The University of California Strike Is Approaching Crunch Time
Grad student workers in the UC system have been on strike for the last month, and they’re now facing a crucial moment in their battle for decent pay. The biggest academic strike in US history needs all the support and solidarity we can provide.
UCLA postdoctoral scholars and academic researchers march to demand better wages, student housing, childcare, and more. Los Angeles, December 1, 2022. (Sarah Reingewirtz / MediaNews Group / Los Angeles Daily News via Getty Images)
Twenty-four years ago, I was a poorly paid graduate student who walked out of my unprotected academic job as a teaching assistant and joined a picket line at the entrance to the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus. I now enjoy the relative privilege of being a tenured professor but have returned to that very same spot to support the current graduate-student labor action.
The largest higher-education strike in US history is now in its fourth week. On November 14, almost fifty thousand University of California (UC) academic workers began an Unfair Labor Practices strike. Teaching assistants, postdoctoral researchers, and other scholars are withholding their labor. They are demanding substantial raises, a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA), increased parental leave, and other measures to cope with California’s prohibitively expensive housing market.
Not Enough to Live On
COLA is at the center of this strike. Amid soaring rents and rising inflation, the people who provide much of the instruction for the system’s 230,000 undergraduates, including grading mountains of exams and papers, can’t afford to live near most of the ten UC teaching campuses.
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