Letters: UCSC COLA Strike Meets the COunter INTELligence PROgram
Grad students working for UCSC as Teacher’s Assistants (TAs) broke from their union on February 10th to engage in a wildcat strike against the UC system. Their demands were simple and straightforward: they wanted a cost of living adjustment (COLA) of $1,412 a month in order to ease their rent burden. Santa Cruz County residents are well aware of the astronomical cost of living here. A USA Today article from February of this year listed the Santa Cruz/Watsonville area as the 7th most expensive to live in the US. For grad students working for the UC system, that means 50-80% of their paycheck goes toward rent, placing it well beyond the 30% threshold of rent burden.
According to documents published by VICE news, FBI and military-grade surveillance tech was used to track and intimidate these striking UCSC teacher’s assistants. Santa Cruz Police were granted access to federal equipment to track and monitor the strike participants. One student was approached by a police officer who was able to recite his first, middle, and last name, along with his date of birth. The student had never had a personal encounter with the officer. Other students were injured as a result of the actions on campus and were summarily suspended for two weeks for their participation in the strike. One man was grabbed by the hair and slammed to the pavement, leaving a two-inch abrasion on his scalp which incurred medical bills from an urgent care facility.
In retaliation for the wildcat strike, UC president and former Department of Homeland Security director Janet Napolitano fired 82 TAs. The UAW, representing the workers filed an Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) claim against UCSC, resulting in at least 40 employees becoming reinstated. This leaves more than half of the strikers without a job or the tuition stipend that accompanies their meager wage from the university. One grad student and TA, Carlos Cruz, was fired and suspended for two years for his role in organizing and participating in the wildcat strike. Carlos’s experience paints a worrisome picture of the UC system and the legend of radical campus activism at UCSC.
Huey Newton went to UCSC. Angela Davis taught there and is still a professor emeritus. Granted, when Newton was getting his PhD, he was stitched up on a murder charge that eventually got dropped due to lack of evidence, but the university uses student activism as a selling point to this day in promotional materials. Carlos Cruz heard the stories of radical activism as an undergrad at UCSC and believed them. He’s the first person from his SoCal community to advance to a PhD program. He is the only student organizer to have been suspended for two years for his activism. “I worked like crazy to pull myself out of the school-to-prison pipeline as a kid, and now I feel like I’m staring it in the face all over again,” he said during an interview over the weekend. “UCSC is endangering the lives and the livelihoods of grad students here on visas; there’s a disproportionate number of us who were fired that are brown or foreign. This is supposed to be a campus famous for its diversity and activism, but they don’t want diversity of opinions. They want diversity for the sake of optics.”
TAs account for more than half of the work performed in a classroom, from lectures to grades and everything in between. TAs who aren’t financially secure, which is an overwhelming majority, are left with few options should they continue to be denied their cost of living adjustment. The part time jobs they take to supplement their survival have largely vanished during this era of COVID-19, leaving far too many food-insecure after paying some of the most expensive rents in the state. Striking grad students are asking for what amounts to 0.01% of the state’s overall budget, or 4.6% of the budget allocated to the UC system. Tuition and rent will continue to increase, along with classroom size, but a future with a livable wage for TAs is more uncertain than ever. For more information, read the Cost-of-Living Adjustment (COLA) Whitepaper : https://uc-cola.herokuapp.com
Steve Poikonen, Boulder Creek
