Category: UAW Strike 2022

At 6pm last night, the UAW 2865 bargaining team held a pre-bargaining caucus to discuss their decision of the previous night to drop COLA as an integral demand across subsequent years of the contract. For now, this means retaining the $54k initial adjustment, but then reverting to static percentage-based increases for each year thereafter. Those who have lived through the duration of the last contract in a town like Santa Cruz, where rents soared 67% since 2018, can sniff the peril. As a point of fact, the bargaining team’s proposal was “packaged” with another article about rents in campus housing, which preserved their legal right to reintroduce COLA –– should the team suddenly develop the political will to respond to the persistent call of rank and file.

If recent encounters with the team are any indication, however, we might expect them to brush off this “minority” of workers pushing a “fringe” position in the name of a silent majority of tens of thousands of workers, whom our esteemed representatives supposedly consult (or intuit) between caucuses. Our reps are so secure in their deeper knowledge of what is reasonable, realistic, and right that the caucus was set up to preclude membership’s reconsideration of their decision, summarily ending the bargaining call later that evening. Yet, the team’s confidence was surely shaken when the pre-bargaining caucus—a Zoom room capped at 500—filled within minutes, and hundreds more members packed into an overflow. What they all witnessed was a dismally choreographed plan to flood the stack with a dozen sycophants off the top, in many cases reading scripted defences of the decision to strike COLA from the contract language. The fiery response from the packed meeting inaugurated a slogan that is gaining ground: No COLA? No Contract! It’s safe to say that our union local has never seen such intense and vocal backlash. In a setting like this, renewed appeals to a “silent majority” can only gesture to silence.

Beyond doubt, the swirl of frustration and anger demonstrates a definite base for the COLA demand and an enormous capacity for mobilization. The urgent question is how this might be channeled into strategic resolve. We are seeing calls for a no-vote campaign, or even a wildcat strike. It is not hard to see why attention turns to these alternatives, even as we remain on strike without a contract to vote down. At this moment, both these calls are premature and concede too much to our bargaining team, crediting them with more control over the direction of the current strike than they in fact possess. The bargaining team and the thin staff layer at UAW—who make several times the base TA wage—are not the union. It is not up to them whether the COLA demand is dropped. It will be dropped only if and when the rank and file relinquishes it. The organizing challenges, then, are to deepen and widen the commitment to the demand, and to develop a strategic orientation of patience and resolve that is sorely lacking in our bargaining team. In the case of our strike, power is wielded against the boss cumulatively, and that power builds as the strike unfolds and disrupts over time.

It is critical to recognize the dynamics of our strike during this abbreviated holiday week. This is a vulnerable period in which concessions might be made rapidly, if the team thinks it can sneak them by membership. It is a time when pickets might dwindle, and rallies might lack the energy of the first week. This is precisely the time to take action at the level of our departments, to find collective expressions of commitment to the COLA demand and the long-haul strike needed to win it, and to link these tactics across departments and campuses. We must return from the long weekend still on strike, and with widespread resolve to take this through finals and, if necessary, beyond.

At this point, UC labor relations and admin must be reflecting on the flatfootedness of their strategy. Entering the second week of a system-wide strike of grad workers, postdocs, and academic researchers, the determination of the rank-and-file to stay on strike until we win is entrenched and expanding. Pickets may be sparser this week due to the impending holiday, with students and workers deserting an already quiet campus a few days earlier than usual to spend time with loved ones. This fact should serve to remind us, however, that the true efficacy of our strike is measured not by the size of rallies or the rowdiness of the picket, but by the number of workers withholding their labor over time. This is something that our bargaining team fails to understand, as it volunteers major concessions on our core demand at a moment of power.

This strategic orientation has developed over several years of organizing behind the COLA demand. We’ve learned that short-term strikes, even with total shutdowns, do not threaten crises at UC in the way that they might at other worksites. The steady accumulation of missed instruction hours, especially late in the quarter, along with the passage of deadlines for finals, grades, and research grants, ratchets up the pressure on the administration as the cogs of university operations jam and effects begin to accumulate in other sectors of the campus workforce. This strategy was hard won in the first place, and was set in motion by meticulous organizing since the end of the wildcats at the onset of the pandemic. We would be remiss not to have it guide our action and tactics both on the ground and at the table.

This shorter, quieter week also gives us an opportunity to reflect on the deeper meaning of the struggle. Our strike has been the subject of overwhelmingly positive national media coverage—even if these stories often, predictably, miss the point. Last week we wrote in these pages that we’re not striking for higher wages, but for COLA— the demand that our compensation be determined by the cost of living in California, so that no worker spends more than 30% of their salary on rent. This, we reiterate, is much more than just a pay increase.

To grasp the significance of this demand, we can look to the history of our own union, the UAW. The tension that we can see between anxious bargaining representatives now pushing very hard to replace the COLA demand with simple raises is continuous with the larger dynamics of the labor movement since World War II. The end of that war saw a massive strike wave across the US, widely considered the most concentrated period of labor-management strife in U.S. history. Following the wildcats in auto during the war years, a strike of 225,000 GM workers exploded in November 1945 demanding a 30% pay increase without an increase in company prices. Workers that is, demanded that their victory not be immediately eaten up by inflation. In making such a demand, they anticipated the principle of COLA—the guarantee that compensation be determined in relation to the cost of living. In our own moment, where rent can rise by more than two-thirds over the life of a contract, our COLA demand strikes at the heart of a decades-long arrangement of price and wage stability amid soaring property values, where wage increases evaporate into the rent check, even when price inflation is steady (which, today, it is not). With this demand, we are saying that working people and tenants will no longer consign increasing portions of their wage to the benefit of real estate portfolios. And no one in California has a real estate portfolio as large as the UC. In both cases, the upward drift in the cost of living is an attack on the entire working class.

In short, COLA intervenes anew in a historical process, and takes up the demand of workers before us that our salary guarantees us the ability to afford to live where we work, and to etch that principle into our contract so that this will always be the case. This is why COLA is about so much more than a raise, and so much more than our own strike. When we win, we ensure that the ability to reproduce our livelihoods will no longer be subject to the vicissitudes of the market. We set the stage for unions across the country to do the same, starting here in the UC. In the midst of a historic wave of unionization drives throughout different industries in the U.S., the potential of our movement to build this kind of worker power has potentially massive consequences.

So when we’re out there on the picket line this week, be encouraged not only by the determination of your comrades, the beauty of our collectivity, and the soundness of our strategy, but in knowing also that we take up the struggle of rank-and-file workers of the past. In winning our COLA, we have the potential to help shape the trajectory of the union movement in this country for years to come.

Still nothing doing at bargaining. Putting the phlegm in phlegmatic, Nadine Fishel—UC’s stonewaller in chief—repackaged UC’s piffling offer between bouts of coughing. Nadine is under the weather, apparently, but no less determined to play the waiting game.

Four days on the picket line, and grad workers across the state continue to feel our power growing. Nothing builds resolve and solidarity like spending the day with our fellow workers, walking the picket side-by-side, eating meals together, and talking about ways to deepen our collective struggle. And our bargaining team members agree. We are at the height of our power, they say. The curious thing is that some of them think this is the time to start offering concessions to the boss.

At a meeting yesterday morning, some bargaining team members argued that this moment of collective power is the time to revoke the central demand of the negotiations, a demand that has been building for over three years: to permanently tie grad workers’ compensation to the cost of living in California. In other words, they would have us abandon COLA at the moment when our power is still building.

But in the midst of the discussion over this misguided proposal, some 300 rank-and-file workers from campuses across the state suddenly flooded a meeting that had not been advertised to membership beforehand. In no uncertain terms, they expressed a nearly univocal position—this strike is about a COLA, about the end of rent burden. Without the demand to tether compensation to cost of living, the wage increase we’re asking for becomes just another number. Lacking the organic connection to soaring rent prices, it becomes something eerily close to the “outrageous” demand that UC labor relations argues it is. With complete clarity, these rank-and-filers let their bargaining team know why they’ve gone out on the largest strike of academic workers in history, and why we plan to stay out until we win.

Without the COLA demand, our struggle loses its bite. COLA is a political demand, not simply a wage demand, because it links our compensation to market values. It makes it so that we, and all the workers who come after
us, can afford to live where we work. This is why administrative intransigence is the only face we’ve seen. Waves of sectoral unionization throughout the UC since the ‘90s have simply been incorporated into the university’s business paradigm, in which incremental wage increases are offered, but without any relation to the outrageous cost of living in this state. This is precisely how we ended up rent-burdened in the first place. Conceding the framing of the demand (COLA) in favor of its result (the $54K salary) has significant consequences for the UC system and for workers in higher education as a whole: it is the first step on the dismal path to capitulation without a real fight. The rank and file appears to appreciate this more keenly than our bargaining team.

Meanwhile, as STEM divisions begin a fresh round of strike-breaking and intimidation tactics, we find ourselves again confronted by the student-worker ambiguity so often exploited by our boss. Student researchers are now being threatened with academic consequences for their labor action because they’re earning required credits for the work they produce for the university. The message is clear, if opportunistic: even if your strike as workers is protected, we will punish you as students. But no less clear is the fact that academic progress is contingent on compliance to the labor process, revealing the fiction on which the student/worker distinction is based.

The fact of being a student is the justification for inadequate compensation as a worker (“part-time work”, as Labor Relations says), while that labor primarily functions to draw in grant money, carry out research operations, and keep the institution’s tuition-rent wheels turning. Here, too, the COLA demand marks a decisive intervention, refusing to accept rent burden as the price of being a student half the time, just as we must refuse to accept intimidation or retaliation as the lot of student-workers.

The cry for “COLA!” rings out on the picket line, but rank-and-file workers know it’s more than just a slogan. It means an end to rent burden for all grad workers, and it’s the only way to end this strike. Tell that to your bargaining team.

Why isn’t the UC coming to the bargaining table? Why is news of the strike absent from University communications? Where is the police presence at the picket? We’re three days into one of the largest strikes in California history, so why isn’t the university trying to stop us—whether through negotiation, ideological pressure, or brute force? The same questions are echoing around picket lines across the state. A whole week has passed since the TAs were invited to the bargaining table and we’ve seen no urgency to get to the heart of the matter — our rent burden — at the SR table either. What’s going on?

The answer is simple. The strike, we must reiterate again and again, is not powerful as a demonstration of force, but as a use of our collective power. In other words, it is powerful as a strike. Those who thought that the first day or two of the strike would bring Labor Relations to the bargaining table with their tails between their legs were mistaken. Our power lies not in the threat of the strike, but in the strike itself, as it unfolds over time. The university’s response shows us, loud and clear, that our success will be determined by how many grad workers are withholding their labor, and for how long they do so.

In official communications sent out before the strike, the University cooed about its dedication to undergraduate learning. But their utter lack of urgency about the cessation of countless hours of teaching by striking grad workers says otherwise. The stark truth is that the university system in the U.S. has transformed largely into a factory for manufacturing student debt. In this environment, the imperative of the admin is to get as many undergrads in the door and as indebted as possible. “Diversity” and “equity,” in this context, take on perverse meanings, resonant more in the register of finance than social justice. “Inclusion,” then, means exposing more students to more debt.
In short, admin needs butts in seats, and for those butts to get stamped with a grade at the end of term. For these university functionaries, what happens in the interim—that is, the totality of teaching and learning—matters little to the functioning of this process. The efficacy of the wildcat grading strike in 2019- 20 showed this clearly. The wholesale shift to zoom university in the pandemic, with no thought of restructuring tuition in that impoverished learning environment, speaks no less eloquently.

Admin has not responded meaningfully to our labor action up to this point because they know this is how the University runs—at least it is how they run it. A week or two of lost classes doesn’t diminish the swelling coffers, nor stem the indebtedness of its students. But as grad workers, we understand that the work we do matters, and we know that it matters to our undergraduates. The admin, sequestered in their professional offices, are utterly detached from this process. So long as the next batch of student debt receipts is not interrupted, there is no need for panic. And there’s some time yet, admin reckons. They’ll soon get tired.

But we won’t. And as we continue to withhold our labor, our power and leverage will accumulate. The exams and papers that turn into grades will begin to pile up. The lack of classes will begin to threaten accreditation. Missing research data will halt publications and grants. The pressure will mount with the duration of the strike and the approach of deadlines. This is essential to understand, because however “reasonable,” or even “generous,” the current offer on the table may seem to these haughty bureaucrats, or to faculty, we know that a few percentage points above the present misery cut it. The status quo is shit. We need to shift the balance between the bosses and the workers, and not only here. We need to radically change what seems reasonable, such that what is unreasonable is a wage that can’t pay the rent. This claim takes our struggle beyond our own situation, and makes it a fight over the parameters for what is possible for workers and students everywhere. This is also why our boss is so adamant, in the words of labor relations, that cost of living is not a big factor in the wages article.

In this context, it’s a positive development for UCOP to now be openly proclaiming that our demands are incompatible with their business model, and explicitly acknowledging that they have a political dimension rather than being narrowly economic. Calls for “neutral” mediation are calls to bring all this back to earth. But the fact that secure housing or adequate childcare are unreasonable under the present paradigm shows that business as usual (or “continuity of education” in the boss’s preferred idiom) has already failed. We, of course, already knew that.

We have to stop asking what’s reasonable, and to whom, and start asking what we’re capable of fighting for. Our fellow grad workers at Columbia were out for 9 ½ weeks and won big wage raises and a huge childcare package. If we are prepared to struggle for our demands, we may be in for a long strike. The University has not been cowed into serious bargaining by a threat of force. But they can be forced to concede what we’re demanding if we use our collective power for as long as necessary.

With thousands of grad workers and postdocs striking a second day at every UC campus, the University has meekly announced that it supports “protected free speech activities.” But this is not a free speech activity. It is not a demonstration or a protest. This is an exercise of collective power.

Those of us at UC Santa Cruz three years ago, walking the familiar intersection of Bay and High, might be forgiven for thinking that something has changed at the top. Gone are the daily emails full of claims about our “illegal activity” from EVC Kletzer or then-grad dean Quentin Williams. There’s also no sign of deporter-in-chief Janet Napolitano, looming in the background, ready to issue another inimitable firing threat, signed “Yours very truly.” Most conspicuous, surely, is the absence of some 30–40 patrol cars and a rotating row of cops clad in riot gear.

Is the Drake administration really more humane than that of the former Director of Homeland Security? On one level, we can attribute the tamer response to the fact that we’re on a sanctioned ULP strike this time, rather than a wildcat. Things are “above board,” even if, as should be obvious to everybody, the UC’s bad-faith bargaining is just a sideshow to the real struggle over wages and working conditions. The pressure is off our local administration too, at least relative to last time, since the COLA demand has now gone statewide.

But if the only bargaining to transpire on day one of the strike is any indication, the Drake administration has inherited Napolitano’s hallmark ruthless attitude toward contract negotiations. While tens of thousands of workers struck ten campuses, the top lawyers at Labor Relations bickered with our SRU bargaining team over the formatting of our transit proposal (how could we possibly forget to underline previous changes at this stage of bargaining!). For all the many “impossible” things we shifted during the wildcat, we never did manage to get the University to any bargaining table.

What’s more, none of the overarching trends of the Napolitano years have wavered. The upward pressure on student tuition (and therefore student debt), interrupted momentarily in the face of the COLA movement, remains constant under Drake. Enrollments and class sizes continue to climb, even in the face of a TA shortage, at least here in Santa Cruz. Rents in campus housing have increased systemwide, and the value of UC’s invested endowment enjoys record growth. It is also clear that our demand to bring every grad worker out of rent burden is no less preposterous to Labor Relations under Drake than it was under Napolitano.

In the most important respects, Drake has done Napolitano’s legacy proud at the head of California’s biggest landlord and biggest boss. With administrators
like this at the helm — however the tone of their emails and their display of police power may vary — it is clear that the only intervention that can salvage the decline of public higher education takes the form of major and prolonged strikes. The recent wave of strikes across the country has shown that when workers fight, we win. This strike is an opportunity not only to get paid enough to live where we work, but to shift the balance of power in public education away from the bureaucrats and investment officers and back toward those actually doing the teaching and research that serve the mission that this administration pretends to.

We know that power lies with those who do the work, and the picket line is an opportunity to continue building it. The conversations and community we find here are not just an affirmation of our power, but a way to strengthen it. So what we win in this strike won’t be determined by what administrators, faculty, or colleagues think we deserve, but by how strong our solidarity and resolve is. And that has very little to do with what the bosses deem “protected free speech.”

UC INSTAGRAM: @PAYUSMOREUCSC
WWW.PAYUSMOREUCSC.COM

Let’s keep talking out here , and keep walking the picket.
Another day longer, another day stronger.

Today, more than four years since we signed our last contract and three full years since we went on wildcat strike, we begin our open-ended strike across four academic-worker units on ten campuses. Depending on how things play out, this may end up one of the largest strikes in the history of California.

For grad workers, the universal goal is the end of rent burden — to be paid enough to live where we work, or COLA. As things stand at the bargaining table, there is some $30k difference between UC’s proposal for annual wages and our own. We are asking for $54k as an annual base. They are proposing a 7% raise on current rates.

Continue reading “Day 1 at the Picket”