Reinstate Fired UCSC Grad Student Workers!

Victory to University of California Strikers!

MARCH 2—For three weeks, a wildcat strike of graduate student workers at the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC) demanding a cost-of-living adjustment, or COLA, has thrown a spotlight on the economic misery of those facing skyrocketing housing costs and falling wages. On February 27, the strike spread to UC Santa Barbara and to UC Davis, where grad students are withholding grades until demands for higher pay are met. UC grad students, who are organized by United Auto Workers Local 2865, walked out without official union authorization. In retaliation, last week the campus administration charged Local 2865 with violating the union contract’s no-strike clause for not stopping the wildcat action. The administration went on to vindictively fire 54 UCSC grad student workers and declared at least 30 others ineligible for teaching jobs. In response, a day of campus protest, including a strike by UCLA grad students, is planned for March 5. Give UCSC grad students their jobs back! Down with UC’s vendetta against strikers and their union!

From the first days of the strike in Santa Cruz, graduate students and their supporters faced off against phalanxes of police. On February 12, the picket lines were brutally assaulted by over 100 riot-equipped cops, with 17 people arrested and banned from campus for two weeks. Fired grad student workers include those on immigrant visas who now may be deported. This is hardly a surprising move by UC President Janet Napolitano who, as secretary of Homeland Security under the Obama administration, ran the massive war on immigrants. No deportations! Cops off campus! Abolish the university administration!

Grad students working as teaching assistants, researchers and graders receive poverty-level wages (at UCSC around $20,000 a year) while being saddled with tens of thousands of dollars in student debt. Those who work and study in the UC system are on the receiving end of the state’s budget slashing, with graduate teaching assistants used as cheap labor while the university cuts back on the number of fully-paid tenured professors. In Santa Cruz, one of the commuter towns for well-heeled Silicon Valley tech workers, the average monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment is roughly equal to the meager monthly wage of a grad student worker (who is paid only nine months of the year). Crowded and costly student housing is a reality for all of the UC campuses. This is only the tip of the iceberg in a state that has more than a quarter of the entire U.S. homeless population.

College campuses reflect the race and class divisions at the core of this profit-driven order. Grad student workers have been justly adamant that their demand for higher compensation not be at the expense of students who are already paying extortionate tuition fees. The same working-class and poor families that are being driven from their homes have long been priced out of a university education. Black people, forcibly segregated in the mass at the bottom of American capitalist society, are systematically cast out. The strikers’ demands pose the larger question of struggling for decent, affordable housing and free, quality, integrated education for all. To open the doors to higher education for everyone requires a fight for free tuition, open admissions and a full state-paid living stipend for all.

While the defiant struggle at UCSC has had an impact, grad students are a petty-bourgeois layer who on their own have little actual social weight. What is needed is the active solidarity of the working class, both on and off campus, which, by withholding its labor, could beat back the bosses’ attacks and give some real teeth to this fight. Those ground down under UC’s boot include AFSCME Local 3299 campus service workers who went three years without a contract while the administration handed their jobs to private contractors paying miserable wages. Earlier this year, Local 3299 carpenters, electricians and other skilled workers at UCSC struck over substandard staffing and pay, citing their inability to afford housing in Santa Cruz.

City bus drivers have refused to cross UCSC picket lines. Several campus unions, including Local 3299 and those representing faculty and lecturers, have declared their solidarity with the grad students’ current demands, but real solidarity isn’t words on paper—it means honoring the picket lines. All campus unions must respect and help build the picket lines to stop anyone from crossing and shut down the struck campuses tight. Picket lines mean don’t cross! For one UC-wide union of all campus workers!

It was an important victory that in 1999 UC graduate students won union recognition after years of struggle. This time around, UCSC grad student workers were compelled to launch a wildcat strike for the cost-of-living adjustment because the Local 2865 leadership refused to mount any struggle, hiding behind the union contract’s no-strike clause. This same leadership earned the mistrust of many when it rammed through the 2018 contract in the face of widespread opposition to the paltry offer of a 3 percent wage increase. Today, instead of approving and extending the strike, the union leadership’s strategy is to file grievances and an unfair labor practices complaint with the bosses’ Public Employment Relations Board as a substitute for a real fight.

By bowing down to the bosses’ laws and contractual no-strike pledges, the labor bureaucrats have emboldened the strikebreaking assaults that have gutted the unions in this country. This subservience is rooted in their pro-capitalist outlook and allegiance to the class enemy and its political representatives, particularly the Democrats. The unions are the basic defense organizations of the working class against capitalist exploitation. It is crucial to forge a new leadership of the unions that will stand up for the interests of workers and all the oppressed. That leadership would be committed to the fight to build an independent party of the working class, one that could be forged into an instrument to lead a socialist revolution.

Today, Bernie Sanders, who has tweeted support to the grad student strikers, is touted as standing up to the “billionaire class.” Yet Sanders is a bourgeois politician running as the presidential candidate of the Democratic Party, which, no less than the Republican Party, represents the exploiting class. His priority is to defend the interests of American capital against the exploited and oppressed. Calls for “Medicare for All” and for canceling student debt, which Sanders puts forward, speak to the felt needs of the majority of the population, but these will never come about by crawling for a capitalist politician, no matter how “progressive” the rhetoric. Like every gain wrested from the U.S. rulers, reforms like these will be won only through hard class and social struggle.

Support to Sanders channels discontent into the electoral con game where “the people” pick their poisoner among contenders for the highest office of U.S. imperialist rule. Sanders seeks to refurbish the credentials of the Democratic Party, which has overseen wholesale attacks on public education and living conditions of the working and poor masses, including black people, immigrants and debt-stricken students. Just look at California, the bluest of blue states, where the filthy rich live it up amid the despair of those at the bottom.

The repression against UC grad student workers shows how the campus administration and the Board of Regents (a rogues’ gallery of powerful California executives, bankers and government officials) are the agents of the capitalist class on campus, enforcing austerity, busting unions and repressing student protest. We call to abolish the UC Board of Regents and the administration. Those who work, study and teach at the universities should run them—for worker/student/teacher control! This points to the question of who rules this society. As communists, our fight is to advance class and social struggle against this depraved system of poverty, racism and war, not to strive for what might be possible under capitalism. Our aim is the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist class rule and the establishment of a workers state as a transition to a classless, egalitarian society, in which the wealth of this country will meet the needs of the many, not the profits of the few.