In the UC Santa Cruz Wildcat Strike, Class War Meets the California Housing Crisis

Posted On Mar 20, 2020 By admin With Comments Off

“This is a marathon , not a sprint, ” Sarah Mason, a graduate student in sociology at the University of California Santa Cruz, tells a gathering of several hundred students, wrapping up the fourth daytime of an unprecedented wildcat strike that has described threats of mass removal and captivated the attention of UC campuses across the state. Using a megaphone, Mason prompts them that LA coaches went on strike for six days last year and Oakland educators for seven before getting their pay causes. She asks for a show of hands to see how many wanted to continue to picket the following day. Arms shoot up all the countries of her.

Graduate student works have been on a work stoppage since February 10, refusing to teach, hold office hours, or do other part until the university satisfies their demands for a cost-of-living adjustment( COLA) of $1,412 a month to help alleviate the payment load in Santa Cruz, one of the least inexpensive casing sells in the country. This was an escalation from a grade ten-strike that over 200 grad student launched on December 9.

Strikers have replenished the field of patchy grass at the primary admission to campus every day to picket with shouts like “Pay us more, ” “No COLA , no points, ” and “Spread the strike.” Students have been handing out irrigate, sunscreen, and food. The authorities have medical and law crews on hand. There’s music–students banging on percussion instruments in the morning and Latin hip hop shell out of orators in the afternoon. There’s a guy etching wildcat typifies on people’s T-shirts. Some profs have even harbour their castes down at the picket line. The vibe has oscillated between tangible activist rampage and the buoyancy of a music fair. Grad students, joined by undergraduates in solidarity, has considerably stopped daily class activities, at times blocking the central entry to campus by sitting in the middle of the road and attaching appendages in a well-organized mass direct action that has forced the university to respond.

On February 12, after an hours-long standoff, 17 students were forcefully was detained by over a hundred police officers in full rioting gear brought in by the administration from outside the district. The repression was concluded in several hurts. Those arrested were suspended for two weeks. The police barbarism at colleges and universities that prides itself on progressive prices has shaped headlines and merely emboldened the strikers, whose chants now include “Cops off campus, COLA in my bank account! ”

Last Friday night, UC President Janet Napolitano publicized a letter threatening to fire students if they don’t call off the affect, and reiterated the university’s position that it refuses to negotiate with the students. “To accede to the demands of a group of employees engaged in an illegal wildcat strike would weaken the very foundation of an agreement negotiated in good faith by the UAW and has been approved by thousands of members across the system.”

The university has given them until 11:59 p.m. tonight to submit grades for the previous precipitate one-fourth or face dismissal. For international students on a student visa–about 30 people, in all–this is de facto deportation. For learn deputies who are parents, this could endanger a child care subsidy of $3,300 they receive per year as part of the union contract. The high ventures have challenged the unity of the strikers, as each student faces distinct and personal importances should they lose their jobs. They will be taking a vote on Friday on how to proceed, and some appear ready to submit grades.

The strike “has been a longtime coming, ” says Yulia Gilichinskaya, a student in the Film and Digital Media Department and co-president of the Graduate Student Association. She is part of a group of students that for the past year or so has been unionizing around the cost-of-living crisis. A majority of student union members in Santa Cruz elected down the statewide contract signed by the UAW in summer 2018 because the annual three-percent wage increase cannot keep up with their building costs. After Measure M on tariff command failed to pass in the 2018 midterm referendum, Gilichinskaya says, the students started to call for a campus-specific solution out of a feeling they had no other recourse. “Everyone is so damn hopeless. Some of us have been homeless and a lot of us are one paycheck away from homelessness. Housing in the Bay Area is pushing bounds in terms of what is possible in organizing.”

In Santa Cruz, downzoning is one of the prime perpetrators, according to Steven McKay, accompany prof of sociology and superintendent of the UCSC Center for Labor Studies. Since the 1990 s, district residents have voted for leadership that prioritizes single-family homes on sizable mints. Assaults to build more inexpensive, multi-family homes have been met with resistance by NIMBY organizations that push for zoning regulations and land-use policies to block new development. In Santa Cruz, many are averse to even four-story builds. “There’s a skyrocketing demand for housing, but no brand-new building, especially economical dwelling, ” McKay says. This has only intensified in recent years, as Santa Cruz became a passenger municipality for Silicon Valley. And with a student organization of over 18,000, some of whom are pinched into converted common dormitory areas colleges and universities has been under pressure for a while to build more housing. A plan to build 3,000 brand-new berths for graduate student has been frozen for over a year due to legal challenges from environmental groups.

McKay says the problem is much bigger than time Santa Cruz, and that if the university surrenders, it would propagandize the position to more amply store the entire UC system, one of the most important one supervisors in California. “California is as flush as ever. It has a $ 20 billion surplus in its budget, ” he says. “The strike is a real opportunity for UC to lead on a much bigger national issue: the funding of public higher education. The strike’s caught fire because it speaks to the real need for living wages and for indeed inexpensive college for everyone.”

Bernie Sanders

Cops drag opponents from High Street in Santa Cruz on Feb. 12, the third day of a wildcat strike by UC Santa Cruz graduate students. Seventeen beings were arrested.

Dan Coyro/ Santa Cruz Sentinel via AP

Graduate student coaches, readers and graders in the different regions of the UC system give $2,400 a few months, for nine months–around $21,000 a year–as part of their union contract with the United Auto Workers Local 2865, which represents more than 18,000 academic workers in the position. With average hires in Santa Cruz at $2,611 per month, many students live under extreme rent burden, paying 50-70 percent of their gross income on rent and utilities. Harmonizing to a report released in October 2019, over half of renter households( virtually 21,300 of all 35,734 households) in Santa Cruz County is discussed rent headache.( Rent burden is defined as spending more than 30 percent of one’s income on rent .)

“We don’t know what our paycheck will look like this month. People are afraid they won’t get paid, ” says Kelsey James, a fourth-year psychology student on affect and a member of the union. “But we also know this situation is untenable. If we didn’t do it now, parties would soon be doing the same thing. It’s simply unlivable. People are living in their gondolas. Everyone has a story about what they can’t afford.” James says she offer $1,000 for a room in a house with two other roommates, expend roughly 60 percentage of her income on housing.

In January, the university responded to the grade strike by recommending two measures for the next academic year: a $2,500 need-based accommodate fellowship; and for doctoral students, a five-year funding program that guarantees part-time teaching assistant work. Students rejected relevant proposals, which they say would only decrease their hire load by 5 percent.

While students face a hard decision on whether and how to continue their strike, their efforts have already gotten widespread attention and shocked a sense of solidarity. The solidarity has called on the university to come to the bargaining counter and reach a resolution. Members have raised over $85,000 dollars for a support fund. Students at UC Davis, UC San Diego, UC Berkeley and others have been emboldened to make their own calls for a COLA and accommodated numerous sit-ins and progress the coming week. Both UCLA students and UC Santa Barbara students revealed a willingness to go on full strike if UCSC students are fired.

UCSC faculty members have suggested the university to halt disciplinary measures and instead open a direct path of communications. Some have joined students at the picket line. The Santa Cruz City Council voted unanimously to endorse the students’ demands. The exec members of the board of the Council of UC Faculty Associations, representing module on all 10 UC campuses, published an open letter of support urging a resolution. Over 2,000 non-UCSC faculty across the country have signed a noncooperation pledge to boycott UCSC until it “provides a more equitable standard of living.” The West Virginia teachers who went on strike and successfully increased their wages in 2018, send a character of providing assistance. City bus drivers in Santa Cruz have refused to cross the protester and drive into campus. And on Wednesday, Democratic frontrunner Bernie Sanders tweeted his support for the strikers.

This strike comes really weeks after Moms 4 Housing activists in Oakland secured a win against a home-flipping business simply by reside a vacant residence. The acute load of living in California has necessitated an acute response from Californians. “Housing politics, ” McKay says, “is the new class politics .”

Mairav Zonszein is an Israeli-American journalist who moves resistance movements and all things difference. She has written for the Washington Post, the New York Review of Books, the Columbia Journalism Review, and many more. She tweets at @Mairavz.