At the end of 2022, grad student workers at the University of California staged a strike that dragged on for weeks, bringing many campuses to a halt.
The strikers won in the end, getting many of their demands met, but now the school system faces another set of problems.
The Los Angeles Times reports:
To afford historic labor contract, UC considers cutting TAs, graduate student admissionsJust weeks after the University of California and academic workers heralded historic wage gains in new labor contracts, the question of how to pay for them is roiling campuses, which are scrambling to identify money, considering cutbacks in graduate student admissions and fearing deficits.The full financial cost of the labor settlements between UC and 48,000 academic workers who help power the vaunted teaching and research engine are still being tallied. But preliminary estimates have dealt a “financial shock to the system,” said Rosemarie Rae, UC Berkeley chief financial officer.The UC Office of the President estimates that the increased costs for salary, benefits and tuition across all 10 campuses will be between $500 million and $570 million over the life of the contracts. Individual campuses have come up with their own calculations: At UC Santa Barbara, for instance, the Academic Senate chair estimated that the cost of pay hikes alone could spiral to more than $53 million over three years.Overall, the costs take in pay increases of 20% to 80%, depending on the workers — teaching assistants, tutors, researchers and postdoctoral scholars — and are among the highest ever granted in the nation’s universities.
This is very similar to the problem California has with taxation. As they raise taxes, more and more taxpayers flee the state. What’s that old saying about running out of other people’s money?
The San Francisco Examiner has more on this:
According to the unions that championed the strike, UC plans to reduce graduate admissions next year by 33%.Rafael Jaime, president of the UAW 2865 representing 19,000 teaching assistants, said his union circulated a survey of 89 departments across all 10 campuses after hearing of possible enrollment cuts from the department of feminist studies at UC Santa Barbara.“Then we started hearing the same from other departments: the psychology department at UCLA, and then the physics department at UC San Diego. We sent out a survey (mid January) and received similar responses,” Jaime told the Examiner.Jaime said there is no discernible trend of which departments are slashing their enrollment, but it appears “to be the departments that tend to have more constricted funding.”Jaime and Neal Sweeney, president of UAW 5810, wrote a letter to University of California President Michael Drake on Jan. 26, stating, “Investing in full enrollment is essential to our state’s economic future as well. The state depends on the University of California to produce the highly–skilled Ph.D and masters degree recipients who are essential to its high-tech economy.”Department heads also reported to the unions that they are being told to cut back on teaching assistant time and discussions, and to increase the number of students enrolled in discussion groups.Both union presidents wrote to president Drake calling this “a matter of grave concern.”
What happens next? Another strike?
Featured image via YouTube.
CLICK HERE FOR FULL VERSION OF THIS STORY