Strike Updates, Wednesday, Feb 19, 2020
For the seventh day, hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, staff, lecturers, and others rallied at both entrances to campus. For the seventh day, all metro bus service to campus was disrupted by the picket line. In late morning, strikers at the main campus were joined by a group of faculty marching down from the women’s center in support of the cola campaign, and together students and faculty rallied at the base of campus chanting “No retaliation, yes negotiation!” Later in the day, parents, families, and children from family student housing marched from Westlake elementary school to join strikers on the picket line. Meanwhile, strikes and other actions are being organized and planned for this week at UC Santa Barbara, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Irvine, UC Davis, and UC Merced. In anticipation of Friday, COLA4ALL Organizers are inviting Janet Napolitano to the picket line at the main entrance of campus for a Firing Party on February 21. #firemejanet #bringyourowntupperware
As of today, UCSC has spent approximately $2.1 million on the police presence at the picket line. However as of today administration has so far offered nothing substantive–and so tomorrow the strike continues!
In an incredible show of support for the COLA campaign and against the threat of firing its graduate workers, today UCSC’s faculty senate passed two resolutions, the first against the use of “tattlebot” and other surveillance technology to undermine academic freedom, and the second to endorse graduate students’ call for a COLA. The second resolution, which passed by a 75% majority in a blind ballot, reads as follows:
“Be it resolved that the UC Santa Cruz Academic Senate
- Supports the graduate students’ and lecturers’ calls for higher wages commensurate with local cost-of-living increases,
- Calls for the withdrawal of sanctions against striking and arrested students,
- Affirms departmental autonomy in the assignment of TAships,
- And urges the UC Santa Cruz administration and UCOP–in dialogue with striking graduate students and lecturers whose contract ended on January 31, 2020–to work swiftly to find fair and lasting solutions that honor each of these unit’s indispensable contributions to teaching and research at the University of California.”
In doing so, the Faculty Senate joins UCSC’s Graduate Student Government and Undergraduate Student Government in officially endorsing the COLA campaign. Faculty, lecturers, graduate students, and undergraduates stand together, while university administration currently stands alone.
In addition to garnering resounding support from our own community here at UCSC, the COLA movement garnered even greater national political attention late this afternoon when Democratic Candidate Senator Bernie Sanders called on UC President Janet Napolitano to stop threatening UCSC graduate students, especially international students who face potential deportation.
Together we invite UCSC administration to come to the negotiating table so we can bring this strike to an end.
Some of today’s action items:
- Join strikers on the picket line, beginning tomorrow at 7:30am. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, hand sanitizer, healthy food, and large containers of drinking water are always in demand.
- Cancel your classes and sections, and do not ask your students to cross the picket line.
- Lecturers should consider holding their classes at the picket.
- Push back the dates of large assignments, or as some instructors have done, cancel them.
- Write to the administration asking them to come to the table to work with graduate students and to rescind threats of retaliation for students demanding the ability to live where they work.
- If you were a faculty member or student who witnessed or recorded video or photographs of police violence please write a description of what you saw and send footage to: mas1218@gmail.com.
- Share media coverage of the strike (Bernie Sanders chose this NPR story, but there is also coverage in most major media outlets).
As always, thank you so so much for your support, and extra special thanks to our undergraduates and to the faculty who have been coming out to support strikers in the street and in the senate–we are so grateful.