Students & unions strike at Univ. of California

By FRED GLASS

Communications Director
California Federation of Teachers

In November, mass protests of deep budget cuts, tuition hikes and layoffs in the University of California system drew national headlines. Student building occupations combined with a brief strike by campus unions to produce the most widespread and dramatic protests at UC in decades.

Bob Samuels, president of the statewide UC unit of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), which represents librarians and contingent faculty, described what happened at UCLA after the UC Board of Regents met there to approve a 32% increase in student fees, bringing the total to more than $10,000 per year:

[S]tudents surrounded the building and locked arms, refusing to let the Regents leave the building. A tense standoff lasted for several hours, and hundreds of students and workers joined the human chain.... When they finally brought [UC Chancellor Mark] Yudof out, they had to taser students in order to clear a way. What message does this send, when you have to use weapons on your own students?

The UCLA protest was not even the largest that day. UC Berkeley activists built a rally of several thousand alongside staff union picket lines, and even traditionally quieter campuses like Davis and San Diego saw building occupations and arrests.

The November actions signaled the latest spike of campus organizing that began last summer in response to California’s state budget crisis, brought on by 30 years of anti-tax policies aimed at shrinking the public sector.

Access denied

At one time, California could brag about the high quality and low cost of its public higher education. Its 1960 Master Plan for the University of California, California State University, and community college systems established the expectation that the top eighth of the graduating high school class could go to a UC campus, the upper third to a CSU school, and anyone over 18 could attend community college. When I enrolled in UCLA in 1970, I paid $49.50 per quarter in student fees.

California’s legislators and voters understood such access to higher education required funding, and set up relatively progressive tax codes to underwrite post-secondary institutions as well as a world-class system of K-12 education. In the 1960s California consistently ranked among the top five states in per-pupil funding.

How times have changed. “California’s public universities and community colleges have half as much to spend today as they did in 1990 in real dollars,” wrote CSU Trustee Jeff Bleich in a recent Los Angeles Times op-ed. “In the 1980s, 17% of the state budget went to higher education and 3% went to prisons. Today, only 9% goes to universities and 10% goes to prisons.”

By 2007, per-pupil funding in K-12 had sunk to 47th in the nation – and that was before the latest savage cuts.

This year Governor Schwarzenegger and the dysfunctional Legislature slashed CSU funding by $500 million, UC by $800 million, and the community colleges by $700 million. Faculty and staff layoffs and furloughs, and program cuts, mean that students wait in vain for required classes. The CSU system has closed its doors to new enrollment this Spring – and thousands of students have been priced out by enormous fee increases in all three systems.

How did this happen? California is the only state in the nation that requires a two-thirds supermajority legislative vote to pass both a state budget and any new tax. The state budget’s 2/3 rule has existed since the 1930s, but only became a serious problem as the hard right came to dominate the Republican Party. The 2/3 requirement for raising taxes came from Proposition 13, the anti-tax initiative passed in 1978, which maintained the threshold to reduce or eliminate a tax at a simple majority.

The Republican Legislative caucus hovers at just over one-third in each house, and today all but one of its elected officials have signed Grover Norquist’s “no new tax” pledge. As a result, tax loopholes have been opened every year during state budget deliberations in order to persuade a few Republicans to approve the budget.

Taxes for the wealthiest have been steadily reduced even though the top one percent of taxpayers in California has nearly doubled its share of adjusted gross income since 1993 from 13.8% to 25.2% in 2007. These taxpayers average $1.6 million in income per year. The state income tax rate of this super-rich group has been pared during that time from 11.3% to 9.3%, robbing the state of $3 to $6 billion each year.

Another $9 to $10 billion in annual revenues have been whittled away through corporate tax reductions. In all, the state gives up $12 to $14 billion per year through these cumulative tax reductions, creating a structural budget deficit.

After state revenues collapsed with the economic crash of 2008, most Democratic legislators pointed to the legislative gridlock caused by the 2/3 rules and threw up their hands. Their plan, such as it is, is to cut now and hope that a return to good economic times will increase state revenues later.

A different perspective has been offered by college and university students, faculty and staff, who launched determined coalition building and direct actions. In several waves, each separated by about a month of planning and preparations, these actions have disrupted business as usual at UC, and, to a lesser degree, the other two public higher education systems. According to longtime UC Santa Cruz lecturer Mike Rotkin, “We haven’t seen this scale of protest for decades – since the Vietnam War.”

The movement started over the summer with the decision by UC president Mark Yudof to ignore tenured faculty who felt shared governance gave them the right to have a say in how their furloughs would be implemented. Faculty proposed at least one furlough day should occur during instruction, to make clear the impact of the budget cuts on education. When Yudof rejected this idea, tenure-track faculty (who at UC are not represented by a union) began discussing action across the system. More than a thousand professors (out of about 8,000) signed an online pledge to strike when school began. They also reached out to students and campus unions, one of which, the University Professional and Technical Employees/CWA, was already preparing a walkout related to bargaining issues.

yudof blamed

The unions and movement at UC have particularly targeted Yudof and the UC administration’s unilateral decisions on drastic cutbacks. While strongly opposed to the statewide cuts in funding for public services, activists argue that UC’s other revenues mean that there are alternatives to Yudof’s layoffs and program closures.

On September 24, the first day of classes, University Professional & Technical Employees (UPTE) struck each UC campus and was joined on the picket lines by members of other unions, professors and lecturers, and students. At least five thousand filled historic Sproul Plaza at UC Berkeley and then marched through downtown, prompting many speakers to compare the day’s events with the Free Speech Movement in the 1960s. UC Santa Cruz’s solid picket lines and central labor council strike sanction turned away union drivers in delivery vehicles and public transit, while elsewhere building trades workers left campus construction sites. Throughout the day, across the state, faculty and students organized teach-ins about how to protect the “public” in public education.

call to action

One month later, on October 24, at a “General Assembly” at UC Berkeley, 800 students, tenure-track and contingent faculty, workers and community supporters met to strategize. A couple hundred activists attended from CSU campuses, community colleges, and K-12 school districts. Over the course of a very long, excruciatingly democratic day, the participants came up with proposals to take back home.

The most important ideas were to build protests a few weeks later to coincide with the Regents meeting at UCLA, where the governing body was to be voting on student fee increases; and call for a statewide “day of action” on March 4, 2010, across all systems of education.

The third week in October, the California Faculty Association, representing full- and part-time faculty in the CSU, worked with student and staff organizations to hold events throughout the 23-campus system. Students walked out at CSU San Bernardino, marched in Pomona, and occupied a library in Fresno.

Rallies featured Assembly member Alberto Torrico, who spoke about his proposed higher education funding bill, AB 656. If passed the bill would bring in around a billion dollars per year for all three levels of higher education through an oil severance tax. California is currently the only oil-producing state that does not tax oil when it is extracted from the ground. The California Federation of Teachers also supports the bill as one part of the changes needed to make California’s tax structure serve the public interest.

A month later

The mid-November protests, which drew the widest national attention, began when students gathered at UCLA November 16 from campuses across the state, bused in with financial support of the UC union coalition (UC-AFT, UPTE, AFSCME, UAW, and the independent clerical union, CUE). There they pitched a “tent city” and turned out, over a thousand strong, at the Regents meeting the following Thursday. Fourteen students were arrested, including some who were tasered, and demonstrations continued the following day.

UC Davis, a once-sleepy agricultural school, topped the week’s police blotter with more than 50 arrests, some of whom were students roughed up by police. Students there also protested the Saturday closure of libraries by appearing at the college president’s official residence to study – where, to avoid a confrontation, they were admitted to his living room.

UC Berkeley produced another huge Sproul Plaza rally, downtown march, and building occupations that lasted into the weekend. UC Santa Cruz students took over the administration building and stayed for two nights, along with shutting down large parts of the campus. UPTE struck at the Berkeley campus, the only official job action in this round (although many lecturers and professors held classes on the picket lines or off campus). At several campuses investigations of police brutality followed the protests, leaving the UC administration increasingly isolated.

The California Federation of Teachers (CFT) executive council voted in late November to support the March 4 call for a statewide day of local action, lending legitimacy as well as resources to the student-led October 24 General Assembly’s proposal. The 70,000 member CFT’s leadership and staff have begun outreach to other unions to build a day of unity across educational sectors and between students and workers to highlight the crisis in education funding and the need for progressive tax policies to address it.

Where this is going next remains fluid, but one thing is clear: a new generation of students is in the process of political radicalization. In December, undeterred by the Regents’ fee increase, students continued sporadic demonstrations and occupations on CSU campuses as well as in the UC system. The campus coalitions are planning further actions.

It is a tall order to build a movement that will be durable, that can reach out to the public, and can combine fighting cuts now with a long-term struggle to change the political rules that govern California. Yet we seem to be in the early stages of a sustained effort to do just that.