We Cannot Wait: A Critical Assessment of the UC Berkeley COLA Movement
Assessing the COLA Movement.
The COLA movement has reached a critical juncture. Since the spring semester has come to an end and the first wave of COLA organizing has subsided on several campuses, a powerful wave of uprisings against white supremacy and police violence sparked by the racist murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, Ahmaud Arbery, and others have emerged across the U.S. and abroad. We as a group of organizers within the wider COLA movement at UC Berkeley and UC Davis understand this moment requires a deep reflection on where we’ve been as a movement and where we’re going.
The COLA wildcat strikes at UC Berkeley are part of the COLA movement that began at our sibling campus UC Santa Cruz last year. In December 2019, after the UCSC administration rejected their repeated attempts to address the dire cost-of-living crisis, our fellow grad workers collectively decided to withhold final grades in a wildcat strike to win a living wage that would bring them out of rent burden. On many UC campuses graduate students, in coalition with undergraduates, lecturers, and affiliated groups like Cola4all and the People’s Coalition, started to organize around both economic and common good demands. The expanded range of demands included, among others, the demilitarization of UC police, increased funding and support for undocumented and international students, and the end to single-semester appointments for lecturers. After COLA organizers at UCSC made the call to spread the strike in response to the firing of 82 graduate student workers, hundreds at Berkeley, following the lead of graduate students in the African American & African Diaspora Studies and Ethnic Studies departments, who had declared themselves strike-ready early on, worked to build a campus-level wildcat. Weeks later, and for reasons that we analyze below, Berkeley wildcat strikers faced significant challenges and ultimately decided to submit spring semester grades.
We believe that in light of the current protests that have renewed collective energy around divestment and demilitarization of the UCPD, the unfolding crisis of the pandemic that has disproportionately affected Black and Brown communities, and the need to organize a response to the austerity measures that will likely impact the most oppressed members of the UC community, a critical assessment of the movement is necessary. This entails a clear-sighted reflection on the shortcomings of the movement on the Berkeley campus and the political differences that caused organizational inertia at a crucial moment, but also the material limitations we have faced in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and the move to shelter-in-place. At the same time, we want to take this opportunity to articulate our political vision of the democratic organizing we believe will grow a powerful, sustainable, and coalitional graduate student worker movement in the future.
The Origins of the COLA Movement
The COLA movement emerged from a context characterized at the national level by increasing teachers’ mobilizations against precarity, and at the state level by discontent with the 2018 labor contract between the UC administration and student workers represented by UAW 2865. The demand for a cost of living adjustment and the wildcat strikes deployed by UC graduate student workers are part of the same historical current that created the Red for Ed wildcat actions that began in 2018 with the West Virginia Teacher’s Strike and spread to Oklahoma, Arizona, Kentucky, and California. In the past couple of years, LA and Oakland teachers have led the way in the fight for public education in California. Graduate student workers and other precarious academic laborers such as lecturers have recently joined these efforts in a moment when universities, including the University of California, have increased exploitation of workers, instituted austerity measures, and undermined the mission of public education.² Furthermore, the UC is one of the largest landlords in the state, and has been responsible for the broader economic context in which we find ourselves as workers with respect to skyrocketing housing costs across California. Thus, graduate student workers find themselves squeezed between the UC as boss and landlord, which is why the COLA movement’s initial and fundamental call was to raise wages enough to bring grad workers out of rent burden.
Like our comrades in the Red for Ed movement, UC graduate workers are at the mercy of a concessionary union leadership. The COLA movement is as much a response to the economic pressure the university exerts on its graduate students as it is a powerful manifestation of rank-and-file dissent within UAW 2865, particularly in response to the weaknesses of the 2018 contract and its undemocratic ratification. During the last three years, the 2018 contract has been contested by student workers via many organizing efforts such as the robust 2018 “Vote No” campaign that brought together a statewide coalition of rank-and-file members to organize against ratification, and the 2018–2019 Mussman Appeal that challenged the undemocratic tactics the Organizing for Student Worker Power leadership caucus (OSWP) used to push through the contract in the summer of 2018. Crucially, the COLA movement was initiated by UC Santa Cruz graduate workers who had voted 83% against ratification in 2018 and had also built recent campaigns for rent control and houseless students.
Despite these sustained graduate worker actions against precarious living and working conditions and their institutionalization through the inadequate 2018 labor contract, UAW 2865 leadership has been reluctant to acknowledge this political reality. Although hundreds of graduate workers from different campuses have attempted to hold UAW leadership accountable by asking them to seriously reflect on the undemocratic character of our current labor contract, OSWP has been oblivious to this petition. Even though hundreds of students went on a wildcat strike during a global pandemic, and more student workers signed the Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) strike petition advocating for UAW to call a legal strike than voted to approve our 2018 contract, OSWP still asserts that conditions are inadequate to win this fight.
OSWP’s main argument is that the conditions for a strike have to be perfect before they will actively organize for one. These ideal conditions can only be met by a “supermajority” of worker participation measured via a series of “structure tests” with arbitrary metrics that ostensibly demonstrate worker engagement and strike-readiness. In the graduate worker context, where there is constant employment turn-over and workers leave the university after degree completion, it is nearly impossible to reach these autocratic benchmarks. This perfectionist strategy ultimately weakens militancy and reinforces the bureaucratic status-quo. We strongly oppose this strategy because we know that worker power is built through democratic, collective engagement in the struggle itself. This difference helps explain why OSWP eventually attempted to co-opt the movement. Adding insult to injury, they stole the rubric Cola4all, which was the name of a POC-led coalition at UCSC mentioned above. This move was made not in order to build up strike capacity, but rather to perform structure tests consisting of surveys and petitions. Ironically, simply asking workers to vote on whether we were ready to strike — which could have happened this spring with a ULP Strike Authorization Vote — was not understood as an appropriate way of gauging strike support. Amidst the most important student mobilization of recent years, the firing of 82 student-workers during a global health crisis, severe, racist student conduct punishments and suspensions, the use of military surveillance on striking grads, and nearly 4,000 signed ULP Strike pledges, much of our elected union leadership refused to send the ULP strike vote to the membership, denying the rank-and-file their right to democratically decide if they wanted to engage in a legally-protected strike.
In contrast to the organizational fetish of current UAW 2865 leadership, we believe that the achievement of our demands necessitates radical action built by bottom-up worker militancy. We recognize that democratic organizing structures are necessary to building a winning fight. This principle distinguishes us from OSWP who understand union democracy as primarily representative. Under this logic, they represent the “majority” of workers who are not actively engaged in the struggle and relegate the militant “minority” to the sidelines. Since coming into power, OSWP leadership has shifted to a model of worker (mis)representation instead of agitating and organizing the rank-and-file.
We as organizers, on the other hand, seek to develop a strategy that bridges the gap between our most ambitious demands and a plan of action that can get us there. We believe that by using democratic organizing, the rank-and-file can self-assess readiness and power, build their own organizing tactics and structures, and create strategies that address the collective needs and challenges they face while engaging in actions. By using a bottom-up method as a starting place, we can work to collectively raise expectations for what is possible both in terms of demands and actions. We understand this can only happen through democratic organizing for collective needs to transform our living and working conditions.
When the Pandemic Struck, Why Didn’t We?
Organizers under the banner of COLA on the Berkeley campus coordinated our first solidarity rally in December during finals week after UCSC grads voted to begin striking and withholding grades the week prior. UCSC grads quickly managed to effectively shut down their campus, garner significant faculty support, and bring national attention to graduate student worker precarity. In early February, the UCSC administration and UC President Janet Napolitano threatened to fire workers who withheld grades during the fall quarter. In response, Santa Cruz comrades called on graduate workers at all UC campuses to protect UCSC striking workers by urgently spreading the strike. Responding to this call for solidarity and the need for our own COLA, UC Berkeley organizers began meeting in earnest to build the movement on our campus. We staged a second, large rally on February 21 and called the first COLA General Assembly on February 24. Four days later, 82 striking workers at UCSC were fired, their jobs and health insurance stripped from them right as the COVID-19 crisis started to emerge in the US. In support of UCSC strikers, and in coordination with COLA movements on other campuses including UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, and UCD, Berkeley organizers started actively mobilizing for a wildcat teaching and grading strike. At the March 2 General Assembly we presented two resolutions put forward by cross-campus organizers: first, participation in a statewide day of action on March 5, and second, a departmental organizing method that guaranteed a strike vote once we successfully organized a critical mass of 10 strike-ready departments. At the time of the mass rally on March 5 that brought over a thousand grads, undergrads, faculty, and staff to Sproul Plaza, the African American and African Diaspora Studies and Ethnic Studies Departments had declared themselves strike ready. In the following two weeks, 15 more departments joined the ranks, and at the March 9 General Assembly student workers voted to officially call a wildcat strike action starting the following week on March 16. Between the strike vote and the start of the work stoppage, we worked to solidify support and coordinate with Berkeley Faculty Organizing Group (BFOG), lecturers, and undergraduates.
Our UCSC coworkers’ urgent need for solidarity meant we felt we had to quickly organize ourselves and each other if we wanted to make a meaningful impact in the fight for their jobs and healthcare. We believed the vulnerability of our comrades at UCSC required calling immediate strike action if possible. At the time the wildcat began at Berkeley, we had only been organizing the strike for about two weeks. The bottom-up departmental organizing strategy allowed for the strike to be shaped democratically as workers discussed and voted to strike in their respective departments. A drawback of this strategy, and of the speed with which circumstances demanded organizing take place, was the lack of a larger set of structures that would allow the COLA movement to coordinate across departments. We recognize the need for such an interdepartmental structure in the future of the movement. On March 10, the day after we voted to go on strike, Berkeley announced classes would move online through the end of spring break, which was shortly after extended through the spring 2020 semester (even now, the prospect of in-person classes in the fall remains uncertain). Alameda County’s shelter-in-place order, among the first in the country, came days after.
When the strike began its second week, shortly after the campus was shut down, we created a Coordinating Committee (CC) made up of departmental delegates that would discuss the various tactics each department was employing, the level of involvement in striking in those departments, striker’s morale, and the challenges they were facing. Besides coordination and communication, the aim of this committee was also to support accountability among striking departments. The CC was then tasked with planning the General Assemblies based on how the strike was developing across departments. Unfortunately, this committee was formed only after the campus was shut down, and the weakness of campus-wide coordination became much more impactful in the face of university strike-breaking tactics and the stresses of organizing after the shelter-in-place order was put into effect. While we moved quickly to strike on the basis of an urgent need for solidarity, we also recognize that we did not anticipate all the structures we would need to sustain and grow the strike under the expected and unexpected strain of engaging in a wildcat action during a global pandemic.
Without an effective communication network among departments that would translate what was happening in each department to the movement as a whole, we were vulnerable to fractures along lines of political ideology, strategy, and a general lack of shared understanding about conditions in different departments and statewide. This left striking departments, and in particular, African American Studies and Ethnic Studies, vulnerable as commitment from other departments waned in the face of administrative and pandemic-related pressures.
As we now more fully understand, a successful wildcat strike requires a deep sense of trust, commitment, and robust democratic decision-making structures. This is only possible if we create better means to facilitate communication not only across departments, but also across differences of gender, race, class, ability, and citizenship status that make risk in strike participation unevenly distributed. We must find ways to center the concerns of students often disenfranchised within the institution so that they do not bear the brunt of the inevitable complications that arise during a strike action. More inclusive and democratic ways of organizing all take time to build, especially in an organizing body as heterogeneous as the graduate students at Berkeley, many of whom teach very different sizes and types of classes and who bear a wide range of differing responsibilities, challenges, and expectations as academic employees. We particularly acknowledge that the consequences of this lack of formal structure and the difficulties arising from the online context, made it hard to build trust and keep us accountable to one another, which disproportionately affected already marginalized graduate workers.
Despite our assessment that the methods and spaces we used to build the strike before the pandemic had outlived their effectiveness, many COLA organizers did seek to adapt to the challenges the pandemic was posing. Out of concern for how undergraduate students were faring as their lives were upended in the initial days of the pandemic, some workers shifted to a Social Welfare Strike and met with undergrads during class time to check in and support them. We also looked to the wildcat strikers at UC Santa Cruz for guidance on how to uphold a “digital” picket line. In addition, organizers created the UCB Mutual Aid Fund that quickly surpassed our own university’s response to supporting students as it distributed both material and non-material aid to the UC Berkeley community. Another set of COLA organizers coordinated on the statewide level to develop Strike University, an online people’s university and think tank for the COLA movement. Still others wrote statements on why the COVID-19 crisis makes COLA demands even more urgent, and continued to organize meetings, general assemblies, and department town halls that had all moved online. However, these adaptations and new initiatives were not enough to maintain the momentum that was built in the previous weeks, when in-person rallies, departmental meetings, and general assemblies had helped demonstrate broad support and energize strikers and supporters.
Under the new conditions of the pandemic, many dedicated organizers were unable to continue organizing. Some were forced to reduce their commitment due to added personal responsibilities, others simply did not know how to sustain the strike in their departments. In addition, a number of initially supportive faculty also stepped back as they were faced with their own problems due to the campus shutdown, or were convinced by the administration’s narratives that grad workers were abandoning their students in their time of need, or that COLA was really just a conflict between a small group of workers and the union that represents them. Many of our undergraduate allies also began leaving Berkeley as in-person classes were cancelled, leading to a dissipation of organized undergraduate support. Outreach to additional departments to grow the strike became increasingly difficult in an online environment. This halted the momentum of the movement, as organizers essentially shifted our efforts to supporting the strike and upholding the picket within striking departments. Almost overnight, we became organizers without a physical campus and strikers without a visible picket line.
At the same time, the University response to the pandemic posed a number of challenges for Berkeley wildcats. That UCOP was willing to fire graduate students in the midst of a historic crisis demonstrated their comfort with extreme strikebreaking tactics. Strikers experienced these tactics in diverse ways. For some, the loss of employment was too big a threat in the light of the uncertain situation, and many began withdrawing from the strike for related reasons. Meanwhile, a few departments began reorganizing their classes in ways that made other strikers feel their strike action was meaningless. The increased difficulty in outreach and communication made it challenging to convince strikers to rejoin the picket line, as did the inability to collectively solve many of the serious issues that plagued some striking departments.
In response to external pressures and insufficient organizing structures, the COLA movement became further weakened by internal conflict at a crucial moment. In our view, as a result of lost momentum, the lack of more effective organizing structures allowing for inter-departmental coordination, and the difficulty of adapting to the conditions of organizing under COVID-19, some unconstructive debates and ways of expressing disagreement emerged at the General Assemblies. Particularly damaging were personal attacks and criticism from some organizers that de-legitimized the already stressed organizing structures that were in place, including critiques of the General Assemblies as a space for coordinated collective decision-making. Some organizers seemed to favor a structureless model without any formalized core organizing or group decision making processes, yet at the same time stated the need for cross-departmental coordination and accountability. Others held a different political perspective and argued for the necessity for more centralized democratic decision-making which they hoped would lead to greater accountability and a more sustainable strike. While we fundamentally agree with the latter’s strategy, political disagreements were not resolved as the new online GA space had at that point become inefficient and unsafe for full participation by all those involved in the movement. Critique began to overwhelm constructive and reassuring dialogue, problem-solving, and community-building, and many people who had attended those spaces looking for support and direction felt demoralized and stopped attending. The number of people attending COLA GAs steadily decreased, and although a few dozen organizers remained active, the strike’s weakening became evident. This unfortunate decline undermined the possibility to organize a robust campaign to withhold grades as confidence and support in the movement was low at that point.
While there is no playbook for any social movement, the sudden changes to the campus left us without an obvious direction which amplified weaknesses in the organizing structure. It is clear that the novel coronavirus pandemic, as well as the University’s response, played a large part in undermining the power and solidarity that was being built under the auspices of the COLA movement. Naming this fact does not absolve the movement as a whole or any of its organizers from responsibility for the failures in building a more robust organizing structure informed by a necessary intersectional framework, or navigating the impasse created by political disagreement. However, any analysis of the strengths, weaknesses, successes, and shortcomings must include the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the movement and UC’s tactics to break up the wildcat strike, both in terms of the limited ability to organize under shelter-in-place, the amplified weight that the threat of retaliation posed, as well as its impact on diminishing momentum and morale.
Challenges Posed by UAW 2865: Should We Stay Wildcats or Organize for a ULP Strike?
In addition to the above challenges, the movement was actively undermined by the concessionary, bureaucratic leadership of UAW 2865 at Berkeley and the statewide level, controlled by the conservative caucus OSWP. At the start, OSWP union leadership distanced themselves from the wildcat strikes at UCSC by ignoring the movement. When this became untenable they attempted to co-opt the movement as outlined above. They then promised to send a ULP strike vote to membership in April, which they delayed acting on until it was too late; they purposefully let the clock run out for organizing the ULP strike in the last weeks of the spring quarter after Berkeley and Merced were already out of session. OSWP successfully prevented the strike vote from being sent to the membership despite wide support and an already-existing strike infrastructure built by wildcating workers. Put simply, when elected union leadership could no longer co-opt the COLA movement, they abandoned the rank-and-file struggle just as they had during 2018 bargaining and ratification.
As a result of OSWP’s destructive orientation towards the COLA movement, organizers questioned how we would relate to the union apparatus at various levels. Dedicated and dissenting rank-and-file militants comprise the bulwark of statewide organizers, and we count ourselves among them. Many of us were involved in the 2018 contract campaign, where we worked to recruit new members and build the organizational capacity of UAW 2865 so that we could organize a majority strike in fall 2018 that would win us decisive gains. While we took various positions in the contentious union politics of the era (before summer 2018 some of us were in OSWP), we were united in our organizing to counter the right-wing faction of OSWP, who sought to use Janus v. AFSCME as a rhetorical cudgel to forestall the fall strike entirely by imposing a concessionary contract in the summer. When the struggle was narrowly lost after their numerous autocratic maneuvers, we launched the Mussman Appeal campaign to annul the illegally-ratified contract and go back to the bargaining table. The Appeal was handled by the OSWP-dominated Executive Board, whose very conduct was being challenged; they were defendant, judge, and jury in the case. Nevertheless, the movement around the Mussman Appeal helped to regroup and sustain dissident organizing at Berkeley, laying one of the organizational foundations of the COLA movement on our campus.
Within the COLA movement, some organizers advocated complete disassociation from UAW 2865 on the basis of the conservative dominance in the statewide and Berkeley leadership. Another real challenge for many was the long history of anti-Blackness and silencing of BIPOC organizers within UAW International and the OSWP caucus, making trust in any organizing through UAW 2865 for a ULP impossible for many. Others advocated using union networks and resources (such as phone banking lists) to mobilize for a legally-protected ULP strike, seeking to overcome the OSWP opposition within the union structure. Both of these positions have shortcomings. On the one hand, complete abstentionism is a flawed strategy because UAW 2865 is not simply another organization we could choose to ignore when the leadership is harmful. The union is, by law, our “exclusive bargaining agent,” meaning that their contract is applicable to all of us, the management is obliged to negotiate with them under certain conditions, and strikes authorized by them enjoy legal protections that other strikes don’t. These have very real and material consequences; ignoring the union does nothing to diminish their power over us, nor does it undermine the OSWP stranglehold in any way. On the other hand, we cannot expect a victory simply by working “within” the existing union structure. While very few, if any, in the COLA movement thought that we could work with the OSWP leadership in good faith, we must always remember that the real source of our power comes from our own movement, our fellow student-workers’ capacities to take action by and for ourselves. The COLA movement must continue to mobilize and develop through autonomous grassroots organizing that builds our own power and undermines the OSWP leadership’s power against us. We must continue to work to remove these bourgeois class-collaborators from positions of power in our union.
What We’ve Accomplished
What we’ve learned as organizers in this movement, and that we count among our strengths, is a self-reflexive praxis that is able to assess shortcomings and mistakes along with our strengths and wins. While we acknowledge a number of faults and critical omissions, we also think that even our errors have taught us infinitely more about our collective power and the potential of graduate-student organizing than any “scientific” assessment from the outside could provide. Although we have not yet had our demands met, we believe it is important to take stock of our strengths and wins as we look ahead to future organizing.
First, we developed and sustained a crucial part of the largest labor action and student movement across the UC system since 2009. Hundreds of student workers at UC Berkeley, and thousands across the state, withheld grades, withdrew their labor, and joined the picket line. More still designed, led, or participated in political education through Strike University, and contributed to mutual aid efforts. The most important lesson that has come out of this movement is that we build strength by engaging in the struggle. The COLA movement raised expectations for actions and expanded the realm of possibilities for demands. A wildcat strike would have seemed nearly impossible to organize just months ago, yet we were able to coordinate it and other radical actions across most of the UC campuses in the state. On the UC Berkeley campus, 17 departments organized for and declared themselves strike ready in a matter of weeks. Clearly, we were responding to widely felt material needs and tapping into a broad readiness to engage in a fight for improved conditions for student workers.
Second, we raised a crucial, timely critique of bureaucratic UAW 2865 leadership. That our actions occurred under the banner of wildcat strikes both situates our movement in the context of rank-and-file militancy that demands more of union bureaucrats, and demonstrates the failure of our current OSWP representatives to adequately respond to the material needs of student workers. In their engagement with COLA, OSWP has exposed themselves as incapable of delivering the improved labor and living conditions we know are necessary, especially for those who are most marginalized by the racist capitalist system on which our university is built. OSWP leaders refused to tap into and strengthen rank-and-file militancy during the wildcat strikes, and they refuse to do so even now during the largest national wave of protests since the 1960s. They decline to take serious action against racist disciplinary hearings and suspensions, police brutality, military surveillance, and increased precarity and inequity during a global pandemic. They have also prevented membership from legally striking to demand the University demilitarize and divest from UCPD in the midst of nationwide demonstrations against police violence, structural racism, and white supremacy. We recognize their increasingly formulaic structure tests as a failure of political vision, an utter blindness to the altered material conditions around them, and a fundamental misunderstanding of the source of labor’s strength: the workers themselves.
Finally, our most significant accomplishment is the collective creation — by direct engagement in the struggle — of organizing networks within and across departments and at the statewide level. When we organized the strike, worker militancy strengthened and spread as many organic leaders emerged from within departments and campuses where there had not previously been a campus-wide coordinated movement. Apart from creating a militant infrastructure, there have been resilient aspects of the movement that have continued despite the difficulties of organizing under COVID-19. Strike University and thriving mutual aid efforts provide critical spaces to expand political education, interrogate the neoliberal university, and provide material support to our community. Moreover, the movement has worked to develop a shared consciousness as workers at the University of California that extends beyond our own union to other academic and non-academic workers including lecturers, service workers, and janitorial staff. We’ve also begun to build solidarity with community members, non-union workers, and soon-to-be union workers.
These strengths put us in a good position to rebuild and expand our fight in the future. The current moment shows us that it is our ethical and political obligation to do so. As long as the university administration plans to make austerity cuts to vital teaching resources and programs, as long as student workers are disciplined for demanding a living wage, as long as the university police terrorize, surveil, and collaborate to quell protests against racism and state violence, we must keep fighting.
Where Do We Go From Here? Laying the Groundwork for Future Organizing
As we look to the summer, fall semester, and beyond, it is clear that we must continue to build on the interdepartmental and statewide organizing networks that we helped construct over the past months. At the same time, we must establish a more robust and accountable organizational structure that works to avoid our past mistakes. We acknowledge the concerns raised by our colleagues about the need to adopt an intersectional framework within the Berkeley COLA movement in order to successfully undertake coalitional work. We understand that rebuilding trust will take time and is contingent on our steadfastness, as much as it is within our power as a group of organizers within a large and diverse student body, to advance the fight against all forms of oppression both within and outside the movement. Likewise, it is crucial that we clarify and reaffirm our collective movement’s goals and commitments, both in the context of our struggle to win a living wage from the UC and vis-a-vis broader political efforts within our communities. We further acknowledge that we were not successful in advancing the struggle for Black liberation in the spring, particularly in our inability to articulate the organic connection between the COLA demand and the fight to abolish campus police. A cost-of-living adjustment is not just an economic demand; in its most capacious sense it is a demand that the university account for the reparations owed to BIPOC students and community members who are subject to police violence, intimidation, and frequent acts of racism and exclusion. The university must start paying this debt by removing UCPD from our campuses.
Within the framework of COLA, we see three key, interrelated fights ahead: a cost-of-living adjustment, the demilitarization of and divestment from campus police, and the struggle against university austerity measures. We understand that a cost of living adjustment continues to be a crucial demand, most critically for first-generation, low-income, and structurally disadvantaged Black, Indigenous, and Latinx scholars on our campus. The fight for a living wage must continue within the context of the struggle against austerity measures that disproportionately affect students of color and poor students. As we articulate the COLA demands, we must draw out their inherent connections to the historical struggle for racial justice: we recognize that a COLA that does not center racial justice will not sufficiently address the additional costs of living incurred by the most marginalized in our community.
All graduate students admitted to the University of California deserve adequate funding, quality education, resources, support, and freedom from police terror. It is unjust that funding and salaries are distributed inequitably, with some graduate students receiving “diversity” scholarships as low as $15,000 a year, while others in STEM departments earn $40,000 salaries, which is still insufficient to lift them out of rent burden.¹ It is unacceptable that the students who have worked the hardest to get into graduate school are expected to work second and third jobs on top of teaching and research in order to survive. It is egregious that many of these same students are confronted with the constant spectre of harassment and violence at the hands of UCPD.We find it intolerable that the least well-funded programs and departments who are doing the critical and necessary intellectual work to dismantle oppression are often the first on the budgetary chopping block. We must commit to not only opposing budget cuts, but to increasing funding to the departments and community members who need it most. It is the university’s obligation to chop from the top: cut adminstrator’s salaries, halt unnecessary building projects and real estate acquisitions, and defund campus police.
The demand for the demilitarization of campus police has a deep history in student organizing at the UC that precedes the COLA movement, and many affiliated organizers and militants have a long-standing commitment to this struggle. We see our fight for justice and equity at the university as connected to the larger struggles against structural racism and police violence. We plan to work with other groups on campus to make divestment and demilitarization of UCPD central to the continued COLA struggle. We must join efforts to end institutionalized racism on our campuses and in our communities. We also understand the need to start showing up for the Black community in more legitimate, material ways in our organizing. While these efforts are still developing and we have much to learn, some COLA organizers in STEM are beginning work to address anti-Blackness, racism, and other forms of oppression in those departments. We hope to leverage our department organizing structure to expand this and other work in coalition with individuals and groups of graduates on campus striving towards the same goals. A COLA for all means not just an economic stimulus for graduate workers, but a new university where all workers can learn, teach, and grow without the worry of making ends meet, without the fear of violence and intimidation, and without police. We cannot wait.
Signed,
Anthony Abel, Chemical Engineering, UC Berkeley
Jeremy Adams, Chemical Engineering, UC Berkeley
Sean Arseo, Sociology, UC Davis
Helen Bergstrom, Chemical Engineering, UC Berkeley
Ángela Castillo Ardila, Anthropology, UC Berkeley
Shannon Ikebe, Sociology, UC Berkeley
Tara Phillips, Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley
Kit Pribble, Slavic Languages & Literatures, UC Berkeley
Notes
(1) Rent burden, as defined by the Department of Housing and Urban Development, is spending more than 30% of pre-tax income on rent and utilities. Severe rent burden is 50% or more of income spent on housing. Many graduate student workers are severely rent burdened.
(2) As a site of social reproduction, the university is crucial for the formation of workers within the capitalist economy. It is in the university’s economic interests — and those of capital more broadly — to exploit to the utmost the critical part we play as educators. The university and its partners in capital want us to turn out highly-skilled workers for the cheapest price possible. They also profit off our basic needs, such as housing, in the process.
