
either. It would have been nice to use the campus mail, but when a
group of concerned faculty tried to send a letter on our behalf
through their normal administrative sponsor, the administration
prevented it. This caused a delay of a week as we scrambled to find
another channel to distribute the letter.
So, as the supposed advocates of the "free exchange of ideas"
monopolize  indeed, interfere with  various modes of
campus communication, we have to hope to reach you all through
means such as this Viewpoint article.
Let’s try to set the record straight. Over the past several
years, academic student employees have faced several serious
problems:
1. Student-to-TA ratios increasing throughout the
university.
2. Pay cuts of 15 percent against inflation for all academic
student employees over the last five years.
3. Inadequate health care. TAs, unlike most other campus
employees, have no spousal or dependent coverage, and no optical or
dental plans. All tutors and readers working 25 percent time or
less (which is most readers at UCLA), have no health care at
all.
4. Cuts in paid preparation time for tutors. Many tutors are not
now paid for both class attendance and course reading.
5. A closed door grievance procedure in which the university is
the final arbiter in any dispute.
Problems like these have convinced academic student employees
that we need a legally recognized voice in negotiating our working
conditions. So, in 1994, a majority of academic student employees
selected  in a state-verified count  SAGE to represent
them in collective bargaining with the university. The university
should have just recognized SAGE then and begun negotiations.
Instead, they refused and began spending millions of university
dollars fighting the right of academic student employees to
collective bargaining. From then until this very day, the conflict
has been starkly simple: SAGE is fighting to see that academic
student employees have a real voice over our working conditions,
and the university is fighting to see that we do not.
SAGE has tried over and over again to bring the university to
the bargaining table. We have tried to remind the university of the
democratically expressed wishes of its academic student employees
through letters, petitions, demonstrations, teach-outs,
informational pickets and other actions. The university has
consistently and categorically refused our offers to negotiate.
Finally, because all other efforts at the time failed, we held a
two-day walkout in the Spring of 1995, and again the university
would not even begin the process of negotiation with us.
Since then, we have tried again to bargain with the university.
For example, in September of this year, an administrative judge
ruled in our legal case. Judge Tamm ruled that the university must
recognize TAs, readers and tutors as workers with collective
bargaining rights. Research assistants, however, need not be so
recognized, he concluded. We offered not to exercise any appeals
concerning research assistants, and asked that the university abide
by the judge’s decision. Let me emphasize that we were willing not
to strike if the university accepted this reasonable offer.
Chancellor Young flatly refused, and we had no choice but to go
ahead with our plans for the Fall walkout which ended last Friday.
Again, all we are asking for is the opportunity to negotiate our
working conditions. If the university had just granted us that
 had been willing to bargain  there would have been no
strikes, no picket lines, no canceled classes.
Here are some notes about this legal decision. In his
startlingly misleading communique last week, Chancellor Young
called Judge Tamm’s decision "provisional." On other occasions,
administrators have called the ruling "advisory." Let’s be clear
 Judge Tamm’s ruling was a complete and valid decision. It is
not more provisional because the university is appealing than a
criminal conviction is provisional because the convict appeals. If
the university is going to monopolize e-mail listings and direct
mailing, they ought to at least not be disingenuous.
The university also claims in their legal brief, and elsewhere,
that when academic student employees teach sections, grade papers,
tutor, hold office hours, or lecture, we do it primarily as an
educational benefit to ourselves, not as the necessary work of the
university, and so it is not really work. How absurd! Anyone who
has taken courses at UCLA, had a paper graded by a reader, or come
to a tutoring session knows that TAs, readers and tutors perform
work essential to the day-to-day functioning of the university.
That’s why they hire us to do it. Indeed, it was exactly this
conclusion that Judge Tamm came to in his ruling. Furthermore, the
university’s own response belies their claims  if the work
that student employees do is primarily for our educational benefit,
why does it anger the administration so, and why do they send
threatening letters to our homes when we call a strike?
Any worries the university claims to have about academic
relationships suffering under collective bargaining are unfounded
as well. Collective bargaining already works at many universities
across the country, including large public universities like the
University of Michigan and the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst  and the administration knows it.
In any event, the legal case is just an attempt by the
university to drag matters out as long as they can, in the hopes
that we will simply become discouraged and quit. In their past
disputes, the administration has stalled collective bargaining
through interminable appeals that have stretched for a decade or
more. We academic student employees have already seen, however, the
clear link between our lack of a clear voice and our working
conditions. We’re going to continue fighting and escalating the
pressure in the face of their indefensible intransigence.
It’s important to remember that what SAGE fights for is not only
the interests of its members, but also the interests of all members
of the academic community. Student-to-TA ratios, for example,
affect not just academic student employees, but students. Whether
tutors are paid to do adequate preparation for their sessions is a
matter of concern not just to tutors, but those who use their
services.
Whether academic student employees have a voice in negotiating
our working conditions and benefits is important not just to
ourselves, but to anyone concerned with administration
accountability in its budgeting process. SAGE’s members are only
graduate students and those undergraduates with academic student
positions. In the era of increasing privatization of the UC system,
however, and pressures to run the UC like a "business" instead of
an institution of public education, SAGE’s fight is important to
anyone who values public higher education. Indeed, we have received
support from many public figures, including Maxine Waters, Lt. Gov.
Gray Davis and the Rev. Jesse Jackson in a letter to Chancellor
Young this week, for exactly this reason.
The pressure to give academic student employees a voice will not
go away. The support for it is too strong, and the reasons it is
important to all of us in the campus community are too compelling.
We ask all of you to urge the university to stop its unreasonable
stonewalling, and to stop squandering millions of university
dollars fighting SAGE. It’s time to sit down at the table and
negotiate.