Quick Take
More than 80% of Santa Cruz’s graduate student workers voted against the December 2022 contract that ended a historic six-week UC-wide strike. The deal, which boosts wages and child care subsidies, exacerbated a rift between workers at prestige campuses such as UCLA and those at smaller schools. The union representing UCSC grad student workers says it’s continuing to find new ways to organize and push for better employment contracts to offset the region’s high cost of living.
It’s been a little more than year since University of California graduate student workers ended their historic six-week strike and ratified a new contract that included significant raises and increases in child care subsidies.
But the union representing nearly 2,000 graduate students at UC Santa Cruz who voted overwhelmingly to reject the contract says it’s continuing to press for a better deal to help teaching assistants, tutors and researchers who are struggling with the region’s high cost of living.
More than 60% of the University of California’s 36,000 graduate student workers voted to support the contract, which was ratified Dec. 23, 2022, and expires May 31, 2025. The deal increased minimum pay for academic student employees from about $23,250 to about $34,000 for nine months of part-time work. Child care reimbursements were set to $1,350 per quarter, plus $1,350 for summer.
However, the contract also exacerbated a rift among UC campuses, with representatives from UCSC, UC Santa Barbara and UC Merced urging their members to reject the deal. More than 80% of Santa Cruz’s union members voted against it.
UCSC unit chair Jack Davies previously told Lookout he thought the majority of the campus membership voted against the deal because of the higher cost of living in Santa Cruz and workers’ confidence that they could win more concessions by continuing with the strike.
In addition, Davies said many Santa Cruz graduate student workers were against the new contract implementing a tier system for the first time among the campuses – UCLA, UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco were given a higher base pay starting at $36,500. The UC attributed the tier system to higher costs of living in those areas and the need to compete for top talent.
UCSC’s United Auto Workers 2865 head steward Rebecca Gross told Lookout recently that while the gains from the new contract were significant, graduate student workers are still struggling to make ends meet in Santa Cruz.
“It’s been considerable, but it just hasn’t made a dent in terms of what we had to pay for rent in Santa Cruz,” she said.
For example, Gross said the union is starting to push for 12 months of employment instead of the contract’s nine-month employment terms to help with the rent burden during the summer. With their campus employment ending at the completion of the academic school year, many graduate student workers leave for the summer months and return for the fall struggling to find housing – with some resorting to couch-surfing.
With the vast majority of Santa Cruz union members opposing ending the strike, union leaders told Lookout that the campus membership felt a need to continue mobilizing and to take a different approach to organizing – working with other unions on campus.
Gross told Lookout that since the ratification of the contract, union members have been building relationships with campus workers from other unions at UCSC and are preparing an event to raise awareness about worker pay.
She said they were inspired by other campuses that saw successful labor actions involving multiple unions. For example, in April 2022, workers at Rutgers University in New Jersey, did a weeklong wall-to-wall strike – meaning a strike involving workers from multiple unions – and won significant pay raises and greater job security.
“We’re trying to follow those folks’ lead and see if we can keep these cross-unit connections high and organize around our collective needs for higher wages,” Gross said.
Gross is a third-year graduate student in the literature department who primarily works as a teaching assistant. She said UCSC’s UAW leaders have been organizing with the UC Santa Cruz Faculty Association, the University Council-American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), which includes non-academic workers, as well as the unrepresented staff under University Professional & Technical Employees (UPTE).
Gross said the union isn’t yet ready to publicize what it’s planning to do, but that in January it would announce an action planned to take place in the winter quarter.
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