About 48,000 unionized academic workers across the University of California’s 10 campuses — who perform much of the teaching and research at the state’s premier higher education system — walked off the job Monday morning, calling for better pay and benefits.The university’s current proposal “would set the standard for graduate academic employee support among public research universities,” King said in the UC statement, noting that graduate students work part time while pursuing their degree and that their pay is “just one of the many ways in which they are supported as students.” Under the university proposals, graduate student pay would be “among the top of the pay scale” for top public research universities and comparable to private universities such as Harvard, MIT and USC, King said.“We are overworked and underpaid, and we are fed up,” said Jamie Mondello, a 27-year-old psychology graduate student worker at UCLA and member of UAW Local 2865 and Student Researchers United.“We can fight all day long.” Lavanya Nott, 30, a third-year graduate student in the geography department and a student researcher, said she makes $24,000 a year from her job and about $2,000 a year from her second job as an on-campus grader for teaching assistants who don’t speak English as their first language.“We just want to be brought out of poverty.” International students, the strikers said, have to pay non-residential tuition fees, which puts them on a “treadmill” to complete their degrees in five years because the university won’t cover their fees beyond that time."