A wave of militant action has gripped the campus at UC Santa Cruz, resulting in a spate of wildcat actions based in the demand for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). A contentious contract was put in place by the statewide union (UAW) in 2018 that bound all UC campuses to a no-strike clause. This contract was rejected by 83% of the unit at Santa Cruz, who are experiencing a drastic increase in cost of living primarily driven by sky-rocketing housing prices.
Organizers at Santa Cruz have mobilized across a variety of groups around one key demand for a COLA. These efforts have united graduate students, undergraduates, and service workers across campus. Graduate students have turned university-sanctioned governance structures like the Graduate Students Association (GSA) into a vehicle for the COLA campaign. A coalition of undergraduates and graduate students have allied around an effort to broaden the ambit of COLA demands, resulting in a campus-wide campaign for #COLA4all that would address the shared struggle for survival. Graduate union organizers have used the organic campus-wide mobilization around COLA to underline the university’s exploitation that students and workers share in common.
After a month of students and workers demanding that the university take meaningful steps to address the dire situation of students and workers at Santa Cruz, wildcat action has erupted, and the campus is in its second week of a wildcat grading strike. The strike is based in decades of organizing on campus, but emerged most recently in response to attempts by the administration to intimidate graduate students with emails referencing the University of California code of conduct.
This intimidation unleashed a flurry of reply-alls in which graduate students—notably, individuals who had previously been inactive within the union movement– organically called for a grading strike until their COLA demands were met. In defiance of the no-strike contract clause, 350 out of 750 Teaching Assistants have elected to withhold grades.
In concert with this wildcat strike, the #COLA4all movement has taken actions to address the immiserating conditions on campus, including commandeering a dining hall for a day to distribute food to the hungry on campus.
To find out more, the File editor Danielle Carr spoke to five graduate union leaders from UCSC: Yulia Gilichinskaya (Film and Digital Media, 4th year PhD), Natalie Ng (Anthropology, 3rd year PhD), Sarah Mason (Sociology, 3rd year PhD), James Sirigotis (Sociology, 5th year PhD), and Patrick King (History of Consciousness, 7th year PhD); and one from Berkeley, Shannon Ikebe, (Sociology).
DC: What was the process of affiliating with UAW? How did your contract come to have a “no strike” clause?
Sarah: Our affiliation with UAW is a few decades old, now. You can read about the history of the UC system’s current contract here.
Shannon: To be fair, a no-strike clause is pretty common. The big issue is that the contract was signed through dubious means, and with inadequate provisions.
DC: Was the contract democratically ratified?
Sarah: No. The union’s argument is that yes, they put the vote to membership and membership voted to ratify the contract, but there were issues with how that was done. One problem was that they put the poll out over the summer when most schools weren’t in session. Our campus voted overwhelmingly to reject the contract. Of the people who voted on our campus at Santa Cruz, 83% rejected the contract.
Natalie: The poll that was sent out was part of an extremely misleading email. It said that the contract was the university’s best and final offer, that if we struck we weren’t going to win, and that if we strike we will have to pay fees from the beginning of the year that we won’t be able to get reimbursed. So the email that sent out the vote was very slanted. Later on, there was a follow up email acknowledging that the original email was biased, but by that point it was too late. Most people had already voted.
Sarah: The statewide union (UAW) ordered all their staff to campaign for a yes vote. Of course, the NO campaign was all volunteer work, so there was an extreme disparity in resources. Even so, 43% of the unit statewide voted NO on the contract. The contract was contentious from the beginning.
James: I was the Santa Cruz elections chair at this time. Per our by-laws, that vote was supposed to be sent out in an email created by the elections committee after it had been agreed on by the entire bargaining committee. Neither of those things happened. A handful of people on the bargaining committee drafted this email and sent it out at like, three in the morning, without anyone on the elections committee ever seeing it. So technically, that vote was invalid because it didn’t meet our bylaw requirements.
DC: What was the story with the administrator email that ignited the campaign?
Yulia: It’s worth pointing out that the history of current organizing starts with the shitty contract. The email exchange with the administrator was a moment that ignited the campaign, but there was long-standing frustration with the state-wide union on our campus because 85% of people at Santa Cruz last August (2018) said “No, we don’t want this contract, and we’re going to strike now.” So when we settled for a shitty contract, people were pissed. For about a year, union meetings were down to about seven people. We couldn’t get any energy. People were extremely frustrated by the contract. So the contract that didn’t serve our campus was a major catalyzing force.
The other factor is that a lot of us have been organizing for a municipal rent control bill in Santa Cruz called Measure M, which was defeated last December (2018). For a while, it felt like failure after failure to secure our survival in this city where rent is sky-rocketing. After the failure of Measure M, we started organizing around housing justice, and thinking about how to support undergrads. The position of undergrad housing is just as dire. As their landlord, UC Santa Cruz charges them exorbitant amounts to live in horrible conditions. So we started organizing around that, and that’s the group that ended up running for graduate student government.
Sarah: A group of us—including me– ran for student government (in the Graduate Student Association, or GSA) on the COLA slate, and we also held officer positions in the union. We ran for student government in order to access to student government funds for organizing, because the statewide union had really cut off our budget. Among ourselves, we had an understanding that if we held dual union/GSA positions, we could use Graduate Student Association funds as a way to fund union activities. I think like many other labor organizers on campus, I was originally allergic to the idea of going into student government. But now, looking back, it was fucking genius.
Yulia: It was the first time all of the candidates who ran for student government ran on a slate. We were very clear that we were running to win COLA, and we won.
DC: So you ran a COLA slate for student government to essentially Robin-Hood funds from the university and divert them toward organizing?
Yulia: (Laughing) Yes. We passed a COLA budget line in student government that’s given us like $10 grand in the student government budget.
DC: What amount of your current activities are funded by these student government funds?
Yulia: First of all, nothing has ever been funded by anything. Nothing has ever been funded by the union. We’ve used some resources from GSA for meetings, for food. We had a camp-out where we actually rented out university equipment like tents and paid for them with GSA money (Everyone laughing). So there’s definitely a Robin Hood approach to using GSA funds for our campaign.
James: Not only has the statewide UAW taken away our funds, but they’ve also taken away our ability to communicate with our own members on this campus. Any email that comes from the official union channels to members at UCSC has to come from the executive board at statewide UAW. So the unit chair at Santa Cruz can’t even email our own members.
DC: How has the burden of rent shaped your experience of working and studying at Santa Cruz?
(long silence)
James: Where to begin? It’s definitive of our experience here. A lot of us have to live out of our cars. A lot of us have to go into additional debt. The stipend we receive from the university is not enough to afford the graduate student housing the university offers and a campus meal plan. So the basic needs of housing and food available on campus are too expensive to purchase with the wage the university gives us.
The vote against the contract was so high at Santa Cruz (83%) because of our particular conditions within the UC system, especially related to the sky-rocketing cost of living in Santa Cruz. The UC offered us a one percent wage increase, and we ended up settling for three percent in that contract. That same year, the price of rent rose 15% in Santa Cruz.
Yulia: So we’ve been running joint GSA-Cola meetings in which we do one hour of GSA bureaucracy and then directly start doing COLA work. One of the tools we’ve developed is a rent burden calculator that shows how much of your stipend goes to rent. Absolutely everyone is rent-burdened, which means they pay more than 30% of their paycheck on rent, and a majority pay more than 50% for rent. But there are so many outrageous numbers, 70 or 80 %. The only remaining union officer in our unit who didn’t quit in solidarity after the strike vote is 98% rent burdened, and survives because she lives with her partner.
James: Even faculty struggle. Santa Cruz faculty got a special pay adjustment from the UC system because the cost of living in Santa Cruz is so much higher. The university is hugely implicated in the rising cost of housing in the city. Because there are so many students in town who rent, the university is able to set a price that then affects the entire rental market, and their prices are not cheap. Undergraduate students who live on campus are required to purchase a meal-plan, and rent together with food ends up being $1500 per month.
Yulia: To be clear, this is the price to share a bedroom with three other people. I need to say this again: to share one room!
Natalie: Graduate student housing is one bedroom in a three-bedroom apartment for $1,400 a month, and parking costs $700 per year. Obviously, this doesn’t include a meal plan. We get paid $19,035 per year after taxes, or $1,586 per month (if you divide the total by 12, not 9). We don’t get paid in the summer.
DC: Within the context of this ambient discontent and immiseration, how did the campaign ignite?
Sarah: A couple of things happened to set the stage before the chain of reply-all emails in response to the Chancellor’s intimidation. We did a pretty large demonstration with a couple hundred graduate students to deliver our demand for COLA to the chancellor. That was exactly a month prior to the email. We had also done a COLA campout a week after this demonstration. We camped out for a day at the base of campus with all our propaganda, and it was really an opportunity for people graduate students to get involved, and 80 people signed in.
Natalie: In response to our actions, the dean sent out an email to the graduate students full of hot air, claiming that the problem of housing is important but making no concrete promises.
James: Their response to the problem is all supply-side economics, claiming that we just need to build more housing. Of course, Santa Cruz is a bit of a NIMBY town and there’s a lot of environmentalism on campus. Because of this, the move to “solve” the problem by building more housing is particularly contentious, and building housing takes even longer than it normally does. So building housing isn’t a viable solution to our needs.
The dean sends this email full of vague platitudes that mean exactly nothing, written in bureaucratese. It says “The complexity of this problem requires a comprehensive approach including analysis of local housing availability and cost coupled with an examination of doctoral student support and campus resources. As stewards of campus resources, we commit to an open and transparent decision-making process, with consultation across stakeholder groups, aimed at providing doctoral student funding packages that better align with the high cost of housing in Santa Cruz.”
For a month, we hear nothing. Then Stephen David Engel, a PhD candidate in History of Consciousness, replies all to the Chancellor.
Chancellor Larive and EVC Kletzer,
It has been nearly a month since you sent this empty and deflective email in response to our demand for a COLA. If the content of your email itself was not proof of your lack of concern for graduate students, your silence and inaction since reveal you as an enemy. Where is this “open and transparent decision-making process […] aimed at providing doctoral student funding packages that better align with the high cost of housing in Santa Cruz”? Nowhere, because it meant nothing. We will not be ignored. We will not be managed. We have one demand: a COLA. With no clear and unequivocal guarantee of a COLA, you invite what graduate students have been prepared to bring from the start: escalation, disruption, conflict.
With hostility,
Stephen David Engel
Graduate students across the university started replying-all to this email. About forty graduate students from STEM to humanities to social sciences were replying to the email, sounding off about their conditions and their frustrations.
Sarah: What started happening was that many people in those reply-all to the administration emails began calling for a strike. We had not anticipated a grading strike this quarter. We had talked about having one much later on, in the spring. But there were rank and file members in the emails saying “We are ready to strike now; we need to strike now. We’re hungry.” These calls were coming from people who were unaffiliated with our COLA organizing. They were random rank-and-files, people we didn’t know. And so that’s when we decided to circulate the vote to strike. We realized that if there was this much energy, we needed to take it seriously.
Yulia: A lot of the phrases we’ve been using for slogans—“Fuck you, pay me” or “No COLA, no grades”—came straight out of those emails. They kind of spontaneously erupted.
We’ve also used UAW infrastructure to set the conditions for the strike. As shitty as the contract is, when the quarter started, we went to every single department’s orientation, where we’d do a UAW presentation about Know Your Contract. But we also talked about COLA to every single department in every single orientation. So we started talking about COLA day one. So to say that it spontaneously erupted isn’t quite true. It just became really clear at a certain point that we had to strike now.
DC: Following the strike vote—which was unanimous among the people who attended the meeting at Santa Cruz—why did 6 out of 7 union leaders step down?
Sarah: We wanted to distance ourselves in case the statewide UAW took any action to discipline us for unsanctioned strike action.
James: There’s also the legal reality that with a no-strike clause, union leadership can’t call a strike. In this case, they didn’t—but our elected union officials stepped down to make sure that there were no legal repercussions for supporting the strike.
DC: If you don’t have access to union communication infrastructure, how did you circulate the poll?
Yulia: Because of our work with GSA, we do have the ability to mass-email some grads. And through the reply-all, we’ve collected a lot of listservs throughout the university. Of course, there are holes in those systems, and that’s by the university’s design. In the same way they’ve designed campus to be riot-proof, the email and communication infrastructures are set up to thwart grass-roots action. So certain departments or groups cannot be reached if you’re not a part of them. We tried hard to email all divisions and departments, and we’ve collected a lot of non USCS emails from all of the COLA actions and meetings we’ve held. We still have access to our union membership information, so we used all of those phone numbers to do a mass text bank, and that’s also how we were verifying that the people responding to the strike poll were employed as TAs or Graduate Student Instructors in their department, using the official union roster.
James: One particularly nefarious aspect of communication is that a lot of the graduate student listservs at Santa Cruz are moderated by department administrators. So a lot of our emails were being censored by staff in certain departments. They’d get sent back to us as having been “denied transmission” for no reason. One of the ways we’ve been trying to work around this is by having department reps in each department, and they individually ensure the information gets out.
DC: What’s amazing about your organizing it that you have taken up this latent mandate that was expressing itself in moments like the Reply-Alls. How did the majority of students and workers claim legitimate decision-making power in defying the no-strike contract, and what does the current decision-making model look like?
Sarah: Because things happened so fast, I don’t know that it’s so much that a majority of students chose specifically to defy the contract. The way that we were talking about the results of the strike poll was like “Look, if we can verify that 350 working TAs out of 750 are willing to strike, that’s enough to be disruptive. That’s enough to get started.” We were making it up as we went along.
Natalie: Some of us in the union core group were not even fully on board about calling a strike at that point, but we realized that if there are 350 TAs who are ready to strike, they’re going to strike with or without us, and we want to be there to support them.
Yulia: So our work was to do research around the benefits and risks of striking now, and to try to present that information. But 350 people said “I am going to strike tomorrow.” It’s not up to us, at that point—it’s happening. We just tried to present our options and research.
Natalie: We got the results of the poll on a Saturday. We called a general assembly immediately for Sunday. 100 or so people showed up in person, and 125 people called in on a Zoom connection. Many of those calling in had multiple people sitting around a computer.
Sarah: After we presented the options for striking and showed the risks and benefits, we had people vote in person and on the Zoom and combined the two. In the room, it was unanimous decision to strike.
Yulia: It was such an incredible feeling. I was facilitating and I asked “Who is in favor of striking now?” It was so beautiful to see literally every single hand in the room go up. I was in shock, because until that morning, I was not certain that it was the way to go. As we were talking about it, I got more convinced, but seeing that room—it was incredible.
Patrick: On decision making: while the GSA-UAW core articulated our options and helped set the infrastructure for the strike, autonomous groups in departments have taken up a huge role in decision making. I’ve been here for seven years and have seen a lot of strikes and actions on campus. This is the most activity I’ve seen among grad students.
DC: Within the institution, who are your allies?
James: A couple of days ago at the university holiday party, we were marching with ACSME clerical workers. They’ve been out of contract for two years and haven’t had a seen a raise in three. We’ve had overwhelming support from faculty members: over 450 have signed a petition in support of us, which is over half. Undergrads have been organizing with us every step of the way.
Yulia: It’s been so heartwarming to see the ways undergrads have come up with ways to support us. They’re writing “Give them COLA” in their TA evaluations and on their exam bluebooks. There’s been so much love. At the top of their final papers, they’re writing “Support the grad students” and “COLA NOW!”
Sarah: At the top of their final, an undergraduate wrote “Fuck the chancellor.”
DC: I’ve been struck by the similarities between your campaign and the $7K or Strike movement out of the CUNY system, which has emerged to demand action for adjuncts who comprise the majority of the bargaining unit. Their strategy in mobilizing around a concrete pay demand is that it’s a specific number: the demand is either granted or it isn’t, and there’s no room for vagueness. In the words of Zach LaMalfa, “It’s very simple: it’s $7K or we fucking strike.” How did this COLA demand for of $1,412 emerge, and how has it worked in organizing?
Sarah: It’s really worked for us!
Yulia: We’ve done the calculations, and the number is designed to bring us out of rent burden, and to bring us to parity with UC Riverside. But it’s also a polemical number. It’s not entirely arbitrary, but it’s to point out that even a 60% pay raise—which is what we’re asking for—is not ludicrous. We’re so underpaid! That’s the minimum that we need to survive.
James: We calculated the number like this: for grad students at Riverside, renting a bedroom in a three-bedroom apartment takes 29% of their wage. For us to spend 29% of our wage on the same room in Santa Cruz, we’d need more than $1,412, we’d need $1,492, but people didn’t like that number (laughs).
Patrick: There’s the numerical content to the number, but it’s also a political demand. I see it functioning similarly to Wages for Housework. It’s a demand that’s able to articulate different struggles within it. So, thinking about the #COLA4all actions, we see undergrads and other grad students doing things like taking over dining halls as an homage to the free lunch programs of the Black Panthers. COLA is a demand that can be taken up by different groups across campus to draw lines of connection between these struggles, whether they’re identity-based or coming from service workers. COLA is a message and a platform through which these demands can coalesce. That’s why #COLA4all has been so powerful to unite workers and students across campus.
Yulia: COLA articulated the different ways students and workers are both exploited by the university, and the result was that it’s really clear who the common enemy is. COLA became a platform for all the ways we can build in solidarity.
DC: What actions have you been taking within that common platform?
James: I was at the cafeteria takeover. There was a group of about 20 of us, including some indigenous folks. We started the morning off on the hill, overlooking the Monterrey Bay, and we did a ritual connecting to the land… I don’t really have the language to describe what we did, but it was about connecting land acknowledgement to a broader struggle… The person who led us in that ritual is a member of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, who are the historical protectors and stewards of the land we are on in Santa Cruz. After the ritual, we just walked right into the dining hall, past the place where you have to swipe your meal-card, and went right to the cafeteria management. We told them there are a lot of hungry people on this campus, and that “Today, everybody is going to eat for free. We think it’s best if you let this happen, because we don’t want to start any problems here by denying people basic things like food.” They basically just let it happen. We also brought along tons of compostable plates and forks to ensure that the dining service workers didn’t get burdened by extra labor cleaning up. As the day went on and we brought in a sound system, it turned into this awesome dance party. We got in at 10 in the morning and we didn’t leave until 8 o’clock at night. It was an amazing experience.
Natalie: It’s important to acknowledge that the dining hall action was done under the banner of #COLA4all, which is a group that is comprised of graduate and undergraduates who are working on broadening the horizon of COLA.
James: The dining hall action followed a #COLA4all action that went down at the library two days earlier, where the idea was “Not eating and not sleeping as usual.” They didn’t want to call it a hunger strike, because we’re always hungry.
Natalie: As COLA organizers, we are groups of different people, with some overlap. We’ve been organizing complementarily, and sometimes together. On Wednesday, we got an email from the Dean of Graduate Studies, Quentin Williams. He said could meet with us directly as graduate students, but with the understanding that if this was a wages issue, we would need UAW involved. We responded that the union and the GSA were willing to meet, and they could come find us at 3 pm.
We planned a rally together with #COLA4all three hours in advance of this bargaining meeting. Hundreds of people showed up—during finals week! You have to remember that people are stressed out and want to leave—and we had hundreds of people show up. You have to remember, we have only 1,800 graduate students, so for the size of our campus this is mass mobilization.
Yulia: The administration did not turn up to the meeting that they themselves requested. The same day, we saw the University PR person speaking to the press and claiming that they were hoping to meet with graduate students. But they didn’t show up. We think it’s because they saw the rally. The emails they’ve been sending are like “Some graduate students are threatening to withhold grades.” I don’t think they had a sense of how serious we are, or how massive this movement is. I think they saw this massive rally outside of the room where we were supposed to meet, and they got scared.
DC: What has been the UAW response to all of this?
Sarah: The statewide and international response so far has been nothing, which is fine with me. They’re not trying to get us to stop the strike. But the rank-and-file response has been amazing.
DC: What do you need from people now? What’s the plan going forward?
James: We need letters of solidarity from all kinds of political organizations. We need contributions to the strike fund. At first, we thought that this would be a fund for undergraduates in case that there’s any possible way that undergraduates could be affected from these actions. Anyone can email the Chancellor, the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) or Janet Napolitano telling them to give us COLA. Those emails should go to Governor Newsome as well: California is slated to have a budget surplus this year to the tune of over $10 billion. UCOP has a discretionary fund from the 2017-18 budget of $370 million to be allocated at will.
DC: Is the plan to continue the strike into next quarter?
Yulia: The plan is to win.
Natalie: We aren’t decision makers. We’re leaders, but we’re not decision makers. The strike is only going to end when the graduate workers decide it’s going to end.
James: In terms of our collaboration with #COLA4all, there has been a pledge sent out to graduate students with two questions. The first is “Are you willing to continue to fight for #COLA4all, regardless of what happens with the grading strike?” 99% of graduate students have committed to continuing to work for COLA for all staff and undergraduates on campus. The second question is “Are you willing to donate your first COLA payments to cover any potential additional financial burdens undergraduates face due to the strike?” That’s had 100% commitment from graduate students.
“We told them there are a lot of hungry people on this campus, and that “Today, everybody is going to eat for free. We think it’s best if you let this happen, because we don’t want to start any problems here by denying people basic things like food.” They basically just let it happen. We also brought along tons of compostable plates and forks to ensure that the dining service workers didn’t get burdened by extra labor cleaning up. As the day went on and we brought in a sound system, it turned into this awesome dance party.”
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.
