It Could Happen Here - The UC Student Worker Strike

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

James and Mia talk to Alex and Tyler from UC San Diego about this week’s strike, what’s at stake, and how you can support 48,000 striking student workers.  https://www.fairucnow.org/support/ See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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me not the legal disclaimer guy from medical advert we just wanted to mention that both of our guests today are members of uaw but they do not speak on behalf of UAW okay enjoy the podcast uh it could happen here it's it's it's a podcast it's a podcast we're doing a podcast it's a podcast and today it's a podcast with me i'm james and i'm joined by chris and i'm joined by a couple of grad students from uc san diego today we're going to talk about grad student strikes we're going to talk about the grad student strike vote that's coming up at UC San Diego and some other grad student strikes that Chris and I have been part of back in the Middle Ages. Okay, so I'm joined today by Alex. Alex, you're studying, I'm trying to get this correct, cancer genomics at UCSD.

Is that correct? That is correct. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. And Tyler Bell as well. And Tyler, you're a postdoc and you're doing Alzheimer's research. Is that correct? That is correct. Thanks for having me. Yeah, you're welcome. And Tyler Bell as well. And Tyler, you're a postdoc and you're doing Alzheimer's research. Is that right? Yes.

And you're both members of UAW? Yes, that's correct. I've been a member for at least two years. But yeah. And I'm a member of the actual subset of uaw that just formed representing student researchers in uh completing their phds so we'll explain all the details of that of course going forward yeah i think maybe we should start there and explain kind of the economic relationship of phd and postdoc students to the university like what what work they do and the i guess as

we were talking about beforehand people might not even be familiar with the fact that you get paid by the university in many of these positions right so can you explain like how that works yeah definitely so yeah as you mentioned um we do uh in our various roles as uh graduate students uh teachers and postdocs. We do a lot of work. Majority of the work, in fact, that is critical for the university to function as it does. And we do that in a few different roles. Some of us are paid to teach or TA classes.

We call those academic student employees who are represented by one of our unions, UAW 2865. The remainder of PhD students are actually paid directly to do their research, and this is usually funded off of grants or other money that the university has earmarked for research. So as we are progressing towards our degrees, we are doing work that is productive in our labs to get papers out, get grant funding coming in, and we receive a stipend to perform that work. Those students are known as graduate student researchers, or GSRs, who are represented by a new union that just formed because it actually became recently legal to form such a union in the state of California. We are represented by SRU,

bargaining for our first contract. And then we have the postdocs, which Tyler can probably talk more about, who are students who have completed their, or their, I'm sorry, I should, I want to really clarify they're not students. They are employees of the university who have completed their degree, so are no longer students and are doing research work in labs, usually driving their own projects forward under supervision of professors. So they are represented by a third union that's part of this sort of collective organizing called UAW 5810. Wait you have postdocs unions? Yeah that's so cool. I think the one here at UC is actually the biggest and one of the first ones that formed. I remember I was on a Wikipedia page which I shouldn't use as an academic but I totally saw us on there and i was like holy game away yeah yeah and i think it's it's fascinating because if there are all these like memes that

you'll see uh as a graduate student and then it's like when you finish your phd where it's like you always think that you're gonna get off the like the grind right like you're like oh i'll do my ma and then i'll get off then i'll do my phd and then the people will respect me and i'll be compensated for the massive amount of work i do and then like i'll just finish this postdoc and then you're like oh i'm 55 you know like it's uh all of those positions are heavily exploited by by universities and make a metric shit ton of money from these people who as you say do most of the work that keeps the university running so perhaps we could talk about the issues that are at stake that are leading to this this strike authorization vote and maybe if we go through a little bit of a timeline as well

that would be great yeah so maybe tyler maybe you could like explain the 5810 timeline and i can talk a little bit about the sru and i guess kind of to a 6-5 one. Yeah, so chronologically, the postdocs were up for their contract negotiation, which that's just to set our wages, benefits and workplace safety and other types of protections we want. And that actually came up, I think in September of 2021. And I could be wrong on the date specifically, so much has changed. But we initially back in 2021 started actually asking people what they wanted to see in their new contract, like our members, because the union isn't like, like, I if I didn't care about the union, or no one else cared, it wouldn't exist. Like, it's the postdocs. And we have to take out like a couple of hours a week

to do this thing. And sometimes it's 20 hours hours on top of our research, which is 40 hours. And so during that time, we surveyed everyone, got the demands that people wanted. And the top two issues that people asked for that they want it changed was our wages and also the housing. We wanted affordable housing because right now, over 70% of academic workers, including the postdocs, who you would think, you know, you have a PhD, this is a time you can finally have affordable housing, and you don't have to worry about food scarcity and all these other things that you're worried about as a graduate student. So just take this in the context of like, we're postdocs, we're supposed to be like the most paid, or at least the better off because we have our PhD. Think about like what that means

for the graduate students and those that aren't yet at that stage yet. And so when we went forward with our proposals we created a lot of other things that we thought were important including things like transit, bargaining demands to make public transit like affordable for postdocs because currently we don't get any kind of like free pass for that. They don't even consider it um in fact you know they they probably think we all have cars which isn't true because a lot of postdocs are international scholars we were also asking for child care support because currently like a good bit of you know uh our postdocs have children um which is normal because this is a normal like family creation time or whatever you want to call it but um it can be one of the only times as an academic when it when it really sort of doesn't massively

disadvantage your career to have start a family right exactly and like postdocs like the whole preposition of a postdoc was you know there's not enough faculty spots for once you get a phd and postdocs now can last five if not longer like five years or longer and there's not enough faculty spots for once you get a PhD. And postdocs now can last five, if not longer, like five years or longer. And there's a new position called an academic researcher, which is a type of like title that you get when you can no longer be a postdoc. But it's also because there's just not enough faculty. So they put you into a different title to do research. And collectively, both us postdocs and people that are academic researchers, we don't get any affordable childcare. We don't have affordable housing, um, and our wages are below the cost of living. And currently we went through the proposals back then. have not really made any leeway on these proposals that actually changed the material conditions for postdocs. Like the university has been, you know, bargaining in bad faith that we have multiple

unfair labor practice lawsuits against from our public relations board for the employers. And three of those have been, sorry, let me get those numbers right. Multiple of those have actually been successfully had complaints filed against numbers right. Multiple of those have actually been successfully had complaints filed against the university. Some of the things that the university has done in particularly while we've been bargaining is one, not bringing the information to the table that we request, like denying our request for information.

They have also refused to bring the people that can make the type of decisions that we need to the table. And they've also been making unilateral changes to things like bullying policies and other workplace issues without even being

at the bargaining table. And the last thing that they've been doing during this process is serving members of our union outside of the bargaining process. We don't know about it. I mean, we did find out about it

and then we filed the complaint. And so right now we're at a point where we've gotten a lot of things, you know, kind of like moved on in terms of things that aren't compensation in terms of our bargaining. Like things that we won, such as bullying protections. That was something that we actually had to like have a big action for to actually get that on the table to move. something that we actually had to like have a big action for to actually get that on the table to move so currently we've won protections against bullying um which is kind of like pretty enormous because in academia the university says we're against bullying and that they have all these resources for you but the resources always end at we're right you're wrong and um now we have something in our contracts not just for the postdocs and academic researchers, but also for the other bargaining units to actually protect us in a process that we could grieve it as union represented workers. researchers, because they started bargaining kind of like maybe further along in that year with us, but they're kind of at the same place of like not getting the same type of responses.

And we just want them to actually come to the table, bring the people that can make the decisions so that we can have, you know, affordable housing, fair wages to actually do the research that we do here. And I just want to say that we bring a lot of value to the university through grants, in particular as postdocs. So we do most of the writing of research papers, conducting the experiments. People think that, if people think that faculty sit there and run a wet lab and actually do the, you know, the work of the wet labs, you know, that would be an amazing faculty person, but they're really busy in terms of like having to write grants themselves. We do the bulk of the work and actually making the research happen. We do a bulk of the training in terms of the graduate students and the undergrads that are in the lab. And so we provide

an enormous value to the university. But at the same time, while we provide these values, the university doesn't want to give us a fair living condition or affordable housing. And the last thing I'll say, and then I'll let Alex talk about the other units, is that we bring a ton of value to the university because of these grants. And for every $100 of that grant that is given to the university, the university charges things like the NIH $58 in indirects.

So this is a ghost money that we don't know where it goes. Our PIs don't get to have a say over. And that's money that usually goes to things like capital projects that could go back to keeping, you know, the postdocs actually living in an okay living situation. Can we just explain what capital projects are? So capital projects are things like, you know, planning out building buildings that they want and other things, things that aren't really like compensation based or employee based, you know,

because the university like UC is the biggest landowner. And so they obviously want more and more things that they can develop or lands that they can buy. And that's kind of what they kind of focus many of these indirects on. And I really don't know the clear picture on indirects. And that's kind of the problem is that we don't know where all this money kind of goes. It's the, if people, obviously lots of our listeners aren't in San Diego, the scale of construction at UCSD is incredible. Like I've been here for 15 years now, and I swear every time I go back there's

a new building like and in terms of student housing it's nearly all student housing I think that they've built but yeah and if I can jump in about one of those which relates a lot to why graduate students have become more active on this campus um three or four of those extraordinarily large buildings you're talking about were actually intended to be built as subsidized graduate student housing, where you would be, you know, you get on a wait list, you're guaranteed once you get off the wait list, you can live there for two years and pay below market rent. That lasted for a little bit of time, but the university just a couple of years ago or so almost doubled the price for those units. They tried to hide it behind saying that their capacity increases,

but what they're saying is for the same price as before, you can live with two people in a very small square footage studio apartment. But really that studio is now just double. So that is one of the things certainly that we are concerned about is that, yeah, money, a significant portion of the university's budget does go into these capital improvement projects, which are nominally intended for student and postdoc benefit, but which tend to come back and not be quite as helpful in the long run. Yeah, I mean, it seems like they're just doing real estate speculation and then doing rent extraction from it, which... Yeah, and this is something they've done. They did a very, very similar thing in, what, 2009? Again, they built a new building, it was affordable for a short period of time,

and then it suddenly became completely unaffordable. They've really consistently extracted rent from the people that they are underpaying. Yeah, and those buildings were actually, this incident even got a lot of faculty on our side because those buildings were a major draw for how we were able to recruit new people to come and do research with us.

As we were saying, yeah, the cost of living here is really high. You're not going to get a huge stipend or salary, but we do have this subsidized housing. And people had actually already committed to do their PhD here in labs at the university. And then the rent increase came out that April or May. And people said, well, no. And then a bunch of people decommitted from programs. So it was a significant issue here, but they have not backed off of that. Yeah. And the problem with the university being one of the biggest landlords is that when they increase the rents for these, even grad housing, it affects everyone else. So like

prices, like my current rent, I live maybe a mile away from campus. My rent was, you know, 1700, which was eating up most of my income anyway. And went up to 2,500 and you know this is directly tied to like the university setting a higher market rate which then allows them to hurt everyone else that lives you know not just in around UCSD but also in San Diego generally. Yeah one of the big things about that we're trying to get the university to understand and one of the reasons I'm proud of the demands that we're making in this round of bargaining is the effect we have on the local economy and of people who aren't even affiliated

with the university have their lives affected based on the rent and based on the cost of things because of the economic footprint that we have. And as Tyler mentioned, one of our demands is some more subsidized transit passes. The university already subsidizes a significant amount of transit, but it's not enough and it's not enough to actually really make a difference in terms of emissions in our region.

So we're trying to raise both our own working conditions as well as, as make meaningful changes in the university's impact in the region. And in response to that, the university released in part a very funny statement the other day that accused us and use transit as an example, accused us of having a, quote, social justice agenda. So I wasn't quite sure if the university or Ron DeSantis wrote that particular release, but it was it was quite funny. You know, OK, the more I'm thinking about this, right, this is a public university. Why are they even charging rent

they own the land right wait why are they even charging rent in the first place like what what is oh my god like well it's just the housing the housing example i brought up was funded through what they very proudly refer to as a public, boy. So that's where the money is going. Oh, great. It's going to investors. Oh. And recently for the postdocs, their solution to our housing crisis was they obtained some building in downtown San Diego, which is, you know, 12 or more miles away from campus.

And the building starts at, like, rents of $3,000 or more. But like I said... Oh, this building. Yeah, the one with the creepy bed and the closet that comes out and kills your cat. The what? It has a closet that folds out.

Oh, good. Comes out the wall. It's at their extended downtown. Yeah, I've been trying to PRA a bunch of stuff about that building, and they've been quite reticent to hand it over, oddly. So, Alex, is there any more context you wanted to add from your side about what is driving people to ask for a strike authorization vote? Yeah, definitely. I mean, our concerns as graduate students are certainly very similar to a lot of the concerns that postdoctoral students have,

except that we make even less money than they do. So certainly urgent on the compensation side, our units are demanding a minimum graduate student stipend of $54,000 a year, whereas none of us make more than $33,000 or $34,000 right now, and that's very dependent on the program and very dependent on your source of funding. So most make quite less than that. We also have a number of other issues that have come up and caused problems for students that we want to be able to have a union in order to rectify. I mentioned that our Student Researchers United Union is actually new. We're bargaining for our first contract. And we think we're going to be able to get a lot of practical benefits out of that, not just

in terms of a contract, but actually something where we can have some parity and some organization to come to bat for us when the university creates issues. For example, the university has known this for a long time, but the payroll system that manages graduate student stipends and fellowships and stipend disbursements is a bit unreliable for reasons that they can't quite explain oh boy so I wasn't

a grad student but I was an undergrad when our UChicago's grad students went on strike and that was a big thing of like people like people would get paid the university would sometimes they would they wouldn't get paid enough they wouldn't get paid at all there was another time where they accidentally get overpaid and the university wouldn't tell them and they just take all the money out of their bank account and it was a

catastrophe yeah is it similar things here very much so yeah i got overpaid and then i got overpaid yeah there is uh at least my personal story with this is um uh pretty much ever since so i i applied for and received an nih uh individual fellowship for uh all the other nerds out there i got it it's an f31 uh nih fellowship but essentially what that says is the NIH likes my research proposal and they are going to fund a portion of the rest of my PhD. So in a sense, I've offset the cost of my labor by bringing an extra few tens of thousands of dollars to the university. However, the processing for that has not been smooth. And there are months where I simply have to remind them to pay me. And when that paycheck doesn't come through my very hardworking program coordinator, it's not her fault, but she has been open support tickets. She has to go through 10 different levels of bureaucracy to find out where the holdup is.

portions of their stipend can tell well into the beginning of the first or second week of the month. I personally have been lucky enough to, you know, build up some savings living here. But many students, especially our first years coming right out of college, have not been able to do that. And a lot of times at the first of the month, we have people, you know, people will come to me and say they just didn't, they, I don't know why my stipend check didn't work. I can't pay rent or I can't get groceries. And these issues have been going on. This is, have not been one-time things or sporadic things. These are things that have been continuously going on for years. And what we're really hoping for is that with the creation of this student researchers union, that we will be able to not just you know send polite emails and say hi can you pay me if you get a chance uh we will actually have a literal international union that will be sending those emails and say you know you fix this or by the terms of the contract we

get x y and z damages um and we're hoping that that leads to improvements in the system as a as a whole because it will be more expensive. That is certainly one of the reasons we formed SRU after a brief vote to strike for recognition because the university ignored the Employee Relations Board of California, which resulted in some very spicy press releases from Perb, which was great. But we did eventually get recognition

and now hopefully in a month or so we'll have a contract. To explain for people as well who aren't familiar, if you're teaching, you may not have been paid over the summer in some positions. I know I wasn't in mine. So a late payment in September or even wait until October, you're already at the bottom of your savings. There were fall quarters

they had quarters at ucsd where like i lived in my car because i didn't didn't make it all the way through the summer on the savings i had you know so it really is and i'm sure there are a lot of still like unhoused graduate students at ucsd because of the cost of living and the the wages are so divergent yeah hey chris you you know what won't make you uh live in your car oh god there's no way uh yeah that's great it's gonna be the how i patrol again the same department will let you live in your car yeah no talk loria okay yeah this is brought to you by Landlords. Enjoy these adverts. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter?

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by student organizations so far, and also some of the repercussions that have come from those actions? Because again, student organizing is a little different and I want people to understand that. So maybe if it makes sense to start with this 2020 Wildcats, we can start there. If you want to start further back, then we can start further back too. Yeah, 2020 is probably about the extent of my, how far my experience goes back. But I can tell kind of the story of that a little bit.

There was a movement that we refer to as COLA, which stands for Cost of Living Adjustment. And it's a very convenient acronym, which resulted in people coming to protest with empty bottles of Coke on a stick. And that was a really common sign. It's fantastic. But that was a movement that started at university of california santa cruz one of the uh as for people aren't familiar with uc it is really actually many campuses uh together in one system in this particular uh one started at our campus in santa cruz um and it was what is called a wildcat strike which is if you're not familiar with unions that is, at least in America, there

are very careful rules that you have to follow of when exactly you are allowed to call a legally protected strike. And that's often dependent on your contract or the labor laws of your state. But it is possible for workers to get together without the explicit approval of their union and explicit approval of their union and take the added risk that that involves to hold a labor stoppage. So I'm not sure of the exact number, but somewhere between 50 and 100 or 200 or so TAs, so teaching assistants at the Santa Cruz campus, decided to withhold teaching and also final exam and semester or sorry quarter grades for a quarter in I believe this would have been fall or fall of 2019 and they held they held essentially daily pickets and protests at their central entrance of their campus. And this resulted in quite an extreme response from Santa Cruz administration, University of Santa Cruz administration. They called in the

California Highway Patrol. Also, there's, well, I've asked, I'll send this to Chris and James to put in the footnotes, but there is a Vice article where someone did a lot of public records requests and found out that the FBI was also involved, or at least FBI provided technology was involved. There may have been sort of counterterrorism units involved in the state in interesting ways. But essentially, there was a highly militarized response to what was essentially a few grad students not doing grades. essentially a few grad students not doing grades. So this response, the images that came out of this, people getting arrested for being in the street and such,

started to actually provoke sympathy actions across the rest of the campus. And there was really a campus-wide or a system-wide movement starting to build. And then March of 2020 happened. And almost all of us, our labs shut down, the campuses shut down. Those of us who work from home could. Those of us who couldn't often had, you know, many other struggles to deal with. And that kind of killed, the pandemic essentially killed that movement. But at the same time, you know, these UAW 2865 and UAW 5810 already existed. SRU was starting to get formed at this time.

We actually managed to get card check recognition during the pandemic where no one could actually go to one central point and get cards. So I'm quite proud of that. So we sort of rebuilt off of kind of sort of the ashes of that movement. And even though it was not, and I personally support it, but even though it was not a university sort of, or excuse me, certainly not university supported, but a union supported movement. I think it really helped to kind of plant seeds for graduate students and postdocs having some, you know, some degree of labor consciousness. When I was doing walkthroughs to get people signed up for the union, get people to vote on the strike, they would say,

you know, they haven't obviously been keeping track of all the bargaining, but say, oh yeah, I remember, is this like in Santa cruz i remember what they did and and people would be in and be ready you know to get involved so um uh it was a deferred kind of uh benefit given the the uh pandemic but i i think it helped uh get a lot of the energy that we have today yeah that's great to see actually because i know we really struggled with sort of political consciousness on the on the among the grad students in my time at ucsd um yeah i guess it makes sense like the i remember like i were talking to some people who were sort of involved with it and like watching the videos coming out of it like that was i think like probably the most intense military response i think i've ever seen to a strike in the u.s it was wild like yeah the

university chancellor chancellor of santa cruz at that time uh bragged or i don't know if it was bragged or complained that they were spending three hundred thousand dollars a day on that response yeah they went incredibly hard and i want to kind of get into why like the universities really really strongly dislike strikes and partly because they rely heavily on underpaid graduate student labor right and are increasingly relying heavily on underpaid adjunct labor as well to take the place of these expensive tenure track positions so can we talk about a little bit about like what it means to strike as a grad student because it's not the same to strike as a grad student as it is to strike if you work on a production line. It really can make a serious impact on your whole career and it can make a serious impact on your relationship, perhaps with your supervisor or advisor or mentor.

So can you, one of you or both of you, explain a little bit about the repercussions that come from striking as a graduate student? Yeah, I'm happy to share my thoughts. And then, Tyler, you can maybe talk about what postdocs are thinking. From the TA perspective, I think I don't want to. I'm not currently. I'm currently a student researcher, so I'm not currently teaching. I think in that sense, it makes it there's a little cut and dry it's you're not going to teach your discussion section you're not going to grade your exams those are very concrete things you can do that are sort of

separate from your research work for those of us paid to do research it's a little bit um harder to figure out where exactly you're sometimes your labor for the university is and and where you're um uh kind of research and and where your um uh kind of research and and and not wanting to sort of harm yourself like i know people who have planned their advancements to candidacy during this time and i think they're still going through with that because we consider well that's more academic that's more your personal uh kind of progress um in life and and so those sort of things will continue um uh but I think it's one of the things that that's sort of important is is sort of your day to day work in the lab and not necessarily just on your research project, but on just sort of maintaining things, answering questions, communicating with collaborators, sharing your results with people,

helping undergraduates in the lab, helping, you know, prepare figures or prepare text for your advisor to submit grants and all these other things that are not necessarily like I am doing this particular, you know, thing for my degree. So I know a lot of people are worried about, especially because in the life sciences, we have situations where we have experiments that go on for months, and they cost tens of thousands of dollars to run. And if you miss a time point on that, you're throwing months of your life out the window, and that hurts yourself really more than the university. So it's been, I think, especially because organizing grad student researchers is something new, at least in America. I think it's something that in the coming years will be kind of considered more and people will kind of, I think, what I hope is people learn from whatever our experience happens to be next week when we walk out and start to kind of calibrate

what does it look like? What is an effective work stoppage for a researcher look like? And I think people are, we've had a lot of discussions and we've had program meetings with a bunch of students from my program got together and talked about this. And I think it might end up looking different for different people, but really what we're trying to communicate is don't do something that's going to, you know, damage yourself, but do what you can to disrupt normal operations. Show up at the picket and make sure you communicate, you know, to everyone around you why you're leaving and, you know, cause as much disruption as you can.

That's kind of what our thinking is at the moment. Yeah. Anything else you want to add, Tyler? Yeah, so I wanted to add that. So for this one, this strike, I mean, the reason that we're doing it is because they're not coming to the table in good faith. So I was going to correct my number. So we had 27 complaints that we filed with the California Public Employment Relations Board, and six of those were actually official complaints to the University of California. And so this strike is a little different because it's, you know, it's interesting to have to explain to other people why this is so important, especially in such a short timeframe. And so for postdocs, like on a day-to-day basis, we do so much research that every day matters and our employment schedules aren't very long. So I say that postdocs are generally in there for five years.

But PIs don't want to keep a postdoc for a year or two or longer. Especially like I've noticed a pattern here in academia in general that postdocs, some people prefer to keep them a year and two years because by the time you ask for pay raises or the time you ask for career development and to get to your next stage, you're not worth it to them anymore. And they change you out. So when I come in as a postdoc, each position I've come in every day mattered. And setting up my research experiment, setting up my papers, setting up what I was going to do for the job search, because you don't have that much time. It takes six to eight months to get get even an initial interview for a faculty job.

And that's a rare thing that you would get anyway. I think about 2% of postdocs become faculty at this point. And so we're giving up a lot of... Yeah, it's really bleak. And so like right now, I think the fact that we authorize the strike based on the bad faith bargaining, we did that because like things are so important, but we know what we're going to lose.

So if we have to strike for weeks, that is lost experiments. That's lost time to do our publications, be competitive for this competitive job field. And also we're going to let down a lot of people because we're kind of anchors in our lab for the undergraduates and the graduate students and also the techs in our lab.

And so if we're gone, the lab just kind of dies, especially if the grad students walk out too. But I think we know that the value that I would get personally for my career, it isn't worth it if I see not only myself suffering each year, not being able to make my rent and able to feed myself, like eating one meal a day is not really great. And being able to make my rent and able to feed myself. Like eating one meal a day is not

really great. And being able to afford one wardrobe this entire two years of employment is not great either. And I'm a postdoc and I see the graduate students who I was a graduate student two years ago. There's not a real border there. And seeing them suffer, you know, most of us postdocs don't want to see anyone else have to go through that. So it's worth the lost time. And it's kind of incalculable, but I could say what we would lose because grants are so up in the air, but, you know, we're talking millions of dollars for a grant cycle being lost if a postdoc can't, you know, submit the application. We're talking, you know, what Alex said, how expensive this equipment experiments are in these big labs in biology and engineering. So it's really immeasurable. And I think it's on the UC to come to the table in good faith and say, hey, let's not do this.

Let's not ruin their research and their teaching, because that's the thing that we're here to support. And I just want to say that overall, we're only less than 1% of UC's total budget. So what is it to give us a fair wage and a good housing so we can continue to our research and teaching and not have to go on strike and lose all of this? Yeah, I think it's very fair. You know what else only pays out 1% of their income to their employees? Co-labor. Is it the Washington State Highway Patrol? No, it's not.

They pay shitload of money. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's disappointing, isn't it? Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonoro.

An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app,

Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground playground for billionaires from the chaotic world of generative ai to the destruction of google search better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose this season i'm going to be joined by everyone from nobel winning economists to leading journalists in the field and i'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get

me wrong, though. I love technology. I just hate the people in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real people. I swear to God, things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com. On Thanksgiving Day, 1999, a five-year-old boy floated alone in the ocean. He had lost his mother trying to reach Florida from Cuba. He looked like a little angel. I mean, he looked so fresh.

And his name, Elian Gonzalez, will make headlines everywhere. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. Elian, Elian. Elian Gonzalez. At the heart of the story is a young boy and the question of who he belongs with. His father in Cuba. Mr. Gonzales wanted to go home and he wanted to take his son with him. Or his relatives in Miami. Imagine that

your mother died trying to get you to freedom. At the heart of it all is still this painful family separation. Something that as a Cuban, I know all too well. Listen to Chess Piece, the Elian Gonzalez story as part of the My Cultura podcast network available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Jack Peace Thomas, the host of a brand new Black Effect original series, Black Lit, the podcast for diving deep into the rich world of Black literature. I'm Jack Peace Thomas, and I'm inviting you to join me and a vibrant community of literary enthusiasts dedicated to protecting and celebrating our stories. is for the page turners, for those who listen to audiobooks while commuting or running errands, for those who find themselves seeking solace, wisdom, and refuge between the chapters.

From thought-provoking novels to powerful poetry, we'll explore the stories that shape our culture. Together, we'll dissect classics and contemporary works while uncovering the stories of the brilliant writers behind them. Blacklit is here to amplify the voices of Black writers and to bring their words to life. Listen to Blacklit on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Yeah, we're back. Yeah, so I think you've done a really excellent job of explaining sort of what's at stake and what uh people can stand to lose i know it can be very confusing also as a teacher i will add like what do you do when you're you're not supposed to communicate

right like so like what about when your students email you that can be very difficult or uh especially if it comes towards the time when you're writing application letters or you're writing letters of support for your BA students who want to go into an MA or PhD program. Many of us teach as much out of vocation as for the 30-odd grand a year we can make in a place where the cost of living is insane. And so we want to help those people because we care about our students. And so it can be very hard for us to go on strike. I will say that we're very fortunate in the community college district here, which is a different system for people who aren't aware. It's an entirely different university system. We have a very strong union. And as a result, our adjunct faculty here are, I believe, some of the best paid in the country.

They teach at a community college sometime, and it's exclusively thanks to a strong union and faculty being willing to back up that union so like it does work which is nice to see but let's talk about some of the actions that have been taken already i understand it uh some some folks occupied like a very busy intersection uh earlier this year in the spring right you want to talk about that yeah that was um the uh action that we had um um back in april um to uh sort of raise um awareness of the you know issues with bargaining and some of the other things that were going on at that time. And I was really impressed with how well it went, actually, in terms of the number of students who came out, number who were actually willing to participate in that. But yeah, we got several hundred people

all together marched down to the intersection for our San Diego listeners at Via La Jolla and La Jolla Village Drive, just so you can get a picture of how important of an intersection this was, those of you who know it, and did not allow any cars to that intersection for an entire rush hour uh which uh was fantastic um and for whole foods it's a real we did yeah yeah it took uh uh i hope that um san diego pd billed ucsd for that because they had about 50 officers controlling traffic, two helicopters. It was quite a response. I talked to an undercover cop on the bridge over the highway. He was upset that he was missing something, some baseball game or something.

I don't know. Should have been a cop. Could have avoided it. Could have had a real job. Could have just left. I'm actually staring at that intersection right now. And if I could tell you how busy it is, like we were terrified of what,

like safety was the most important thing. And I think we did a good job being sure everyone was safe, but like it's busy. It is a heartline over here in La Jolla. Yeah. My first day in America, I was walking with another grad student to try and find some food

and uh we tried to cross that road got stuck in the middle got a jaywalking ticket and i knew i'd made a great choice in coming to california at that time yeah that is that road it's like if you want to cross all three ways because it's one of our one of our stupid california roads you can only cross the intersection on three sides so if you want to go all the way around that's going to be like five six seven minutes waiting at crosswalks it's it's oh my god but that's that's for maybe a different podcast about our transportation nightmare here in san diego yeah um i think there's one other action that we had that i would really want to highlight and and this was about you know related to a postdoc so maybe maybe tyler can kind of fill in the details um uh about the um the action we had for um for the uh that postdoc

i can't i can't i'm blanking on your name but tyler were you maybe able to talk about there's been so many postdocs in actions so this is a really horrible case where someone who you know had brought up that there was data ethics issues in their lab which obviously as any postdoc or graduate student telling your boss that they're doing something wrong never goes well um but this person was bringing up this issue this person also was um was pregnant and um at that point the, once they found out that this person was pregnant, had decided, oh, well, you need to leave by the end of the year. Which would make it to where the person would get deported, because this was an international scholar, in their third trimester, you know, in January. And so it was a horrible case. And have no income or insurance during her third trimester.

Yeah. And so, Alex, if you have a good memory of the action, I'll let you speak about it because it was pretty awesome. Yeah, it was pretty great. We got a ton of people to rally in the health sciences area of campus. People essentially set up little mini pickets of the relevant buildings, basically not blocking the insurance, but making sure everyone who went in knew exactly, you know, why we were there and what the issue was. And they were eventually, uh, towards the end of the day, I was, I wasn't there at that point, but they were able to actually get up to, um, uh, where, um, the chair of her department's office and lab were. Um, and I, there was nothing threatening that went on, but I do believe the cops were called nonetheless.

um and i i there was nothing threatening that went on but i do believe the cops were called nonetheless um and and my understanding was uh this is just rumor but he told someone that he really needed them to leave because he had to get to the bathroom and didn't want to talk to the students so that was a funny uh part of the story um but they did get him on video because they eventually were able to talk to the chair of the department and got them on video saying, I think this person deserves an extension of their contract. And a day or two later, UCSD did actually award this postdoc an extension of her contract. But yeah, this is an incident that, you know, never would have seen the light of day unless this had been raised, unless we hadn't already had this kind of activist kind of consciousness going on because of the ongoing bargaining and the union was able to, postdoc union was able to win kind of,

I think, out of a really terrible situation, I think salvage probably wanted the best outcome. She'll be able to have her child here and look for new jobs in the meantime to, you know, whatever her family wants to do, extend the visa or go back to their original country. But they essentially, they have security, some measure of security now, which wouldn't have happened without raising quite a disruption over it. And I also want to say that this was a postdoc and the grad students came out to protect a postdoc. So all these invisible lines that the university draws, like obviously there were postdocs there too, but if you think about the number of graduate students,

like they are the immune system that has come out and saved a bunch of postdocs through these actions. There was another action with someone that was being let go within four months of their employment in an inappropriate way, this person was kind of using their lab as that research mill I talked about, only really hired women postdocs and really did not treat them well,

despite doing research in women's health. And the grad students also came out for that and we got to save that person from getting immediately fired and they're better off now. Hell yeah. Yeah, it's great. I think that solidarity is super important.

And yeah, it's the only thing that stops the university from just rampantly exploiting everyone apart from like 150 people at the very top. Yeah. Actually, on that note, can I ask, have y'all been working with like, I guess, what's the tactical name for them? Like the other non-student

unions on campus oh it's like aft employee unions yeah yeah or like yeah yeah yeah they um unfortunately most of the unions don't have sympathy strike or uh yeah uh those sorts of things in their contract if they they cannot do an official strike if they are under contract but yeah they've definitely been helping in terms of kind of raising consciousness and awareness i know uh the ones that have the ability to um you know maybe cancel their classes or use class time to teach about the strike or you know do things like that um have been um uh they're that they're planning to do that.

Um, what's nice as well is I, this isn't really a union, but there's kind of a non-university affiliated sort of group of faculty, uh, who, you know, advocate for, for, for changes across the entire campus. And they're organizing a very large petition and letter writing campaign from faculty members supporting, um, our action, which I think is really critical because the university won't listen to us, but they may listen to, if you get to a critical mass of professors supporting what we're doing. So there's been, you know, not universal certainly, but there's been a great deal of solidarity, even coming from some of the

people who the university, I think, has relied on to be more on their side, which is the professors. Yeah. And if like the faculty association, I think that's pretty awesome because you could imagine that UC doesn't want them to ever unionize, but they obviously see the leaky pipeline where grad students are, you know, either not staying in their programs or postdocs aren't coming and you just you know what you happen to have at the end of that is people that have generational wealth um at the end of it who happen to stay in these programs and i think that's what really motivated the faculty to come out and say something because like uc says oh we support equity and diversity but then they have seen constantly the university not do anything materially to change that.

Yeah. Yeah. It's good. It's good to see the faculty showing up. And again, that's the sort of, that's how we fix these things, right? Is by sticking together with solidarity,

with organizing. So maybe to finish up, if we talk about what next week is going to look like, or what next week might look like, I guess. Well, I guess. Well, I guess it'll, it'll be this week by the time this comes out. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So what can people look for on the, on the timeline from UCSD?

From the university or from, from, from, from the, from the strike. Yeah. From the strike. Yeah. Well, we'll have a number of pickets throughout campus. Mostly kind of trying to keep them geographically oriented so everyone from the surrounding buildings just go to one specific spot. We're doing sign-ups, organizing strike pay, all of those sorts of typical things

have been going on this week. And the walkout begins November 14th for across not just UCSD, but all the campuses. So that's our total bargaining unit membership across three unions is 48,000 people. Of those, 75% voted on our strike-off vote, 98% voted yes. So we're expecting a pretty significant turnout of that entire membership to be on the picket line. So that will, there will be, you know, those TAs who are walking out will be that that'll be the first disruption university feels before they feel the research disruption. They will very clearly see the teaching disruption and exams not taking place, grades not being entered, sections not being taught across every single campus.

And and that will certainly be something that they will have to deal with. And hopefully the size of the disruption in the first few days will convince them to come to the bargaining table in a reasonable way. And if not, we are prepared to continue until they do. And the other interesting part about what's going to happen next week is that this is um a picket line that is going to be not just including you know researchers and instructors but also people that support us so there's a big conference downtown for a lot of neuroscientists and um it's it's called sfn i can't remember what that stands for um but a lot

of them are actually coming to the picket line to support us. Amazing. I didn't know about that. That's great. Yeah, I think that's pretty exciting. I didn't know it was in San Diego, but they're going to be here and also vouch for us. Because UC does, like, we are the leading research group, and we contribute to a lot of the research that are at these meetings anyway. There's also going to be, it a child friendly picket line. And for people with access needs, we're going to have, you know, virtual picketing.

And you'll see what that looks like. It's still being developed. But I think that's pretty exciting as someone, you know, with a disability myself, it's exciting that other people can contribute to that. Yeah, it's very cool of you guys to do that. It's very cool. All right. How can people help how can

people support you how can people find you on the internet yeah so i think if you want to keep up with the strike news there's three twitter accounts the sru uaw uaw 5810 and uaw 2865 i think they kind of share a lot of the same content sometimes because we're all kind of doing this together but that's a good place to keep track of the news i know there is a link to um there's a they've set up a hardship uh strike fund um i don't have that link off the top of my head but we can put that in the notes i guess yeah yeah yeah to us later and if you go to fair you see now.org it'll have all the information about what's happening but also those type of links too um so if you want some context so it's pretty good website yeah and then how about you two personally would you like to share your personal twitters or do you just want to stick with the uh

the organizational ones um i would love to i promise i'm not that fun, but mine is Tyler Bell, PhD. That's my tag. Yeah. And I'm Alex T. Wenzel on Twitter. Once this is over, I'll probably go back to tweeting entirely about my work and pictures of buses. I love your Twitter, Alex. Yeah, Alex is a high value follower.

Oh, thank you. Alex gives live updates about transit and it's exciting. You see a train train it's all good Alex really like hits that like five year old child we have pretty electric buses in San Diego now what can I say

alright thank you so much for your time both of you I really appreciate it best of luck next week maybe I'll come up and bring you I don't know some soup or like like an oil can that we can start firing on campus or something. I would love that. Yeah, let's do it.

I have one here. Let's do it. I'm down. All right. Yeah, best of luck. And we'll look forward to hearing what happens. Thank you so much for talking to us. Hello, podcast fans.

I know you got to the end of the episode and you were thinking, not enough James, not enough Strikes, not enough UCSD. So lucky you, I've been up to UC San Diego today and I've recorded with Tyler and Alex at the Strike and we got some audio of the Strike going on as well. It was really amazing, really incredible to see that many people out.

Never thought I'd see that at UCSD. So without further ado, here's my interview with them. All right. So I'm here with Tyler and Alex again, this time with more background noise. We're at the strike now. How many people are here, roughly? Oh, man, somewhere probably around

at least a couple thousand, right, right now? Definitely a couple thousand people out here. It's really impressive. I went to UCSD, if you haven't picked that up yet, and we did not get this many people, even when people started hanging nooses around campus. I don't think our project's got this big. So this is genuinely very impressive.

And how have things gone so far? What's been happening? I think things have gone really well so far. This is day two as we're recording this, that we've been on strike. There has been some progress at the bargaining table that I've heard, but we do know that UC is going to try to drag this out. They think that they can outlast our momentum, but so far as you can really hear from the noise behind us and see all the different, you know, thousands of people converging from all the picket locations across campus that they've

been at since eight in the morning, I think our energy is going strong. What do you think, Tyler? picket locations across campus that they've been at since 8 in the morning. I think our energy is going strong. What do you think, Tyler? Yeah, so I think the energy is really strong here today. The UC did not expect us to come on day two, which we know because at bargaining they canceled our meetings for today because they didn't expect us to show up.

But somehow, magically, a meeting emerged around 2 o'clock today and it may be due to the fact that 2,000 people are out here pretty pissed and want a fair contract. But, yeah, I think the momentum is pretty high. We actually did more disruption today, going directly talking to the deans and the faculty

and screaming in their offices as they sat really comfy. I'll say, yeah, first floor seminars didn't go well today. I'll put it that way. Nice. All right. There was something that I know both of you have posted about intimidation and unfair labor practices. Are you comfortable talking about that like, intimidation and unfair labor practices.

Are you comfortable talking about that, even in big terms? Yeah, I can talk in generalities. There's, well, the labor law that governs us is a little bit complicated because some of us also receive course credit for the work that we do that is protected under activity that protects our strike activity, which is a little bit of an anti-labor practice in and of itself. There's no reason I have to sign up for 12 credits of just existing doing work. That doesn't make any particular sense, but it's the way the university run things. So there has been some emails that are sent out that are of questionable legal correctness as to whether we can be hurt in terms of our academic standing for participating on the strike. That is definitely not true.

If we are if the activity that's governed under the what our union is representing us for. So we know we've had some issues with that. Tyler, I guess you could talk about maybe some other examples that have come out. So on the postdoc side right now, the university has released like an FAQ of sorts in an email where it says, oh, well, you have to tell the NIH that your postdocs aren't doing research and that their funding needs to get pulled. But that's kind of a joke. There's no like reporting mechanism for that.

It's more like a stipend for a living. So we're telling people just to stay strong. And people seem to kind of pass like the threat that they're making. And a lot of faculty see through it, too. Is that OK? Huh? We've just intercepted you when you're going somewhere else. That's all right.

I'm here. Do you would like to introduce yourself? All right. So I'm Vidya. I'm a postdoc. I'm pretty new. In UCSD, I joined in April and I came here having already done another postdoc and a PhD in Europe.

I joined the union almost instantly when I came here since I was basically horrified, for lack of a better way to put it. So I studied in the EU for 10 years and my experience of academia is what I experienced there, which was decent working conditions, being able to save money, not having to spend 50% of your salary on rent so when I came here and experienced postdoc life I couldn't believe it so I believe I met Tyler when I came here for the first time and we did this orientation that was awesome and also horrifying at the same time

sorry, it was awesome to meet you because I realized it was then that I learned how a labor union worked my knowledge of labor unions was minimal up until the point that I moved here. So minimal that I didn't even know what labor unions in the EU functioned like until I came here and realized, oh my god, we are actually lucky to have a union that supports postdocs. And this is not the case in a lot of places in the US. Yeah, yeah, that's true. So how has the strike action gone so far? the US. Yeah, that's true. So how has the strike action gone so far? It's been crazy. We've been planning this for so long. It's a bit surreal to be part of it. I think it's been going great.

It's been very energizing. And it's been intense. Yeah, it's hard, right? None of us really want to be out here and strike. And the fact that so many people are putting work on hold just speaks to the intensity and seriousness of the problem and what we're striking for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think that's very true. It's really impressive how many people here I can't over-interested. Yeah. Yeah, very impressive. So what's the outlook? Do you guys know how the bargaining has gone and what we can expect from here? Well, what we would like would be for the UC to meet us at the bargaining table and give us the fair contract. But repeating that ad infinitum while we withhold labor is the plan thus far. But what's actually been happening is the UC just hasn't been paying fair as you know.

It's been infuriating for me. It makes me very angry. It's very surreal especially I think if you're used to a sort of more sane labor context to see them just like gaslighting and lying and doing what on the face of it is illegal stuff. It's disrespectful is what I feel. Yeah. And maybe illustrates sort of what they see post-oxygraphic in economic terms.

Yeah, as a workforce whose rights are not to be valued to do a bulk of the work, it's very disrespectful. Yeah, no, I think it certainly speaks to, like I said earlier, they're trying to outlast us and they think that we will reach a certain point where we no longer feel like we can avoid our work, that we can stay out here. And I think you would think that

if that's their strategy, they would realize that we are in a point of desperation. We are in a point of precarity where we really need wages and compensation and workplace protections that meet the current economic situation that we live in. Because right now, that's not what we have. And currently at the bargaining table, they're kind of putting a lot of our labor reps into something that looks like Jigsaw-type trap rooms, where they have only fluorescent lighting and no windows. And then them not knowing whether or not they're going to have to get a flight back because they're not going to meet with them that day. Them saying that they haven't reserved rooms, even though they have so much power. Who's taking up a room from them to meet with them and actually come up with some proposals?

I got an update that admin wasn't bargaining because they couldn't reserve a room? What does that mean? There's 48,000 people on strike. The entire system isn't working. What do you mean? It's your rooms also. You own the rooms. That was a fascinating update. I'm sorry sorry i just had to mention something about that so that's just all we have to know right now is that they keep canceling meetings adding meetings they're kind of just waiting us out to see how long we're actually beyond strike and whether or not uh we actually care about our contracts which i think you being here today you see how many people are out no one's going to leave this picket line throughout the week so yeah yeah i i think that's basically it people aren't going to leave the picket line and the energy is awesome because people are fed up people are fed up people are fed up of being poor

and homeless and this is not why we come to grad school right i mean i was very fortunate to have a good grad school experience and that's why i'm still in academia but a majority of the people who come to the university spending savings i know people with student loans back from India who are here to do a master's and are TAing doing research killing themselves because they had a dream they literally moved across the world to come here following a dream and are ending up being broke and that's that's heartbreaking from a university as big as this nobody deserves to be treated this way and i think everybody here is feeling it if you go to fair you see now.org there's a link to a strike fund right now a hardship fund and people can donate to that any amount they want to and there's also we're taking donations to actually feed people out here

so if people have questions about that they can just email the links at that website. Yeah. Can people show up to the picket to help too? Like, would you like people to? People are very, very welcome to show up to the picket line to come help. All help is appreciated. You want to join us, you want to chant,

you want to bring supplies, we'll be there. This is across all 10 UC campuses. If you're near a picket line, if you want to show support and solidarity, come join us. Yeah, the virtual picketing is still happening. And what they've been actually doing is making sure people get here and know where to go since picketing is so transient. Like we're literally moving building to building as it's needed. And they're doing the calls for us and directing us. So which is a wild thing. But also the other thing is just people retweeting everything that we post,

making sure that no one can silence us because that's what you see once. Thank you so much for coming. Thanks for giving us this platform. The awareness is really critical to make sure that you see can't ignore us. So thank you so much for coming. It could happen here as a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow.

Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I found out I was related to the guy that I was dating. I don't feel emotions correctly. I collect my roommate's toenails and fingernails. Those were some callers from my call-in podcast, Therapy Gecko. It's a show where I take phone calls from anonymous strangers as a fake gecko therapist

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You can listen to Sniffy's Cruising Confessions, sponsored by Gilead, now on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes every Thursday. world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search. Better Offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, wherever else you get your podcasts from.