In the wake of the recent firings of 54 graduate students by UC Santa Cruz following their wildcat strike, the Blog of the APA connected with organizers to discuss their perspective on the event and its significance for higher education in general. The details in the following interview regarding the strike and events surrounding it (missing from much national coverage) are presented to provide further insights about the implications of the strike for the field of philosophy.
Yulia Gilich is an artist, activist, and scholar. She is a PhD candidate in Film and Digital Media at UC Santa Cruz and one of the organizers of the COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment) campaign.
Please describe the background that led to the strike and the subsequent firings.
Graduate student workers at 10 University of California campuses across the state receive the same wages—$2,434 a month—which after taxes amounts to $19,000 a year, given that we are only paid for nine months. In Santa Cruz, the least affordable area to live in the country, this wage is insufficient. We have been demanding an additional monthly payment for all graduate students at UCSC to account for the exorbitant cost of living and rent.
In 2018, Auto Workers (UAW) Local 2865, representing student workers across all UC campuses, settled for a contract that 83% of UCSC membership voted against. Its 3 percent annual wage increase fell far short of dealing with the cost of living in Santa Cruz. With our financial situation becoming more precarious, we could not wait until the next round of union bargaining in 2022 and began organizing around a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) to respond to the needs of students in Santa Cruz. The COLA was designed as an ongoing payment to every graduate student that would bring them out of rent burden. Rent burden is defined as spending more than 30% of wages on rent, which a majority of UCSC grads do. Many are severely (50%) and obscenely (70%) rent burdened–the term Santa Cruz housing scholars had to invent to describe the housing crisis in town.
After the state-wide UAW cut the UCSC funding for meetings and campus organizers and took away their ability to email local membership directly, a group of UCSC graduate students decided to use the resources of the student government to organize for the COLA campaign. Twelve people ran on a COLA slate in May 2019 and filled all elected positions of the UCSC Graduate Student Association (GSA). Both GSA and UAW resources and infrastructure were used to advance the campaign.
In September and October, COLA organizers spoke at dozens of student orientations to present a brief teach-ins about the housing crisis and the COLA solution. GSA and UAW ran monthly joint meetings to engage graduate students in COLA organizing. We planned a series of actions, events, social media strategies, and COLA teach-ins for graduate students, undergrads, faculty, and staff to gradually build momentum for a possible grading strike in spring 2020. The campaign was going well. On November 7, several hundred grad students, out of only around 1,800 in total, marched to the administration building and officially presented a COLA demand to the Chancellor. The administration, which knew of the demand since spring 2019, never offered any concrete solutions.
In early December things escalated in ways no one imagined. A “speak-out” for grads to tell administration about our living conditions was planned for December 5 but was ultimately cancelled due to the weather. On that day, one graduate student emailed the administration and copied all grads demanding that administration guarantees us COLAs or grads will engage in “escalation, disruption, conflict.” Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer, apparently unaware of the cancellation of the speak-out, replied- saying that she welcomes “a discussion” and pointed to sections in the Student Policies and Regulations Handbook that regulate speech, university property, and grounds for student discipline. Admin’s threatening email produced the digital version of the speak-out.Over 40 students replied-all, creating a spirited email chain that accelerated the COLA timeline. In addition to using phrases that since have been used as chants, like “no COLA, no grades,” grads began calling for an immediate grading strike. Within 48 hours after the email exchange, a strike poll was circulated among graduate students. Over 450 people responded to the poll. Out of 350 currently working grad students, 285 were ready to strike now. Another 100 grad students who were not currently working as TAs responded in favor of striking. The next day, Sunday December 8, COLA organizers called a General Assembly meeting to discuss the risks and benefits of striking with the graduate students. Over 250 people virtually and in person attended the Strike Assembly meeting and overwhelmingly voted in favor of striking now. Our controversial contract has a “No Strikes” clause that prohibits “strikes, stoppages or interruptions of work” which means that the labor stoppage we are engaged in while in contract has to be a wildcat strike.
Admin’s threatening email produced the digital version of the speak-out.Over 40 students replied-all, creating a spirited email chain that accelerated the COLA timeline. In addition to using phrases that since have been used as chants, like “no COLA, no grades,” grads began calling for an immediate grading strike. Within 48 hours after the email exchange, a strike poll was circulated among graduate students. Over 450 people responded to the poll. Out of 350 currently working grad students, 285 were ready to strike now. Another 100 grad students who were not currently working as TAs responded in favor of striking. The next day, Sunday December 8, COLA organizers called a General Assembly meeting to discuss the risks and benefits of striking with the graduate students. Over 250 people virtually and in person attended the Strike Assembly meeting and overwhelmingly voted in favor of striking now. Our controversial contract has a “No Strikes” clause that prohibits “strikes, stoppages or interruptions of work” which means that the labor stoppage we are engaged in while in contract has to be a wildcat strike.
UC Santa Cruz recently put out its argument defending its actions. Among other arguments are that rental costs reported in the media are inflated, graduate students—especially those in good standing—are eligible for numerous benefits, and the harm to undergraduate students caused by the strike is significant. How does Pay Us More UCSC respond to these arguments?
Graduate students are workers who are recruited by Universities to carry out research. On top of their research, many grads work as teaching and research assistants at 50% employment or 20 hours a week. Many take on other jobs as readers and graders who get paid hourly or as graduate interns in various resource centers. Waged and unwaged labor that graduate students provide is essential to the operations of the university. We are responsible for teaching, grading, mentoring, tutoring, running labs, writing, publishing, etc. When we account for all the labor graduate students provide to the university, it quickly amounts to 60-80 hours a week. And yet, we are not paid enough to live where we work.
As part of the COLA campaign, we collected anonymous testimonies that made it clear: grads are paid poverty wages and live in poverty. Many commute from hours away, while others sleep in their cars and sometimes in motels or AirBnb’s in absence of affordable housing. Many skip meals and forego medical procedures to make rent. International students, who don’t have university jobs for the summer, must sublease their houses and leave the U.S. because their visas prohibit them from off-campus employment. Student parents consider dropping out of their programs because they anticipate not being able to afford new privatized childcare after the closure of a university-subsidized childcare center.
UCSC, the biggest landlord in town, houses thousands of students on campus. On top of tuition and fees, undergrads who live on campus are charged over $1500 a month (with a compulsory meal plan) to share a bedroom with 2-3 other people. Grads pay $1211 monthly for a bedroom in a shared apartment on campus. UCSC is implicated in the housing crisis in Santa Cruz in as much as city landlords consistently raise rents to match the exorbitant costs of on-campus housing.
The housing crisis has intensified in the recent years as Santa Cruz became a commuter town for Silicon Valley. The median rent is $1,685, according to the most recent data from the American Community Survey. With local rent control measures failing in 2018, rents in small, mountainous, NIMBY Santa Cruz continue to sky-rocket, going up on average 15% every year.
More about the Santa Cruz housing crisis can be found here, here, or here.
What connections do you see between the events at UCSC and broader trends in academia and/or the USA? Did these connections play a role in the decisions the graduate students made?
This strike has garnered support from students, faculty, workers, other campuses, labor and academic community, Santa Cruz City Council and across the world. Auto-workers from all over the country, rank and file UAW members, some of whom donated to our strike fund, have written to us with words of encouragement and inspiration, as we continue to strike. They see our fight as their fight. Our community, comrades from other UC campuses, and even Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders expressed support and solidarity.
We understand the COLA movement in the context of a strike wage in education. Across the country, we are seeing that educators acknowledge and demand a livable wage. Like the teachers in Oakland, Los Angeles, and West Virginia, all of whom have endorsed our strike, we are organizing and taking collective action to have greater control over our workplaces and learning environments. We are fighting back against austerity and budget cuts. We are fighting against racist policies that increase funding for police on campuses but don’t reduce the cost of textbooks or tuition. We are fighting for equal access to the vocation of teaching and research. We want to see an academy that is accessible to all—indigenous students, students of color, LGBTQ students, undocumented and international students, disabled students, and poor students. All people deserve the opportunity to teach and learn in the community, not just those whose families can subsidize their graduate education. Until then, we strike!
You can watch this video that talks about our vision for COLA:
Now, with the global pandemic, our demand is acquiring new urgency. First, for those of us living paycheck to paycheck, the ability to access emergency provisions in our moment of crisis is virtually impossible. Many of us have no savings. Most of us have no family or generational wealth to draw on. The financial insecurity that compelled us to demand a COLA is now compounded by crisis-related expenses (unexpected travel, additional childcare costs, medical supplies, aid to relatives and loved ones, to name just a few). Second, since the order to shelter in place began in Santa Cruz, graduate student-workers, like workers around the country, are reporting being formally laid off or told to stay home without pay (who knows for how long, though a federal report estimates at least 18 months).
In the present moment, workers around the world are taking strike action; tenants are organizing for a rent strike; and unhoused folks are expropriating vacant homes. They act not in spite of the pandemic but because of it. Their demands—our demands—for economic justice are demands to end the intolerable inequality that both exacerbates and is exacerbated by the COVID-19 outbreak. Now, more than ever, we, like all unemployed and low-waged workers, need a living wage!
How are graduate students responding to the firings?
We continue to strike even after 80+ of us have been fired for withholding our labor. We issued a call to withhold winter grades until we win a COLA and all the student workers who were fired are reinstated. These demands resonated with other UC campuses who are organizing in solidarity with UCSC and for their own COLAs.
On February 27, before the letters of termination were sent out, UC Santa Barbara grads went on a full teaching strike, and UC Davis grads went on a grading strike. UC San Diego joined the grading strike a few days later, and UC Berkeley declared March 16 the first day of their teaching strike. UC Irvine will start a social welfare strike on March 30. UCLA is waiting for 10 departments to declare themselves strike-ready to hold a strike vote. All other UCs—Merced, Riverside, and San Francisco—started their own COLA campaigns and expressed their support and solidarity with fired comrades.
Does the Pay Us More UCSC movement have any plans for the future?
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the University of California moving winter final exams and spring classes online—instructors are advised to use the digital platform Zoom. The strike also moved online: the digital picket line means that strikers will be withholding students’ winter grades and won’t teach over Zoom.
Our union, UAW 2865, is responding to this rapidly changing situation. They demanded that UC bargain over our changing labor conditions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The union won the remission of healthcare premiums for all student workers who were terminated and will continue bargaining to improve our working conditions. The union also filed two Unlawful Labor Practice charges against the University and is planning to hold a strike ratification vote early April, which will likely result in a union-sanctioned state-wide graduate student worker strike for COLA.
You can learn more about the strike and COLA by visiting: https://payusmoreucsc.com/ and https://twitter.com/payusmoreucsc
And if you can, donate to our GoFundMe strike fund: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc/donate
