Twenty arrested at UC Santa Cruz as teaching assistants strike

[Lionel Mandrake]

Source: Los Angeles Times

Twenty picketers were arrested Wednesday morning for blocking traffic at UC Santa Cruz as unionized teaching assistants and tutors began a strike at two UC campuses.

The arrests came around 8 a.m. as the picketers, mainly graduate students, tried to block auto entrances into the Santa Cruz campus, according to university spokesman Jim Burns. The 20 — cited on charges such as failing to disperse and being a pedestrian in a roadway — were taken to the Santa Cruz County jail and were expected to be released soon. One of the 20 also faces a charge of resisting arrest, Burns said.

Student academic workers walked off the job at Santa Cruz and UC Berkeley on Wednesday. Union officials said the strike would extend to all nine UC undergraduate campuses on Thursday.

The United Auto Workers Local 2865 — which represents about 13,000 teaching assistants, tutors and readers — called the strike to protest what it called unfair labor practices and intimidation by UC administrators. Among other issues, the union contends that growing class sizes and workloads are making it difficult to offer quality teaching and tutoring.



Read more: http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-uc-arrests-20140402,0,4374812.story#axzz2xpxOKsBO

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University administrators in the UC system, like those in the CSU system, view graduate students as a plentiful source of cheap labor. The administrators don't hesitate to call in the cops to remove picketers. The picketers were breaking the law, but where, exactly, should they set up their picket lines on a sprawling university campus?

[Omaha Steve]

1. SOLIDARITY!!!

K&R!

More at link: http://www.aflcio.org/Learn-About-Unions/What-Unions-Do/The-Union-Difference

Union members earn better wages and benefits than workers who aren’t union members. On average, union workers’ wages are 27 percent higher than their nonunion counterparts.

Unionized workers are 60 percent more likely to have employer-provided pensions.

More than 85 percent of union workers have jobs that provide health insurance benefits, but only 54 percent of nonunion workers do. Unions help employers create a more stable, productive workforce—where workers have a say in improving their jobs.

Unions help bring workers out of poverty and into the middle class. In fact, in states where workers don’t have union rights, workers’ incomes are lower.

[mike_c]

2. solidarity!

I participated in the historic CSU East Bay faculty strike a few years ago and we faced the same problem, as did strikers at CSU Dominguez Hills, the other campus where faculty walked out. The solution was to be very strategic about disrupting traffic. Pickets had to keep moving while walking through cross walks and we had to let traffic proceed. However, we could slow it significantly, so we stationed traffic control "safety observers" in each lane who stopped traffic by standing in the lane while picketers were in the crosswalk, then the strike captains would clear the crosswalk and we'd let ONE CAR from each lane proceed, before stepping back into the lane and blocking traffic for another several minutes of crosswalk picketing. This went on from 6:00 AM until about noon, when the police simply barricaded the access roads and shut down the University. Anyway, they stood by and watched without interfering as long as we let one car at a time pass and only occupied the crosswalks for two or three minutes at a time. But you can create significant traffic disruption that way, legally.

[Lionel Mandrake]

5. Way to go!

I especially like to see solidarity between TAs (represented by the UAW) and faculty (represented in the CSU by the CFA) in California. Both unions struggle with the same bunch of overpaid, over-perked administrators.

[certainot]

3. good on em, and when they hear the local right wing radio blowhards excusing the cops and

UC admin and continuing their attacks on all teachers and unions and public ed and student loans, maybe they can protest one of those stations too...

like KSCO 1080- the limbaugh station....

what are rosie and rick saying before limbaugh, or charles freedman right after....?

[alp227]

4. More coverage by Santa Cruz Sentinel

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/santacruz/ci_25476456/twenty-arrested-at-ucsc-during-teaching-assistant-strike

[daleanime]

6. K&R....

[YoungDemCA]

7. Kick

nt

[geardaddy]

8. K and R

solidarity!

[reddread]

9. those pigs

the cops there are real fucks.
they should be forced to go get actual jobs.