UCSC Graduate student workers refuse to submit grades until given better wages
SANTA CRUZ, Calif. (KION) University of California Santa Cruz graduate students filed in out front McHenry library on campus to fight for a wage increase Monday.
Several hundred graduate students who are teacher assistants are refusing to submit grades this quarter. The students are demanding a $1,412-a-month cost of living adjustment. The students say what they get paid now is not enough to pay for rent and groceries.
“We’re striking because we have no other choice,” said UCSC History of Consciousness graduate student Jack Davies. “We are spending more than half our paycheck on rent, falling deeper and deeper into debt, skipping meals, and find ourselves materially unable to do the research we came here to do.”
Currently, student workers receive about $2,400 a month for their work as a teacher assistant or student instructor.
“They’re not aware of how much we struggle. If they are aware and they keep doing this it's evil,” PhD student Zia Piue said.
One of the responsibilities as a teaching assistant is submitting grades, which a few hundred graduate students say they won't do until the university meets their demands.
“It's to show how quickly and how much power graduate students actually have in terms of meeting their students needs every day and also how quickly we have administrative power of grading,” graduate student Breanna Byrd said.
So far the university hasn’t budged, but say they want to come up with a fair resolution.
“This is an illegal strike. We see the way to resolve this is to get in a room and express their concerns and how we might be able to make their experience here at UC Santa Cruz a little bit easier,” UCSC spokesman Scott Hernandez-Jason said.
However, if there isn’t a resolution by next week it's still unclear how all those grades for students will be submitted.
“We’re working to find ways to impact the ways to mitigate the impact of students who might be impacted by a late grade. For instance, if they’re graduating this quarter,” Hernandez-Jason said.
This quarters final grades are due Dec. 18.
