Among the 10 University of California campuses, UCSF is unique in ways that raise the stakes of the month-long academic worker strike even higher.
UCSF is focused solely on health and medical research, and it has no undergraduate programs. Faculty members rely heavily on student employees not just to grade exams, but also to run lab experiments and write research papers.
As The Frisc reported two weeks ago, the strike also disrupted deliveries to UCSF labs and pharmacies, because United Parcel Service drivers, part of the Teamsters Union, refused to cross picket lines. Lisa Kroon, the clinical pharmacy department chair at UCSF’s School of Pharmacy, said that the two Walgreens locations on campus, which serve patients checking out from UCSF hospitals, “had challenges with timely medication deliveries.”
Four groups of workers went on strike in mid-November. Two groups, postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers, reached an agreement Dec. 9 and have returned to work. The other two groups, student employees and graduate student researchers, are voting on a tentative agreement this week.
[Update 12/23/22: The student employee and graduate student bargaining groups ratified their contract agreements today. Their new contracts run through May 2025 and include updates to compensation, childcare reimbursement, paid leave, fee remission, and transit benefits.]
Despite the disruptions, some faculty members voiced full support for the strikers, underscoring how San Francisco is an insanely expensive place to live and work — among the world’s top ten.
“I had several post-docs and students who had to find a place to live and ended up having to move quite far away from the lab and from San Francisco,” says Dean Sheppard, a professor of medicine who studies the biology behind lung disease and injury. “It was a lot more challenging for them to do their work.”
A message to you, UC
Compensation is a big part of the new work agreements, which differ for each of the groups. For instance, postdoctoral scholars will now receive an average salary increase of 8 percent next year, with annual increases in the remaining years of the contract, which runs into 2027.
“In the long term, it’s going to be to the advantage of people trying to run research labs in the UC system,” says Sheppard. “We’ll be able to recruit and retain more talented people.”
When Sheppard and a few colleagues circulated a petition in support of the action, however, only a fraction of the faculty signed on.
Biochemist Noelle L’Etoile, who runs a neuroscience lab at UCSF’s Parnassus campus and helped draft the petition, first emailed it to 435 faculty members, a sliver of the 3,400 total. It also circulated on social media. The message to UC administration was that UCSF faculty members “strongly support the efforts of [their] students” to ask for higher wages to “allow them to afford to live in San Francisco.”
“If UCSF is to remain a desirable place to study then this must also be a place that is desirable for employment, particularly when students depend on campus employment to make their education possible,” the letter stated.
Fewer than 100 faculty have signed so far. L’Etoile says some who didn’t sign have expressed concerns about the higher pay.
“The biggest concern I heard over and over from faculty is that ‘if the students got their demands, who would pay for this?’” L’Etoile tells The Frisc. “Their biggest concern is that they won’t be able to afford their students and they’re going to have to shrink their lab size to afford to pay the students that they have.”
L’Etoile also speculates that some people didn’t see it via social media and email, which “don’t always give you complete coverage, right?”
‘Graduate students are going to graduate later. If you don’t work for a month you probably have two months of work to catch up on.’ — UCSF biochemist Noelle L’Etoile, who supported the strike and shut down her lab experiments for a month.
Sara Suliman, an immunologist and assistant professor who also helped draft the letter, echoed L’Etoile: “Not a lot of faculty members are active on Twitter. The ones that are active have been able to sit and engage, but they had to be connected to the right people even for that to be visible on their social media.”
The Frisc reached out to several faculty members who have not signed the petition. None responded by publication time.
A month without neuroscience
L’Etoile paused her lab’s neuroscience research in solidarity with the strikers — “our projects haven’t been moving at all for the past month” — but she acknowledges that the effects will linger for the strikers themselves.
“For graduate students, they’re going to graduate later. If you don’t work for a month you probably have two months of work to catch up on,” L’Etoile says. “Because we’re not going to be publishing at the rate of other universities and professors, post-docs are not going to be able to apply for certain grants. It’s almost like a competition, sadly.”
The two remaining strike groups, academic student employees and graduate student researchers, have until Friday to vote on their tentative contracts, which have different terms. For instance, academic student employees (which include teaching assistants) would receive 55 to 80 percent increases by 2024, while graduate student researchers would get a boost of 25 to 80 percent. Other benefits include better childcare subsidies, paid parental leave and time off, and protections for international students.
Sheppard praises the strategy behind the strike: “I think the [United Auto Workers] was smart to do it across the board at all the UC campuses,” referencing the national union that includes the university academic workers. “It provided a real historical point of leverage.”
Kelsey Oliver is a graduate student in the schools of journalism and public health at UC Berkeley.
