November 8 Walkout

Meet up at Sproul Plaza, Noon. 

Public education in California is facing a severe crisis. State budget cuts and austerity measures have accelerated administrators’ efforts to privatize our public colleges. This November, UC Regents and CSU Trustees plan to submit our universities to radical, privatizing reforms. 

Even if Prop. 30 passes, in the best-case scenario, it would only maintain the status quo; meaning excessive fees, under-funded programs, overcrowded classes, layoffs and pay-cuts for campus workers, and an ongoing process of privatization. And that’s the best-case scenario! This would preserve the UCs as inaccessible for tens of thousands of low- and middle- income students, and for already under-represented students of color. And for those who do make it in, a lifetime of debt awaits. University privatization also involves attacks on public sector workers, from pension raids to mass layoffs.

The future of public education is bleak, unless we act in the present to prevent the indebting of students and the walling off of our public institutions. By taking collective, mass action this fall, we can begin to reverse the waves of fee-hikes, course reductions, budget cuts, and layoffs.

 

Through collective struggle, we can defend and sustain public education in California, and we can counter state austerity.

 

Event Page

Student Debt in a Global Context: Neoliberalism and Crisis

Debt is a permanent feature of most of our lives. Yet the socialization of risk debt represents isolates individuals, locking us in the private misery of our dealings with banks and creditors. Medical debt, student debt, consumer debt, foreclosures -- these social forms mark so many personal failings and moral obligations, we are told. Debt, in other words, not only insures our continued servitude to the corporate pursuit of dwindling private profits. It also serves to alienate us from one another, and foreclose the possibility of collective resistance. Debtors’ Assemblies, then, are a first step in fighting back to reclaim our stolen futures. Please join us Wednesday, October 24th from 5-6 in front of California Hall for the first in a series of weekly Debtors’ Assemblies to learn more about the many forms of debt and discuss ways to resist debt’s claim upon our lives. Robert Meister will speak briefly at the beginning of the first assembly.

We Are Toxic Assets

Fantastic interview on austerity at the UC. Covers all the bases: Bob Meister's "They Pledged Your Tuition," construction bonds and rating agencies, pepper-spray cop, the Davis Dozen, student debt...

Musical Interlude in Solidarity with the Chicago Teachers Strike feat. Rebel Díaz

The UC Administration Pressures Faculty to Join It In Opposing GSR Unionization (SB 259)

Many of you will be familiar with a bill that recently made it through the California state legislature: SB 259, which would allow graduate student researchers (GSRs) at public universities to unionize. It passed the state senate on August 23 and has been sent to the desk of Governor Jerry Brown for a signature. Living up to all of our expectations, the UC administration -- like many other universities across the country -- has come out in public opposition to the bill, urging Brown not to sign it. A number of predictably managerial arguments have been enlisted, such as the fact that this could cost the UC $10-18 million a year, as UC spokesperson Dianne Klein put it, without yielding "significant benefit." It goes without saying that the university's 14,000 GSRs might see things somewhat differently. Notably, the UC Berkeley Faculty Association has also come out in support of the bill, deftly critiquing the administration's arguments and "affirm[ing] the right of all employees to organize and . . . the importance of Graduate Student Researchers helping to shape the contract stipulating conditions of their work." [Update: the Council of UC Faculty Associations has written a letter as well.]

For obvious reasons, the UC administration doesn't want any push back from its faculty. This is because the faculty play a key role in the administration's media strategy to defeat SB 259, according to which it's not really a question of profitability but rather one of maintaining the pleasant relationship between GSRs and the professors they work for: "extending collective bargaining rights to graduate student researchers would change the relationship between these students and their professors from an academic mentee/mentor relationship to a professional employee/employer relationship."

It appears that the administration is doubling down. What follows is an email sent yesterday by Jeff Gibeling, the Dean of Graduate Studies at UC Davis, to the Academic Senate. In it, he lays out the UC administration's case against SB 259 and "suggests" that faculty members write to the governor to voice their opposition. He also attached a document containing the administration's talking points as well as a letter from UC president Mark Yudof to Brown. Toward the end of the email, almost as an afterthought, comes the following line: "you are, of course free to express that position as well - notwithstanding that it is different from the official UC position." Of course, this brings up a series of questions about whether recommending and facilitating your employees taking a specific position of a piece of public legislation is legal, and what constitutes implicit coercion. At the very least, it reveals just how desperate the administration is.

From: "Gibeling, Jeffery"
Subject: Legislation Affecting Graduate Student Researchers
Date: September 7, 2012 11:05:42 AM PDT
To: "academic-senate@ucdavis.edu"

Dear Academic Senate Colleagues

In the past, the Public Employment Relations Board has interpreted state law in such a way that Graduate Student Researchers were deemed to be students rather than employees, hence ineligible to be represented under a collective bargaining agreement. Recently, legislation that would extend collective bargaining rights to GSRs (SB 259) has moved through the legislative process. It has passed through the State Senate and the State Assembly and has been forwarded to Governor Brown. He has 12 days from last Wednesday to act on the legislation (sign or veto). The text of the bill is available at http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?bill_id=201120120SB259&search_keywords=).

The University administration has officially taken a stand in opposition to the bill as described in the attached talking points and letter from President Yudof to the Governor. Last year, the systemwide Academic Senate also took a position to oppose this bill (http://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/senate/AcademicSenPositiononSB259_REVISED_050411.pdf).

Some of the concerns are that under a collective bargaining agreement, compensation for GSR’s could be forced to be the same across all disciplines and all campuses. This change would impact our ability to offer competitive stipends that vary by discipline. A collective bargaining agreement might potentially result in fewer UC graduate researchers being hired due to the additional requirements that will likely be imposed as part of a union contract. Moreover, a union contract may seek limits on working hours during a given period, preventing well-intentioned graduate students from pursuing their research and degree objectives as they see fit. The costs associated with implementing the collective bargaining process will also draw away from UC campuses some resources that could otherwise be devoted to providing direct services to students. While I agree that the cost and workload issues are important, my greatest concern is the potentially damaging effect that this change in relationship between graduate students and their faculty mentors may have on our graduate students and our programs.

I anticipate that some faculty will have concerns about this legislation. If you wish to express your opposition, you may want to visit the website:
http://www.ucforcalifornia.org/uc4ca/home/opposeSB259 and consider sending an email or making a phone call to Governor Jerry Brown and asking him to veto SB 259. I also recognize that some faculty colleagues may support this legislation, and you are, of course free to express that position as well - notwithstanding that it is different from the official UC position. Following is the contact information for the Governor and key advisors on this matter:

· Governor Brown: (916) 445-2841
· Nancy McFadden: Executive Secretary to the Governor: (916) 445-2841, nancy.mcfadden@gov.ca.gov
· David Lanier, Chief Deputy Legislative Secretary, Office of the Governor: (916) 445-4341, david.lanier@gov.ca.gov
· Marty Morgenstern, Secretary of Labor & Workforce Development: (916) 327-9064, marty.morgenstern@labor.ca.gov

If you have an opinion on this matter, you may wish to make your views known to the Governor.

Sincerely,

Jeff Gibeling


Jeffery C. Gibeling
Dean--Graduate Studies
University of California, Davis
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
phone: (530) 752-2050
FAX: (530) 752-6222

Before the Fall: Possible Futures for Anti-Austerity Movements

This article, by Amanda Armstrong, was originally posted at Viewpoint. We're reposting it here on the eve of the new school year as a point of departure for some much-needed thinking about organizing strategies for the fall, especially with regard to avoiding the recuperation effect of electoral politics.

We’re passing through a low phase in Northern California – a lull that partially parallels those facing organizers from Madison to New York. The rebellious energies so evident recently seem scattered these days, dormant. The universities are quiet. And the forces that had gathered in city parks and squares, most massively at Oakland’s Oscar Grant Plaza, are largely absent. The encampments are broken up, the assemblies dissolved.

It’s hard to know whether this is simply a period of incubation, from which another, similar wave of class struggle will soon emerge, or if this moment of relative inactivity is allowing for the recomposition of our forces, our alliances, the ways we take action together. If the terrain of struggle we now encounter has been remade by the past year of action – by our effective acts of opposition, by new forms of state repression and co-optation, and by our own missteps – how can we most effectively intervene in the shifting political force fields we’re coming to inhabit?

As we offer ourselves a bit of relief from the intensities of the past year – as we heal, maintain ties, and work through it all – it’s worth collaboratively thinking through these questions. Struggles against austerity in California, which I’ve participated in and tried to think critically about, can provide a concrete context for this kind of reflection.

While many of us have been taking a rest, politicians have been active as ever. The recently passed California state budget is, as in previous years, crushing. It shortens the amount of time people can remain in the workfare program, reduces the program’s work exemptions for people with young children, cuts payments for and limits access to childcare, reduces funding for in-home supportive services, and guts public health care programs. In combination, these cuts constitute a severe attack on working-class women, and therefore on the class as a whole. The undoing of welfare, childcare, and in-home service programs further privatizes and devalues caring labor, and thus imposes increasingly impossible burdens of domestic and waged work on all those, particularly women of color, who have been denied financial reserves.

Austerity is still the order of the day. For all the class struggle that’s been staged in the streets, plazas, and universities this past year, and despite what we’ve accomplished, those who govern and manage capital are still effectively making it harder for working people to survive. And no partial, uncertain victories in the educational sector should allow us to lose sight of this stark reality.

There are a number of ways to make sense of the effects this year’s state budget will have on students and campus workers. The basic story is that, rather than simply cutting once again the budgets of schools and universities, the state has made these cuts contingent upon the potential failure of the compromise tax initiative this November. If the initiative passes, we’ll have a tuition freeze in the Universities of California, and a year without significant cuts in other sectors of public education.

That we may have another year without undergraduate fee hikes in the UCs, and without cuts to schools and colleges, should be understood as an effect of recent rounds of uncompromising student protest, including the cascading strikes and encampments that shook California’s universities last fall. These protests demonstrated to the state and to the UC Regents that further fee increases would come with a cost, and helped build support for the original Millionaires’ Tax, of which the current tax initiative – formed out of a compromise between the governor and the president of the California Federation of Teachers – is a pale copy.

While we might be inclined to consider the possibility of a year without cuts to public education as a victory, albeit an uncertain one, there are other political dynamics shaping the current situation that make for a murkier picture. Governor Jerry Brown, in tying the fate of students to his tax initiative, is working to co-opt and neutralize student movements – movements that otherwise could further delegitimate state institutions enacting and enforcing austerity, and even potentially set off, as in Quebec, a period of generalized social unrest. This fall, it will be incredibly difficult for those active on campuses to resist pressures to put our energies into campaigning for the tax initiative, despite the fact that relatively little of the revenue would go to education (much is slated to “pay down the deficit”); that the initiative includes a temporary, regressive sales tax; and that electoral campaigns force us to engage on a terrain and in a mode of struggle that work to our disadvantage, in comparison to campus-based direct action and mass organizing. As we recently saw in Wisconsin, social movements that allow themselves to be entirely diverted into electoral politics risk massive demoralization, defeat in both electoral and non-electoral domains, and the fraying of bonds forged through collective struggle.

Still, the pressure to participate in the initiative campaign will be intense, since the effects of a defeat would be so severe. In addition to the cuts that would be triggered, the initiative’s defeat would make educational privatization appear all the more inevitable, allowing those pushing fee hikes and pension reductions to invoke the “will of the voters” in support of their efforts. The UC Regents, for instance, are rumored to already be considering a 20% fee hike (approximately $2,500/year), which they’d try to implement in the event that the tax initiative failed. And the initiative very well could fail, especially if, for instance, the European debt crisis intensifies, and the economic depression in the States subsequently deepens.

While we have little control over broader economic dynamics, we can still prevent our movements from being co-opted and neutralized by the governor. We could, for instance, explicitly reject the electoral process as a primary terrain of struggle; along the lines of the movement of the Indignados in Spain, we could organize a series of walkouts and occupations in October tied together by the slogan: “There’s no vote against austerity.” Alternatively, we could prioritize local struggles whose outcomes will not directly be affected by the fate of the tax initiative. At UC Berkeley, for instance, the administration is attempting to move up to six hundred staff members to a building located miles away from campus – a move explicitly designed to spur workers to resign rather than endure degraded and isolating conditions of employment. In solidarity with workers organizing against their displacement, we could hold disruptive actions at the building to which they would be relocated. We could also link up with the movement to defend City College of San Francisco, which appears to be taking shape in response to the threat of dis-accreditation and closure levied by a recent audit – an audit performed by a body with ties to educational privatizers and for-profit colleges. Given how imbricated the various sectors of public education are in California, all students have a stake in the fight at CCSF, which has the potential to generalize struggles against tuition hikes and course reductions.

Even if student movements successfully avoid getting directly caught up in electoral campaigning, it’s conceivable that their more rebellious edges might be worn off by the specter of the November election. There’s a danger that students might be haunted by the imagined judgment of “the voting public,” that we might take on this phantom as a kind of superego, avoiding actions that could upset a projected voter or make them less sympathetic to the cause of public education. And there’s plenty of reason to think that voters in California are inclined to be unsympathetic: in recent decades, they’ve passed a number of reactionary propositions, including 13, 209, 8 and 36.  While Governor Brown may be confident that voters’ presumed classification of students as members of the “deserving” middle class will ensure passage of this year’s tax initiative, student activists ultimately have little to gain from attempting to fill the role of respectable defenders of existing educational institutions.

While higher education has historically been understood, with some validity, as a marker and reproducer of middle class status, college is no longer a guaranteed ticket to a stable, decent paying job. Increasingly, it offers to the degree-holder little more than decades of indebtedness and precarious employment. Our generation of students is facing a process of proletarianization; and rather than clinging to a fantastical “middle class” status, definitively refuted by economic transformations, we should act in solidarity with, and with an eye towards, the working class from which many of us hail and into which we’re headed. As we plan another round of protest, let’s concern ourselves with the perception of the broader class, those facing another devastating round of austerity, rather than with the sanctimonious vision of those who fear and resent the pleasures and possibilities of working class struggle and mutual aid – pleasures that many of us experienced last fall at the Occupy Oakland encampment, and during strikes on our campuses.

While things have been slow this summer, we’re still here; and if the recent past is any indication, another upsurge is likely imminent.  As we attempt to determine the shape coming struggles will take, the experience of the past year can give us confidence that direct actions, coupled with mass organizing, have the potential to generate widespread participation, open up new centers of gravity, and offer us lives less consumed with the anxieties of debt, work, and uncertain futures.

Victor Martinez People's Library / Biblioteca Popular [Update: OPD Raid]

[Update 8/14 3am]: The library was raided by OPD just before midnight. Check back for more info.

[Update 8/14 later]: Some photos and twitter updates from last night's raid are consolidated here. Zunguzungu has a beautiful photo essay: "A Day in the Life of the Biblioteca Popular Victor Martinez (People's Library), August 13, 2012, East Oakland." Finally, you can hear the voices of some of the occupiers, participants, and community members in this great radio report put together by Radio Autonomia.



From occupyca:

OAKLAND, California – On Monday morning, the former 23rd Avenue Branch of the Oakland Public Library was occupied and renamed the Victor Martinez People’s Library. The building was shut down as a public library in 1976 and was briefly an alternative school and later a social services facility. The building has been vacant since 2010, located on 1449 Miller Avenue in East Oakland. (Read more about the life of Victor Martinez here.)

Here’s an initial statement from the people’s library:

The building unveiled today as the Victor Martinez Community Library was part of a Carnegie Foundation endowment of four libraries given to the city of Oakland between 1916 and 1918. Oakland’s librarian at the time, Charles S. Greene, believed that the city’s people would benefit most from libraries placed within their communities.

Despite this vision, the building was one of seven branch casualties of budget cuts in the late seventies, severing vital library life-lines in poor and working communities. Since then, the “Latin American Branch” library building located at the corner of Miller and 15th st. has mostly sat empty, despite the fact that the next nearest library is miles away, and increasingly difficult to access in a city like Oakland with an increasingly expensive transit system. With its eroding chain link fence and decaying, armored exterior, the building is much more than an eyesore; the unused, but inaccessible, space creates a life-draining dark vacuum of stability that serves at best as a convenient place for the unscrupulous to dump their old mattresses, couches and assorted garbage.

This morning, a group of activists opened this building again for use as a library. Inside is the modest seed for a library and community center—hundreds of books donated by people who envision the rebirth of local, community-owned libraries and social and political centers throughout Oakland. We’ve named the building after recently deceased author, Victor Martinez, who overcame a young life of hard agricultural work to become a successful writer in the Bay Area. His semi-autobiographical novel, Parrot in the Oven, has become a seminal work of the Latino experience. Martinez died last year at 56 of an illness caused by his work in the fields.

If you live in this community, we only ask that you think about how you can use this building. Name it anything you like. Purpose it to any goal that benefits the community—library, social or political neighborhood center. All we ask is that you consider keeping it out of the hands of a city which will only seal the fence and doors again, turning the space back into an aggregator of the city’s trash and a dark hole in the middle of an embattled community. The doors here are open. And there are many others simply waiting to be.

Thoughts on UC Berkeley's Propaganda Faces + More

By friend of the blog Aaron Bady (also known as zunguzungu).

Update below the fold.