Monday morning at 8 am, 48,000 UC academic workers hit the picket lines in the largest higher education strike in US history. The strike has been a long time in the making and has had many authors.
A ๐งต on austerity budgets ...
A ๐งต on austerity budgets ...
Back in 2004, the state higher education leaders struck a deal with then governor Arnold Schwartzenegger that promised sustained levels of state funding (naturally, lower levels) in return for more reliance on tuition payments and private fundraising by the university
Arnold and subsequent state leaders never made good on their promises. The core budget for the UC never recovered. Campus admins struggled to keep a lid on the growth of employee compensation, mainly by suppressing wages at the bottom end utotherescue.blogspot.com
Tuition became the main engine of revenue. After the market crash of 2008, the UC jacked up tuition more than 30% in one year sparking a wave of protest by undergrad and graduate students and even a few faculty known as Occupy UC
UC budgets improved under Govs Brown and Newsom, but never returned to pre-2000 levels. Then the state then mandated a cap on tuition growth while also demanding more undergraduate enrollment. That put another squeeze UC budgets. utotherescue.blogspot.com
A budget squeeze always presses down. Even before the pandemic, a quarter of UC graduate students faced food insecurity. Strikingly, 11% of graduate students at UCSC were homeless at some point in their career according to a UC Regents report
Those are the same graduate students who teach discussion sections, staff labs, and create new knowledge for society--and they can barely pay the rent. In 2019-20, they launched wildcat strikes with the slogan, "Pay Us Enough to Live Here." dailybruin.com
So the strike of UC academic workers should surprise no one. The UC had plenty of time to prepare. The question is whether the university and the state can shake off their reliance on wage suppression as a budgeting tool. Every worker deserves a living wage.
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