Dear admin,
Once again you have threatened striking grad students rather than engaging with our reasonable demands for a living wage. You claim that a collective sick-out is “not an appropriate use of sick leave.”
Once again you are wrong. Graduate students are sick. Our illness is not an acute infection that will quickly pass, but rather a chronic condition borne from low wages, rent burden, food insecurity, overwork, and dwindling career prospects. According to the UC’s own survey, 1 in 3 graduate students are depressed, and grad depression is significantly correlated with “living conditions,” “financial confidence,” and skipped meals. We know that many more grad students suffer from chronic mental and physical illnesses and disabilities, either exacerbated by or resulting from our financial precarity. THE UC IS MAKING US SICK, LITERALLY.
Over the previous weeks, we sent you a series of anonymous, unedited graduate student stories that reveal the deep impacts of financial precarity on grad student health. In just ten stories, we found that graduate students:
- with chronic illnesses say that their health has deteriorated since starting at UCSC
- developed chronic illnesses from toxic mold
- were unable to afford medical care due to rent burden, which for one student resulted in hospitalizations
- reported new or worsened anxiety and depression from living paycheck to paycheck, lacking basic needs, moving frequently, and being unable to find adequate housing
- were exhausted and traumatized from sleeping in offices, unsafe housing, or living unhoused
- developed burnout from overwork, with many working multiple jobs to make ends meet and/or commuting hours to avoid the Santa Cruz rental market
- regularly skipped meals due to rent burden
- were traumatized from not having enough money to escape abusive landlords
- felt financially incapable of leaving romantic relationships, making grad students highly vulnerable to partner abuse
These stories are in no way exceptional. They illustrate how financial, mental, and physical health are deeply intertwined. While the UC claims to care about student health, they have not even bothered to respond to these testimonies. When we brought attention to our lack of basic needs at the Chancellor’s Holiday Party, EVC Lori Keltzer responded, “I don’t dispute that that’s your point of view.”
Graduate students need a COLA now. For many of us, this is a matter of survival.
Meditation Mondays will not cure us. Workshops on time management will not cure us. Even increased CAPS services will not cure us. Neoliberal, individualized treatments cannot cure the systemic illnesses of underpay, overwork, and rent burden.
We are sick today and we are sick every day. We gather together with other sick grads, collectively sacrificing our sick days, to demand that the UC meet the most basic means of reproduction for its student-workers. Wildcat strikers and COLA4All are building communities of care among students and workers. We are addressing the needs of students whom the university has repeatedly failed: disabled students, chronically ill students, and student parents. We have a long way to go, and the COLA campaign must continually center the needs of students who are most vulnerable to university-imposed austerity measures. This work is vital.
Now is the time for the administration to show that they care about sick, disabled, burnt out, exhausted, hungry, and broke grad students — not through platitudes (we’ve had enough of those), but materially, by giving us the money we need to survive in Santa Cruz. It is time for the university to cure the systemic illness of grad student underpay and overwork. It is time for a COLA. We will not stop striking until we receive it.
Sincerely,
Sick and Tired Striking Grads