Fifth-year astrophysics doctoral candidate Isabel Kain recalled her experience at a rally in the Quarry Plaza in fall 2021. As she listened to a mother of two speak about her struggles to support her family while making only $20,000 a year, Kain felt empowered and obligated to take action.
“She was not being paid in a way that reflected [her] value. She literally could not make ends meet,” Kain said. “She was really struggling.” Her story is not uncommon. She is one of nearly 65,000 graduate students across the UC system, many of whom face similar hardships.
After eight months of negotiations, graduate student members of United Auto Workers (UAW) 4811 secured an updated contract agreement on a UC-wide level on April 6. Out of 21,161 UAW members voting, 91.5 percent voted to accept the tentative agreement drafted last month. This new contract expires on Dec. 31, 2029. If not for this approved contract, the union would have gone on strike for the third time in five years.
Though the majority of union members across the UC system favored the contract, UC Santa Cruz’s numbers told a different story. Out of 685 UCSC union members, 453 voted against it, making UCSC the only UC largely opposed to the contract.
The average salary for a UCSC graduate student teaching assistant is $2,434 per month, not including benefits signed into their new contract. These additional benefits include about $1,533 per month for tuition and fees, about 4 percent annual wage increases, $1,900 per three months for childcare subsidies, a one-time signing bonus and complete remission of about $540 worth of healthcare premiums.
Santa Cruz-affiliated UAW 4811 members are especially disadvantaged as the city maintained the most expensive rental market in the country for three consecutive years. Rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Santa Cruz is roughly $2,600 per month, compared to about $1,800 for a one-bedroom apartment in Davis, another city with a UC campus.
“We’re seeing the university cut back funding. They’re lowering grad cohort sizes,” said Rebecca Gross, UAW 4811 unit chair and fifth-year literature Ph.D. candidate. “Workers in Santa Cruz feel this is an existential threat.”
Rebecca Gross is the current UCSC UAW 4811 unit chair and a fifth-year literature Ph.D. candidate who serves as one of two UCSC representatives on the bargaining team. Gross is a long-time labor advocate, working with UAW since her arrival at UCSC in 2021. Photo by Isla Patrick.
Even with some small wins in the latest agreement, union members feel disappointed by the lack of major gains. The current contract is very similar to the contract from 2022, missing some prevalent issues that UAW members have been fighting to address, such as 12-month funding, class size caps and further international student protections. These omissions caused UCSC UAW negotiators to reject the initial proposal.
“It would have been protections against a lot of the administration’s austerity measures that we are seeing implemented as grad students and also as undergrads,” said first-year sociology doctoral candidate Laila Bárcenas.
Many graduate students in the UAW believed the union was going to strike, telling the undergrad students in their sections to prepare for the disruption. However, the strike never went through.
“[Other UC representatives] made an assessment that workers could not strike in this political climate, that a strike would have had to be long. We would have had to fight hard to win these gains right now,” Gross said.
When a contract is in place, the UAW is legally forbidden from striking through a no-strike clause. However, when the UC is between contracts with the UAW, that clause expires, and the union is able to use striking to achieve additional grievances against the university.
“The whole time that we were in contract bargaining here in Santa Cruz, at least, we were preparing to actually walk off the job, to withhold our labor and interrupt the functioning of the university because we know that is when the power balance tips towards us, towards the workers who actually run the university,” Gross said.
Even though the UCSC branch was ready to strike, most of the other UC campuses, with the exception of UC Merced, did not feel the same. Gross and Jess Fournier, the other UCSC representative on the bargaining team, alongside Carlo Acevedo and Ethan Custodio at UC Merced, were often outvoted 20-4.
“The reality is that I don’t think concessions were made in this contract fight. A lot of the wins are just keeping things the same, what was won in 2022,” Gross said. “Now we’re locked into this contract for four years, so it’s kind of a long time to be locked into something that was won back in 2022.”
UAW members striking for higher wages and more hours in 2022. Photo by Keith Gelderloos.
Despite the unsatisfactory results of this bargaining season, Gross urges UCSC undergrad and graduate students alike, along with student workers, to not give up.
“When we fight, we win, but it requires a lot of work and organizing to put up that fight and do a good job. Solidarity is going to be the only way through this landscape,” Gross said. 
