In late December 2019, graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz began a wildcat strike to secure a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). In one of the most expensive housing markets in the US, graduate workers at UCSC are paid poverty wages, leaving many unable to afford basic necessities. The UC administration has responded brutally to the student action. The campus has called in riot police to break strike action, at the cost of $300,000 per day, resulting in 17 arrests and several student injuries. International students are being threatened with deportation. In a hardline move to intimidate the workers, UC President Janet Napolitano issued a “Doomsday” deadline of February 21: turn in the grades or face termination and deportation.
On the morning of February 22, graduate worker Stephen David Engel sent this letter to Napolitano and the UCSC administration:
Dear President Napolitano, Chancellor Larive, EVC Kletzer, Dean Williams, and UC Regents:
I am a graduate student worker at UC Santa Cruz, and I am also a wildcat striker. It is past 12:00 AM on February 22nd, 2020, and I have not submitted grades from fall quarter. Since receiving President Napolitano’s threat a week ago, I have had no doubt that her threat was real. So, I expect to be fired from my spring quarter appointment.
However, I know that I have made the right decision. The COLA movement is about improving the material conditions of people in my community and enabling them to do what they came here to do: teach and research. It is also, and perhaps most importantly, about equal access to the vocation of teaching and researching. The current funding structure of this university is racist, classist, ableist, and all sorts of other awful. It discriminates against humanists, social scientists, and artists. Our COLA movement is aimed at forcing a concrete change in this discriminatory, exclusionary, and exploitative structure.
You can learn more about the COLA movement at http://payusmoreucsc.com/. You can follow the campaign on Instagram and Twitter. Donate to them here.
Four University of California graduate workers – who themselves went out on wildcat grading and teaching strikes in 2019-2020, and are now members of the Rank and File Action (RAFA-UC) caucus in the UC Student Workers’ Union (UAW-2865) – talked to members of C-AWDU to get a frank assessment of the dynamics at play, and some of the prehistory, of this ongoing, important strike.
A year ago, we were holding rallies across the university demanding pay equity for adjuncts, but today we are fighting for our very lives and our livelihoods. The crisis has only made those injustices worse, and only made the need for a rank-and-file class struggle union more necessary. This context has produced these five demands that are powering our movement.
The pandemic has dissolved the sustaining myth of grad school itself: that if you play along for long enough, you’ll get yours. The COVID crisis demands that we think bigger than a return for the “Golden Era” of universities, or concessions to extend the status quo. How do we want to imagine what the university could look like in the 21st century, after so many years of defunding and corporatization? If the crisis has introduced the certainty that the university will be transformed, how can we bend its potential toward a fundamental reversal of its long neoliberal course?
Mass eviction from university housing in the coronavirus crisis has shown students what communities being gentrified have known for a long time: in most cities, the university is first and foremost a landlord. As student tenants, it’s up to us to organize towards collective actions that reflect the interlinked realities of work, tuition, debt, and rent.
In late December 2019, graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz began a wildcat strike to secure a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). In one of the most expensive housing markets in the US, graduate workers at UCSC are paid poverty wages, leaving many unable to afford basic necessities. The UC administration has responded brutally to the student action.
A wave of militant action has swept across UC Santa Cruz, based on the demand for a cost of living adjustment. Danielle Carr spoke to the wildcat strikers to learn more.
The recent wildcat action at UC Santa Cruz arose out of a long history of organizing against concessionary contracts. Shannon Ikebe gives a history of the strikes in terms of the 2018 University of California contract.
Jarrod Shanahan recently sat down with two strike organizers to discuss their experiences at Rutgers and why they needed to found the Rutgers Rank-and-File Caucus.
Nick Caverly reflects on Rubin and Bobroff’s pamphlet and the struggles of rank and file union members at the University of Michigan in the 1970s.
Gayle Rubin and Anne Bobroff distributed this essay in a pamphlet during a graduate student strike at the University of Michigan in 1975. In it, they argue that bargaining must be underwritten by strong rank-and-file power.
A former Cornell Graduate Students United Organizing Committee chair reflects on the union’s narrow recognition election loss, transactional unionism that instrumentalizes workers, and the challenge to build enduring democratic structures.
For years, CUNY’s two tier union system has colluded with public austerity to sell out adjuncts. A new militant movement has emerged to change that.
