Local News May 28, 2024 / 2:16 PM PDT / AP Nearly a third of the academic and graduate student workers of the University of California are on strike after the union of 48,000 employees escalated its labor standoff by walking off the job at UCLA and UC Davis Tuesday morning.With as many as 2,000 UC Santa Cruz graduate students and academic workers picketing since last Monday, Tuesday's action brings 12,000 more out of classrooms and laboratories, potentially crippling the university's mission of educating the roughly 80,000 undergraduates at the three campuses just two weeks before students begin to take their end-of-quarter finals.Workers, including teaching assistants, academic researchers and graders, are striking not over pay and benefits but instead over the UC's response to pro-Palestinian protesters who were arrested by police or suspended from their campuses. Some union members were arrested or suspended for their role in the protests. Core to the union's demands is that the UC...
