Remembering who you work for has a way of changing things. After 1992, the university could never be a magical place of learning for me, if it ever really was. UC Berkeley is a profit-driven institution, just like Microsoft or Sony, and people associated with it are bound together in relations of production. But it takes a strike to remind us how much of what we do in the university is labor. Graduate student instructors at UC Berkeley share with faculty the position of being the only non-unionized labor force on campus.
Staff have their own union, as do librarians.
The idea, I suppose, is that you cannot be both a student and a worker. One form of identity must always take precedence over the other. So, our work becomes a reward, something special we get along with money, to make our graduate studies more relevant and complete. This logic would actually be rather utopian if it weren't for the fact that it allows for gross abuses of power. As long as our work is a reward, of course, departments are not obligated to advertise or regulate jobs.