Teaching Assistants, Postdoctoral Fellows and Academic and Student Researchers of the entire University of California, which total about 48,000, on 10 campus, presented a massive protest of one day on Tuesday, urging administrators to see them and treat them as essential academic workers.
Each group of workers (TA, postdocs, academic researchers and, from last year, research assistants) is affiliated with united car workers, in different negotiation units governed by different union contracts. But as everyone is currently in negotiations for their respective contracts and share concern problems, they have requested a coordinated negotiating table from the system. (Research students are negotiating their first contract, after the recognition of the system after their strike authorization vote in December).
The system has not yet granted the application for coordinated collective bargaining on common problems in all workplaces, and that is part of what was the action on Tuesday. But the protests and demonstrations that cover the 10 UC campuses and the National Lawrence Berkeley laboratory were also trying to amplify the key contract problems.
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Gwen Chodur, a .d pH. The candidate in nutritional biology at the Davis campus of UC and president of the Council of Graduates and Professionals of the University of California, said before his Rally speech on the campus on Tuesday that housing costs remain a "great concern in All the UC "and a large part of the union negotiations ((Chodur, like many doctoral students, is paid as a ta and researcher). But so far the conversations have been disappointing: the most recent offer of UC includes a salary increase 4 percent for the first year of the contract and an annual increase of 3 percent after that, Chodur said, "which is a salary reduction to the inflation rate." ) Googetag.display ("dfp-ad-article_in_article");); dates back to 2019, partly because The system is not properly maintained with the way in which the roles of postgraduate attendees or work titles change from quarter to quarter.
Pay and Housing (and inflation)
“We are among the most paid employees, so when our salary is late, we are even more deeply impacted because it is difficult to have some kind of type of Accumulated savings, ”said Chodur, added that his salary was 50 days at the end of the summer of 2020, which caused his bouncing rental check. "I was really worried about being evicted and homeless, since there is no way that you can pay a security deposit or a rental type of the first month, even if I could find homes in Davis, where the vacancies rate is lower to 1 percentage. It owes anything because
