UC reach tentative agreement with employees
DAVIS, Calif. (NBC) - The University of California reached a tentative labor agreement on Friday with thousands of graduate student teaching assistants and other academic workers.
The deal includes significant raises for the employees and ends the grad students' five-week strike.
Day-to-day operations in and around the UC-Davis campus, and other UC system universities, will tentatively soon be back to business as usual.
This comes with a tentative agreement between striking workers and the UC system.
Among the terms in the tentative agreement are the following:
- Increases in pay for grad student researchers
- Academic student employees
- reimbursements for child care
Not only that, the tentative agreement will include increases for healthcare of dependents.
Weeks of protests
There have been weeks of protests, with workers wanting an increase in pay and expanded benefits.
The strike also disrupted classes at all ten of the university system's campuses, including Davis, with workers saying "Pay us what we deserve."
The United Auto Workers Union, representing some 48,000 teaching assistants, researchers and postdoctoral scholars, wrote Friday night:
"Our members stood up to show the university that academic workers are vital to UC's success. They deserve nothing less than a contract that reflects the important role they play and the reality of working in cities with extremely high costs of living."
Mayoral help
Sacramento's Mayor Daryl Steinberg, a former attorney for the California State Employees Association, helped mediate the deal, weighing in:
"This agreement represents a fundamental transformation for graduate level higher education. With this breakthrough, the University of California will continue to attract the best and brightest minds to our state."
Overall, the President of the UC system, Michael Drake, thanked Steinberg for entering the process just days ago.
In a statement, Drake further writes:
"I would like to thank Mayor Steinberg, and negotiators for both the university and the UAW, for coming together in a spirit of compromise to reach this tentative agreement."
