Donation protected
This February, 85 graduate students at UCSC were fired for their participation in a wildcat strike for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). Notwithstanding the COVID-19 pandemic presently affecting the Bay Area , the UC will be severing its students from their already meager incomes (~20k per annum) in just two weeks. In the Literature department alone, 12 graduate students are now without incomes for the foreseeable future. We have no side-jobs to fall back on, little or no savings or family support, preexisting debt, spouses and partners newly unemployed, grandparents, parents and children needing care, and emergency expenses to boot. The Literature department, which is already impacted by austerity mandates, had told us that no travel funds can be redirected to those in need, and the department is unable to create GSR (graduate student research) positions or fellowships for the fired students. Because there is seemingly no other way to support the fired students aside from individual donations, we are asking for your contributions here. Thank you faculty, fellow graduate students, and whoever else may still have a job, for your support.
Many of us have been told to give up the COLA fight and get back to work in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. We feel, however, that the crisis itself gives new urgency to our strike demand (and the demand for reinstatement). How are those of us living paycheck-to-paycheck expected to cover emergency expenses? How are graduate student-workers going to make ends meet when they've just lost their second job?
Workers need a COLA, especially now.
We know from the history of labor organizing that crises are surely not the time to call for a pause in our fight for a more just society. To treat a national emergency as something that must supersede all other demands is to all but guarantee that the crisis will be resolved to the benefit of those in power, and on the backs of the most vulnerable. The greatest gains for labor of the last century came as the result of a decade and a half long national strike wave that took place in the midst of the successive crises and national mobilizations of the great depression and the Second World War. The workers who led these strikes knew that if they bracketed their demands during these global emergencies, the world that emerged would be a world that was worse for working people.
The idea that a crisis is a time when everyone’s interests align in the face of a greater shared danger is a quaint fantasy. This danger is never shared evenly. In the present moment, workers around the world are taking strike action and demanding what they need from their employer to live. Their demands—our demands—for economic justice are demands to end the intolerable inequality that both exacerbates and is exacerbated by the COVID-19 outbreak.
The University has the ability to negotiate with us and to resolve this matter immediately. Now, more than ever, we (and all low-wage workers) need a living wage!
Solidarity forever,
Striking Literature graduate students
Many of us have been told to give up the COLA fight and get back to work in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. We feel, however, that the crisis itself gives new urgency to our strike demand (and the demand for reinstatement). How are those of us living paycheck-to-paycheck expected to cover emergency expenses? How are graduate student-workers going to make ends meet when they've just lost their second job?
Workers need a COLA, especially now.
We know from the history of labor organizing that crises are surely not the time to call for a pause in our fight for a more just society. To treat a national emergency as something that must supersede all other demands is to all but guarantee that the crisis will be resolved to the benefit of those in power, and on the backs of the most vulnerable. The greatest gains for labor of the last century came as the result of a decade and a half long national strike wave that took place in the midst of the successive crises and national mobilizations of the great depression and the Second World War. The workers who led these strikes knew that if they bracketed their demands during these global emergencies, the world that emerged would be a world that was worse for working people.
The idea that a crisis is a time when everyone’s interests align in the face of a greater shared danger is a quaint fantasy. This danger is never shared evenly. In the present moment, workers around the world are taking strike action and demanding what they need from their employer to live. Their demands—our demands—for economic justice are demands to end the intolerable inequality that both exacerbates and is exacerbated by the COVID-19 outbreak.
The University has the ability to negotiate with us and to resolve this matter immediately. Now, more than ever, we (and all low-wage workers) need a living wage!
Solidarity forever,
Striking Literature graduate students
Organizer
Hannah Newburn
Organizer
Santa Cruz, CA