A Labor of Love, Despite the Strife

On Tuesday, Leonard Nevarez and thousands of other UC graduate students walked off the job. The strike, part of a 15-year effort by teaching assistants and associates to win recognition as a union, forced the cancellation of hundreds of classes.

Question: What does a teaching associate do?

Answer: A better title for my job is “graduate student employee.” That is, I am working for the University of California system while I complete my graduate studies. Teaching associates, much like teaching assistants--or TAs, as we’re known--handle much of the day-to-day contact with students. At the UC Santa Barbara campus, where I work, TAs generally do most of the teaching of students in small groups, oversee any laboratory sections, do most of the grading of students’ exams and papers, and are there for the students when they have questions or problems.

Q: What’s left for the professors to do then?

A: Professors are most often the teachers who give the lectures, design the course and are there to assure quality control for the educational process.

Q: Many teaching assistants and teaching associates have walked off the job at eight UC campuses. Why did you join them?

A: TAs need to be recognized as employees--men and women with the same rights as any other workers in the state of California. The fact is that the UC system could not function without our labor, but we have been denied the right to organize for collective bargaining. If a strike is the only way to achieve that goal, which many of us believe it is, then we had to walk out.

Q: What’s the daily life of a TA like, when you’re not on strike?

A: In my case, it’s a very full--even hectic--life. Because my graduate work is in sociology, that is the department where I teach. Sociology is the largest undergrad major at UCSB, with 2,000 to 3,000 students in the undergraduate classes. I taught for Sociology II with six other TAs and had four sections of about 25 students each that I was responsible for. As a teaching associate, which is a somewhat more demanding and slightly better paid position than teaching assistant, I am the professor of record. I devise the syllabus, set the assignments, set criteria for grades, do some of the grading, write and deliver the lectures.

Q: Whew! That’s a big job. How many hours a week does that take?

A: Technically, TAs aren’t supposed to be working more than 20 hours a week, but in busy times of the year, at midterms and finals, it is not unusual for me to have to put in 30 or 40 hours a week to get the job done.

Q: What’s the pay like? Do you get any other benefits?

A: The pay looks fairly good on paper--up to about $1,500 gross per month. But you have to reconcile a figure like that with the fact that few TAs work more than half the year yet still must make that salary last 12 months. As for health benefits, we have access to the student health center and have emergency room coverage. But for most of us, the benefit we came for is the break on tuition.

Q: How are you supporting yourself while on strike?

A: Well, since TAs voted to authorize a strike back in May, I prepared for this loss of income by borrowing absolutely as much money as I could when school began, so that’s what I’m living on, and my wife works, so she is helping out a great deal, of course. If I can put in regular time on the picket line, I’ll get some basic strike pay from the UAW. But right now, I hope to use this break to do what I came back to college to do--finish my dissertation.

Q: Where did you begin your education?

A: I spent four years at UCLA, where I finished with a [bachelor of arts] in sociology.

Q: You’re 30 now. What sort of work did you do before deciding to go back to pursue your PhD, and what do you hope to do with the degree?

A: Well, I hope to do basically the same work I’ve been doing while working on my degree--teaching sociology at a university level. When I wasn’t in school, I did all sorts of work. I worked in a bookstore and a coffee shop. I was a computer operator and a writer--none of which lasted. I went back to UCSB in 1992 to study urban sociology.

Q: Have the professors you work with and students you teach been supportive about the strike?

A: Many of the professors in the sociology department have refused to take on our jobs as a show of sympathy for our work action. As for the students, they have been very supportive. They understand that our working conditions are their learning conditions.