As EECS and Data Science ASEs vote to decide whether to accept or reject the tentative agreement, one question keeps coming up—”how should I vote in ratification?” While the bargaining team is remaining neutral in the ratification vote, we’ve written up arguments in favor of and against ratification to help you decide how to vote:
“Yes” argument in favor of ratification
The tentative agreement will ensure our wages and benefits get healthy increases while preserving to the greatest extent possible the system of undergraduate teaching that has made EECS/DS the number one undergraduate computing programs in the world.
While teaching assistants would get paid less under the tentative agreement compared to the systemwide contract, the TA still ensures that all workers get raises. Taking these slightly lower wage increases (16% vs. 46%) will incentivize the department to hire more ASEs than it otherwise would. Under a fixed budget, lower cost workers means that more workers will be hired.
Under the systemwide contract, all TAs receive 100% fee remission; this makes lower hour appointments prohibitively expensive, and 8-hour TAs would therefore likely stop existing under the systemwide contract. In comparison, the tentative agreement prorates fee remissions for 8-, 10-, and 12-hour TAs, making it cost-effective to hire undergrad TAs in these positions. The tentative agreement is the best shot we have at preserving these intermediate workload TA appointments and the pipeline they create.
In exchange for creating more permissive job titles, we receive an unprecedented commitment from the university that would preemptively prevent it from creating a “tutor army”—that is, replacing TA labor with tutor and reader labor. The university has never before in its history agreed to such a provision, and this agreement therefore represents a major step forward not only for the priorities of ASEs in EECS/DS, but also for the abilities of ASEs across the UC system to control their working and hiring conditions.
The tentative agreement also grants a variety of protections that would improve the working conditions for ASEs in EECS/DS. These include overwork protections, guarantees that summer 375 is offered, better union orientation meetings, and assurances that head TAs will not have unsupervised authority over hiring decisions. The better union orientation meetings, in particular, present an excellent opportunity to talk to every ASE at the beginning of the semester, improving knowledge of rights and bolstering organizing efforts in EECS/DS for years to come.
Not every bargaining process is a smashing success for the union. While the 2022 systemwide contract campaign was one of the most successful in the union’s history, other rounds of bargaining have been less successful. The tentative agreement does not have everything we wanted, but it does make serious progress toward a better future in EECS/DS, and often the best indicator of a good compromise is the fact that it makes both sides unhappy. At the next round of bargaining in two years, we will have the opportunity to renegotiate and push to win more of our priorities. On the other hand, rejecting the tentative agreement means that bargaining specific to EECS/DS has ended; there is no guarantee that the university will agree to bargain with us again.
Although the systemwide contract would preserve more of our rights, progress is only meaningful if there are ASEs to enjoy it. This agreement is our best shot of preserving these jobs and building organizing infrastructure so that we can live to fight another day.
“No” argument against ratification
ASEs have fought for decades to achieve the wages and remissions guaranteed in our union contract. Many ASEs went on strike last year specifically to win these increases. The tentative agreement bargains away most of what we won under the strike for very little in return.
The university has made no commitment to increase staffing or even guarantee that staffing issues will not get worse under the tentative agreement, which was the point of these negotiations in the first place. Agreeing to this side letter would not improve instructional quality and would merely leave TAs in EECS/DS with hundreds of dollars less per month compared to other departments. For a 20-hour TA, the tentative agreement means $760 less per month compared to peers in other departments.
Lower wages without a binding commitment to increase staffing would not necessarily mean more staff. It could allow the university or department to simply cut the amount of funding provided to ASEs, putting the departments in the exact same staffing situation they would otherwise be in but with significantly less wages. For example, the EECS department for several years has used extraordinary measures to fund ASEs; with lower wages and benefits, the EECS department might be less motivated to secure these funding streams.
The largest concession from the university—the 55% TA guarantee—does not represent progress because that ratio is substantially lower than the current proportion of TA hours, 68%. Additionally, this guarantee would not even be necessary if the tentative agreement did not create new permissive job titles that allows the university to convert TAs into tutors. On the other hand, under the systemwide contract, grievances relating to tutor and reader misclassification could continue; if those are successful, the university would be forced to hire far more TAs than it otherwise would.
Rejecting this agreement would be a decisive show that the university cannot unilaterally force us to pay the price of their budget mismanagement out of our own pockets. We would continue to file grievances en masse, pursue unfair labor practice charges, and engage our colleagues to fight back against staffing cuts and efforts to violate the contract. This campaign would allow us to fight the root cause of these staffing issues, which is the university’s unwillingness to allocate sufficient funding towards hiring in our departments.
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For more information about the ratification vote, please see the ratification vote information center. If you haven’t received a ratification vote ballot in your email inbox with the subject line “EECS & Data Science Local Agreement Ratification Vote 2023,” you can request a ballot here.
Best,
Gabe Classon
CS 61A uGSI
(Half of voters received the “yes” argument before the “no” argument; the other half received the “no” argument before the “yes” argument.)