Strikes spread across US as postdocs and other researchers fight for better pay and conditions

In the wake of high-profile and successful strikes by tens of thousands of academics at the University of California (UC) system late last year, higher education workers across the US are now mobilising. The United Auto Workers (UAW), through which the UC employees negotiated with their university system, says it is in talks with graduate student workers at more than a dozen universities in the country, including the University of Southern California (USC) and the University of Maine (UM), which are in the process of organising to secure better working conditions.

Two days before Christmas, academic and postdoctoral researchers across the University of California’s 10 campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory won new five-year contracts that gave them a 20–23% raise, and graduate student researchers there secured a 10% pay increase in the first year of their contract and 6.4% increases in each subsequent year. In addition, the employees negotiated eight weeks of paid leave per year for serious health conditions and also parental leave and other leave to care for family, on top of childcare reimbursement and subsidised transport. These improvements to working conditions ended the unprecedented 40-day strike.

Academic employees across the US took note. The strikes inspired people at research institutions like the University of Washington, where workers have been fighting for their first union contract for about a year-and-a-half.