Fired UCSC graduate students given path to reinstatement under union deal

Dozens of graduate-student workers fired for engaging in a wildcat strike at UC Santa Cruz have a path to reinstatement this fall under a deal reached between the campus and the students’ union.

SANTA CRUZ — Dozens of graduate-student workers fired for engaging in a wildcat strike at UC Santa Cruz have a path to reinstatement this fall under a deal reached between the campus and the students’ union.

The UAW 2865 union committed to drop an unfair labor practice charge against UCSC as part of the settlement, which also includes an agreement to shift student-conduct sanctions to employee warning letters for teaching assistants who deleted grades as part of a strike.

Warning letters issued to 245 students for initially refusing to submit grades can also be removed from students’ files under the deal, at least for the majority of students who eventually submitted the grades.

“As the campus continues to prepare for fall quarter, we can close some of the chapters of a turbulent past academic year,” UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive and campus provost Lori Kletzer wrote in a campus message Thursday.

The two campus leaders acknowledged that some claims resulting from the wildcat strike remain unsettled, calling the agreement “a small yet important step for our community, one we believe sets us up for a stronger future together.”

Veronica Hamilton, UCSC’s UAW 2865 unit chair and a psychology doctoral student, is among at least 75 students who were dismissed or barred from teaching positions for alleged wildcat strike activity.

In an interview Thursday, Hamilton said polling found support for the deal from a majority of union members caught up in discipline related to the strike. But the settlement doesn’t extend as far as she would have hoped.

“The deal ensures some things that we do need, but it is such an incredibly small step,” Hamilton said. “It’s hard to feel proud of this deal when it doesn’t include things like full reinstatement and withdrawing of all discipline.”

According to Hamilton, the path to reinstatement divides fired graduate students into two groups. About 35 students who were barred from appointments they had yet to receive are now eligible for reinstatement, she said.

A larger group of more than 40 students that were dismissed from spring appointments, herself included, will still need to go through an expedited arbitration, she said.

“They should have reinstated everybody,” Hamilton said. “And that is something that we asked for and demanded multiple times, and they were sort of unrelenting.”

A total of 75 students have been involved in student-conduct proceedings for alleged deletion of grades as part of the wildcat strike, according to a campus spokesperson.

Graduate students — mostly working as teaching assistants — first set out on the wildcat strike in November of last year, demanding a raise of about $1,400 a month on top of their average monthly wages of about $2,400.

The students billed the raise as a long overdue cost-of-living adjustment to afford Santa Cruz’s sky-high rental rates. Some students reported spending upward of 70% of their income on rent, while others shared stories of skipping meals and enduring cramped and unsafe living conditions.

Hundreds of teaching assistants and graduate-student instructors coordinated to withhold about 20% of all course grades — more than 12,000 individual grades — from the fall term.

Under a contract with a no-strike provision that most UCSC members opposed, UAW 2865 did not authorize the strike.

Over the following months, the grading strike boiled over into a teaching strike and led to weeks of picketing at the campus’ entrances that at times completely shut off the campus to outside traffic.

In one dramatic incident Feb. 12, demonstrators occupying the intersection engaged in an hourslong standoff with police who repeatedly ordered them to clear the roadway. At least 17 people were arrested and some demonstrators were treated for minor injuries after police unsuccessfully attempted to clear the intersection.

Similar calls and strikes for a cost-of-living adjustment emerged across the UC system. UAW 2865 leaders eventually stepped in to call on the UC to reopen negotiations, filed multiple unfair labor practice charges against the UC and threatened to call a general strike.

In response, UCSC leaders took steps to boost support for graduate students, including offering temporary $2,500 annual housing vouchers, and committed to do more to examine the issues students said they faced. But the campus administrators repeatedly insisted they were unable to negotiate with the teaching assistants who were already subject to a union-ratified contract with the UC system.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the UCSC wildcat strikers’ campaign has gone digital and — at least publicly — cooled. In the campus message Thursday, Larive and Kletzer said they believed the agreement to be a step toward rebuilding trust.

“Graduate students are valued members of our scholarly community, they make important contributions to our teaching and research missions, and we want to make sure they are supported while they work toward earning a UC Santa Cruz degree,” the campus leaders wrote. “With this agreement in place, we are committed to working with our graduate students to understand their needs and how we can best support them.”

Hamilton, the UCSC unit chair and said Thursday that even with the union deal reached, the graduate students’ broader campaign continues. She predicted their activism would “ramp up” once again in the fall.

“People are still angry,” she said. “People still cannot afford to live here, and this is not ending here.”