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Add an EventCall to Action from UCSC Strikers
UC Santa Cruz terminated student workers engaged in a strike calling for a Cost of Living Adjustment.
We are hereby calling for the strike to spread, into new quarters, with as far a reach as possible, to every UC campus. We are calling for a day of action on Monday, March 2, with rallies and marches on every campus!
[ JOIN, or DIE. Artwork by Evie Chang ]
Today, UCSC's administration officially sent letters of termination to 54 graduate student workers. "This has been a difficult time for our campus and we have more problems to solve," EVC Kletzer states, while looking "forward to continuing to fulfill our tremendous mission," presumably after every wildcat strikers is dismissed. What Kletzer forgot to add is that strikers also have a "tremendous mission" to be fulfilled: that of winning a COLA.
The UC administration indeed has "more problems to solve". The COLA campaign is now a major fight that encompasses large bodies of graduate student-workers at every UC campus. The stakes of the strike are clear, and implicate the future academic conditions for us all. This is not a time to back down, but rise up. Firing one of us is unacceptable, and must be opposed with the full force of our organizational capacities; firing 54 of us, however, is strikebreaking of a much higher order of magnitude, undermining the very idea of independent rank and file activity, on and off campus.
It is imperative that we fight back against the repressive measures of Williams, Kletzer, Napolitano, and the UC regents. In our view, the only way to reinstate our comrades at UCSC, combat the preemptive disciplinary measures of an increasingly intransigent UC administration, and win a COLA, is concerted strike action on a mass scale. We are hereby calling for the strike to spread, into new quarters, with as far a reach as possible, to every UC campus. We are calling for a day of action on Monday, March 2, with rallies and marches on every campus!
See you on the picket.
Solidarity forever,
UCSC wildcats
For more on the infamous former Secretary of Homeland Security (the anti-immigrant Gestapo) under Democrat Pres. Obama, Janet Napolitano, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Napolitano
Janet Napolitano is among the 600 plus UC Administrators who receive over $500,000 a year EACH from us taxpayers, while the Teaching Assistants receive less than $20,000 a year or $9.61 an hour, less than the $11 per hour State of California minimum wage, to teach college classes, which require that they have at least a bachelor’s degree. In addition to these outrageous salaries to worthless, anti-labor administrators, we, the taxpayers, have to pay police $300,000 PER DAY to “monitor” protests by the tens of thousands of students at the 10 or so UC campuses. California has a supermajority Democratic Legislature and a Democratic governor who could and should raise the progressive income tax on the rich to pay for decent wages for all state workers, pay for free university for all, pay for free medical care of all who live here, and pay for affordable housing for the workingclass, the 80% of Americans who sell our labor for less than $80,000 a year, and pay for free, comprehensive public transportation statewide. California has at least 663,000 millionaire households including 124 billionaires in our state of 40 million people, so there is ALWAYS ENOUGH MONEY to be raised from the rich to pay for our needs.
Apparently Janet Napolitano and her capitalist class patrons have no idea as to the outrage that exists as to the housing prices and the student loan crisis. They also have no idea as to how tens of thousands of energetic 20 year old college students will be further angered by these firings. The capitalist class now faces the outrage of all students on UC campuses, especially the 4-year undergraduate schools. Their numbers are:
UC Berkeley 41,910
UC Davis 38,035
UC Irvine 35,982
UC Los Angeles 45,930
UC Merced 8,540
UC Riverside 23,922
UC Santa Barbara 24,057
UC Santa Cruz 19,700
Should the expected picket lines materialize, all UC workers should honor those picket lines so that UC is shut down since PICKET LINES MEAN DON’T CROSS. The picket lines should stay up until all of the fire workers are immediately reinstated, all UC workers receive a decent living wage so that their rent is no more than 25% of their net income, all UC workers receive annual COLAs, all UC workers receive free, comprehensive medical benefits, and JANET NAPOLITANO IS FIRED!
Since this is the latest example of how the Democratic Party is just as anti-labor as the Republican Party, you can and should change your registration to the only two pro-labor parties on the ballot which by definition never take any corporate contributions, namely Peace & Freedom Party, a socialist party, and the Green Party. Both parties are for free university education, free preschool education, cancelling the student debt, free medical care for all who live here, rent control and vacancy control so that no rent is more than 25% of anyone’s net income and speculation in real estate is illegal, affordable housing for all paid for with our tax dollars, free comprehensive public transportation and much more, all paid for with the progressive income tax, better known as tax the rich, the millionaires and billionaires. You can change your registration online at https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/voter-registration/
For more information, see:
http://www.peaceandfreedom.org/home/
http://www.cagreens.org/
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