UCSC Call for Solidarity

February 18, 2020

Dear graduate students at other UCs,

Our struggle for a cost of living adjustment (COLA) is your struggle as well. In this crucial moment, we fundamentally and absolutely need your collective strength to help us. We have taken enormous risks, and our fight needs your solidarity now.

This Friday, February 21 at 11:59pm is the UCSC administration’s “final” deadline for the submission of “final” grades withheld in Fall quarter, set according to the public directive of UC President Janet Napolitano. To quote EVC Lori Kletzer: striking students have been given this deadline “to submit all missing grades, to end the strike and to fulfill their contractual obligations…Those who do not submit full grade information by February 21 will not receive spring quarter appointments or will be dismissed from their spring quarter appointments.”

Rather than sit down and bargain over our demand to be paid enough to live where we work, the bosses are willing to fire hundreds of ASEs. Wildcats at Santa Cruz therefore call on graduate students across the UC to hold a one-day picket this Friday.

For many of us at Santa Cruz, including dozens of international students, these disciplinary reprisals would not only endanger our position in the UC, and our careers, but our status in this country. We believe that the best defense against this obscene possibility is taking militant, offensive action, escalating our strike, and refusing to submit to intimidation.

The administration is terrified by the prospect of this strike activity spreading. In a meeting with admin over the weekend, we were told that the University of California Office of the President (UCOP) is unwilling to negotiate a COLA because there is no perceivable uptick in labor organizing at other UC campuses. We know this to be untrue, having a far better sense of the growing momentum than UCOP.

The time to demand a UC-wide COLA is now. Walk out on Friday in solidarity against the retaliatory measures that are being threatened against your UCSC comrades, but also to build collective power in the fight for the future of higher education. Organize in your departments, committing to defend one another and insulate each other from administrative retaliation. Perhaps most importantly, help us build a credible counterthreat to this administration by pledging, in your departments and divisions, to withhold grades in the event of retaliation against Santa Cruz graduate strikers.

We have all reached a crucial moment in this struggle, one that could decide its outcome. An injury to one is an injury to all. Show up for Santa Cruz grads under attack; show up for a UC-wide COLA. Let’s go!

Solidarity forever,
UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strikers