Dear Strikers and Faculty,
We are writing in response to Lori Kletzer’s email, “Opportunities for dialogue.” First, we are encouraged by Kletzer’s willingness to meet with us. We affirm that we are ready to engage in productive dialogue in order to reach a favorable resolution to the ongoing strike. However, we are deeply concerned that the parameters of the meeting being proposed will make such a resolution impossible. We are currently pushing for a meeting that would be acceptable for us. Additionally, given our impending strike action, we are concerned that Kletzer’s email is a bad faith attempt to interrupt the momentum we have built and persuade graduate students to abandon the strongest leverage we have. We hope that this email will help you to better understand the University’s messaging today and our response to it.
Most importantly, we believe that any decision to “pause” the strike must be made by all graduate students and not a handful of representatives. We will have a General Assembly on the picket line (base of campus) on Monday, February 10 at 4:30 PM. At this meeting, we will raise the question of “pausing” the strike for all to consider. We encourage everyone to participate.
Before we contextualize, here’s the TL;DR:
- Administration has still not made any offer to meet our demand.
- Administration has still not even agreed to bargain over our demand.
- Based on the conversations we have had thus far with administration, we do not believe that another “touch base” style discussion will yield any meaningful movement towards a COLA. We need formal negotiations.
- To get us to “pause” our strike, all administration would offer is a pause on “employee disciplinary and student conduct processes for one week”. (our italics)
- Administration can meet with us.
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On January 31, Graduate Student Association co-presidents Yulia Gilichinskaya and Tony Boardman received an invitation to a “Winter Quarter Touch Base” with Vice Provost and Dean of Graduate Studies Quentin Williams and Assistant Dean of Graduate Studies Jim Moore.
Many of us remember the administration’s constant refrain about meeting to bargain with striking grads (they were apparently “precluded by law from such direct dealing” during the strike) back in the most intense days of the Fall grading strike. To us, this private “Touch Base” meeting sounded like a way for administration to roll back their initial rhetoric without actually making any concessions — to meet with us without calling it a meeting with us, just “touching base.”
This “Touch Base” meeting occurred yesterday, February 6. Leading up to the meeting, admin was unforthcoming and underhanded — the location of the meeting was not announced until 30 minutes before it began, no agenda was distributed prior to it, and two additional, unannounced participants joined 10 minutes in. These were EVC Lori Kletzer and Director of Labor Relations Jennifer Schiffner. They asked if they could join the meeting, which was already in progress; GSA co-presidents, stunned but ready for dialogue, agreed.
Kletzer and Schiffner took over the meeting. They wanted to discuss “de-escalation” options. They asked how GSA co-presidents could “pause” the strike. The co-presidents stated that not one person has this power, and only the administration can stop the strike by meeting our demands or, at the very least, engaging in good faith bargaining over the matter. Admin did suggest that if graduate students “pause” the strike, the administrators would pause further discipline. We want to be very clear; the administration has offered a week’s pause in their disciplinary action, not an end to them. In effect, the administrators have offered nothing; they have simply leveraged their disciplinary power. They admitted that discipline is an escalation on their part, and we presume they began disciplinary measures earlier this week so that they could use them as a bargaining chip today.
Gilichinskaya and Boardman reiterated that the strike will only end the way it began: when strikers vote on an offer from the administration with a dollar amount attached to it, that will bring us out of rent-burden and includes a guarantee of non-retaliation–not a pause. Since the administration did not make an offer but suggested a “pause” to retaliation, Boardman and Gilichinskaya said that the administration could put their suggestions in writing and send it to the campus community. The email from EVC Kletzer does not guarantee us any of these things we have been demanding since the beginning. In the meeting, Gilichinskaya and Boardman expressed that graduate students do not trust this administration after years of failed attempts to compel UCSC to improve their conditions.
The administration claims they are ready for dialogue. We are too, and have been since December. Yet unlike our administrators, we have maintained a consistent position. We don’t respond to threats, implicit or explicit, or to back-channel, bad faith meetings. When this administration is serious about addressing our dire conditions, we will be, as ever, open to good faith discussions. As we have said from the beginning, and as the administration has now tacitly acknowledged, nothing prevents them from meeting with us while we are on strike.
See you on the picket line!
Solidarity forever,
UAW 2865, Santa Cruz
GSA
Striking graduate students
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Sarah Mason
Doctoral Student | Research Associate
Sociology
University of California, Santa Cruz