When thousands of University of California (UC) graduate students, postdocs, and academic researchers secured new contracts late last year thanks to their unions and historic strikes, the expected raises were a cause for celebration. Many began to see a boost in their checks starting in May. But others didn’t receive the pay they contend the university agreed to—a situation that’s led to dozens of arbitration cases, the arrests of three early-career researchers, and a complaint to the state labor board alleging “unfair practice” by UC officials. “We’re back where we were … continuing to have to fight for living wages,” says Gwenevere Frank, a Ph.D. student studying electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego (UCSD).
The disputes come amid rising tension in higher education over low graduate student and postdoc salaries and surging unionization efforts. According to a report released last week, 18 student-worker unions have formed at U.S. institutions this year alone, the largest increase over the past decade. Many of those unions have looked to the contracts negotiated in California as an indicator of what might be possible at their institutions. “The rest of higher education is watching,” says Jacqueline Perez, a psychology Ph.D. student and union representative at UC Los Angeles (UCLA).
UC agreed to the contracts after the unions, which represent 48,000 workers, staged the largest strike in the history of U.S. academia, disrupting classes and research on 10 campuses across the state. For graduate students, the 6-week ordeal ended a few days before Christmas, when research and teaching assistants ratified a deal that granted them higher pay, fee waivers, and other benefits. Postdocs and academic researchers reached a similar deal weeks earlier.
The deals were hailed as historic wins. But the road to implementation has been bumpy, particularly when it comes to the salaries of graduate student researchers. “The UC has chosen to not centrally fund the raises in our contracts,” says Samantha Abbott, a physics Ph.D. student and union representative at UC Davis. That means departments and lab leaders have largely been left to themselves in figuring out how to foot the bill, leading to a patchwork of budgetary approaches and policies.
The agreed-on base rate in the new contract is $41,688 for a 50% position during the current academic year, which covers 20 hours of work per week. (This is a standard appointment for many graduate student workers, although most work significantly more hours than that.) But some departments have gotten around paying that amount by appointing students to positions that on paper require fewer hours. Maya Gosztyla, a biomedical sciences Ph.D. student at UCSD, says she and others in her department are appointed at 43%, which means they’re paid to carry out research for 17.2 hours per week. “Obviously in a lab you’re never going to actually work that little,” Gosztyla says. “I’m just paid for fewer … hours.”
The contract doesn’t explicitly require 50% appointments, but it specifies that student researchers should be paid an amount that’s commensurate with their workload. “Many departments in the past arbitrarily underemployed workers to pay them less,” notes Rafael Jaime, president of the union that represents graduate teaching assistants. “The point of the contract was to fix that and make sure that people are actually being fairly compensated.”
In a statement to Science, a UC spokesperson wrote that appointment percentages are determined by departments based on the work a student does for the university. “A student may perform several hours working on their dissertation every day and none of those research hours would necessarily be performing work for the university,” they wrote, adding that “no contract language” stipulates that graduate student researchers must be appointed at 50%.
“There’s a little bit of a disconnect between what the agreement actually says and what some people think or want the agreement to say,” says a UC faculty member and former department chair who spoke with Science on the condition of anonymity. Many students, they say, “are fixated that they deserve 50%” but the reality is that “all these numbers and percentages are arbitrary because we’re taking what’s fundamentally a graduate program—an educational program—and we’re intertwining it with labor.”
Union leaders have filed more than 100 formal grievances with individual universities to dispute what they see as contract violations related to pay, workplace harassment policies, and other issues. Some resulted in outcomes that satisfied union leaders. In July, for instance, UC Berkeley agreed to bring graduate students up to a 50% appointment level and to give $600,000 in backpay to those who were paid at lower percentages earlier in the year. Roughly 1000 students at UCLA also received $100 each in fees reimbursements they were owed.
But many disputes have yet to be resolved. Neal Sweeney, president of the union that represents postdocs and academic researchers, says hundreds of postdocs haven’t received the wage increases they’re owed under the new contract. “We’ve had to file grievances at every campus,” he says. “The university has been very slow to resolve it to pay people the correct amounts.” UC has also continued to appoint some new postdocs to 1-year contracts rather than the required 2 years. That’s especially problematic for international postdocs, he says, because that means they’ll be granted a visa that lasts just 1 year. To renew it, they’ll be forced to leave the country and pay any associated travel costs.
Larger legal disputes are playing out at UCSD, where two graduate students and a postdoc were arrested in June and charged with felony vandalism for allegedly writing “Living Wage Now” with chalk on a sidewalk. Around the same time, a group of graduate students received letters stating that they were being charged for student misconduct violations, including assault, after going onstage to disrupt an alumni event featuring a talk by UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla. The university contends that Khosla was bumped by union members onstage, but the union disputes that allegation. It has filed a complaint with the state labor board alleging that the arrests and student misconduct letters constitute “unfair practice.”
Gosztyla, one of the students who received a misconduct notice, believes UCSD is trying to frighten unionized workers. “I absolutely think the university is afraid of the power we have.” But a UC spokesperson said that’s not the case. “UC has filed a response denying the allegations.”
