Affording Play

As I write this, there’s a wildcat strike going on at UC Santa Cruz. Since December last year, graduate student teaching assistants and instructors have been withholding final fall quarter grades as part of their campaign for a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) to help them afford to live in Santa Cruz. Santa Cruz is one of the most expensive places to live in the United States; an average one-bedroom apartment here runs about $2600 per month in rent, and the prorated UCSC TA salary comes out to around $1800 per month.

Moreover, as of last Monday, the campaign has escalated from a grading strike to a full strike. Since then, picketing at the entrances to the main UCSC campus has intermittently shut down the campus altogether, and many classes, meetings, events, and other activities have been cancelled, held remotely, or otherwise disrupted.

There’s been a bunch of news coverage of the strike already, including the police violence inflicted on graduate and undergraduate students at Monday and Wednesday’s protests, so I won’t spend too much time on the history of the campaign here. Instead, I’m going to focus on the most recent development, and what it might mean for the future of UCSC and the University of California as institutions.

Last night, Friday, Feb 14, at around 6pm – presumably in an attempt to bury the story – two emails were sent out by UCSC and system-wide University of California administration. The first email, from UCSC vice chancellor Lori Kletzer, was sent to UCSC faculty. It instructed them to tell their grad students that any grad students who don’t submit fall quarter grades by EOD next Friday, Feb 21, will be dismissed from their spring quarter appointments. This email was more or less immediately leaked to grad students.

At around the same time, a second email signed by Janet Napolitano – the president of the whole UC system – was sent out to everyone at UCSC. This one, being public, has been more widely reported. However, the threats it contains are vaguer: no specific deadlines are mentioned, and it states that strikers will face consequences “up to and including the termination of existing employment at the University.” This may be an attempt to keep the details of the threats made in the first email under wraps, possibly because these specific threats are going to be really hard to actually enforce.

At present, it can be conservatively estimated that somewhere between 200 and 400 grad student TAs and instructors are on strike. This constitutes at least 25% (and maybe up to half) of all the grad student TAs and instructors across UCSC as a whole, of whom there are typically about 800 per quarter. There are several academic departments at UCSC in which the strike is so widespread that firing every striking TA would result in the department being almost entirely unable to hire any grad student TAs in the spring. These aren’t small departments, either: many of the striking TAs are helping to run classes with hundreds of undergraduate students each. Moreover, several of the striking departments already have trouble every quarter finding enough TAs to teach all the classes they offer.

So a spring quarter at UCSC without any of the striking TAs would be chaos. Instructors would have to do a ton of heavy lifting themselves just to make these classes run, and the quality of undergraduate education would be immensely degraded. And I haven’t yet spoken to any faculty about this myself, but I can’t imagine they’re too happy about the threat of having their departments and labs pulled out from under them, nor the prospect of delivering this news to their close collaborators and mentees themselves, as the Kletzer email instructs.

Oh, and the admin doesn’t have any plans regarding what to do once they fire everybody. To quote from the Kletzer email:

Contingency plans will be developed to mitigate the issues this will create once we understand who has returned to work and who has not. I understand that this is going to result in challenges but believe at this point, it is our best option.

The ultimate question, therefore, is whether the UC Office of the President is willing to irreparably damage UCSC’s educational and research capacity, not to mention its reputation, in order to suppress the strike. And there’s no guarantee that the strike wouldn’t spread to other UC campuses anyway, even after its suppression at UCSC. A number of other campuses are holding graduate general assemblies on Tuesday, at which point it’s expected that at least some will begin their own strike campaigns.

Throughout the COLA campaign, the admin’s line has been that the strikers are harming undergrads. At this point, between the aforementioned police violence against students and the new threat of burning several major UCSC academic departments to the ground, it seems increasingly clear that the greater harm to undergrads by far originates directly from the UC Office of the President.

In short: it’s time for a week-long game of chicken with Janet Napolitano.

q&a

Why is UCSC striking? It’s a long story, but basically, the last union contract between the UC and the system-wide union that represents UC TAs was signed into effect by a majority of system-wide TAs, despite its rejection by a overwhelming majority of the UCSC TAs. UCSC rejected this contract because it failed to provide sufficient compensation relative to the dramatically increased cost of living in Santa Cruz relative to the cost of living near other UC campuses. You can learn more about the history of the campaign at the official campaign website, which also contains a whole bunch of other useful information.

How can they just fire everyone? Aren’t there protections against that? The current contract contains a no-strikes clause, which means that UCSC TAs aren’t supposed to be striking, and can’t officially be supported by the union in their strike efforts. A “wildcat strike” is an unsanctioned strike by on-the-ground union membership, and that’s what we’re looking at here.

What can I do to support the strikers? There’s a strike fund to which you can donate! If you’re faculty, there’s also a non-UCSC faculty pledge of solidarity with the strikers that you can sign. Alumni and donors should consider calling the school to complain and/or retract their pledges, and Californians in general can contact their representatives.