At the beginning of the 2009-2010 academic year a coalition of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty occupy the Graduate Student Commons of the University of California, Santa Cruz. They splinter off of a demonstration at the base of campus against an egregious tuition hike. A prepared statement declares the situation untenable, the space liberated, and demands outmoded. Barricades go up as an attempted occupation at UC Berkeley is thwarted.
The Grad Student Commons holds for a week before voluntarily then dissolving. Over the course of the next four months there are something like twenty actions, primarily occupations and sit-ins, across the University of California system. In 2010 the escalation continues as electrocommunist dance parties are added to the mix to disrupt business and cover for other militant actions. Students also begin to join non-university actions like the riots against the verdict in the murder of Oscar Grant.
In 2011 the escalations spike. Students continue to struggle against the hollowing of the university by the state and the administration and continue to cross over with militant struggle against police brutality. When the Occupy Wall Street movement hits, it is in part due to the veterans and comrades of the Occupy California struggle (in New York and Oakland especially, but also elsewhere) who help transform the idea from an Adbusters photo-op to the seeds of a USian mass movement with a class analysis.
The continuity of national struggle over the past decade is full of ruptures. The police repression of Occupy eventually snuffed it out. Black Lives Matter developed its own momentum and path with, at best, assists from participants and organizers of Occupy. A number of sites of struggle also pop up, from Standing Rock to the Muslim Ban to street fights against alt right and neo-Nazi goons. Electorally, Bernie Sanders’ 2016 primary candidacy blew open the doors of the DSA, who seem primarily to have educated and agitated in order to position him better for his 2020 run (and surprisingly successfully, it seems, even if he does not take the nomination).
I begin in 2009 not because it is the origin (though it can sometimes feel that way, given the massive ruptures that Obama and the Great Recession constituted) or because it was my own point of radicalization, but because we seem to have looped back around. Graduate students at the University of California, Santa Cruz are engaging in a wildcat strike for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) right now which started in December of 2019.
They are striking even though it is against the terms set by their union (the United Auto Workers) in the last rounds of negotiation. The strike has quickly been held up by a coalition – of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty – and has faced barely-veiled threats of deportation from former Department of Homeland Security head and current UC President Janet Napolitano.
The first four years of Trump’s presidency have seen inspiring actions but little in the way of engaged, mass movement building (and no, the liberal #Resistance does not count). COLA4All is reminiscent of that pre-Occupy occupy, spreading quickly across the UC system and, hopefully, into broader movement building opportunities. Hell, they even got a nod from Sanders, and Napolitano backed down quickly thereafter.
Reclaim UC put it well, arguing that the material conditions behind the COLA wildcat strike are consistent with those that inspired the initial wave of Occupy California – “[D]uring the California student movement of 2009-10, everyone understood how the UC administration used its police forces to enable and enforce tuition hikes: ‘Behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops.’ 10 years later, tuition increases have slowed down and, with few options for revenue growth, administrators have turned to ‘cost-cutting,’ esp[ecially] regarding labor costs, as a key component of their strategy. UCSC police are still on the front lines of UC’s financial strategy.”
The conversion of the public university system into a de facto private entity, run like a business with minimal state support, lends continuity to the administrative and repressive apparatus. At a more systemic level, the struggle for COLA is linked to Occupy California by way of the Great Recession. The wave of immiseration that hit low- and middle-income households (with a wildly disproportionate impact on people of color) was a kind of creative destruction. From developers’ perspectives, neighborhoods that had been subject to the slow beat of "Urban Renewal" and tax breakdown were suddenly freed of the one barrier to successful gentrification – the fact that they were lived in by poor people of color who couldn’t be arrested (or murdered by police) for being homeless. Even better when those neighborhoods were adjacent to the booming tech industry. Silicon Valley’s radiating wealth coupled with scarcity artificially created by developers buying up foreclosed houses meant the second half of the 2010s blossomed into rent hikes that left even unionized graduate student workers in a position that they have once again described as untenable.
It would be ridiculous to claim that as goes the UC system, so goes the nation. What is clear, I hope, is that the material conditions facing university workers are not at all disconnected from the material conditions we all face. Graduate students too are being immiserated by the private control of the means of production, by the neoliberal state’s disinvestment from every social service except the military and police, from being propertyless wage workers in proximity to the fluid exchange of venture capital, IPOs, and land developers.
There has been a spark of life in the labor movement over the last half decade, although most of it has been talk. Bernie Sanders and Sarah Nelson have been among the most identifiable spokespeople, but everyone from graduate students to Kickstarter Employees to Game Workers Unite (and even SAG-AFTRA, in striking against the videogame industry a few years back) have been making moves unprecedented since Reaganomics. If that spark is to catch fire, COLA is one of the necessary models.
UAW leadership is facing corruption charges. Unions for Iron Workers and Firefighters have endorsed Joe “Medicare for all is bad for unions” Biden in the Democratic Primary. Even more recently, leadership of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW, a union known for at least a handful of militant locals) endorsed Biden as well to immediate backlash from a sizable group of members. A reborn labor movement without the capacity for actions like the COLA wildcat strike is, at best, only marginally better than the shambling zombie of a labor movement we have seen under neoliberalism.
Like Occupy California before it, the COLA wildcat strike represents a possible path forward in response to the same prevailing conditions, mutated as they have been over the last dozen years. It will require material support, generalization, and escalation. But we’ve done it before. This time we’ll just have to do it better.