Last week, after decades of organizing, 17,000 student researchers across the University of California (UC) won recognition of our union, Student Researchers United–United Auto Workers (SRU-UAW). Spanning 10 campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, we’re now the largest academic student employee union in US history, following one of the biggest new organizing drives in any sector in this century. But it wasn’t easy.
Academic workers at UC have been fighting for our rights for a quarter-century. In the 1980s and ’90s, when TAs and SRs at UC organized for a union together, UC argued that all of us were students first, not workers, and took this question to the courts. An unjust legal ruling recognized TAs as employees, but not SRs. It took another two decades of struggle to change state law and gain the right to a union of our own.