Tag: wildcat2019

Strike Updates Day 14 / MAYDAY

Please come out Monday!

From Joe Klein
February 28, 2020

Dear Colleagues, 

I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike. 
For the 14th day, graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, staff, lecturers, and others rallied at the base of campus. For the 14th consecutive working day, metro bus drivers refused to cross the picket line in solidarity with striking graduate students. Today’s energy built from yesterday’s Radical History March and Teach In which moved across campus gathering support and teaching about the history of student and labor organizing at UC Santa Cruz. Strikers sang and chanted about the legacy of social movements that they now join, before marching down to the base where they peacefully shut down the main entrance to campus.

Just after noon today, EVC Lori Kletzer wrote to inform graduate students that they were being fired from their spring appointments. In an email which began with laughable posturing about “increasing support” and “caring deeply” about graduate students, Lori Kletzer proceeded to fire close to 100 graduate students, knowingly and willingly depriving them of housing, medical care, the ability to feed their children and families, and condemning international students to deportation. As one grad noted, “Nothing like being fired by someone who really cares.” It is worth reiterating that EVC Kletzer’s claim to have attempted to “find an amenable resolution” is false, or in a more colloquial sense, a lie. Administration has never agreed to discuss “amenable solutions” with graduate students, preferring instead to dictate the terms of a labor dispute, to call in police to arrest and brutalize students, and then to fire them unilaterally, going against the directives and wishes of the Faculty Senate, the Graduate Student Association, and the undergraduate Student Union Assembly.

This is mayday. To meet this egregious escalation, strikers are organizing for a massive week of action for this coming week 9. In an incredible show of solidarity, more than 500 graduate students have so far pledged to refuse appointments and go on strike. We will need all hands on deck to disrupt the violence of this university and to fight for a living wage for graduate workers. Faculty are called upon to get organized as quickly as possible and to move towards a full teaching strike. Together, faculty, graduate students, undergraduates, staff, and lecturers continue to fight for living wages for all of us, and for a university that works for all of us, not just the privileged or elite. And so the strike continues!

If you have ever cared about a graduate student we need you at the picket line on Monday. This is about your friends, your students, and the future of graduate education at the University of California. Please come join us in defiant celebration wearing red for education. 

As of today, UCSC has spent at least $4.2 million on police presence at the picket line. This is nearly 20% of the annual cost of a COLA for all graduates at UCSC at the rate of $1412 per month. It was also revealed today that Chancellor Cynthia Larive is in charge of a discretionary fund of approximately $120 million dollars, from which the police presence at the picket line has been paid. In other words, Larive could have paid for the entire annual cost of a COLA for all grads and still had $100 million left over in her no-strings-attached slush fund. While administration has made its priorities clear, we nevertheless, once again, invite them to negotiate in good faith to bring this strike to an end and to prevent further ongoing labor actions.

Yesterday as strikers chanted “UC UC you can’t hide, this strike’s going UC wide!,” the strike was indeed spreading like wildfire. On Thursday UC Santa Barbara began a full teaching strike to demand their own COLA and in solidarity with UCSC, while UC Davis also began a grading strike. UC Irvine, UC Riverside, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UC Merced, and UC San Diego are organizing toward strikes of their own. Meanwhile, yesterday the statewide UC graduate workers union UAW 2865 has filed Unfair Labor Practice charges against the University of California, and today Senator Bernie Sanders again called on Janet Napolitano and UCSC to negotiate with striking graduate students and stop union-busting. 

More information about the week ahead will be forthcoming but we are planning a massive “Red for Ed” rally on Monday, a Get out the Vote / Super BBQs-day on Tuesday with voter taxis, and a “Cola-chela” lineup of musical performances on Wednesday as a taste.  
Some of today’s action items: 

  • Join strikers on the picket line, beginning Monday at 7:30am. Please wear red and please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, coffee, hand sanitizer, healthy food, and large containers of drinking water are always in demand.   
  • Donate to the strike fund to support striking grads and to provide material relief to our fired grads: https://www.gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc  Please share the strike fund with your networks!
  • Faculty are encouraged to move to a full teaching strike. 
  • Cancel your classes and sections, and do not ask your students to cross the picket line, especially this coming Monday and Tuesday.
  • 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 the decision to fire nearly 100 graduate student workers. 

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–we are so grateful. 

See you Monday!
P.S. Please feel free to forward and share this message.

[From Admin] Confidential Personnel Matter

February 28, 2020

Graduate students who withheld Fall grades in departments that assign their TAships further in advance (i.e., grads who received appointments before the ultimatum to submit grades) received a “Notice of Intent to Dismiss for Spring Teaching Fellow Appointment.” This totaled 54 people.

Graduate students in departments that assign their TAships closer to the start date for that TAship are also out of work for striking. But instead of the “Intent to Dismiss” letters, they received emails like the following. This was about 28 people, for a total of about 82 graduate students fired in retaliation for striking.

Screenshot of an email. Subject: Confidential Personnel Matter. From: Office of CPEVC. Sent Feb 28, 4:51 PM. This email serves to inform you that you will no longer be considered for or receive any Academic Student Employee (ASE) appointment including such positions as teaching assistant, graduate student instructor, tutor, or reader, for the spring quarter of the 2019-20 academic year.

[From Admin] Notice of Intent to Dismiss for Spring Teaching Fellow Appointment

One of the 54 letters sent to TAs withholding fall grades on February 28, 2020. Approximately 28 other TAs received notices that they “will no longer be considered for or receive any Academic Student Employee (ASE) appointment.”

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[From Admin] Update on grade strike

Email from EVC Lori Kletzer to UCSC community on February 28, 2020, at 12:30 pm stating 54 TAs have continued to withhold fall grades and will be dismissed from spring appointments.

February 28, 2020

To: UC Santa Cruz Community
From: Interim Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Lori Kletzer
Subject: Update on grade strike

Dear Colleagues,

As you are likely aware, in an effort to better support our Ph.D. and MFA students and help address the very legitimate financial concerns they have raised, we announced and implemented a number of new campus programs to help alleviate their financial burdens – and we are working together to provide greater levels of support. Unfortunately, despite our best efforts to find an amenable resolution, 54 teaching assistants have continued to withhold fall grade information. As a result, we have been left with no choice but to take an action that we had truly and deeply hoped to avoid. As I previously shared, students who fail to meet their contractual obligations by withholding fall grade information will not receive spring quarter appointments, or if they have received them they will be dismissed from their spring quarter appointments.

We care deeply about our graduate students, value their contributions to our campus through both their scholarship and research, and their work as teaching assistants and graduate student instructors. It is extremely disappointing to us that we have to take such a drastic step, but we ultimately cannot retain graduate students as teaching assistants who will not fulfill their responsibilities. While we have been able to successfully get 96 percent of grades submitted for the fall quarter, we cannot again jeopardize our undergraduates’ education or put them in a position where they may not have the teaching resources they need to succeed throughout the spring quarter.

I want to thank all of you who have had honest and difficult conversations with graduate students about the need to end this unsanctioned strike. Our graduate students are brilliant scholars and, like you, I want to see them succeed at UC Santa Cruz and beyond. No doubt your conversations encouraged some graduate students to return to their important work.

Alongside other campus leaders, I met five times with graduate student leadership with the hope that we could resolve this unsanctioned strike and return to our shared mission of educating undergraduates and conducting research for the good of our society.

While I’ve disagreed with the tactics the graduate students have used to communicate their concerns, I do not want to downplay the gravity of those concerns. The students have highlighted a real need for greater support because of the high cost of housing in Santa Cruz and limited campus housing available to them. As a reminder, in an effort to provide more financial support and predictability for our Ph.D. and MFA students and work toward greater support overall, the campus is:

  • providing an annual $2,500 housing supplement until more campus housing becomes available for graduate students. This support will be available retroactively for this academic year for doctoral and MFA students who resume their TA/GSI appointment obligations for fall, winter, and spring quarters.
  • offering new and continuing doctoral students support packages for five years (two years for MFA students). These packages will have a minimum level of support equivalent to that of a 50 percent teaching assistantship.
  • creating two temporary housing assistance programs to support graduate students through Slug Support.
  • forming a joint Senate-Administrative Graduate Education Working Group to develop a strategic plan for appropriate and sustainable graduate program support.
  • convening a new Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Graduate Education to examine and make recommendations to improve graduate student support throughout graduate school and beyond as graduate students prepare for a range of careers beyond the professoriate. 

With a clear sense for how many graduate students will continue serving as teaching assistants in the spring, we can now begin planning for how we deliver an education to our undergraduates. As I shared at the Feb. 19 Academic Senate meeting, this is a problem for us to solve. I am committed to working closely with all impacted departments and providing additional resources so that we can continue with our mission. I will soon be visiting impacted departments to join in discussions about our curriculum.

This has been a difficult time for our campus and we have more problems to solve.

We all believe deeply in the mission of UC Santa Cruz and public higher education. We have the privilege to teach a diverse student body and provide them with knowledge and skills that can transform their lives. We have the honor to cultivate scholars who will be the next generation of professors and practitioners. And we, as professors, help reshape our world, whether it’s through ideas, inventions, and discovery.

I look forward to continuing to fulfill our tremendous mission.  

Letter to Lecturers, Workers, & Staff

February 19, 2020

Dear UCSC lecturers, workers, and staff,

We know that you cannot show your solidarity with graduate students in
all the ways you want to.

We know that it pains you to have to cross our picket line to make
sure you can pay rent and put food on the table.

We know that our strike has impacted you, whether by creating more
labor for you, slowing your commute, or otherwise inconveniencing you.

We know that workers and staff have faced intimidation from the
administration, and that some have been threatened with docked pay
because of impacts of the strike.

We know that lecturers face a particular form of precarity, absent
many protections we and others on this campus enjoy, and that even if
you want to cancel classes to support us, you might not be able to.

We want lecturers, workers, and staff to know that we appreciate you.

We want you to know that we see and cherish your efforts to support us.

We thank you for the risks you are taking to aid us.

Love & Solidarity Forever,
Striking Graduate Students

After Doomsday / Life After Death

Doomsday came and went, or was deferred until Thursday. 

Wildcat strikers stared down the UC’s biggest possible threat—mass termination—and the UC blinked, at least for now, as EVC Lori Kletzer this morning released a series of “clarifications” on the terms of her mass firing threat.

In a meeting with department chairs today, Kletzer made it clear that the $2,500 program is not a COLA designed to alleviate rent burden, nor is it an offer in response to our demand for a COLA. It is, in her words, an “incentive to go back to work.” 

If the last doomsday was the stick-version of strikebreaking (Kletzer today: “I want this strike to end”), then this is the carrot. No doubt we prefer carrots to sticks, but this is not much of a carrot.

This “program” excludes MA students as well as graduate students in their sixth year and beyond, many of whom have been delayed in their studies precisely because of the housing market in Santa Cruz. Furthermore, there is no transparency about the length of this program. Like any merely academic program, it may be revoked any year, or under the next austerity-dictated budget. It is not even a promise of non-retaliation: none of the disciplinary measures through the student code of conduct process will be paused or stopped, and disciplinary suspensions for arrestees will not be lifted.

In meetings with various academic divisions today, Kletzer repeatedly and consistently confirmed that this was neither an offer nor part of any future negotiation with strikers. Rather, this is a program that UCSC will roll out regardless of strikers’ input, with the caveat that any present or future wildcat striker, in addition to facing the prospect of dismissal, will not be eligible for this funding. Instead of opening good-faith negotiations with a collective of strikers to end the strike once and for all, the administration has simply unveiled a tactic designed to bribe individual strikers into returning to work. 

Annual rents in Santa Cruz increase by $2,500 every few years (or sooner, depending on the landlord). This “incentive” does almost nothing to address the reasons most of us went on strike in the first place.

Grads at multiple UC campuses are meeting tonight and throughout this week to decide their escalation in response to our strike and our plight here at Santa Cruz. If last week was an indication of how much the administration might be willing to budge, another week of mass action and the threat of mass action at other campuses may just tip the scales in our favor. 

We might be hearing some news very soon.

Picket Teach-in Coordination

From Jack Davies
February 24, 2020

Dear all,

We’re in the third week of our strike. Throughout, undergrads, grads, lecturers, and faculty have been running teach-ins everyday on the picket. These are wonderful learning moments and for many of us, the kinds of education that we have often wished to include in a UC curriculum. Topics have ranged from student debt and housing to horizontal education, legal observation and direct action training, and many more besides.

We are sending out this form (https://forms.gle/goYScQiRf8e6gVo86) to try to better coordinate and give advance notice of our teach-ins. If you have any plans or desires to teach or learn on the picket, on whatever topic, please fill it out and we’ll support you to make it happen.

Tomorrow, we are running our teach-ins on legal observation at 12pm and on horizontal pedagogy at 1pm.

Can’t wait.

Statement on Doomsday

At our General Assembly on February 21, COLA wildcat strikers at UCSC voted overwhelmingly to continue to withhold Fall grades beyond Janet Napolitano’s midnight deadline. 

At least 85 UCSC graduate student workers, and very likely more, have refused to submit to Napolitano and EVC Kletzer’s threat to revoke Spring appointments and block future ones. Nearly 20% of these workers are international graduate students, who now face the risk of de facto deportation. 

We are now past Napolitano’s firing deadline. Until we hear otherwise, we hereby consider ourselves terminated from our employment. 

But the momentum of the struggle is growing. We feel the collective strength of our fellow workers who have committed to act decisively in solidarity. And while the decision of strikers on the firing line underlines our resolve, it does not express the full scale of the movement for COLA. 

It does not include the 351 UCSC graduate workers who committed at the start of this quarter to withhold Winter grades, and the additional numbers who will undoubtedly be moved to withhold grades after recent events. 

It does not include the dozen departments across UCSC refusing to accept Spring appointments if UCSC terminates their colleagues—nor the rumblings of faculty organizing autonomously and across disciplines, nor the commitment of thousands of professors across the country to effectively boycott UCSC when our spring employment is void. 

Nor does it include the mass commitments of several other UC campuses to commence grading and teaching strikes in solidarity with UCSC wildcats. 

And it does not begin to capture the force of our Doomsday Rally, where over 1000 undergrads, grads, faculty, lecturers, and workers shut down both entrances to campus, leading to the cancellation of all classes on Friday. Nor the mass rallies, pickets, and building occupations across the UC on Friday and throughout last week.

We already knew, and UC now surely knows, that we are stronger than they are—that we will not submit to police violence or threats to our employment. The time to strike with us is now, because we’re striking to win.

Response to Janet Napolitano’s Invitation to Meet with UCGPC

Dear Janet Napolitano and UC community,

It has come to our attention that the University of California administration intends to negotiate the COLA demands, initiated at UC Santa Cruz, with the UC Graduate and Professional Council (UCGPC). For many reasons including, but not limited to, the fact that this organization does not represent our campus in any leadership or representational capacity, we are sorry to inform you that any decisions at which you may collectively arrive will not impact our organizing or our conviction. We have explicitly and intentionally chosen for several years not to become members of this organization, we do not pay dues, and our External Vice President does not sit on its board. Furthermore, UCGPC has nothing to do with the COLA campaign, has refused contact since its inception, and continues to fail to recognize our needs.

We continue to welcome negotiations directly with striking graduate students at UCSC, and continue to assure our comrades that all substantive decisions related to the strike will be put to a democratic vote.

No COLA; no grads,

UCSC Graduate Student Association

UAW-2865 Santa Cruz

Striking graduate students

Strike Updates Day 9

From Joe Klein
February 21, 2020

Dear Colleagues, 

I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike. 
Today was a historic day in labor history at the University of California. For the 9th day, graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, staff, lecturers, and others rallied at both entrances to campus. For the 9th consecutive working day, metro bus drivers refused to cross the picket line in solidarity with striking graduate students. Energy was incredibly high all morning as strikers donned costumes and danced to celebrate DOOMSDAY which many noted marks a new beginning, not the end, of the fight for COLA. In a massive show of strength, strikers peacefully shut down the entire campus. 

Late in the morning, a huge group of STEM graduate students marched from science hill to quarry plaza to join rallying undergraduates. From quarry plaza, a group of about 200 strikers marched to the west entrance of campus and peacefully closed it down, while allowing traffic from family student housing to flow. Meanwhile, hundreds of strikers marched through the streets from quarry plaza down towards the base of campus. A large group of faculty members met the march in front of faculty housing, and together faculty and students marched to the base of campus, where strikers had already peacefully closed the main entrance to campus. Students and faculty held a rally in the streets at the main entrance and shut down the intersection of Bay and High. Later, strikers from the west entrance marched down Empire Grade to join the main entrance picketers. By my own estimates, there were more than 1,500 students, staff, faculty, lecturers, and supporters rallying in support of the COLA movement. UCSC has now spent approximately $2.7 million dollars on the police presence at the picket line–and this is likely a conservative estimate.

Meanwhile, the COLA movement has now spread to all 10 campuses in the UC system. Today simultaneous actions were held across the state, as UCSB occupied an administrative building, UCLA held a 1-day strike, and massive rallies were held at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, UC Merced, UC Riverside, while UCSF is beginning to organize their own COLA campaign. UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, UC Davis, and UC Berkeley have all committed to striking in solidarity with UCSC strikers if threats of retaliation are carried out. Here at UCSC, hundreds of graduate students have pledged to refuse Spring TA appointments in the event of mass firings. 

Although strikers were prepared to submit grades if administration met them at the bargaining table, today in a meeting UCSC administration rejected graduate students’ attempts to discuss solutions to the strike, and reiterated their commitment to retaliation against strikers engaged in this labor dispute. Among other revelations, it was also disclosed today that UCSC administration has been censoring communications from at least some department chairs to their students and faculty, claiming the right to “vet” correspondence. 

In a stunning rebuke to administration’s punitive and divisive tactics, striking graduate students held a general assembly where they voted almost unanimously to stand together in solidarity and to continue withholding grades–and so the strike continues!

The COLA campaign was born out of the dire circumstances of graduate students at UC Santa Cruz who have been repeatedly thrown under the bus by their own administrators–administrators whose $500,000 salaries are topped off with lavish monthly housing stipends. And still, administration is and has been continually invited to negotiate in good faith to bring the strike to close. Graduate students ask for dialogue and a living wage; administration asks for obsequious compliance to a system of worker exploitation. UCSC is morally, not financially, bankrupt. 

However, today we saw something new: a new community of students, faculty, lecturers, and staff rising together in solidarity to demand the university that we want. The doomsday clock is just a few seconds to midnight, and midnight is just the beginning. 

Some of today’s action items: 

  • Join strikers on the picket line, beginning Monday at 7:30am. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, coffee, hand sanitizer, healthy food, and large containers of drinking water are always in demand.   
  • Donate to the strike fund to support striking grads and to provide material relief in the event of mass firings: gofundme.com/f/support-fund-for-striking-workers-at-ucsc  
  • Faculty are encouraged to organize among themselves and to consider striking in solidarity with graduate students. 
  • 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. 

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 streets–we are so grateful. 

See you Monday!