In the EECS/DS staffing bargaining process, one of the most contentious issues at the bargaining table has been the compensation and benefits that should be provided to ASEs. Key areas of disagreement include
- Wages, which refers to the pay that ASEs receive for rendering instructional services for the university.
- Fee remission (or tuition remission), which refers to a full or partial refund of tuition and campus fees.
What’s been proposed
ASEs and the university have both proposed wages and remissions for undergraduate TAs in EECS/DS lower than that guaranteed under the union contract.
For context, a section TA at UC Berkeley is currently provided with an annual salary of $9,298 and remission of 40% of tuition, and a head TA is provided with an annual salary of $23,247. In the union contract won after last year’s strike, the University of California agreed to give TAs a raise of 57% by 2024-25 and provide all TAs, including section TAs, with 100% fee remission. In the event that no deal is reached on the side letter, we would revert to the union contract.
Annual wages, 2024-25
| Basis | 8-hour Section TA | 20-hour Head TA |
|---|---|---|
| Union contract | $14,594 | $36,486 |
| ASE proposal | $11,556 | $28,891 |
| University proposal | $10,401 | $28,891 |
Annual take-home pay after paying in-state tuition, 2024-25
| Basis | 8-hour Section TA | 20-hour Head TA |
|---|---|---|
| Union contract | $14,594 | $36,486 |
| ASE proposal | $2,793 | $28,890 |
| University proposal | -$4,204 | $28,891 |
Tuition remission rate
| Basis | 8-hour Section TA | 20-hour Head TA |
|---|---|---|
| Union contract | 100% | 100% |
| ASE proposal | 40% | 100% |
| University proposal | 0% | 100% |
Neither side has proposed a change to the compensation of hourly workers. Tutors and readers would continue to be paid by the hour, and would receive the full $3.50/hr. raise by 2024-25 guaranteed by the full union contract.
The ASE proposal would mean TA wages 21% lower than those guaranteed under the union contract. Under the ASE proposal, undergraduate TAs in EECS/DS would be paid significantly less than every other TA in the University of California, including other undergraduate TAs in other departments.
The university proposal would mean TA wages 29% lower than those guaranteed under the union contract. The university proposal would eliminate fee remission for most TAs. It would also result in most TAs’ take home (after in-state tuition) being negative.
How ASEs feel about this
The ASE economic package is highly reasonable and maintains fair wages and benefits for TAs while offering the university a significant amount of savings per worker.
The purpose of this bargaining process is to increase staffing and improve instructional quality. In any bargaining process, both sides are supposed to give up a little bit. In this case, TAs in EECS/DS are willing to take lower wages and remissions than those guaranteed under the union contract in exchange for a minimum staffing guarantee from the university. However, the university has proposed both dramatically cutting TA benefits and not actually guaranteeing an increase in staffing.
Addressing misconceptions & misinformation
- Why do you want TAs to be paid $61/hour?
- But aren’t fee remission and wages the same thing?
- Why can’t we just get rid of fee remission?
- Why should TAs get fee remission when other undergraduate workers do not?
- Doesn’t fee remission benefit wealthy students more?
- Why should TAs here be paid so much more than TAs at other universities?
Why do you want TAs to be paid $61/hour?
Professor John DeNero has shared a highly misleading figure suggesting that TAs are asking to be paid $61/hour. DeNero comes to this figure by adding tuition remission to wages and then dividing by the statutory number of hours a TA is supposed to work in a semester. The truth is that TAs are paid a salary, not by the hour, and that the salaries we are asking for are highly reasonable and below what the university has already agreed to pay us, as the tables above demonstrate.
Applying these same assumptions to other employees produces similarly absurd results. For example, in 2018, Professor John DeNero earned $125,562 in wages, $40,487 in other pay, and $30,570 in benefits, according to Transparent California. Adding these wages and benefits and then dividing by the statutory number of working hours in a full-time academic year, 1360, would produce an hourly pay rate of $145 per hour. The point of this is not to say that DeNero is overpaid, but to point out the absurdity of this analysis. Just like with TAs, overstating the amount of compensation, understating the amount of work, and disregarding the nature of salaried employment in an instructional setting produces hourly wage figures that seem unreasonably high.
But aren’t fee remission and wages the same thing?
Wages and fee remission differ in several significant ways. Wages can be used by workers in any way they see fit. Wages are subject to taxes because they are income.
Fee remission, on the other hand, is a benefit of employment. It is a way to offset the cost of tuition, which ASEs would otherwise have to pay. Fee remission cannot be used to pay rent or buy groceries. Fee remission is also not taxed because the government recognizes that it is not income.
While fee remission clearly has value, it is misleading to lump it in with wages. It is a benefit of employment. Many university employees receive other benefits of employment—such as health insurance, retirement benefits, and childcare—and it would seem odd to describe these as equivalent to wages. Job posts, for example, typically do not include the cost of health insurance in their salary range because these benefits of employment do not constitute income.
Fee remission is a little bit different because, for ASEs, the University of California is both our employer and the provider of our education. When an ASE does not have to pay tuition, it does not incur a direct cost to the university in the same way that writing a check does. It is actually very difficult to quantify what the marginal cost of that enrollment is to the university. It is also very difficult to say what the value of a fee remission is to student workers. Tuition prices are largely set based on what students are willing to pay, and the price of tuition has changed greatly over history and differs wildly between different universities of similar caliber. If this were a private university and tuition were $50,000 per year, it would seem ludicrous to say that the value of a 100% fee remission to ASEs would be $50,000.
Why can’t we just get rid of fee remission?
If you work for the university in a significant capacity, you should not have to pay to go to school here, and your wages should not be completely eaten up by tuition. TAs, in particular, have to sacrifice so much to run the courses that students take, so it seems cruel to turn around and force them to pay and arm and a leg for taking those very same courses.
Due to a heavy workload, many TAs have to compromise their academics for the sake of their courses and students. Some TAs even end up taking extra semesters to graduate because of this. Many TAs have noted that they would feel cheated if they were forced to pay for this somewhat diminished academic experience.
Why should TAs get fee remission when other undergraduate workers do not?
It is true that the university does not provide fee remission to many other classes of student employees. The fact that there are student workers at this university who have to pay to work at the school that they help run is unfair. However, removing fee remission for TAs would produce more, not less, injustice.
For better or worse, progress on issues of workers rights is typically made incrementally rather than all at once. That means that there will be some groups of workers who will end up with a right before others. However, by creating a precedent for workers to receive a right, the hope is that the path to win that right will be cleared for other workers in the future. To demand that everybody get their tuition covered before anybody gets their tuition covered would result in nobody getting their tuition covered.
Doesn’t fee remission benefit wealthy students more?
Professor John DeNero has said that “if a student already had their tuition covered because of need, they would not get any benefit from tuition remission.” This statement is false. Those on financial aid receive an equal amount of fee remission as those not on financial aid, and any excess funds are available to help them pay for other expenses related to attending college.
There are some cases where the additional income/remission may affect the ASE’s eligibility for some financial aid. There does not appear to be a hard and fast rule for how this works.
When talking about fee remission, Professor DeNero has stated that he believes that “we should stop offering it entirely” for a variety of reasons unrelated to resource constraints. Among the reasons DeNero cites is a belief that tuition should be covered for the students with the greatest need for it first. While we agree that the university should work toward a future where tuition is completely covered for all students, with priority given to the students with the greatest need, we should recognize that fee remission is not mutually exclusive with that goal. It is not the university’s proposal to eliminate fee remission for TAs and give them to EECS/DS students with financial need. The funds “saved” by eliminating fee remission under the university’s proposal would most likely disappear into the system, where history has shown that it would be likely mismanaged and offer very little benefit to students.
Why should TAs here be paid so much more than TAs at other universities?
We are not asking to be paid more than other TAs. To reiterate, every TA at UC Berkeley is guaranteed 57% raises by 2024-25. In comparison, under the ASE proposal, TAs in EECS/DS would be paid less than every other TA, undergraduate or graduate, at all 10 UC campuses. This is despite the fact that we run the number one EECS/DS program in the country.
Professor John DeNero has shared misleading information that purports to show an absurd pay gap between UC Berkeley TAs and TAs at other universities. These comparisons are flawed for various reasons:
- The analysis uses the $61/hour figure for comparisons, which is problematic for reasons previously mentioned.
- The analysis includes tuition remission in the compensation figure for UC Berkeley but excludes similar benefits at other institutions where they exist.
- At many of the universities mentioned in the comparison, undergraduate TAs do fundamentally different work than they do within UC Berkeley EECS/DS.
- Berkeley has a uniquely high cost of living that is not accounted for in the analysis.
- DeNero compared our unionized workforce with numerous nonunionized workforces with worse working conditions. It should not be particularly surprising or exceptional that unionized workforces typically have higher compensation levels than other workforces. This kind of comparison is commonly used in union busting to convince workers that they deserve to be paid less.