Make a donation to the UCSC Graduate Students on strike
“There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part! You can’t even passively take part! And you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels…upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop! And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you’re free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!” — Mario Savio
(Editor’s note: On February 10th, UCSC Graduate Students (UAW Local 2865) elevated what had started out as a grading strike into a full-on wildcat strike in order to fight for a COLA adjustment. You can find out more about the strike here.)
Having kept track of the strike at UCSC since it first began, the thing about these graduate students I believe that I admire the most is their idealism. They believe fundamental change is possible. They refuse to be totally beaten down by the college bosses. They believe they deserve better than what they’ve gotten. They believe that if they stand together in solidarity in order to fight against the greed of the University, they can actually win. That realize they don’t have to accept what they are told they should be happy with. They realize that they should decide what they believe is acceptable.
This strike in California is a breath of fresh air for me. Far too often today — at least in the auto industry — we are told what is not possible by our UAW overlords. It’s not possible to fight for and win true equality. It’s not possible to fight for and win cost of living. It’s not possible to fight for and win pensions for all. It’s not possible to stop whipsawing. The only thing that is possible — according to our overlords — is working yourself into oblivion, and maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll get to retire one day.
Not exactly inspiring stuff.
However, the wildcat strikers at UCSC understand a truth that many of us autoworkers have long forgotten — that rank-and-file militancy is the only way workers can truly win. You don’t win by approving contracts that continue to divide workers up. You don’t win by whipsawing other plants. You don’t win by blindly accepting every decision made by the labor bosses like its the gospel. You don’t win by saying “Well, I got mine so who cares what happens to the younger generation of workers.”
You only win when you stand together with your fellow workers and take on the system and those who are hell-bent on keeping that system in place.
The UCSC wildcat strike is very much in the same spirit as the militant beginnings of the UAW within the auto industry some 80-odd years ago. Back when thousands of autoworkers finally told the boss “enough is enough.” When the rank-and-file took power into their own hands, and stopped the supposedly unstoppable GM machine dead in it’s tracks. When the workers told the corporation, “we will let you know when we are ready to start production again — but only after you start treating us with dignity and recognize our right to unionize.”
Ultimately, labor has all of the power. It’s not something the labor bosses, the corporations, or the media would ever tell you because they greatly fear this reality —but it is an undeniable truth.
We have been brainwashed by those same labor bosses, corporations, and media to believe that we are powerless. That we must accept the system the way that it is, and that if any change is even possible, it can only happen on the very fringes of that system. For decades it has been beaten into our psyche that we should be elated to receive the bread crumbs the labor bosses negotiate for us while they live a life 98% of us will never come close to attaining.
The current system is — for lack of a better phrase — complete and utter bullshit. It is a system built on continually exploiting our labor to enrich a very small group of people while we take the beating. These graduate students know the game, and they are actually doing something about it in order to change it.
As an autoworker working smack dab in the middle of the Heartland and extremely frustrated with that very same system, these grad students on the west coast give me hope about what the UAW can be in the future.
In Solidarity,
Justin Mayhugh