These UC Santa Cruz Graduate Students Are Striking For Better Working Conditions

By Jessica Suriano


Brenda Arjona is a doctoral anthropology student, a teaching assistant, solitary parent, along with a resident of the University of California Santa Cruz’s family-student housing, where she pays 78 percent of her monthly revenue to her rent. In December she went on strike for better working conditions; two months later, she was fired.


As soon as Arjona and over 250 UCSC graduate students first joined forces on the picket line late last year, it was to demand that the university supply graduate-student workers a cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, to their teaching assistant pay in light of Santa Cruz’s surging housing expenditures — where over half of renters spend more than 30 percent of their household revenue, making them rent-burdened. (A recent analysis noticed that Santa Cruz is the least affordable city in the nation for educators to live.) Aside from their constant battle to avoid eviction, people who are rent-burdened often find themselves choosing between paying for housing or purchasing nutritious foods, medicines, and access to transportation.


“That’s certainly not the position you wish to be in as a parent,” Arjona told MTV News. “There's been times where we're doing so bad financially that I've Been telling my son, you know what, I can't purchase you milk this week.”


And that stress can take a toll on every aspect of a person’s life, including their job. Student workers can often integral links between professors and their students, as they are involved in designing curriculum, grading projects, meeting with students one-on-one for added help, and teaching class sections of their own. In lectures with hundreds of students, teaching assistants can foster personalized connections that make the higher education system feel far less isolating. A number of studies have noticed that undergraduate students, especially freshmen, are much less likely to quit school and more likely to have positive learning experiences once working with graduate teaching assistants.


The student workers at UCSC first determined to withhold from submitting undergraduates’ grades by the fall quarter deadline of December 18, an action the university told them was a “abandonment of your job responsibilities,” yet the movement soon escalated to a labor strike. By early February 2020, 82 student workers rejected to submit grades, and over 300 declined to teach classes, hold office hours, or conduct studies. In response, the university sent dismissal letters to 54 student workers associated with their teaching assistant positions in the upcoming spring term on February 28, and 28 other student workers were told they would “no longer be considered” for teaching positions.


Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) voiced support for the striking students the same day they were fired and criticized the university’s actions as “disgraceful,” stating that “all workers deserve the correct to bargain and strike for better wages and benefits” He also issued a demand to the University of California system president, Janet Napolitano, and to the school specifically to “stop this outrageous union-busting and negotiate in good faith.”


However better wages are only the tip of the iceberg for several student workers at UCSC, who are joining a broader movement in which students call attention to other issues they face, including immigration reform and access to health care within labor rights of the education sector. In 2019, thousands of students performed walkouts from their campuses in support of undocumented students and to denounce President Donald Trump’s attempts to rescind the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. At Brigham Young University-Idaho, students protested their university’s health insurance policy up until it was amended, and graduate student-workers at Harvard University went on strike for affordable health care that included mental health treatment.


“I think that's why a lot of us feel so compelled to continue to fight,” Arjona mentioned. “Because we visualize what we're really fighting, and it's not just the UC, it's not just the rent burden — we're fighting these larger issues, yet just at the university level.”


Arjona’s frustrations with UCSC were validated by dozens of peers, each facing unique challenges that were not being resolved by university administration. Yulia Gilich, who statistics in the Film and Digital Media department and serves as copresident of the Graduate Student Association, is facing deportation right after their participation in the UCSC strike. Their visa for international students is contingent on being employed in an on-campus job. Without a new on-campus job to replace their teaching assistant position, which was terminated as a result of the strike, Gilich could have to leave the country.


“It's notable that a lot of international and undocumented students have been at the forefront of this movement, organizing for the strike and while in the strike,” they told MTV News. “Our conditions here are particularly unlivable. So for me, it was either I try my best and I try my hardest… and I attempt to create it better, or I have to leave anyway.”


Gilich has had to move four times over the range of three years since they first relocated to Santa Cruz because their housing became unsafe for one reason or another. Some of their companions couldn’t afford to move as often, and at times resigned to living in unsanitary conditions.:  Right after first sharing a two-bedroom residence with four other students and sleeping in the living room for nine months, Sohum Banerjea, an international student in a PhD program for computer science at UCSC, secured a new residence. He was excited to finally have his own bedroom — until he walked in one day to be able to see a rat.


While these student workers later realized they shared a regular objective, they had different paths that led them to the movement. Arjona was deriving fellowship funds while in the initial two years of her PhD program, yet she soon realized the teaching assistant pay would not be enough to preserve her family member. She determined to be more involved immediately after attending a COLA rally, while Gilich had a history of organizing around local campaigns in Santa Cruz, like those for rent control measures and mutual aid programs for homeless encampments. Banerjea mentioned his department is “historically under-organized,” yet he began feeling strongly about the strike once the university administration threatened to fire the student workers. Soon, hundreds of people started meeting on the picket line for hours day-to-day and were some days met with police presence and the threat of arrest.


“This university is supposed to care about access to education for all,” Banerjea, who like Gilich uses a F1 visa to attend UCSC, told MTV News. “It's supposed have the ability to supply an environment in which anyone can come and contribute their ideas, and their thoughts, and their skills to welcoming studies, education and learning community,” he added. “It's made it clear that it's not that. It's made it clear that far because the university's concerned, the only thing that they're prepared to care about is their bottom line.”


The students’ movement, Pay Us More UCSC, called the threat of termination of employment “de facto deportation” for international students on strike. Although it’s not the only threat they’re facing: The striking students’ health care was also jeopardized soon after they obtained their notices of dismissal. The precarious positions they right now face have only been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic — and undocumented students, immunocompromised students, and students with chronic illnesses are at a special risk of acquiring inadequate care should they contract COVID-19.


“I recognize that the administration’s position is that TAs who withheld grades should lose their employment,” a pregnant PhD student wrote to the university. “But if we are allowed to remain students, do you not worry for our wellbeing as students, who cannot afford healthcare in a public health crisis?”


The student-workers’ mental health has become strained, also. Arjona experiences anxiety and panic attacks because she isn’t able to afford generic needs. First costs in the mail that are already past-due is a weekly nightmare.


“My son has watched me go through depression and have these little meltdowns and that’s another big sacrifice I never thought I’d be making in graduate school that is affecting the excellent class of life that my son is getting and that I’m getting,” she said.


In a long-awaited victory, the fired students won back their health insurance coverage on March 16. Still, they have no intention of ending the strike up until all of their necessitates, including a cost-of-living adjustment and reinstatement of the terminated jobs, are met. And according to Literary texts PhD student Nathan Osorio, choosing to continue the strike is worth the risks all the graduate students face because they don’t want the University of California system to return to its antiquated ways.


“I don't know if I can survive with myself thinking If I had the possibility to create higher education the place I thought it was growing up, that I didn't take that chance, and I left it a place of scarcity, a place where only privileged bodies and voices can be present,” he told MTV News.


The counter-offers university administration made to the striking students includes providing graduate students with an annual $2,500 housing supplement up until more campus housing is accessible, supplying five-year support packages for doctorate students, making a short-term housing assistance program, and forming a working sort to “develop a tactical plan” for graduate student support. Yet as Gilich sees it, those offers aren’t enough.


“A five-year guarantee of poverty wages isn't a good enough allocate for us to give up our power,” Gilich mentioned. “A housing supplement of $2,500 per year is not enough to bring us out of rent-burden in Santa Cruz, it's a supplement that isn't accessible to all graduate students, and will sunset as soon as the school builds more unaffordable housing. So it's certainly not something that we were taking seriously.”


In a statement emailed to MTV News, a university official from the office of UC’s president mentioned the striking students “are unfairly harming UC’s undergraduate students.” And Andrew Gordon, coworker director of media relations for the UC system, also wrote to MTV News that the strike violated the university’s contract with the United Auto Workers union (UAW 2865), which symbolizes 19,000 student-workers in the UC system; that contract expires in 2022. (The UCSC strike was first thought a “wildcat strike,” because it was not officially recognized by UAW.) As of mid-March, UAW 2865 leadership reported that 97 percent of graduate student respondents across the UC system voted overwhelmingly to ratify union necessitates to reopen contract negotiations and to fight for a cost-of-living adjustment across the state. And over 1,600 UCSC undergraduate students have signed a letter directly disputing the university’s claim that they have been harmed by the graduate students’ strike.


“Your repeated attempts to pit undergraduate students against graduate students have failed,” the letter mentioned. “As graduate students have mentored, supported, and cared for us, we plan to, in turn, support and care for them.”


More than 70 faculty members have also planned statements of support to the students while shaming the university for taking punitive measures against them, and approximately 250 faculty members signed a petition urging the university to reinstate the students’ jobs with the cost-of-living adjustment incorporated into the pay. Over 2,000 alumni of UCSC pledged to withhold any donations to the school up until the administration agrees to pay for the COLA.


“The precarity of graduate life in Santa Cruz makes it more and more complicated to recruit possible grads from diverse backgrounds,” Madeleine Fairbairn, a Environmental Statistics professor, wrote. “This is a social justice allocate. We can’t become an institution that only grants PhDs to the already-privileged.”


Camilla Hawthorne, a sociology professor, agreed. “Graduate students are the backbone of this institution, and their labor is what permits the university to fulfill its missions of high-quality undergraduate education and cutting-edge statistics production,” she wrote.


The threat of the coronavirus has also forced the students concentrate on their “digital picket” rather than their regular in-person actions. UCSC suspended in-person classes up until at least April 3 in response to the coronavirus outbreak, and discouraged gatherings of more than 50 people per Centers for Infection Control and Prevention suggestions. Even with new uncertainties on how and any time the students can organize, the impact of their mobilization has spread far in back of their own campus. Graduate students at UC Santa Barbara and UC Berkeley reported they would start their own teaching strikes for cost-of-living-adjustment stipends, while counterparts at UC Davis and UC San Diego have also launched grading strikes. And students far because the University of Oregon and the University of Maryland have voiced support for the strikes in the UC system.


“This campaign has sort of been like an earthquake in the way that earthquakes reveal the fault lines in an entire system,” Osorio said.