I had a wonderful first day at UAW 4811’s picket line at the University of California at Santa Cruz. The weather was exactly as beautiful as everyone always said — my walk back to my hotel from the picket was 30 minutes of strolling through sunsoaked suburbs and breathing in the sea air — and the workers could not have been more welcoming to me. I had learned a lot about their organizing context and their challenges and successes in organizing both for their own working conditions and in response to the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
On Tuesday, the second day of their strike, I was eager to learn even more. In the morning, before walking back up the hill to the picket, I looked up apartments in Santa Cruz out of curiosity — and learned the cost of housing here was even higher than my own neighborhood in Manhattan. After I posted about this revelation, a former UC Santa Cruz graduate student worker told me on Twitter, “Wait until you learn about quadruples in Santa Cruz.
That’s four people to a single bedroom for about $1300/month each.” This really put into perspective for me the stakes of UAW 4811’s 2022 strike, especially the fury over the bargaining team’s significant concessions on wage demands (a reduction of $12,000 in one counter-proposal) and ultimate decision to agree on wage differentials for certain campuses (UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco, and UC Los Angeles) and not others, even though campuses like UC Santa Cruz, which are not receiving the differen.
