Academic workers at UC are preparing for a strike. Our union, UAW 4811, has filed an unfair labor practice charge over the UC administration’s brutal police response to the encampment and protests at UCLA. They have also authorized a statewide strike authorization vote (SAV) to commence May 13th – May 15th. If this SAV passes, UAW 4811 members will go on a sanctioned strike. With this strike, grad workers, as members of one of the largest UAW locals in the country, have the real potential to force the UC to concede to our demands in support of the uprisings and in solidarity with Palestine. UAW 4811 has adopted this set of strike demands focusing on divestment, free speech protection, transitional funding for researchers, and amnesty for student protestors (hugely inspired by organizing here at UCSC), and have issued this strike resolution.
Winning these demands from the UC will take sustained and concerted organizing across all departments at every campus. At UCSC, graduate student researchers comprise about 40% of the grad population, and our participation in this strike action will be a crucial part in forcing concessions from the UC. However, unlike TAs, whose work for the UC is largely synchronized, standardized and clearly different from their dissertation research, the work that researchers are paid to do is highly varied, largely asynchronous, and often completely entwined with the research we do to complete our degrees.
This presents several challenges that are unique to student researchers. . Namely, (1) how do we strike together and maintain solidarity across our varied work environments and positions, and (2) how do we put maximum pressure on the UC while minimally damaging our dissertation research for the duration of the strike (likely weeks or more)? With these questions in mind, and building on lessons learned from our contract strike in 2022, SRs from several STEM departments developed the following steps to organize a successful student researcher strike:
Step 1: Power map your department
During a strike, our collective power comes from a coordinated refusal of labor, and to assess our power going into (and during) a strike, it’s crucial to map your workplace. It allows us to understand strike numbers and worker power within our department, while identifying special points of leverage. Who are the workers in my department? Who do they work with? What are the products of their labor (who is TAing, who is doing research), and what are the upcoming disruption points (grade deadlines, midterms, grant deadlines, conferences)? Who is ready to strike their labor?
This model of assessment is called power mapping. This is crucial to understand the spread of circumstances that researchers are in within different labs, and what labor withholding is happening for each worker. A power map can be shared internally and updated as a strike goes on to clearly track a department’s strike power at any given moment.
Here is a step-by-step guide to power mapping your department, and here is a template for the power map spreadsheet itself. This template was created with SR-heavy departments in mind, but feel free to tailor it to the specifics of your department.
If you’re going at this alone, don’t! It’s useful to have a core of people within your department who are committed to organizing their coworkers towards this strike. Talk to your coworkers, figure out who is committed to meeting regularly and doing this organizing work over the medium term, and establish a shared communication channel – this will be your department’s organizing committee.
Step 2: Collectively make a department strike plan
Call a meeting with workers in your department to develop a collective strike plan. This means your entire lab or department has a cohesive understanding of what labor everyone is agreeing to withhold to maximize pressure on the university while avoiding long-term damage to your dissertation work (for example, a fly genetics lab could make a plan to ensure that their flies are fed every day, but would cease collecting data, refuse to attend meetings, and refuse to share results). Discussion and reaching consensus about this early helps keep your department coherent and disciplined as time passes and pressure builds on both the UC and us. It also helps prevent confusion about struck work, resentment between workers, and the gradual attrition of individual SRs. Members of different labs and departments know their working conditions best, and so these strike plans may look different lab to lab, or department to department. We have learned that when we make these decisions together with the other workers we know, our strike will be more powerful, more sustained, and safer.
You may choose to fill out this worksheet as a department to collectively develop and discuss a lab-by-lab strike plan.
Cohere around a definition of labor withholding
Make a strong & specific plan for labor withholding in your lab or department. This will vary based on what you’ve learned from power mapping (key points of power for your department, and your fellow workers’ attitude towards labor withholding) and is best done in conversation with your fellow workers. The objective is to withhold the maximum amount of labor that you can while avoiding catastrophic impacts to department members’ degree progress. This flowchart can be helpful for SRs to figure out the maximum amount of research labor you can strike.
When dealing with the nuances of a researcher strike, it’s easy to rationalize not withholding more and more types of labor. Here is a recommended minimum baseline for research labor withholding, based on experience from previous UCSC strikes:
- Refuse to share existing data/results with your PI or collaborators
- Refuse to take new data
- Don’t be physically present on campus, at your standard department seminar, or at the lab (unless there is an immediate need to keep creatures alive or instruments from self-destructing; even then, can one person at a time take care of everyone’s urgent lab upkeep tasks to minimize presence on campus?)
- Stop doing unpaid/organizational labor for your department
The protective is the collective
Our collective, united power is the defining element of a strike. While organizing, you will very likely encounter folks who have fears about participating because they feel like they are individually at risk. The most important way to alleviate these fears is to build solidarity. There is strength, and protection, in numbers – the university cannot possibly fire every union member, or even a fraction of us, without catastrophic impact to their own goals. Think about how to evenly spread the pressure around so certain workers (e.g. grade-withholding TAs) are not isolated and vulnerable. Frequent communication and contact between members of your department is important to combat the sense of isolation that the bosses want for us. (Keep in mind that some folks will simply not be willing to participate – if they’re sympathetic, see if they can take on organizing roles, even if they’re not willing to withhold labor!)
A concrete way to help fellow workers in your department feel safe is to approach faculty and get them to commit to not retaliating (example letter template). While retaliation against striking workers is illegal, the unfortunate truth is that this has not always stopped PIs and university administrators from doing it. Having commitments not to illegally come after strikers from faculty in advance can help assuage the fears of workers who may be on the fence about participating.
Here are some tips for creating collective protection within your department:
- Stay in frequent communication with all your coworkers – not just your friend group. Consider setting up a strike-specific communication channel and try to get all your coworkers into it
- Don’t be afraid to loop in a union representative to walk through tough conversations within your department, or answer questions
- We all have different combinations of privilege and precarity. Map out where these strong & weak points are, and figure out how more protected individuals can collectively shield the more vulnerable ones
- We are comrades, not enemies. Even if someone is not willing to strike now, they are still part of the collective and worth protecting – we’re pitting ourselves against the boss, not against each other
Counterprogramming
To create a more visible (and satisfying) disruption than simply being absent from your lab, consider trading your hours spent researching for hours spent building agitational and visible counter-programming in your departments (e.g., instead of going to your weekly department seminar, host a seminar at the same time describing a department-specific take on the issues and demands at hand). Most of our department colloquiums, seminars, social and research coffees are organized by graduate students and postdocs – if even that time spent organizing meetings went into building this programming it would make a hugely felt difference at the department level. Here is a starting point for imagining what this counterprogramming would look like in your department.
Reassess often
The dynamics of the strike will change as time goes by – check in every one to two weeks with your department or lab to assess your current strike power, look for (and troubleshoot) points of strain on your fellow workers, and evaluate your department strike plan for the next two-week phase. As pressure points (like grade deadlines, conferences, important meetings, and grant deadlines) arrive, you have the opportunity to shift your strike strategy to capitalize on these.
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