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NOVEMBER 29, 2022

Meyerson on TAP

The Academic Proles on the Barricades

Some progress in the University of California strike, but nowhere near
enough. And by the way, where's Gavin?

In her 2019 book Squeezed
<[link removed]>, Alissa
Quart gave a name to the middle class that was just getting by in
today's middle-class-unfriendly economy: the middle precariat.

One group that may just manage to ascend, wobbily, to the ranks of the
precarious middle are the 12,000 striking postdoctoral scholars who
reached a tentative agreement
<[link removed]>
with the University of California earlier today to boost their wages and
benefits. Under the agreement, which will shortly be presented to the
postdocs for an up-or-down vote, the scholars will receive raises of
between 20 percent and 23 percent to take effect next year, as well as a
couple thousand dollars in child care assistance. By my very rough
calculations, that should put them in the lower ranks of the mid-precar,
with annual incomes in the mid- or upper 40 thousands-not enough to
get a decent rental in coastal California, but able to buy a good-sized
car to sleep in.

But the 36,000 teaching and research assistants, most of whose annual
incomes come in at around the mid-20 thousands, remain on strike, and
the postdocs made very clear that they're not reporting back to work
until the TAs and RAs get a contract they can live with (if not live on,
exactly), too. In a sense, the postdocs' solidarity is in the grand
historic tradition of UAW strikes against the Big Three auto companies,
in which the skilled craft workers for those companies-the ones who
could fix the assembly lines if they sputtered to a halt-won
comparatively higher pay than their union brothers and sisters who
actually worked on those assembly lines. Those craft workers often
settled their contracts first, but stayed off the job until the far more
numerous assembly line workers could settle theirs. As the union credo
goes, an injury to one was, and still is, an injury to all.

The importance of this UC strike cannot be overstated. Like their fellow
Gen Zers and millennials who work at Starbucks, the TAs and RAs are well
educated and lowly paid. In this, they're no different from the grad
student employees at universities throughout the land, but by living in
California, the fundamentals of a decent life-like adequate
housing-elude them. They're not even close to joining the middle
precariat. It's a mystery why anyone should think it's a mystery
that these generations are the most radical at least since the 1930s.
Like the veterans of the Great Depression, they don't need deep dives
into Marxist classics to understand that capitalism isn't working very
well. As was not the case during the Depression, it's not even working
very well with unemployment at three and a half percent. An immense
low-wage economy is so built in to 21st-century America that even
something close to full employment doesn't majorly diminish low-wage
work.

And it certainly doesn't eliminate it in the public sector (including
for underpaid K-12 teachers), which has never recovered from the revenue
losses brought about by post-1980 tax cuts on the wealthy and
corporations, and in California, by 1978's Proposition 13. California
may be home to a motley crew of billionaires, but the share of UC's
income that comes from the state government's tax revenues has been in
steady decline for nearly the past half-century. That's why this
strike should be a wake-up call to the legislature and to Gov. Gavin
Newsom, who, after all, appoints the university's Board of Regents and
should be at the center of the negotiations to settle the
strike-which, at least to all appearances, he is not. Newsom may not
have anything like sole discretionary power to raise and spend the
public's till, but he has more of that power than anybody else. If he
cannot intervene on behalf of a large number of workers who are
effectively both state employees and the state's future talent bank,
just what is it that he thinks is in his job description?

~ HAROLD MEYERSON

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The midterms displayed a polarized America. Paradoxically, the thin
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