We want to begin by acknowledging the exhaustion and anxiety many of us are experiencing. For us at UCSC, the arrival of the COVID-19 pandemic comes amidst an already tumultuous year. Like so many faculty, staff, and undergraduate students, we are tired, we are stressed, and we desperately want to see a resolution to the ongoing strike.
Over the last week, strikers have been asked, “Why, in the face of a global health pandemic, would you continue striking for a COLA?” Sometimes, this question is followed with concern for undergraduate students who, without a doubt, have endured an unusual and stressful quarter. More often, this question is posed alongside the assertion that there are much larger matters to attend to, now. While we agree that we are in the midst of a crisis, we strongly disagree that this crisis gives us reason to pause our labor action. In fact, we argue that the crisis itself gives new urgency to our strike demand and renders our victory all the more necessary. We are writing to explain why.
First, for those of us living paycheck-to-paycheck, the ability to access emergency provisions in our moment of crisis is virtually impossible. Many of us have no savings. Most of us have no family or generational wealth to draw on. The financial insecurity that compelled us to demand a COLA is now compounded by crisis-related expenses (unexpected travel, additional childcare costs, medical supplies, aid to relatives and loved ones, to name just a few).
Second, given the exorbitant cost of living in Santa Cruz, it is not uncommon for graduate student-workers to work additional jobs. These second and third jobs are necessary to supplement the inadequate wages we receive as TAs and GSIs. However, since the order to “shelter in place” began, graduate student-workers, like workers around the country, are reporting being formally laid off or told to stay home without pay (who knows for how long, though a federal report estimates at least 18 months). With people losing their second and third jobs, the demand for a COLA is the demand to survive.
But beyond the ways in which the economic precarity of graduate workers is compounded by the crisis, it also needs to be pointed out that this precarity itself compounds the crisis. The University can grant sick leave and move all instruction online, but so long as it continues to underpay its workforce, requiring grads to continue to seek out second and third jobs (now as “essential” Instacart shoppers, DoorDashers, and Amazon delivery drivers) in order to make rent in Santa Cruz, it is still contributing to the likelihood that its workers, out of desperation and unable to forego supplemental employment, will contribute to the spread of the virus. Therefore, organizing against economic precarity is very directly about addressing the conditions that produce this pandemic.
We know from the history of labor organizing that crises are most definitely not when a pause is called for in our work for a more just society. To treat a national emergency as something that must supersede all other demands we place on our employers and our governments is to all but guarantee that the crisis will be resolved to the benefit of those in power and on the backs of the most vulnerable. The greatest gains for labor of the last century came as the result of a decade and a half long national strike wave that took place in the midst of the successive crises and national mobilizations of the great depression and the Second World War. The workers who led these strikes knew that if they bracketed their demands during these global emergencies, the world that emerged would be one that was worse for working people.
The idea that a crisis is a time when everyone’s interests align in the face of a greater shared danger is a quaint fantasy. This danger is never shared evenly. In the present moment, workers around the world are taking strike action and demanding what they need from their employer to live. They are striking not in spite of the pandemic but because of it. Their demands—our demands—for economic justice are demands to end the intolerable inequality that both exacerbates and is exacerbated by the COVID-19 outbreak.
The University has the ability to negotiate with us and to resolve this matter immediately. Now, more than ever, we (and all low-wage workers) need a living wage!
Solidarity forever,
Striking graduate students