Undergraduate student assistants at California State University are mounting a union organizing campaign, calling for more work hours, paid sick time and higher wages.
with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board in 2021 to add student assistants into its existing bargaining units, and has been working with student organizers to collect union authorization cards since last fall.
Cal State has disputed the union’s claim that student workers have enough in common with other university support staff to be folded into existing bargaining units. “The Student Assistants’ primary role is that of a student and not a traditional employee,” Timothy Yeung, a lawyer for the university,“We don’t have anything else to add on the matter,” Cal State spokesperson Mike Uhlenkamp wrote in response to an interview request.
Several cited the discrepancy between Cal State’s minimum wage and local minimum wages as part of their motivation. University attorney Marc Mootchnik told San Diego State’s student newspaper, the Daily Aztec, in 2016 that because Cal State is a state agency, itEmma Galloway, a commuter student at Cal State Northridge, said receiving at least the Los Angeles minimum wage of $16.
“The most fundamental demand that people on college campuses are making right now is honor the principles that you say you are committed to,” said Caroline Luce, a labor historian at the UCLA Institute for Research on Labor and Employment and a member of the university’s lecturers’ union. “You say you’re a public-serving institution; it doesn’t make sense to be paying people wages that they can’t live on.
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