Doomsday came and went, or was deferred until Thursday.
Wildcat strikers stared down the UC’s biggest possible threat—mass termination—and the UC blinked, at least for now, as EVC Lori Kletzer this morning released a series of “clarifications” on the terms of her mass firing threat.
In a meeting with department chairs today, Kletzer made it clear that the $2,500 program is not a COLA designed to alleviate rent burden, nor is it an offer in response to our demand for a COLA. It is, in her words, an “incentive to go back to work.”
If the last doomsday was the stick-version of strikebreaking (Kletzer today: “I want this strike to end”), then this is the carrot. No doubt we prefer carrots to sticks, but this is not much of a carrot.
This “program” excludes MA students as well as graduate students in their sixth year and beyond, many of whom have been delayed in their studies precisely because of the housing market in Santa Cruz. Furthermore, there is no transparency about the length of this program. Like any merely academic program, it may be revoked any year, or under the next austerity-dictated budget. It is not even a promise of non-retaliation: none of the disciplinary measures through the student code of conduct process will be paused or stopped, and disciplinary suspensions for arrestees will not be lifted.
In meetings with various academic divisions today, Kletzer repeatedly and consistently confirmed that this was neither an offer nor part of any future negotiation with strikers. Rather, this is a program that UCSC will roll out regardless of strikers’ input, with the caveat that any present or future wildcat striker, in addition to facing the prospect of dismissal, will not be eligible for this funding. Instead of opening good-faith negotiations with a collective of strikers to end the strike once and for all, the administration has simply unveiled a tactic designed to bribe individual strikers into returning to work.
Annual rents in Santa Cruz increase by $2,500 every few years (or sooner, depending on the landlord). This “incentive” does almost nothing to address the reasons most of us went on strike in the first place.
Grads at multiple UC campuses are meeting tonight and throughout this week to decide their escalation in response to our strike and our plight here at Santa Cruz. If last week was an indication of how much the administration might be willing to budge, another week of mass action and the threat of mass action at other campuses may just tip the scales in our favor.
We might be hearing some news very soon.