Category: Uncategorized

Picket Teach-in Coordination

From Jack Davies
February 24, 2020

Dear all,

We’re in the third week of our strike. Throughout, undergrads, grads, lecturers, and faculty have been running teach-ins everyday on the picket. These are wonderful learning moments and for many of us, the kinds of education that we have often wished to include in a UC curriculum. Topics have ranged from student debt and housing to horizontal education, legal observation and direct action training, and many more besides.

We are sending out this form (https://forms.gle/goYScQiRf8e6gVo86) to try to better coordinate and give advance notice of our teach-ins. If you have any plans or desires to teach or learn on the picket, on whatever topic, please fill it out and we’ll support you to make it happen.

Tomorrow, we are running our teach-ins on legal observation at 12pm and on horizontal pedagogy at 1pm.

Can’t wait.

Statement on Doomsday

At our General Assembly on February 21, COLA wildcat strikers at UCSC voted overwhelmingly to continue to withhold Fall grades beyond Janet Napolitano’s midnight deadline. 

At least 85 UCSC graduate student workers, and very likely more, have refused to submit to Napolitano and EVC Kletzer’s threat to revoke Spring appointments and block future ones. Nearly 20% of these workers are international graduate students, who now face the risk of de facto deportation. 

We are now past Napolitano’s firing deadline. Until we hear otherwise, we hereby consider ourselves terminated from our employment. 

But the momentum of the struggle is growing. We feel the collective strength of our fellow workers who have committed to act decisively in solidarity. And while the decision of strikers on the firing line underlines our resolve, it does not express the full scale of the movement for COLA. 

It does not include the 351 UCSC graduate workers who committed at the start of this quarter to withhold Winter grades, and the additional numbers who will undoubtedly be moved to withhold grades after recent events. 

It does not include the dozen departments across UCSC refusing to accept Spring appointments if UCSC terminates their colleagues—nor the rumblings of faculty organizing autonomously and across disciplines, nor the commitment of thousands of professors across the country to effectively boycott UCSC when our spring employment is void. 

Nor does it include the mass commitments of several other UC campuses to commence grading and teaching strikes in solidarity with UCSC wildcats. 

And it does not begin to capture the force of our Doomsday Rally, where over 1000 undergrads, grads, faculty, lecturers, and workers shut down both entrances to campus, leading to the cancellation of all classes on Friday. Nor the mass rallies, pickets, and building occupations across the UC on Friday and throughout last week.

We already knew, and UC now surely knows, that we are stronger than they are—that we will not submit to police violence or threats to our employment. The time to strike with us is now, because we’re striking to win.

Response to Janet Napolitano’s Invitation to Meet with UCGPC

Dear Janet Napolitano and UC community,

It has come to our attention that the University of California administration intends to negotiate the COLA demands, initiated at UC Santa Cruz, with the UC Graduate and Professional Council (UCGPC). For many reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that this organization does not represent our campus in any leadership or representational capacity, we are sorry to inform you that any decisions at which you may collectively arrive will not impact our organizing or our conviction. We have explicitly and intentionally chosen for several years not to become members of this organization, we do not pay dues, and our External Vice President does not sit on its board. Furthermore, UCGPC has nothing to do with the COLA campaign, has refused contact since its inception, and continues to fail to recognize our needs.

We continue to welcome negotiations directly with striking graduate students at UCSC, and continue to assure our comrades that all substantive decisions related to the strike will be put to a democratic vote.

No COLA; no grads,

UCSC Graduate Student Association

UAW-2865 Santa Cruz

Striking graduate students

Strike Updates Day 9

From Joe Klein
February 21, 2020

Dear Colleagues, 

I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike. 
Today was a historic day in labor history at the University of California. For the 9th day, graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, staff, lecturers, and others rallied at both entrances to campus. For the 9th consecutive working day, metro bus drivers refused to cross the picket line in solidarity with striking graduate students. Energy was incredibly high all morning as strikers donned costumes and danced to celebrate DOOMSDAY which many noted marks a new beginning, not the end, of the fight for COLA. In a massive show of strength, strikers peacefully shut down the entire campus. 

Late in the morning, a huge group of STEM graduate students marched from science hill to quarry plaza to join rallying undergraduates. From quarry plaza, a group of about 200 strikers marched to the west entrance of campus and peacefully closed it down, while allowing traffic from family student housing to flow. Meanwhile, hundreds of strikers marched through the streets from quarry plaza down towards the base of campus. A large group of faculty members met the march in front of faculty housing, and together faculty and students marched to the base of campus, where strikers had already peacefully closed the main entrance to campus. Students and faculty held a rally in the streets at the main entrance and shut down the intersection of Bay and High. Later, strikers from the west entrance marched down Empire Grade to join the main entrance picketers. By my own estimates, there were more than 1,500 students, staff, faculty, lecturers, and supporters rallying in support of the COLA movement. UCSC has now spent approximately $2.7 million dollars on the police presence at the picket line–and this is likely a conservative estimate.

Meanwhile, the COLA movement has now spread to all 10 campuses in the UC system. Today simultaneous actions were held across the state, as UCSB occupied an administrative building, UCLA held a 1-day strike, and massive rallies were held at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Merced, UC Riverside, while UCSF is beginning to organize their own COLA campaign. UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley have all committed to striking in solidarity with UCSC strikers if threats of retaliation are carried out. Here at UCSC, hundreds of graduate students have pledged to refuse Spring TA appointments in the event of mass firings. 

Although strikers were prepared to submit grades if administration met them at the bargaining table, today in a meeting UCSC administration rejected graduate students’ attempts to discuss solutions to the strike, and reiterated their commitment to retaliation against strikers engaged in this labor dispute. Among other revelations, it was also disclosed today that UCSC administration has been censoring communications from at least some department chairs to their students and faculty, claiming the right to “vet” correspondence. 

In a stunning rebuke to administration’s punitive and divisive tactics, striking graduate students held a general assembly where they voted almost unanimously to stand together in solidarity and to continue withholding grades–and so the strike continues!

The COLA campaign was born out of the dire circumstances of graduate students at UC Santa Cruz who have been repeatedly thrown under the bus by their own administrators–administrators whose $500,000 salaries are topped off with lavish monthly housing stipends. And still, administration is and has been continually invited to negotiate in good faith to bring the strike to close. Graduate students ask for dialogue and a living wage; administration asks for obsequious compliance to a system of worker exploitation. UCSC is morally, not financially, bankrupt. 

However, today we saw something new: a new community of students, faculty, lecturers, and staff rising together in solidarity to demand the university that we want. The doomsday clock is just a few seconds to midnight, and midnight is just the beginning. 

Some of today’s action items: 

  • Join strikers on the picket line, beginning Monday at 7:30am. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, coffee, hand sanitizer, healthy food, and large containers of drinking water are always in demand.   
  • Donate to the strike fund to support striking grads and to provide material relief in the event of mass firings: gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc  
  • Faculty are encouraged to organize among themselves and to consider striking in solidarity with graduate students. 
  • Cancel your classes and sections, and do not ask your students to cross the picket line. 
  • Lecturers should consider holding their classes at the picket. 
  • Push back the dates of large assignments, or as some instructors have done, cancel them. 
  • Write to the administration asking them to come to the table to work with graduate students and to rescind threats of retaliation for students demanding the ability to live where they work. 

As always, thank you so so much for your support, and extra special thanks to our undergraduates and to the faculty who have been coming out to support strikers in the streets–we are so grateful. 

See you Monday!

Strike Updates Day 8

From Joe Klein
February 20, 2020

Dear Colleagues, 

I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike. 

For the eighth day, hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, staff, lecturers, faculty, and others rallied at both entrances to campus. Energy was incredibly high throughout the morning, and for the 8th consecutive working day metro bus drivers refused to cross the picket line in solidarity with striking graduate students. UCSC has spent approximately $2.4 million on the police presence at the picket line. However as of today administration has offered nothing substantive–and so tomorrow the strike continues! 

Meanwhile, the strike is spreading. Friday February 21 will be a state-wide day of action across the UC system for COLA and against administrative repression. Strikers at UC Santa Barbara have occupied an admin building in solidarity with UCSC and over 400 graduates have pledged to begin a full teaching strike on Monday if UCSC graduates are fired. Strikers at UC Irvine also occupied an admin building today and are also organizing plans for their own strike. UC San Diego strikers shut down a major library today and are staging a strike for Friday. UCLA strikers today staged a sick-out strike and along with UC Berkeley are committing to withhold winter quarter grades if UCSC fires its striking grads. Berkeley is also delivering its own COLA demands to administration tomorrow and planning for escalating to a strike. UC Riverside and UC Merced are staging rallies and organizing for their own COLA campaign, and UC Davis is also organizing a teaching strike in solidarity with UCSC and to demand their own COLA. Across California, graduate workers struggle together. 

Here at UCSC organizers are planning a double-header DOOMSDAY Rally and Party whileCOLA4ALL Organizers are hosting a #FIREUSJANET party at the picket line (these events are free and open to the public). Strikers will rally all day at the base of campus, and at 11am a DOOMSDAY Rally will be held at the Quarry Plaza at followed by a march to join strikers at the base of campus for a 12pm rally and party. All campus community members are encouraged to attend. Janet Napolitano has been invited to be the guest of honor at the #FIREUSJANET party at the base of campus. The text of the invitation for the latter (attached) reads as follows: 

Dear Janet, 

We cordially invite you to our celebration on Friday February 21st 2020 at the picket line.

As our guess of honor, we invite you to 
FIRE US IN PERSON! 

There will be good food and great music. 

#BringTupperware #FireUsJanet 

Yours very truly,
@cola4all @payusmoreucsc @thepeoples.co

In the face of administrative attacks on students and our departments, many voices are now calling for building toward a general strike for all UCSC workers if our graduate workers are fired. To this end, there is discussion of faculty beginning to organize in consideration of a full teaching strike if UC admin should choose to fire its graduate students. Together as graduates, undergraduates, faculty, staff, and lecturers across the state, we are re-imagining what solidarity and mutual aid can look like at the University of California. 

Some of today’s action items: 

  • PLEASE COME OUT FOR A DOOMSDAY / #FIREUSJANET PARTY! Join strikers on the picket line, beginning tomorrow at 7:30am, with a rally at 12pm. If you are so inclined, costumes are encouraged. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, hand sanitizer, healthy food, coffee, costumes for your friends, and large containers of drinking water are always in demand. 
  • Donate to the strike fund to support striking grads and to provide material relief in the event of mass firings: gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc  
  • Cancel your classes and sections, and do not ask your students to cross the picket line. 
  • Lecturers should consider holding their classes at the picket. 
  • Push back the dates of large assignments, or as some instructors have done, cancel them. 
  • Write to the administration asking them to come to the table to work with graduate students and to rescind threats of retaliation for students demanding the ability to live where they work. 
  • If you were a faculty member or student who witnessed or recorded video or photographs of police violence please write a description of what you saw and send footage to: mas1218@gmail.com. 

As always, thank you so so much for your support, and extra special thanks to our undergraduates and to the faculty who have been coming out to support strikers in the street and in the senate–we are so grateful. 

See you tomorrow!

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UCSC international graduate students on strike | Statement against de facto deportation

February 20, 2020

We are international graduate students at UC Santa Cruz on strike for a cost of living adjustment.

A February 7 email from UCSC’s International Student and Scholar Services stated that “actions that result in student discipline or arrest may have immigration consequences, both on our current status and on possible future immigration applications you may make in the United States.” On February 14, EVC Lori Kletzer and UC President Janet Napolitano made this implicit threat of deportation a reality by threatening to revoke Spring 2020 work appointments for striking graduate students.

We can only assume that the UC administration understands that this is a de facto threat to deport dozens of international graduate students at UCSC. With the termination of our spring employment, we lose tuition remissions, without which we cannot remain enrolled full-time and without which our visas become forfeit. We have no protections and no guarantees, especially those of us from the global South, for whom student visa reapplications can be an uncertain and nightmarish process.
We see these threats as consistent with Janet Napolitano’s history as chief of the Department of Homeland Security, and we do not take them lightly. The UC has imperilled our futures in this country for participating in labor actions for living wages. We have no reason to believe that submitting grades and ending our strike activities will keep any of us safe from retaliation.

Many of us applied to study at UCSC for its tradition of scholar-activism, its social justice mission, and its stated commitment to diversity. Some of us took on financial and emotional risks by deciding to come to the U.S. for work and study in a Trumpian political climate of travel bans and anti-immigrant sentiment. All of us understand that our labor as teaching assistants is an indispensable component of the research and educational vision of this university.

The restrictions we face as visa holders drove us to go on strike in the first place. Under conditions of severe rent burden, many of our fellow graduate workers are forced into additional academic employment or low-wage side jobs. These options are unavailable to international students. We cannot take more than a 50% employment load on campus and are prohibited from seeking off-campus employment. We find it extraordinarily difficult to develop credit histories to support our tenant applications to local landlords.

We are on strike because our situation in Santa Cruz is untenable. For us, the most recent threat is only the formalization of our existing reality. ​Having recruited us to an unlivable situation, the UC is now making our status in this country impossible.

—
Tony Boardman
Pronouns: he/him
Rent Burden: 50% (what’s this?)
University of California, Santa Cruz
PhD candidate in Literature
I SUPPORT THE COLA CAMPAIGN
—

Strike Updates Day 7

Strike Updates, Wednesday, Feb 19, 2020

For the seventh day, hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, staff, lecturers, and others rallied at both entrances to campus. For the seventh day, all metro bus service to campus was disrupted by the picket line. In late morning, strikers at the main campus were joined by a group of faculty marching down from the women’s center in support of the cola campaign, and together students and faculty rallied at the base of campus chanting “No retaliation, yes negotiation!” Later in the day, parents, families, and children from family student housing marched from Westlake elementary school to join strikers on the picket line. Meanwhile, strikes and other actions are being organized and planned for this week at UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Davis, and UC Merced. In anticipation of Friday, COLA4ALL Organizers are inviting Janet Napolitano to the picket line at the main entrance of campus for a Firing Party on February 21. #firemejanet #bringyourowntupperware

As of today, UCSC has spent approximately $2.1 million on the police presence at the picket line. However as of today administration has so far offered nothing substantive–and so tomorrow the strike continues! 

In an incredible show of support for the COLA campaign and against the threat of firing its graduate workers, today UCSC’s faculty senate passed two resolutions, the first against the use of “tattlebot” and other surveillance technology to undermine academic freedom, and the second to endorse graduate students’ call for a COLA. The second resolution, which passed by a 75% majority in a blind ballot, reads as follows: 

“Be it resolved that the UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate

  1. Supports the graduate students’ and lecturers’ calls for higher wages commensurate with local cost-of-living increases,
  2. Calls for the withdrawal of sanctions against striking and arrested students,
  3. Affirms departmental autonomy in the assignment of TAships,
  4. And urges the UC Santa Cruz administration and UCOP–in dialogue with striking graduate students and lecturers whose contract ended on January 31, 2020–to work swiftly to find fair and lasting solutions that honor each of these unit’s indispensable contributions to teaching and research at the University of California.”

In doing so, the Faculty Senate joins UCSC’s Graduate Student Government and Undergraduate Student Government in officially endorsing the COLA campaign. Faculty, lecturers, graduate students, and undergraduates stand together, while university administration currently stands alone. 

In addition to garnering resounding support from our own community here at UCSC, the COLA movement garnered even greater national political attention late this afternoon when Democratic Candidate Senator Bernie Sanders called on UC President Janet Napolitano to stop threatening UCSC graduate students, especially international students who face potential deportation.  

Together we invite UCSC administration to come to the negotiating table so we can bring this strike to an end. 

Some of today’s action items: 

  • Join strikers on the picket line, beginning tomorrow at 7:30am. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, hand sanitizer, healthy food, and large containers of drinking water are always in demand. 
  • Cancel your classes and sections, and do not ask your students to cross the picket line. 
  • Lecturers should consider holding their classes at the picket. 
  • Push back the dates of large assignments, or as some instructors have done, cancel them. 
  • Write to the administration asking them to come to the table to work with graduate students and to rescind threats of retaliation for students demanding the ability to live where they work. 
  • If you were a faculty member or student who witnessed or recorded video or photographs of police violence please write a description of what you saw and send footage to: mas1218@gmail.com. 
  • Share media coverage of the strike (Bernie Sanders chose this NPR story, but there is also coverage in most major media outlets). 

As always, thank you so so much for your support, and extra special thanks to our undergraduates and to the faculty who have been coming out to support strikers in the street and in the senate–we are so grateful. 

March for COLA, 11am Quarry Plaza

February 20, 2020

Dear grads,

Tomorrow will be big. Undergrads, faculty, lecturers, STEM, and townies are all marching for COLA and joining us at the base of campus for a rally. 

Contact your sections and invite undergrads to the march starting at 11am in Quarry plaza tomorrow, Feb 21. Let your students know that TAs engaged in the strike for a living wage might get fired and need undergrad support. We’ve seen incredible solidarity from undergrads since we first went on strike and this movement would not be possible without them! 

Reach out to your departments, text your friends, and turn out yourself! Picket starts at 7:30 and after everyone marches for COLA to the base of campus, we’ll have a big rally at 1PM.

We encourage everyone to wear costumes–let’s have fun before having to make a serious collective decision at the General Assembly (Friday, 4:30PM, Oaks 105).

Solidarity forever which is way past Doomsday!
Striking Graduate Students

STEM will meet at 10:45 am in the E2 courtyard and walk together to the quarry plaza to join the undergrads.

Everyone is welcomed!

United we fight. STEM won’t break the strike!

DOOMSDAY Flyer Feb 21 (PDF)Download

A Brief History of Wildcat Strikes

by Dana Frank, Professor of History Emerita, UCSC

In responding to the UCSC graduate students’ strike, the UC Administration has aggressively stressed that this walkout is “unsanctioned” by the UAW leadership and therefore, as a “wildcat” strike, is illegitimate and the University of California has no obligation to bargain.

However, many of the most powerful, successful, and popular strikes in US history have been wildcats. The concept of a “wildcat” strike is in fact a modern one, that grew out of a particular historical context that no longer exists. Before the 1930s, large groups of workers, with or without union approval (or sometimes even unions), commonly just withdrew their labor and made demands of employers, who could then choose to accede to those demands or not. The outcome was not necessarily enshrined in a contract. Only with the rise of the New Deal industrial relations system did the legal structure of the National Labor Relations Act codify a bureaucratic system of federally-managed elections, “collective bargaining,” and seemingly binding contracts–in which some unions chose to forgo the right to strike during that contract, in exchange for other gains.

During the years of powerful national unions, from the late 1930s through the 1970s, that system benefited many workers, in a context of countervailing powers and a federal government that generally accepted unions. But when both employers and the government broke out of that model beginning in the 1970s and turned aggressively against labor, contracts worsened dramatically. Gains for workers plummeted and contracts covered fewer and fewer workers within a given firm. Employers, always negotiating on a playing field far from equal, continue to force unions under duress to give up their right to strike. They exalt the sanctity of union contracts while themselves routinely violating agreements, laying off workers by the thousands simply because they chose to, or closing up shop altogether.

A “wildcat” strike means the strike is not “sanctioned,” that is, officially endorsed by a national union with which a local group of workers is affiliated. But some–but by no means all–of the national-level unions that control contracts in the US today are famously undemocratic. These routinely thwart democratic decision-making by rank-and-file members; they in some cases can negotiate contracts without consulting members; they repress union militancy rather than unleash it, in order to defend their own bureaucratic entrenchment. The more progressive national unions, by contrast, understand that rank-and-file militancy is the key to power. The United Auto Workers, with which the graduate students are affiliated, has long been one of the most famously undemocratic unions in the country. Its current leadership is facing criminal charges for corruption.

In the face of undemocratic, compromised leadership, workers in the US have routinely chosen to engage in “wildcat” strikes without national-level approval. Many of the most famous and crucial strikes in the modern US history have been wildcats, including the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, the 1970 national postal workers’ strike, and the recent 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike. Unsanctioned strikes can mean workers forgo certain vital resources of solidarity, such as the support of Central Labor Councils and of unions whose own contracts give them the right to refuse to cross the picket line of another union only if that strike is sanctioned by the local’s national leadership. But wildcats also open the door to other forms of solidarity and creative militancy, and in many cases the previous hostile national leadership is forced to support the strike and, along with it, more militant demands.

The UC administration, then, can choose to assert the sanctity of a contract and stress that the UAW leadership has not approved this strike. But US labor history makes clear that contracts, and national-level systems of bureaucratic control, have always been simply tactics utilized by management or labor or both, as they chose or did not choose. Working people have a long, successful, and celebrated history of improving their lives–and those of others–using a far broader toolkit and a far broader vision of what democracy, and justice, look like.

International Students Statement

We are international graduate students at UC Santa Cruz on strike for a cost of living adjustment.


A February 7 email from UCSC’s International Student and Scholar Services stated that “ actions that result in student discipline or arrest may have immigration consequences, both on our current status and on possible future immigration applications you may make in the United States.” On February 14, EVC Lori Kletzer and UC President Janet Napolitano made this implicit threat of deportation a reality by threatening to revoke Spring 2020 work appointments for striking graduate students.

We can only assume that the UC administration understands that this is a de facto threat to deport dozens of international graduate students at UCSC. With the termination of our spring employment, we lose tuition remissions, without which we cannot remain enrolled full-time and without which our visas become forfeit. We have no protections and no guarantees, especially those of us from the global South, for whom student visa reapplications can be an uncertain and nightmarish process.

We see these threats as consistent with Janet Napolitano’s history as chief of the Department of Homeland Security, and we do not take them lightly. The UC has imperiled our futures in this country for participating in labor actions for living wages. We have no reason to believe that submitting grades and ending our strike activities will keep any of us safe from retaliation.

Many of us applied to study at UCSC for its tradition of scholar-activism, its social justice mission, and its stated commitment to diversity. Some of us took on financial and emotional risks by deciding to come to the U.S. for work and study in a Trumpian political climate of travel bans and anti-immigrant sentiment. All of us understand that our labor as teaching assistants is an indispensable component of the research and educational vision of this university.

The restrictions we face as visa holders drove us to go on strike in the first place. Under conditions of severe rent burden, many of our fellow graduate workers are forced into additional academic employment or low-wage side jobs. These options are unavailable to international students. We cannot take more than a 50% employment load on campus and are prohibited from seeking off-campus employment. We find it extraordinarily difficult to develop credit histories to support our tenant applications to local landlords.

We are on strike because our situation in Santa Cruz is untenable. For us, the most recent threat is only the formalization of our existing reality. Having recruited us to an unlivable situation, the UC is now making our status in this country impossible.

This statement was released by international students on February 19th, 2020.