Sacramento Mayor Steinberg will mediate UC-union talks as some researchers return to work

Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg will mediate negotiations between the University of California and two United Auto Workers bargaining units that represent about 36,000 striking academic workers.

The nearly month-long walkout came to a partial end when 12,000 senior-most researchers, also represented by the UAW, voted last week to ratify contracts that boosted their pay by at least 20%. They returned to work on Monday.

The two UAW units representing teaching assistants, tutors and graduate student researchers, among others, voted to move to private mediation on Friday. The decision followed the university’s announcement that it would not present any new proposals in bargaining. UC has asked for a private mediator since the beginning of the strike.

Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office proposed Steinberg as a candidate for mediator, according to the unions, and both parties agreed to his appointment. The mayor, a former staff attorney for CSEA/SEIU Local 1000, met with both parties over the weekend, his office confirmed.

In October, Steinberg facilitated an agreement between thousands of striking mental health workers and Kaiser Permanente after only a week of negotiations. The walkout had lasted 10 weeks.

“We feel that in order to make progress, it is time for somebody else to step in,” said Tarini Hardikar, a bargaining team member from UC Berkeley, in a statement.

Prior to the mediation vote, strikers escalated their demonstrations and staged sit-ins around the state early last week. A group of 17 workers were arrested in Sacramento last Monday on trespassing charges after they occupied the lobby of 1130 K Street, a downtown building that houses some UC administrators’ offices.

In addition to pay boosts of 20% or more, the senior-most researchers who returned to work Monday won a guaranteed eight weeks of fully paid parental leave. The contracts make UC’s postdocs and academic researchers among the highest paid in the country.

“I’m pretty excited about it overall,” said Sierra Durham, a postdoctoral scholar studying food science at UC Davis. “Postdocs have been working on that contract for close to 19 months since we started bargaining over it, so it was a long time coming, but I think we got a really great contract.”

Durham is particularly excited about new policies that protect researchers from bullying and harassment in the workplace. Existing policy protected workers from hate speech or overt sexism, but the new policy extends those protections to prevent verbal or emotional abuse.

“Now, we don’t just have protections from someone yelling hate speech at you, but also we have protection if someone is just yelling at you in an unreasonable way,” she said. “I think that’s going to be important for for a lot of folks.”

Durham, whose research investigates how to make infant formula more nutritionally equivalent to breast milk and other dairy products, hasn’t touched her work in four weeks due to the strike. She was able to stabilize her experiments and “put them on ice” before the strike began, so she won’t have to start from scratch. That doesn’t mean her to-do list is short though — she has multiple academic papers to finish and submit this week, along with waking up the equipment and machinery that’s lain dormant for nearly a month.

“Just because we’re back at work doesn’t mean we’re not standing in solidarity,” Durham emphasized. She plans to continue showing up to campus early to help organize picket lines and also make calls in the evenings to support her colleagues.

This story was originally published December 12, 2022 at 12:33 PM.