UIC are on strike.

The Chicago Tribune reporter Naheed Rajwani wrote about the story on Tuesday. The strike started yesterday when University of Illinois at Chicago faculty members picketed on the Quad of the East Campus. The strike is drawing attention to the contract negotiations between the university and the union that represents about 1,150 full-time tenured and nontenured faculty members.

According to organizes this was the campus’ first faculty-led walkout and was a last resort. They acknowledge this is a short-term plan with the hopes of a long-term payout with the investment in education. Members of the Campus Worker and Student Coalition and SEUI 73 came out to show support for the unionized faculty.

Students drew attention to the working conditions of teachers directly impacting their learning conditions. Of course, students are also concerned about the strike’s impact on their coursework. To which all I can say is fuck those kids. Sure, it would suck if the faculty walked out for a month, but we’re talking two days. We’re talking about the working conditions of people verses a slight inconvenience.

UIC’s faculty union was certified in 2012, and it hasn’t finalized its first contract with the university even though they’ve had dozens of bargaining sessions. The sticking point seems to be (according to the university) the minimum salaries for lectures to be competitive with other institutions’ lectures. The university does acknowledge they need to increase wages. The union says the university’s latest proposal fall short. The university is proposing a 3.25 percent salary increase, while the union is asking for 4.5 percent. The union is asking that tenured faculty make a minimum of $60 thousand per year and nontenured between $30 and $45 thousand. Bargaining sessions are scheduled for Friday, February 24, and March 3.

Obviously, I’m with the faculty on this one. I have some friends there in Chicago watching and protesting with them so my Facebook feed is kind of better than Twitter on this one.

So what is happening in Indiana?

I read about this last night after a kid I went to undergrad posted a link to it on Facebook. I respect this kid’s opinion, more so now that he has undergone a radical ideological shift. He also hails from Indiana, which means this is probably a big deal.

The Nation had a piece from a few days ago by James Cersonsky and Student Nation on the Indiana University strike. They note that as March Madness ended, most of those in Hoosier country are not happy about the restructuring and gutting that has taken place. Thursday and Friday (yesterday and today), the university has been the site of a statewide strike. The Board of Trustees is holding its annual meeting, and students and staff walked out of class and off the job. Photos of the strike can be found here.

One poster reads:

“The goal is to contest the administration’s efforts to make IU a more exclusive, costly institution, at the expense of students and staff. We have already forced the administration to acknowledge these issues, but through collective action, we want to push further so that we can imagine together a different future for IU.

In addition to a 45 percent increase in tuition and fees over the past six years, the strikers cite issues of diversity and racism:

Recent cuts at IU have disproportionately targeted international students and students of color, college education has been eliminated from Indiana prisons, and immigration laws have been implemented that make an IU education cost-prohibitive for undocumented Indiana students.

Rather than organizing solely around affordability, students list a slate of demands:

1. Immediately reduce tuition and eliminate fees.
2. Stop privatization and outsourcing at IU.
3. End the wage freeze [for faculty and staff].
4. The university must honor its promise to double the enrollment of African-American students to 8%.
5. Support the abolition of both HB1402 [which prevents undocumented students from receiving in-state tuition] and SB590 [an immigration law enforcement bill styled after Arizona’s SB1070].”

They continue:

“These demands are obviously not exhaustive—there’s no way to concisely communicate all the things that need to change at IU. These demands are a starting point, a spark to foster discussion and encourage action. These demands are made not just of the Board of Trustees, but of the entire state bureaucracy that the Board is part of.”

IU campus activists have spent the last six months organizing the strike. On Monday, strikers called for the university not to retaliate against non-student strikers. More than 100 faculty have signed a petition in solidarity with striking students and calling for the university not to punish them for walking out. This is all accompanied by other actions and “Free University Days” organized by grad students and instructors. Some things to note:

• Public service workers in Indiana aren’t legally allowed to strike.
• Faculty are prohibited from using “faculty LISTSERVs and emails to promote organization around the proposed student strike.”
• As of yet we don’t know how much of this is student driven.