Drop the Rent – pay us more ucsc

We come into the COVID crisis after months of struggling to be paid enough to live in Santa Cruz, one of the most expensive rental markets in the US.

More than 80 of us were fired in the process, now scrambling without our second and third jobs. Undergraduates are choosing between grossly overpriced housing on a closed campus and the uncertainty of securing housing in a closed economy. Residents of Santa Cruz, losing their “non-essential” jobs, remain compelled to participate in the “essential” economy—paying rent to landlords.

Although all residents of Santa Cruz lived in a crisis long before COVID, it is especially acute and urgent now.

A group of Santa Cruz housing activists and organizers from the COLA movement at UCSC ask you to fill in this survey (droprentsc.com). We are developing a network of tenants, both affiliated with UCSC and not, to gauge the political will for tenant organizing in Santa Cruz around rent forgiveness, eliminating rent burden, and forming mutual aid networks.

If our county won’t introduce proper rental protections, if our employers will not pay us enough to live here, if our state won’t support us through the pandemic,

Then we will drop the rent ourselves.

Mission

We are TAs, GSIs, Tutors, Readers, Student Researchers, Fellows, Postdocs, and Academic Researchers at UCSC. We are represented by our union, UAW 4811 (Formerly UAW 2865 and UAW 5810). In 2019/2020, workers at UCSC withheld labor for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA), and in 2022, our statewide union struck for 6 weeks over a COLA, arguing for a 54k base wage for all academic workers with the goal of raising the living conditions of academic workers across the state. Now, we are on strike for Divestment, Disclosure, Transitional funding for researchers, & Amnesty for all protestors.