Reposted from some strikers:
AN OPEN LETTER TO UC GRAD STUDENTS—
This coming week, our union—United Auto Workers Local 2865—has called
a system-wide strike in protest of unfair labor practices (ULPs) by the
university. Although particular grievances differ from campus to
campus, in aggregate, they concern the university’s unwillingness to
bargain over key aspects of our employment, including class size and the
length of our workweek. Also at issue is the university’s history of
illegal intimidation of student workers. For example, this past
November, an administrator at UCLA threatened overseas students with the
loss of their visas for participating in a sympathy strike—a claim as
insulting as it was untrue.
The reasons for striking are serious, but also banal. By any measure,
our labor is appallingly undervalued by the managers of the UC, its
remuneration calibrated neither to the ballooning costs of living in
present-day California nor to the wages of our peers at equivalent
out-of-state universities. Nonetheless, many of us persist in believing
that, no matter how untenable or degrading, our working conditions can
always be tolerated, since they are only temporary, lasting no longer
than our apprenticeships. The ideology of grad school rationalizes this
deficit as the price of shelter from the “working world,” of which the
academy is surely the opposite. Those who do not support the strike will
claim that grad students are not workers at all, but rather
professionals in the chrysalis stage of a post-laborious life cycle.
Labor is the fate of the unlucky, the futureless, the unspecial—of all
who fail admittance to the academy, or who find themselves passed over
in the competition for grants, honors, and jobs. Today’s strikers,
tomorrow’s adjuncts.
The academy has always warmed to such delusions. To exist,
universities depend on the extraction of un- and underpaid labor from
students and faculty, exploiting a population convinced of its special
intelligence and competitive edge. Fear of imposture, of mere adequacy,
is the coin of the academic realm. As minter of this coin, the
university holds its subjects in a state of blind dependency: students
compete for the attention of a shrinking pool of professionals
(part-time instructors currently outnumber tenure-track faculty by a
ration of four to one), while the latter scurry to commodify the
drippings of a hive-mind on the brink of colony collapse. A
population that does not recognize itself as working will not mind
working harder, longer, and more obediently, whatever the personal cost. For
many grad students, the very idea of a contract governing the limits
and conditions of our labor is a source of skepticism, and even
derision. This system is not an alternative to the working world; it is the model every employer would eagerly adopt.
Far from prefiguring an emancipated society, the university offers a
foretaste of the total domination of workers by management.
Perhaps our peers are right: perhaps we strikers are the futureless, the luckless, the unspecial. To which we should reply—Yes, and so are you! Of
course, logic dictates that some of us will be retained by the academy
as its favored prodigies; that some of us will best our peers on a
tightening job market; that odds will always (ever) be in someone’s
favor. But this is not a logic, not a system, that we could ever
willingly endorse. The university profits by our atomization, our
disunity; it encourages our delusions of specialness, our faith in
anointment and meritocratic providence; it thrives on our belief,
against every shred of evidence, that we are not workers. We are striking because we are workers.
We are striking, not to withdraw our labor arbitrarily, but so that we
can find each other outside the walls of the academy. We are striking so
that we do not to end up like the fortunate ones.
There are no fair labor practices in the academy or anywhere else;
there are only the gains we win for ourselves, together, fighting.
Signed,
Some strikers, some friends
provisional home of the College of Debtors in Defiance
