An arbitrator has ordered the University of California, Berkeley to pay teaching assistants $5 million (£3.8 million) in back wages for having engaged in a pattern of limiting their hours to avoid providing mandatory benefits, including tuition fee reimbursement.

The some 1,000 student workers – all undergraduates in the high-demand field of electrical engineering and computer sciences – whose hours in recent years were kept just below the weekly 10-hour threshold at which the benefits would have kicked in.

Berkeley said it limited the hours to protect the students from being overburdened while pursuing their studies. But it said it would comply with the decision allowing 10 hours of work a week, rather than the current typical level of eight.

“While we are disappointed with the arbitrator’s decision, we accept the decision and will abide by it,” a Berkeley spokeswoman said. “We will work with the union to determine how to implement the decision.”

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Data provided by the union, UAW Local 2865, which represents various non-faculty instructor groups in the California system, show a sharp rise since 2016, to some 200 or more a year, in the number of student instructors in electrical engineering and computer sciences at Berkeley working just below the 10-hour level.

The “vast majority” of them were working eight hours a week, said Nathan Kenshur, a Berkeley undergraduate in mathematics and history who works as a maths tutor and serves as a steward with the union.

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“Eight hours is awfully close to 10 hours”, which “certainly calls into question” the university’s argument that it was trying to protect students, he said. “What student would decline tuition [fee help] in exchange for two hours of work per week?”

The union lodged a grievance over the matter in 2017, and the ruling this week came in a mutually agreed the arbitration process. The ruling requires Berkeley to raise weekly hours to 10 and to pay compensatory benefits to those short-changed in the past – an amount estimated by the union to be worth at least $5 million.

Other US universities also are facing heavy demand in computer-related instruction, especially elite institutions such as Berkeley, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Washington, said Kavitha Iyengar, the president of UAW 2865. Mr Kenshur said UAW 2865 was one of the few unions nationwide with a contract that guarantees tuition benefits for undergraduate teaching assistants.

The case comes amid a rise in activism by university workers nationwide fending off ever increasing employer demands as their institutions try to cope with shrinking government support and demands for lower student costs.

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There have been strikes recently by graduate students at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Cruz, while the Trump administration has been pursuing a regulatory change barring collective bargaining by such student unions at private universities.

The Berkeley ruling affects only students in its department of electrical engineering and computer sciences, and individuals could receive reimbursements of up to $7,500, UAW 2865 said.

The affected benefits include tuition fee support and childcare, the union said. That assistance “is one of the most important rights” that teaching aides have won and defended in recent years, it said.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com