Largest Higher-Education Strike in U.S. History Ends in Tentative Agreement
The largest strike in higher education ended just days before the new year, bringing as many as 48,000 academic student employees back to work from the picket line. For six weeks, UAW Local 2865—which represents teaching assistants, tutors, graders, and readers across the University of California system—had coordinated the strike with a bargaining unit composed of student researchers. Consequently, academic student employees represented by UAW Local 2865 may see wage increases of up to 66% over the course of the union’s tentative agreement with the UC system. Additionally, for the first time in their history, student researchers will have a collective bargaining agreement in the UC system.
Unlike private-sector employees, whose collective bargaining rights are governed by the National Labor Relations Act, public-sector employees’ collective bargaining rights are governed by state and local law. Even if the law permits public employees to collectively bargain, it does not always grant them the right to strike. Public employees have always had an inherent power to strike, but employers and anti-union officials may exercise their legal clout to interfere with that power. Labor must keep up the fight to maintain the right to strike. Today, California’s Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act, or HEERA, not only allows public-sector student employees to bargain, but also to strike. These rights expanded gradually from 1998, when the Public Employment Relations Board first decided that teaching assistants had the right to collectively bargain, to 2017, when Governor Brown signed a bill extending that right to student researchers.
The historic strike provides a vision for student employees who are organizing in other states’ public university systems but who still lack full collective bargaining and striking rights, such as Arizona, Georgia, and Virginia.
For questions about collective bargaining rights in the public sector, contact your labor law counsel.
By Zach Angulo