Op-Ed: As a UC professor, I support the strikers. Our schools shouldn’t have let it come to this. pic.twitter.com/1y7E1LH2YW — Rachael Bade (@rabade) April 13, 2015
On Monday, UC faculty members walked off the job to protest over a “toxic” and “ineffective” unionization proposal. On Tuesday, the protesters held another rally in which they spoke out against a plan to expand UC’s existing contract with the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to include contract workers.
On Wednesday, California law professor and critic of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), Peter Lehner, tweeted to his 733 thousand followers: “I am an adjunct at this university. I teach courses in English. I teach classes in political theory. I have never been on strike. I have never been on strike this long. I am appalled by what has been happening here.”
“I am an adjunct at this university. I teach courses in English. I teach classes in political theory. I have never been on strike. I have never been on strike this long. I am appalled by what has been happening here.”
– Peter Lehner, a California law professor, critic of the Service Employees International Union
The strike began over the weekend after the university’s Board of Regents approved a proposal to expand the union’s already-existing contract with the Service Employees International Union, or SEIU, with the addition of contract workers. The move would have brought in about 20,000 contract workers in addition to the 10,000 currently unionized.
“I was very hopeful that we would come up with a settlement,” Larry Siegel, the professor who penned the letter to the regents, told The Daily Beast. But, “the regents went ahead and did this anyway—not just for their self interest, but for the sake of their students and students outside of the UC system.”
Now, the protesters, represented by the UC Workers Coalition, are going to battle back against a plan to extend the SEIU contract to include contract workers. The coalition released a statement on Wednesday afternoon calling for a return to class on
