Single Moms Vote NO
In the words of a talent show judge, “It’s a NO for me, dog!”
The UC’s refusal to fairly compensate the workers who are the foundation and proponents of innovative research and prestige has been a longstanding clear and deliberate exercise of labor exploitation. The proposed tentative agreement that has been passed to union members, to potentially end the UC academic strike is absolute trash. It fails to recognize that the UC’s academic student workers and researchers are worth much more and deserve to live and work with dignity, not with a tentative agreement with inadequate child care reimbursements, unmet access needs, tuition-burdened non-resident workers, and where proposed wage increases will be outpaced by inflation and housing market increases.
To be a marginalized reentry graduate student in the UC system, is to be held hostage in a toxic “entanglement” at best. Caught up with an institution who during courtship “love-bombs” the mess out of us, reeling us in, telling us everything we want to hear and promising resources they had no intention of delivering. Now that we’ve left our previous careers behind, pledged our commitment and devotion, landing ourselves in vulnerable positions of dependency on them — they switch up and show us who they really are. The gas has been lit and the false narratives spread — we don’t or shouldn’t feel the way we do. We don’t have the right to be secure, we need to take the bare minimum they give for our families sake, make do, and shut up. We’re ungrateful; it’s us, not them. If this was one story, maybe, but tens of thousands UC?! Yeah…I think not. You could not be MORE wrong! It’s definitely you, you’re the problem, not us, and you need to get it together — ALL the way together, UC.
Choosing to attend graduate school comes at an opportunity cost for most graduate students. For those of us that are single moms, returning to academia after building our families and careers, the cost is exceptionally high, especially as Black and Brown women with multiple marginalized identities. We bring a breadth and depth of knowledge and lived experience that university committees agreed were valuable enough to warrant recruiting with “prestigious” fellowships. We left the careers that allowed us to provide for our families to devote our expertise to research directly benefiting the university, only to be met with stipends, wages, and benefits that fall short of meeting basic needs. Thus, we inevitably regret leaving our careers and hold resentment toward the UC for belittling us and endangering our survival under promises of diversity fellowships that oftentimes cause ineligibility for other forms of financial aid that are necessary to support our families.
We should not accept the UC’s poverty level standards for its academic workers when our contributions, by way of labor, maintain its institutional prestige. If the UC mission is to provide societal benefits through discovering and advancing knowledge, then they need to place their money where their mouth is. Meeting strike demands would require a mere 1.5% budget point investment to ensure basic needs are met, so marginalized voices don’t have to worry about how they will maintain their housing, food, childcare, and healthcare. These are real-life concerns for many of us reentry students, all while we train to become scholars and changemakers in our communities, directly benefiting the UC and society. But we know you are aware, because, “Since 2000, no fewer than five university task forces have stressed the imperative to address the neglected needs of graduate students.” In 2012, two of those task forces concluded that the “UC must increase graduate student stipends and eliminate nonresident supplemental tuition (NRST) for academic graduate students to the maximum extent possible.”
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To refuse to account for increases in costs of living and inflation in the compensation proposal and continue to pay poverty wages, provide inadequate child care subsidies and no dependent healthcare coverage, is reprehensible. As parents, we teach our children that integrity is doing the right thing wherever and whenever you can, even when no one is watching. The UC is the largest employer and the largest landlord in the fifth largest economy in the world. Holding onto an unrelenting, unbending power position when they can truly afford all the strike demands is unethical and immoral; a practice for which we, as marginalized students, continue to be disproportionately negatively impacted. Their negotiation strategy has been focused on not giving in, when it should be about doing the right thing, like my 6-yr old is learning to do.
Losing us and those that will not follow if rent burden, poverty wages, insufficient childcare, and a tiered healthcare system persist, means the UC will miss out on the transformative research power and academic insights we bring. This power will go elsewhere, as it should. We will find ourselves forced to reenter the workforce on a new path or return to our previous careers, quitting quite early into our scholarship, short a doctorate or master’s degree — scholars denied.
We’ve given up too much, given the UC so much, to receive so little. We marginalized reentry students are done with your excuses. We will be seen. We will be heard. We will be fairly compensated, and our scholarship will not be denied.
We are thousands strong, we know our worth, and demand it!
We said what we said.
Jullanar Zakiyyah Williams (she/her/queen)
Ph.D. Student, Sociology
University of California, Merced
Claudia Madrigal Johnson (she/her/ella)
PhD Student, Sociology
University of California, Merced
