UAW strike and faculty rights

During the Spring 2024 UAW ULP strike, SCFA continued to provide critical information to faculty members.  On May 3, following the UAW’s call for a strike authorization vote, we emphasized that faculty should not be expected to do the work of striking ASEs and organized a zoom town hall.  We contributed to and shared CUCFA’s FAQ on the strike, and offered “office hours at the picket” and to visit departments to discuss questions about faculty rights during a strike and reiterated that it is not in faculty interests to take up graduate students’ struck labor.  When the strike was halted due to a temporary restraining order, we expressed our outrage at the UC’s anti-labor venue shopping and its potential impacts on workers’ rights around the state.  We worked with our colleagues in the other instructional unions to call for both central funding and instructor authority in the hiring of workers to complete final grades that were not able to be addressed before the end of the quarter. With regard to the issue of ASE and GSR timesheets and strike attestations, we communicated to the administration that faculty should not be expected to have complete information regarding graduate workers’ hours during the strike and reiterated that our only responsibility with regard to graduate workers’ time is to review and approve when their submitted leave reports.