, based on the mismatch between median earnings and home prices.Graduate teaching assistants at UC receive a waiver of tuition and some fees, along with a monthly stipend of about $2,435 . In Santa Cruz, monthly rent and utilities averages about $1,339, meaning that TAs at that campus on average spend about 55% of their compensation on housing. Spending more than 50% places them in the category the Department of Housing and Urban Development defines as “severely rent-burdened.
The strikers are seeking a cost-of-living increase of $1,412 a month; the university has offered $2,500 a year. At just over $200 a month, “that doesn’t really change the rent burden, even for on-campus housing, says Veronica Hamilton, head of the Santa Cruz unit of the UAW. The broader issue underlying the strike is the increasing reliance of universities like UC on low-paid teaching staff. Universities like UC tend to regard their graduate teaching assistants essentially as students being helped along by stipends and benefits such as tuition waivers, rather than workers entitled to a living wage. But they are employees who often shoulder workloads on a scale that, when all the hours are counted, may bring their pay within the category of minimum wage.
“This is part of a growing movement to address a crisis,” Hamilton says. “Graduate education has been effectively defunded over the years, and we see a lot of people fighting against that.” “There is a significant difference between public demonstrations of self-expression and actions that directly violate the terms of a collective bargaining agreement,” the administration says, “including disrupting educational activities.”
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