SANTA CRUZ — In the latest escalation to an ongoing pay dispute, teaching assistants at UC Santa Cruz say they are organizing for an open-ended strike starting next week.

The group of graduate students announced their plan to UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive via email Monday.

“On February 10, hundreds of graduate students will begin an open-ended strike,” stated the email, authored by strike organizers that include the elected leadership of the UCSC Graduate Student Association. “This means we will be withholding our labor, including teaching, grading, office hours, and research.”

According to the student leaders, the escalation was supported by 60% of hundreds of graduate students who attended a Thursday general assembly. An earlier online poll taken by roughly half the campus’ 1,800 graduate students was also supportive of a strike, they said.

Organizing without authorization of their union, the students have engaged in a grading strike since December — refusing to submit fall quarter grades until given a $1,412 monthly raise on top of the average teaching assistant’s monthly pay of $2,434.

Graduate students have shared stories of paying as much as 70% of their wages toward rent and reported skimping on meals as they struggle to make ends meet in one of the nation’s least affordable rental markets.

The raise, they argue, would bring their wages in line with those of peers at UC Riverside once cost of living is taken into account.

Complicating the issue, the student workers’ contract is negotiated with the UC system as a whole — not at the campus level — by the UAW Local 2865 union. And the students’ actions have not been authorized by the union.

Those facts have been repeatedly cited by the UCSC administration as reasons for its refusal to sit down and negotiate with the students directly. The students counter by citing a history of side-letter negotiations with wildcat strikers, claiming the administration could separately bargain with them if it chose.

In a Monday statement, UCSC spokesman Scott Hernandez-Jason said the campus administration is “disappointed” that some students are continuing to withhold grades from the fall quarter.

“Our graduate students play an important role in the educational mission of UCSC and any escalation of their wildcat strike will only impact our undergraduate students further,” Hernandez-Jason said.

Support and punishment

The threat to escalate to a teaching strike comes in the wake of a Jan. 27 campus message from Larive — the chancellor’s first public comment on the students’ unrest.

In it, Larive announced two new programs aimed at alleviating graduate students’ housing stress: a needs-based $2,500 annual housing supplement, and a funding guarantee that would solidify the level of support currently afforded to the average teaching assistant — ensuring five years of support for doctoral students, and two years for master’s students starting next year.

Larive also announced disciplinary actions against grading strikers.

Those who had not submitted grades by Sundaywill receive a written disciplinary warning per their contract, she said. Those who had deleted course grades from the campus’ online grading portal to participate in the grading strike will face a summons for student conduct violations.

“UC Santa Cruz has a proud history of activism, and the university is committed to ensuring that all people may exercise the constitutionally protected rights of free expression, speech, and assembly,” Larive said in the message “And while I commend our students for drawing attention to a very real problem, I am extremely disappointed that some graduate students chose to do so in a way that was unsanctioned by their union and is harmful to our undergraduate students, many of whom are struggling themselves.”

President of the UCSC Graduate Student Association Yulia Gilichinskaya said the teaching strike plans come as a response to both facets of Larive’s announcement.

“It’s to escalate in the face of potential retaliation, and to make clear that we’re serious about our demands and won’t stop striking until they’re met in a sufficient way,” Gilichinskaya said.

The UAW Local 2865 union has not authorized the students to strike. But in a Jan. 28 email, union President Kavitha Iyenger responded directly to the student conduct violation threat, writing that it would constitute a “misplaced and unlawful effort to subvert” the union’s contract and members’ rights.

Hernandez-Jason was unable to provide figures Monday about how many students could be at risk of punishment.

Indeed, UCSC has repeatedly declined to release any figures demonstrating the number of students withholding grades. However, as of Jan. 5 more than 12,000 individual course grades were outstanding — about 20% of all course grades from the fall quarter.

The students themselves estimate that hundreds of graders — in the ballpark of half of all teaching assistants employed at UCSC — withheld grades.

More than 750 graduate students work as teaching assistants and graduate-student instructors, constituting nearly half of the roughly 1,800 graduate students enrolled at the Santa Cruz campus, according to Hernandez-Jason.