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UC Berkeley academic employees rally on Sproul Plaza on Nov. 14, 2022. The union reached a tentative agreement with the University of California over a new contract on Friday.<\/p>\nUC Berkeley academic employees rally on Sproul Plaza on Nov. 14, 2022. The union reached a tentative agreement with the University of California over a new contract on Friday.<\/p>\n
University of California graduate student workers and professional staff reached tentative agreements with the university on Friday after months of often-contentious contract negotiations centered on cost-of-living increases and protections for international workers<\/a>.<\/p>\n The proposed deals include what union negotiators described as the strongest protections in the country for international student workers, along with sizable pay increases over four years. If union members vote to ratify the four-year contracts this week, they would cover roughly 40,000 workers at UC Berkeley and the other nine UC campuses.<\/p>\n The agreements come after the workers, organized into three separate bargaining units all represented by the United Auto Workers union, voted to authorize a strike last month<\/a> after accusing the university of unfair labor practices. Thousands of university workers also turned out to picket at UC campuses Thursday, urging the university to settle the contracts.<\/p>\n Teaching assistants and graduate student researchers had pushed for job security, pay bumps and aid for international student workers who have found themselves under pressure from a xenophobic Trump administration<\/a>.<\/p>\n The tentative agreement they reached<\/a>, covering some 28,000 graduate student workers, including 15,000 at UC Berkeley, includes pay raises ranging from about 3% to 6% annually for salaried workers depending on job category and experience, a guarantee that teaching assistants will receive appointments of at least half-time, and increased child care benefits. The university would set up a $400,000 legal fund for international workers, allow them to take up to three weeks of paid leave to handle visa issues, and rehire them if their visas are temporarily revoked and then restored.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m thrilled to have reached this agreement because it\u2019s really going to improve my working life and the working life of so many of my coworkers, and also just make our university stronger by defending the important research and teaching that we do,\u201d said Tanzil Chowdhury, a UC Berkeley Ph.D. student in materials science and engineering who chaired the graduate student workers\u2019 negotiating committee.<\/p>\n Less-experienced teaching assistants at some campuses could receive up to a 45% pay bump over the life of the contract as they ascend up the salary scale and annual increases kick in<\/a>, Chowdhury said.<\/p>\n Chowdhury said the pressure created by workers\u2019 strike vote nudged negotiations across the finish line. \u201c[The university] understood that it was their last chance to stop bargaining in bad faith and come to a fair agreement and that\u2019s what they did,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Missy Matella, the university\u2019s associate vice president for employee and labor relations, said in a statement that both sides \u201cremained committed to productive, good-faith negotiations throughout bargaining.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWe are grateful to achieve agreements that mutually benefit the University\u2019s academic student employees and new staff units,\u201d she said.\u00a0<\/p>\n Some UC Berkeley graduate student workers said the proposed contract doesn\u2019t go far enough to address the Bay Area\u2019s high cost of living or the insecurity of their appointments, which are not always funded for the entire calendar year or the full length of a student\u2019s degree program.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s better than nothing, but it\u2019s not much, especially considering the scale of the crisis and the potential leverage that tens of thousands of graduate workers could have wielded if we had organized and negotiated more strategically,\u201d said Andy Haas, a union steward in the English department. Haas said he and his English department colleagues planned to vote no on the deal, though he predicted it would be ratified.<\/p>\n The agreement would by 2029 eliminate pay disparities between teaching assistants at campuses in areas with higher costs of living \u2013 including UC Berkeley, UCLA and UC San Francisco \u2013 and their peers at other campuses. Teaching assistants at UC Berkeley, whose pay\u00a0 currently starts at $38,000 for the school year, would receive annual raises of about 3%. Hourly tutors would get larger percentage increases.<\/p>\n About 12,000 UC professional staff \u2013 including advisors, program administrators and data analysts \u2013 reached a separate tentative agreement Friday on their first contract<\/a> after joining UAW last year. Besides seniority-based pay steps and a cap on health insurance premiums, the contract will allow staff to collectively address issues through a formal grievance procedure, said Christine Mullarkey, an advisor at UC Berkeley who served on the unit\u2019s bargaining team.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve had so many people tell me today, \u2018I feel like I can stay at the UC. There\u2019s some stability. There\u2019s some clarity,\u2019 \u201d she said.<\/p>\n Voting on both contract proposals will run through Friday.<\/p>\n “*” indicates required fields<\/p>\n \t