New guidelines from the Committee on Educational Policy (CEP) have resolved to replace all missing grades with Ps on May 1, 2020. After multiple failed attempts to break the strike and break solidarity between undergraduate students, grads, and faculty, the administration has turned to its only sure tactic: its heavy hand from above.
In doing so, the administration has shifted the burden of missing grades from themselves and onto the undergraduates it purports to care for and educate. We cannot allow this.
In response, the COLA strikers have decided collectively to submit outstanding Fall and Winter grades and organize for a ULP strike—a union-sanctioned and legally protected state-wide strike! We are living through a pandemic that exacerbates our existing precarity and faced with a brutal and exploitative employer that will take every latitude to rebalance power in its favor.
By submitting the grades we have carried through our struggle, we ensure that our students receive the grades they earned despite the administration’s continued indifference towards undergraduate education.
We are deeply grateful for all of the undergraduate support we have received throughout our movement. As a movement born out of precarity, we work in solidarity with all who fight for better living conditions and a quality education at UCSC.
On multiple occasions over recent months, we offered UC Labor Relations a “grade trade.” Two weeks ago, UC Santa Cruz and Santa Barbara strikers offered to submit all outstanding grades for the reinstatement of all student workers fired for striking and the retraction of all student discipline. UC administrators, once again, said no. Around 80 UCSC graduate students remain terminated. Dozens, including undergrads, face student conduct charges. Despite the global pandemic, UC is pursuing punitive measures against students. And we cannot afford rent.
Therefore, our fight continues as we move to a new phase of organizing. Our union, UAW-2865, filed two Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges against the UC for their discriminatory discipline of strikers and their refusal to bargain for COLA with the union. In addition to representing our strongest path to reinstatement, the ULP includes a call for a raise to $40,000 per year for all graduate student workers.
We urge all TAs, GSIs, tutors, and readers to sign the ULP strike pledge for a sanctioned union strike (and to join the union if you have not already). More than 3,600 grads have currently signed the ULP strike pledge across the state, with more than 2,300 currently in-unit workers. The union is pushing for 5,000 in-unit pledges before calling the strike vote, guaranteeing that we will strike in huge numbers.
Share the strike pledge with your departments and with your colleagues and comrades on other UC campuses.
Sign up to phone bank to help us win COLA.