December 23, 2019
To: Campus Administrators and Campus Community:
We, the graduate students at UCSC, acknowledge the receipt of your letter dated December 20, 2019. We have invited you to meet with us as elected representatives of the Graduate Student Association. We have invited you to meet with UAW 2865 (“the Union”) and the duly elected Unit Chair of the Union for the University of California, Santa Cruz (“UCSC”), Veronica Hamilton. You continue to find excuses to not meet with us even though nothing in the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act (“HEERA”) or in the Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) prohibits the University from meeting with a Unit Chair of the Union to discuss matters relating to the terms and conditions of graduate students’ employment. After discussing our current situation with attorneys who specialize in labor law, we are led to believe that the issue is not that you can’t meet with us, it’s that you are choosing not to.
Specifically, we want to respond to your claim that this cannot be resolved at the campus level. There is direct precedent for constructive engagement between the Unit Chairs of individual University campuses and administrators to resolve disputes regarding the terms and conditions of graduate students’ employment. In 2014, Union leadership at UCSC announced a UCSC-specific strike (click here to read more) over the Math Department’s use of grossly underpaid undergraduate TAs. The University immediately requested formal mediation (click here to read more) with local campus leadership to avert the strike. In so doing, the University recognized the campus leadership’s authority to negotiate and sign a settlement on behalf of the Union. Similarly, during the 2017 Thomas Fire in Santa Barbara County, the administration of UC Santa Barbara bargained pay and employment issues directly with the local Unit Chair of UAW-2865 (click here to read more).
But, we have not just made ourselves available to you as the UAW. We have suggested multiple options for you to grant us COLA: you can devise a side letter to the CBA with a memorandum of understanding for graduate students outside of the bargaining unit; you can grant all graduate students a guaranteed permanent COLA fellowship. There are, of course, so many options!
Don’t want to meet with anyone? Announce your plans over email! We can discuss your solution to our economic precarity while we visit with family and friends during the campus closure. Of course, regardless of how you present your solution, all graduate students will vote on whether we find it acceptable, as has been stated numerous times in the last two weeks.
More importantly, we are faced with a crisis that requires creative and comprehensive solutions. To campus administrators: we know that you remember the countless times that graduate students, including UAW and GSA representatives, have asked you to identify the concrete steps you would take to improve our economic circumstances. In our experience, you would often deflect responsibility or allude to long term plans to build more unaffordable housing on campus. You also have said that if graduate students would submit their grades, you would be willing to discuss how you plan to address the housing crisis. We worry that your “solutions” will not address our economic precarity. We worry that your “solutions” will reflect the lack of creativity you have demonstrated in your response to both the strike and to graduate student needs thus far. Furthermore, we worry that your response will be unnecessarily punitive to graduate students, faculty, and other campus supporters of the strike. We have no guarantee that you will do enough to support graduate students, and in fact, the last several years have demonstrated that we cannot trust you to prioritize graduate student needs (click here to read more). Please, prove us wrong.
As many graduate students have said in the last two weeks, the strike ends when graduate students vote to end it. Given the solidarity of the graduate student body as well as the overwhelming support of the faculty, associated organizations, and the City of Santa Cruz itself (click here to read more), it is unlikely that the strike will end without concessions being made by the University. We implore you to reconsider your silence about how you will address graduate student needs. We, and many other graduate students, look forward to hearing your solutions as promptly as possible.
Sincerely,
Yulia Gilichinskaya and Tony Boardman, GSA co-presidents
Veronica Hamilton, UAW 2865 Unit Chair, GSA IVPSG