The UAW Bargaining Framework is a Gift to the Columbia Administration
Founding member of the Barnard Adjunct Union Sonam Singh critiques UAW for undercutting members’ power and playing into the hands of their employer.
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.
Founding member of the Barnard Adjunct Union Sonam Singh critiques UAW for undercutting members’ power and playing into the hands of their employer.
Kim Moody founded Labor Notes and theorized ‘The Rank and File Strategy.’ In this piece, he discusses the extension of that strategy to campus activism.
An update on graduate worker organizing at Emory University