Grad Students at Berkeley Galvanized by Union Elections

University of California graduate students who work as instructors, teaching assistants, tutors and readers may soon have a more vocal and active union representing them in negotiations with the university.

That is because, for the first time in years, the election of officers for the graduate student employees' union, or local 2865 of the United Auto Workers, has become a hotly contested affair, prodding candidates to promise to do more for working graduate students — while also provoking allegations of vote fraud and a suspension in counting ballots.

“There are so many changes affecting graduate students right now, especially graduate student parents,” said University Village resident Sara Hinkley, who is in the fourth year of a doctoral program in city and regional planning at UC Berkeley. Among the changes, she said, are rising fees and reductions in stipends for child care.

“I’ve been here for four years and, when I first got here, the union was not really engaging with students,” Hinkley continued. “The fact that there’s a huge battle over leadership right now is a huge victory for students.”

Thursday, counting ballots resumes for the election of a 10-person Executive Board, including a president, and an 80-person student leadership council in the union that represents 12,000 graduate students at nine of the 10 University of California campuses.

The resumption comes after counting was abruptly halted Saturday by the election committee after charges of fraud were levied at Berkeley and UCLA, and big arguments erupted in the counting room, according to a letter posted online by the current president Daraka Larimore-Hall, a graduate student at UC Santa Barbara. He is running for reelection as union president, representing the student United for Social & Economic Justice party.

But the halt meant ballots from Berkeley and Los Angeles were left uncounted, a move the opposing party, the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union, claimed was fraudulent in itself.

Students in Berkeley and Los Angeles protested the halt with sit-ins this week at union offices and then incumbent union leadership agreed to keep counting – provided an independent mediator watches over the process and candidates are not in the counting room.

Jennifer Tucker, a UC Berkeley doctoral student in the Department of City and Regional Planning, is running for re-election as chair of the Berkeley unit of Local 2865 and a member of the Joint Council.

“We actually just had a great victory. After organizing sit-ins at UCLA and Berkeley, the elections committee yesterday afternoon decided to change course and resume vote count,” she said.

“We know it is an incredibly close race,” Tucker said.

She and some other challengers want the union to move beyond representing student instructors at wage and benefit negotiations to get involved in what is happening to the UC campuses as a whole in this time of great change and budget cuts.

One of the big issues, she said, is continuation of a UC practice of paying the tuition fees for graduate student instructors, many of whom work 20 hours a week or more teaching sections of classes and grading papers. That policy is under threat in the current budget cutting environment, she said.

“It’s not clear yet what they will do, but it is an example that this is a time we really need a strong union.”

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