The UC Strike Was Overdetermined

I spent two years as a graduate student at UC Berkeley, from September 2017 to May 2019. During three of the four semesters that I studied there, I was also employed by the university as a graduate student instructor, and later as a reader. Thanks to our union contract, I got full tuition remission all three of those semesters.

It was a good deal, but there were issues. While the union contract capped the number of hours we were supposed to work each week, professors varied in their willingness to follow the rules. Some were openly dismissive of the notion that we had to stop working after we reached our limit; that by doing extra unpaid labor for them, we would have not only consented to our own exploitation but undermined the solidarity that gives collective bargaining agreements much of their power.

And then there was the take home pay. It was pretty good, but not good enough to keep up with housing costs in the East Bay. I spent my second year of graduate school living in the suburb of El Cerrito, in a basement apartment underneath a single family home. I had no stove or oven, and my little apartment flooded whenever it rained. I could hear virtually everything that happened in the bedroom of the surly teenager who lived overhead. I was living off credit card debt and the feverish hope that my master’s degree would get me a good income when I graduated.

Still, I was stupid lucky. I had the credit lines to go into debt. And I only had to worry about myself, not a spouse or any dependents. Most importantly, I knew I was only in for two years; I could afford to take on some debt for a couple of years because I knew there was probably a good white collar job waiting on the other end. And I could say no to tenured professors when I had to, because I knew they had no real power over my future. I was going to do my two years and then leave academia forever.

The situation would have been very different if I were a PhD student. I would have had to spend several more years going even deeper into debt, and that would have obviously changed the financial calculus. Plus, I would have been far more dependent on the professors that I worked for. They would have been esteemed members of the professional community I was trying to enter. I would have been desperate for their imprimatur. But I also would have found the situation intolerable.

All of which is to say that I was not remotely surprised to learn that University of California graduate student workers are currently on strike. If anything, the strike feels overdetermined. The housing crisis and the decline of the academy both provide ample tinder for something like this; the growing assertiveness of American organized labor is the spark.

The Labor Resurgence

I was a labor journalist before I was a graduate student, and approximately every third piece I wrote about labor needed to include a reference to something like this chart:

American organized labor has been losing strength for nearly three-quarters of a century. But there has been some cause for hope over the past couple of years. While one of the COVID-19 pandemic’s immediate consequences was an economic crisis, that very rapidly gave way to a sustained period of labor market tightness. The shortage of labor in most industries tilted the balance of power back in workers’ favor. Workers’ ability to quit suddenly became a source of significant leverage; employers’ ability to fire people was no longer much of a threat. At the same time, the election of Joe Biden to the presidency immediately changed workers’ fortunes when it came to administrative law. Under Biden, the National Labor Relations Board has been far more sympathetic to labor organizing than it had been under Trump.

The combination of low unemployment and a sympathetic administration appears to have galvanized workers across a number of industries. The past two years have seen organizing—successful organizing—in workplaces where unionization would have seemed like a pipe dream just prior to the pandemic. The two most famous examples are probably the Amazon warehouse workers campaign and the wave of Starbucks unionizations. But we’ve also seen unions win representation at brick and mortar locations operated by Trader Joe’s, REI, Apple, Chipotle—the list goes on.

Unionized graduate student workers are obviously in a very different situation from non-union Amazon warehouse workers. To the extent that the two are linked, I suspect it’s because the background condition of a pro-worker NLRB matter to both. But more than that, I think the successful low-wage worker campaigns of the past couple of years have motivated and inspired pre-existing unions across the country. These campaigns certainly seem to have helped labor unions recover some of their former prestige with the country as a whole; a recent poll found that pro-union sentiment is at its highest point in nearly six decades.

The Housing Crisis

Readers of this newsletter don’t need to be reminded that California is in the middle of a severe housing affordability crisis. But I do think it’s worth noting that the crisis is particularly brutal in many UC towns. Universities are major job centers; and of course, they attract tens of thousands of students, many of whom live off-campus. This creates a lot of population pressure that California’s historically pro-NIMBY land use regime has failed to accommodate.

As a former UC Berkeley graduate student and current Berkeley renter, I have some personal experience with this. But the situation is far worse in Santa Cruz. I recommend this post from my colleague Darrell Owens, a current UC Santa Cruz student, to get a bit of the flavor down there. Suffice it to say, I find the UAW’s claim that 70 percent of its members are rent burdened fairly plausible.

The Decline of the Academy

The last background condition worth noting is the dire state of American universities and the academic job market. To put it mildly, the general labor market tightness of the past couple of years has not penetrated the ivory tower. There are still vastly more doctoral students than there are decent teaching and research jobs waiting for them on the other side.

This generally gets framed as a problem for the humanities and social sciences in particular. But the long-term trajectory for STEM academics—supposedly the more prudent, responsible ones—has been similarly dire. See the below chart from a 2013 paper in Nature Biotechnology, which looks specifically at science and engineering fields. It’s not just Heidegger specialists who are part of the academic precariat.

The dire career prospects for current doctoral students have, I suspect, cranked up the pressure to at least secure a better bargain in their current jobs.

Conclusion

Needless to say, I support the graduate student workers. Although I was pretty passive as a member, I owe a lot to that union. And I can tell you from experience that working as a graduate student instructor or researcher isn’t some extracurricular hobby; it’s a job, and it should be appropriately compensated. More to the point, it should be compensated at a level commensurate with regional housing costs.

There are two mechanisms for fixing the mismatch between incomes and housing prices in California. I spend much of my day job focused on one of those levers: building more housing and bringing down the cost. But raising incomes and improving the lot of workers in all industries is also absolutely necessary.

Since we’re all about positive-sum solutions at the Bristlecone, I’ll note that one exists for the University of California’s administration and its graduate student workers—at least in the long run. The state should expand enrollment at its public institutions of higher learning, and even build new ones.

The UC system, the CSU system and the community college system collectively represent one of California’s most spectacular treasures and its greatest engine of upward economic mobility. Allowing more students to access these systems would benefit everyone; it would create more revenue for the universities and community colleges, generate more demand for academic workers, and provide more students from California and beyond with a world-class education.

Of course, this positive-sum solution only works if college towns build enough housing to accommodate the students and employees of California’s public higher education system. That’s a whole other story.