Hundreds of graduate student workers at the University of California Santa Cruz are currently staging a wildcat strike, or a strike undertaken without the approval of union leadership. Strikers are refusing to work until they receive a Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) of $1,412 a month to cover their increasing rent burden. The #COLA strikers are calling on Twitter to #spreadthestrike to other schools in the University of California system. Graduate workers, faculty and undergraduates at UNC should stand behind them.
Graduate workers provide a massive amount of labor to universities, especially at state institutions such as UCSC and UNC. They work as both teaching assistants and primary course instructors, grade the majority of student papers and exams and conduct much of the research in campus labs. Their ability to perform that labor under fair working conditions, including making enough money to live, affects the quality of research produced at the university and the quality of teaching that undergraduates receive.
UCSC graduate workers began their strike last semester by refusing to submit grades, in many ways reminiscent of the UNC TA grading strike. This semester, after no response from the administration, UCSC graduate students initiated a full work stoppage. The strike has since garnered national media attention and an onslaught of threats of termination and even deportation from administrators.
While graduate student participation and public faculty support at UCSC are much higher than during UNC’s strike, there are a number of other similarities between the two actions. Familiar rhetoric condemning graduate workers taking undergraduates (grades) hostage, despite explicit support from respective undergraduate communities, have defined both administrations’ anti-strike strategies. Likewise, akin to UNC’s commitment of massive funds to police student protesters, UCSC spent $300,000 in one day to station riot police at UCSC pickets according to organizers. On February 12th, 17 UCSC protesters were arrested.
Moreover, neither the Workers Union at UNC nor the UC Student-Workers Union UAW 2865, which represents graduate workers in the UC system, chose to provide support. Instead, from the perspective of strikers, they remain committed to top-down unionism and bureaucratic channels.
Finally, the COLA strikers have recognized something that quickly became evident to UNC TAs: in the words of Frederick Douglas, “Power concedes nothing without a demand.”
After years of advocacy from departments, the Graduate and Professional Student Federation and students themselves, UNC serendipitously dropped student fees for many graduate workers the semester immediately after the TA strike. Meanwhile, in his graduate student listening sessions in spring 2019, I witnessed then College of Arts and Sciences Dean Kevin Guskiewicz feign ignorance of students being pepper sprayed by police on campus. I heard this in no less than three separate meetings. At UNC, we've found that administrators listen to action, not words.
As we confront a declining academic job market, a growing "crisis” of homeless college students and the defunding of higher education at the state level, the stakes of the UCSC COLA strike are high for anyone invested in the future of higher education. As the underpaid, overworked UCSC graduate workers put their careers, livelihoods and even immigration status on the line, we have to stand behind them.
Follow them on Twitter. Donate to the strike fund. Write public endorsements of the strike. And take their message — that graduate workers should be paid a living wage — seriously.
