The graduate worker wildcat strike at the University of California Santa Cruz has spread across the University of California system. Last Thursday, UC Santa Barbara graduate workers began a full teaching strike, while those at UC Davis committed to a grading strike, both echoing UCSC strikers’ demands for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). On Friday, the UCSC administration fired 54 of the striking graduate workers.
As with my last column, I urge anyone who cares about workers rights, social justice in academia and the future of higher education in general to follow and support the strike. This week, I hope to offer context around the reasoning behind radical graduate labor actions by highlighting the less visible labor graduate students perform. I would also like to push back on the far-too-common argument that graduate worker strikes — and not the neoliberal, classist academic system — hurt undergraduates.
Whether in the sciences, humanities or social sciences, graduate students put in long hours outside of the familiar labors of teaching, grading and lab work. However, much of this labor isn’t readily recognized or acknowledged by University administrators, faculty or often even ourselves.
By defining us as part-workers and part-students, many of our contributions to the University are purposely ignored or reframed as self-indulgent, educational or voluntary in order to justify our poverty-level stipends.
But when graduate students discuss our difficulties and successes as teaching assistants or course instructors with one another, we are working. This kind of commiserating, idea-sharing and strategizing is crucial work for class preparation — and necessary, considering we often aren’t formally (or informally) provided teaching training or resources from our employers.
When we are in class or reading in our subject area, we are also working. This sort of job training and expertise building is what qualifies us to teach and conduct research in the first place. If we didn’t take classes or conduct our own research, we wouldn’t have the authority or skills to teach the material we do.
And when some of us organize against unfair labor practices within our departments or rally against racism, sexism or other issues on campus, we are working. Without years of graduate and undergraduate labor through activism, for example, we’d still have a literal Confederate statue at the center of our campus — creating a racially-hostile learning environment and risking student safety by welcoming white supremacist groups to rally around it.
You could argue that activism is voluntary, but the alternative is sitting by while our colleagues, students and ourselves are subjected to repeated institutional violence that, without organizing, will continue to be perpetuated in our workplace. You could argue that our education is an investment in our future careers, but the abysmal academic job market suggests otherwise. You could argue that we are only expected to put in 15 to 20 hours of work into teaching, but many of us care deeply about our students’ learning experience and take seriously the fact — unlike many administrators and faculty — that we are the front lines of teaching.
So of course undergraduates suffer when we aren’t able to perform this and more visible labor — our work makes their education at UNC not only possible, but of far higher quality than faculty alone could (and are willing to) provide. But what determines whether graduate workers can perform this labor and how well they can do so is not based on a false choice of sucking it up or going on strike.
