We stand with the graduate workers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) who are on strike in demand of a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) of $1,412 per month. UCSC graduate workers live in one of the most expensive housing markets in the country, and they need the COLA to reach a basic standard of living necessary to engage in academic labor. So far, UCSC has decided to attempt to break the strike rather than engage in any substantive dialogue with the graduate workers.
As academic workers in the fight for our first contract with Columbia, we recognize that the striking workers’ fight for better working conditions is our fight too. It is the fight for graduate workers facing exploitation everywhere. UCSC, we are inspired by your courageous struggle, and moved by the union siblings across the UC system who have come to your aid.
We reject a future for higher education that produces houselessness, food insecurity, more debt, and more precarity into our lives. And we condemn UC President Janet Napolitano for firing graduate workers fighting for a future that ensures their survival.
Therefore, we call on the University of California to reinstate the positions of the graduate workers fired, and to meet the demands for a COLA—now. Sign their union’s petition calling on the university to bargain here.
In Solidarity,
GWC-UAW Local 2110 Organizing Committee