GRADUATE teaching assistants at the University of California have staged their longest strike yet over their demand to be recognised as employees rather than students. And they are promising a second walkout before the end of the academic year.
More than 2,300 graduate students working as part-time teachers, exam graders and tutors joined a five-day "rolling" strike starting at the UCLA campus in Los Angeles, and moving to UC San Diego and UC Berkeley.
They are seeking union recognition and the right under United States labour law to engage in collective bargaining with their university employers. They want to negotiate better salaries, smaller classes and shorter hours, complaining they lost out in a recent pay rise.
The California students' action echoes a bitter labour dispute earlier this year involving graduate students at Yale University, who were reportedly threatened with firings and disciplinary action by university administrators after they refused to deliver grades for undergraduates.
It also reflects unrest and uncertainty about employment conditions on campuses among faculty members as well as their graduate assistants. Financial squeezes and the end of years of confident growth in higher education are blamed for a new hard-nosed, corporate approach shown by university administrators.
John Medears, a board member of the Student Association of Graduate Employees at UCLA, which organised the strike, said: "The various strains on the university today heighten the sense among academic student employees that they should band together and defend themselves."
Both Yale, a private university, and UC, the nine-campus public system that is the largest in the country, have adamantly refused to recognise graduate students as employees. They liken them to apprentices who are working under professors primarily for their own academic benefit.
UCLA chancellor Charles Young said in a letter: "We believe that unionisation would seriously harm the flexibility, collegiality and harmony the university strives to foster."
But at both institutions graduate students do much of the grading along with the nuts and bolts of coursework.
A sympathetic San Francisco judge has ruled students should have the right to unionise, a decision that is now under appeal by the university.
For three years the UC students have sought to negotiate as a union. They are paid an average of $14,000 a year, with benefits on top, for part-time work. But real wages for them have dropped 15 per cent, Mr Medears said.