Tag: wildcat2019

Strike Updates Day 8

From Joe Klein
February 20, 2020

Dear Colleagues, 

I wanted to write again with some updates from the ongoing strike. 

For the eighth day, hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, staff, lecturers, faculty, and others rallied at both entrances to campus. Energy was incredibly high throughout the morning, and for the 8th consecutive working day metro bus drivers refused to cross the picket line in solidarity with striking graduate students. UCSC has spent approximately $2.4 million on the police presence at the picket line. However as of today administration has offered nothing substantive–and so tomorrow the strike continues! 

Meanwhile, the strike is spreading. Friday February 21 will be a state-wide day of action across the UC system for COLA and against administrative repression. Strikers at UC Santa Barbara have occupied an admin building in solidarity with UCSC and over 400 graduates have pledged to begin a full teaching strike on Monday if UCSC graduates are fired. Strikers at UC Irvine also occupied an admin building today and are also organizing plans for their own strike. UC San Diego strikers shut down a major library today and are staging a strike for Friday. UCLA strikers today staged a sick-out strike and along with UC Berkeley are committing to withhold winter quarter grades if UCSC fires its striking grads. Berkeley is also delivering its own COLA demands to administration tomorrow and planning for escalating to a strike. UC Riverside and UC Merced are staging rallies and organizing for their own COLA campaign, and UC Davis is also organizing a teaching strike in solidarity with UCSC and to demand their own COLA. Across California, graduate workers struggle together. 

Here at UCSC organizers are planning a double-header DOOMSDAY Rally and Party whileCOLA4ALL Organizers are hosting a #FIREUSJANET party at the picket line (these events are free and open to the public). Strikers will rally all day at the base of campus, and at 11am a DOOMSDAY Rally will be held at the Quarry Plaza at followed by a march to join strikers at the base of campus for a 12pm rally and party. All campus community members are encouraged to attend. Janet Napolitano has been invited to be the guest of honor at the #FIREUSJANET party at the base of campus. The text of the invitation for the latter (attached) reads as follows: 

Dear Janet, 

We cordially invite you to our celebration on Friday February 21st 2020 at the picket line.

As our guess of honor, we invite you to 
FIRE US IN PERSON! 

There will be good food and great music. 

#BringTupperware #FireUsJanet 

Yours very truly,
@cola4all @payusmoreucsc @thepeoples.co

In the face of administrative attacks on students and our departments, many voices are now calling for building toward a general strike for all UCSC workers if our graduate workers are fired. To this end, there is discussion of faculty beginning to organize in consideration of a full teaching strike if UC admin should choose to fire its graduate students. Together as graduates, undergraduates, faculty, staff, and lecturers across the state, we are re-imagining what solidarity and mutual aid can look like at the University of California. 

Some of today’s action items: 

  • PLEASE COME OUT FOR A DOOMSDAY / #FIREUSJANET PARTY! Join strikers on the picket line, beginning tomorrow at 7:30am, with a rally at 12pm. If you are so inclined, costumes are encouraged. Please bring friends! You can also bring supplies: sunscreen, hand sanitizer, healthy food, coffee, costumes for your friends, 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  
  • 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. 

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. 

See you tomorrow!

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UCSC international graduate students on strike | Statement against de facto deportation

February 20, 2020

We are international graduate students at UC Santa Cruz on strike for a cost of living adjustment.

A February 7 email from UCSC’s International Student and Scholar Services stated that “actions that result in student discipline or arrest may have immigration consequences, both on our current status and on possible future immigration applications you may make in the United States.” On February 14, EVC Lori Kletzer and UC President Janet Napolitano made this implicit threat of deportation a reality by threatening to revoke Spring 2020 work appointments for striking graduate students.

We can only assume that the UC administration understands that this is a de facto threat to deport dozens of international graduate students at UCSC. With the termination of our spring employment, we lose tuition remissions, without which we cannot remain enrolled full-time and without which our visas become forfeit. We have no protections and no guarantees, especially those of us from the global South, for whom student visa reapplications can be an uncertain and nightmarish process.
We see these threats as consistent with Janet Napolitano’s history as chief of the Department of Homeland Security, and we do not take them lightly. The UC has imperilled our futures in this country for participating in labor actions for living wages. We have no reason to believe that submitting grades and ending our strike activities will keep any of us safe from retaliation.

Many of us applied to study at UCSC for its tradition of scholar-activism, its social justice mission, and its stated commitment to diversity. Some of us took on financial and emotional risks by deciding to come to the U.S. for work and study in a Trumpian political climate of travel bans and anti-immigrant sentiment. All of us understand that our labor as teaching assistants is an indispensable component of the research and educational vision of this university.

The restrictions we face as visa holders drove us to go on strike in the first place. Under conditions of severe rent burden, many of our fellow graduate workers are forced into additional academic employment or low-wage side jobs. These options are unavailable to international students. We cannot take more than a 50% employment load on campus and are prohibited from seeking off-campus employment. We find it extraordinarily difficult to develop credit histories to support our tenant applications to local landlords.

We are on strike because our situation in Santa Cruz is untenable. For us, the most recent threat is only the formalization of our existing reality. ​Having recruited us to an unlivable situation, the UC is now making our status in this country impossible.

—
Tony Boardman
Pronouns: he/him
Rent Burden: 50% (what’s this?)
University of California, Santa Cruz
PhD candidate in Literature
I SUPPORT THE COLA CAMPAIGN
—

Strike Updates Day 7

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

  1. Supports the graduate students’ and lecturers’ calls for higher wages commensurate with local cost-of-living increases,
  2. Calls for the withdrawal of sanctions against striking and arrested students,
  3. Affirms departmental autonomy in the assignment of TAships,
  4. 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. 

March for COLA, 11am Quarry Plaza

February 20, 2020

Dear grads,

Tomorrow will be big. Undergrads, faculty, lecturers, STEM, and townies are all marching for COLA and joining us at the base of campus for a rally. 

Contact your sections and invite undergrads to the march starting at 11am in Quarry plaza tomorrow, Feb 21. Let your students know that TAs engaged in the strike for a living wage might get fired and need undergrad support. We’ve seen incredible solidarity from undergrads since we first went on strike and this movement would not be possible without them! 

Reach out to your departments, text your friends, and turn out yourself! Picket starts at 7:30 and after everyone marches for COLA to the base of campus, we’ll have a big rally at 1PM.

We encourage everyone to wear costumes–let’s have fun before having to make a serious collective decision at the General Assembly (Friday, 4:30PM, Oaks 105).

Solidarity forever which is way past Doomsday!
Striking Graduate Students

STEM will meet at 10:45 am in the E2 courtyard and walk together to the quarry plaza to join the undergrads.

Everyone is welcomed!

United we fight. STEM won’t break the strike!

DOOMSDAY Flyer Feb 21 (PDF)Download

A Brief History of Wildcat Strikes

by Dana Frank, Professor of History Emerita, UCSC

In responding to the UCSC graduate students’ strike, the UC Administration has aggressively stressed that this walkout is “unsanctioned” by the UAW leadership and therefore, as a “wildcat” strike, is illegitimate and the University of California has no obligation to bargain.

However, many of the most powerful, successful, and popular strikes in US history have been wildcats. The concept of a “wildcat” strike is in fact a modern one, that grew out of a particular historical context that no longer exists. Before the 1930s, large groups of workers, with or without union approval (or sometimes even unions), commonly just withdrew their labor and made demands of employers, who could then choose to accede to those demands or not. The outcome was not necessarily enshrined in a contract. Only with the rise of the New Deal industrial relations system did the legal structure of the National Labor Relations Act codify a bureaucratic system of federally-managed elections, “collective bargaining,” and seemingly binding contracts–in which some unions chose to forgo the right to strike during that contract, in exchange for other gains.

During the years of powerful national unions, from the late 1930s through the 1970s, that system benefited many workers, in a context of countervailing powers and a federal government that generally accepted unions. But when both employers and the government broke out of that model beginning in the 1970s and turned aggressively against labor, contracts worsened dramatically. Gains for workers plummeted and contracts covered fewer and fewer workers within a given firm. Employers, always negotiating on a playing field far from equal, continue to force unions under duress to give up their right to strike. They exalt the sanctity of union contracts while themselves routinely violating agreements, laying off workers by the thousands simply because they chose to, or closing up shop altogether.

A “wildcat” strike means the strike is not “sanctioned,” that is, officially endorsed by a national union with which a local group of workers is affiliated. But some–but by no means all–of the national-level unions that control contracts in the US today are famously undemocratic. These routinely thwart democratic decision-making by rank-and-file members; they in some cases can negotiate contracts without consulting members; they repress union militancy rather than unleash it, in order to defend their own bureaucratic entrenchment. The more progressive national unions, by contrast, understand that rank-and-file militancy is the key to power. The United Auto Workers, with which the graduate students are affiliated, has long been one of the most famously undemocratic unions in the country. Its current leadership is facing criminal charges for corruption.

In the face of undemocratic, compromised leadership, workers in the US have routinely chosen to engage in “wildcat” strikes without national-level approval. Many of the most famous and crucial strikes in the modern US history have been wildcats, including the 1968 Memphis Sanitation Workers’ Strike, the 1970 national postal workers’ strike, and the recent 2018 West Virginia teachers’ strike. Unsanctioned strikes can mean workers forgo certain vital resources of solidarity, such as the support of Central Labor Councils and of unions whose own contracts give them the right to refuse to cross the picket line of another union only if that strike is sanctioned by the local’s national leadership. But wildcats also open the door to other forms of solidarity and creative militancy, and in many cases the previous hostile national leadership is forced to support the strike and, along with it, more militant demands.

The UC administration, then, can choose to assert the sanctity of a contract and stress that the UAW leadership has not approved this strike. But US labor history makes clear that contracts, and national-level systems of bureaucratic control, have always been simply tactics utilized by management or labor or both, as they chose or did not choose. Working people have a long, successful, and celebrated history of improving their lives–and those of others–using a far broader toolkit and a far broader vision of what democracy, and justice, look like.

International Students Statement

We are international graduate students at UC Santa Cruz on strike for a cost of living adjustment.


A February 7 email from UCSC’s International Student and Scholar Services stated that “ actions that result in student discipline or arrest may have immigration consequences, both on our current status and on possible future immigration applications you may make in the United States.” On February 14, EVC Lori Kletzer and UC President Janet Napolitano made this implicit threat of deportation a reality by threatening to revoke Spring 2020 work appointments for striking graduate students.

We can only assume that the UC administration understands that this is a de facto threat to deport dozens of international graduate students at UCSC. With the termination of our spring employment, we lose tuition remissions, without which we cannot remain enrolled full-time and without which our visas become forfeit. We have no protections and no guarantees, especially those of us from the global South, for whom student visa reapplications can be an uncertain and nightmarish process.

We see these threats as consistent with Janet Napolitano’s history as chief of the Department of Homeland Security, and we do not take them lightly. The UC has imperiled our futures in this country for participating in labor actions for living wages. We have no reason to believe that submitting grades and ending our strike activities will keep any of us safe from retaliation.

Many of us applied to study at UCSC for its tradition of scholar-activism, its social justice mission, and its stated commitment to diversity. Some of us took on financial and emotional risks by deciding to come to the U.S. for work and study in a Trumpian political climate of travel bans and anti-immigrant sentiment. All of us understand that our labor as teaching assistants is an indispensable component of the research and educational vision of this university.

The restrictions we face as visa holders drove us to go on strike in the first place. Under conditions of severe rent burden, many of our fellow graduate workers are forced into additional academic employment or low-wage side jobs. These options are unavailable to international students. We cannot take more than a 50% employment load on campus and are prohibited from seeking off-campus employment. We find it extraordinarily difficult to develop credit histories to support our tenant applications to local landlords.

We are on strike because our situation in Santa Cruz is untenable. For us, the most recent threat is only the formalization of our existing reality. Having recruited us to an unlivable situation, the UC is now making our status in this country impossible.

This statement was released by international students on February 19th, 2020.

Friday Undergrads4COLA March

February 19, 2020

The doomsday clock is close to midnight. Janet Napolitano has spoken. If wildcat strikers do not submit grades and cease their strike activities by 11:59pm on Friday, February 21, over 200 graduate student workers risk being fired en masse by the UC. 

The time to show up is now. The Undergrads for COLA Doomsday Rally and March is this Friday in the Quarry Plaza at 11am. 

If carried out, the consequences of this mass firing will be severe. For many strikers, it would spell the end of academic careers at UCSC. For the many international grad students on strike, this means de facto deportation from the United States. The sudden absence of hundreds of TAs from campus will drastically limit the ability of academic departments to offer classes, impairing the ability of many to graduate. Undergraduate education, especially in the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Arts, is likely to take a historically unprecedented hit. Contrary to the administration’s claims that they have your safety and well-being in mind, they propose sacking hundreds of graduate students—those who most closely mentor and supervise undergraduate academic work conducted at UCSC.

This Friday, we need your solidarity and your collective strength more than ever. Rally with us on Doomsday in the Quarry. March with us to the base of campus, where we will be joined by contingents from other rallies on campus—Faculty for COLA, STEM for COLA, Lecturers for COLA, and the many autonomous groups of students and workers springing up daily.  

Solidarity will ripple across the UC system as the strike spreads. Our rally coincides with rallies and pickets planned at UC Davis, UCLA, UC Riverside, and UC Santa Barbara. 

Beyond the UC, many thousands of workers, students, professors, members of the national media, the City Council of Santa Cruz, and a U.S. presidential candidate have thrown their support behind our movement. Which side will you be on when the clock strikes?

Undergrads for COLA! Solidarity forever!

DOOMSDAY Flyer Feb 21 (PDF)Download

Strike Updates Day 6

Strike Updates, Tuesday, Feb 18, 2020

For the sixth day, hundreds of graduate students, undergraduates, faculty, staff, lecturers, and others rallied at both entrances to campus. For the sixth day, all metro bus service to campus was disrupted by the picket line. In the afternoon, a huge group of STEM graduate students wearing lab coats once again marched to join the picket line, and joined strikers in peacefully shutting down the main entrance to campus, for the sixth consecutive working day. As of today, UCSC has spent approximately $1.8 million on the police presence at the picket line. By the end of this week, the figure will be approximately $2.7 million. Administration has so far offered nothing substantive–not even non-retaliation for those who they are asking to capitulate–and so tomorrow the strike continues!

In response to the cartoonish threats of administration and UCOP to fire hundreds of graduate students for participating in the strike, COLA strikes and actions are planned at every UC campus for this week. Tomorrow UCLA graduates are staging a sickout strike, and UCSB is considering going on a full strike to demand their own COLA. Meanwhile, UCSC undergraduate student government announced that they are introducing resolutions to investigate the offices of UCOP and UCSC administration, and to explore recalling EVC Kletzer for endangering students and negligence in the handling of this crisis. 

Tomorrow the UCSC faculty senate will meet to vote on two resolutions, one condemning the threats of the university to fire its graduate students and the infringement on faculty rights and academic freedom, and a second calling for higher wages and departmental autonomy in hiring and advocating for a meaningful resolution to the strike. 

To be very clear: The university’s current position is that they would rather destroy entire departments, including almost all of the social sciences and humanities at UCSC, and fire hundreds of graduate students than to have a single substantive meeting to discuss a solution to the cost of living crisis. This would willfully lead to graduate student homelessness, lack of access to medical care, and deportation for graduate students who already barely get by. That position is hopelessly reckless and must be abandoned. 
Alternatively, strikers once again invite the administration to the table to have a substantive conversation about the material conditions in which we live and to bring the strike to a peaceful end. 

Of note: More than a few strikers are ready to begin pushing for a university in which administrators are made irrelevant, and in which workers–faculty, students, and staff–govern the university collectively. One supporter asked: How much longer until we abolish the UC Regents and truly return this university to its core missions of teaching and research by placing it in the hands of its teachers, students, and scholars. 
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. 
  • FACULTY: Please attend tomorrow’s faculty senate meeting and vote in favor of the resolutions condemning administration’s threats and in support of the COLA campaign. 
  • 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 about how you feel about Lori Kletzer and Cynthia Larive threatening to fire hundreds of graduate students for demanding to be able to afford 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. 

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 tomorrow!

Notice of Violation of UC-UAW CBA

From: Sheila Kulkarni, Recording Secretary of the UAW 2865 Bargaining Unit at UCSB
To: Napolitano, Regents, Larive, Kletzer, Williams
CC: COLA UCSC and COLA UCSB lists
Date: Feb 18, 2020, 4:50 PM
Subject: Notice of Violation of UC-UAW CBA

Dear UC President Napolitano, and all others it may concern,

I hope this email finds you well. My name is Sheila Kulkarni, and I am the Recording Secretary of the UAW 2865 Bargaining Unit at UC Santa Barbara. 

First, I would like to thank you for your unwavering dedication to upholding our hard-won union contract. In your own words, “the obligations between the University and its unions are negotiated and memorialized systemwide in collective bargaining agreements.”

As such, I am obligated to inform you that your notice dated Friday, February 14th, 2020, indicating that strike participation “will have consequences, up to and including termination of existing employment at the University” is in violation of the UC-UAW Collectively Bargained Agreement (CBA), Article 3 (Appointment Security), Section D.

Article 3 Section D of the UC-UAW CBA states that an Academic Student Employee (ASE) appointment cannot be revoked when promised unless a student has become “academically ineligible.” Per a previous email from Veronica Hamilton, UAW 2865 Bargaining Unit Chair at UC Santa Cruz, the University is in receipt of at least 80 union grievances regarding fraudulent student conduct charges brought against striking TAs. As the University has already violated Article 8 (Discipline & Dismissal) subsections A and B by issuing these student conduct summons, the University has no standing to terminate ASEs who have been promised employment in spring quarter.

To be clear, if you are a TA who has been promised an appointment for spring quarter in any way, formally or informally, verbally or in writing, this statement from President Napolitano is in clear violation of your union rights. To remedy this, please get in contact with me or anyone on our contract enforcement team at santabarbara@uaw2865.org to file a union grievance. We are more than happy to help file grievances on behalf of our colleagues at UC Santa Cruz. 

It is shameful to see the UC administration so plainly transgressing the UC-UAW CBA that they have cited multiple times (falsely) as a way to avoid negotiating with UCSC graduate students. As such, I hope this issue can come to a speedy resolution in which the University revokes these baseless threats. I look forward to working with all parties involved. 

All the best,

Sheila Kulkarni
they/them/theirs
Rent Burden: 37% (what’s this?)
Ph.D Student, Department of Chemistry & Biochemistry
Unit Recording Secretary, UAW 2865
University of California, Santa Barbara

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