Lately, Brenda Arjona has been leaning hard on the campus food pantry. The 33-year-old single mother and third-year anthropology graduate student says she makes around $2,200 a month after taxes as a part-time teaching assistant at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also pays around $1,700 a month for the two-bedroom she shares with her 10-year-old son in student housing. After that, there’s little money to spare.

If not for the cash shortfall, the lush, redwood-filled campus on a hill would be a lovely place to raise a kid: There’s a state park across the street; the beach is a 12-minute drive away. But Santa Cruz’s extreme housing costs have injected a feeling of “continuous stress” into Arjona and her son’s tranquil academic life.

While other California cities may eclipse it in terms of average rent price, Santa Cruz, which has become a Silicon Valley commuter town in recent years, stands out for the disparity between what educators generally make and what they must pay for housing. It is not uncommon for graduate students to pay well over 50 percent of their income on rent, students say. Currently, teaching assistant wages are set by a union contract that was ratified in 2018 with a slim majority of votes from members statewide. However, more than 80 percent of graduate student instructors at UC Santa Cruz voted against the contract because they found the annual wage increases insufficient. Since then, the school’s Graduate Student Association has lobbied the state’s university system to address the disparity between cost of living and pay but didn’t feel it was taken seriously. The campaign it has waged since has had one clear focus: a substantial cost of living raise that will better account for local housing prices.

Against this backdrop, Arjona found herself on the picket line last week as part of an ongoing wildcat teaching strike. The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released data showing that 2018 and 2019 had the highest two-year striking average in more than three decades. Generally, these work stoppages are union-sanctioned, meaning participants can access a strike fund and are legally protected from termination. But though they remain a rarity, unsanctioned strikes led by a union’s rank-and-file membership have loomed large in recent years, notably through the “red-state revolt,” a national wave of teacher insurgencies sparked by West Virginia educators who waged a largely successful wildcat strike in 2018, even though their right to collectively bargain was unrecognized by state law.

Wildcat strikes like the one in which Arjona is now participating come with particular risks: Employers can refuse to meet with strikers to renegotiate a settled contract—currently the official tack of the University of California. Wildcat strikers are also exposed to potential termination, and the union itself could face consequences for sanctioning or appearing to support a work stoppage that violates a no-strike clause, undermining its ability to assist, even if union leadership is sympathetic to the grievances of the rank and file (as it appears, in this case, to be).