The Forgotten Santa Cruz Grad Student/TA Strike

It may be hard to remember but there was a grad student/TA strike at Santa Cruz that was eclipsed by the coronavirus crisis.

From the Santa Cruz Sentinel: Dozens of graduate-student workers fired for engaging in a wildcat strike at UC Santa Cruz have a path to reinstatement this fall under a deal reached between the campus and the students’ union. The UAW 2865 union committed to drop an unfair labor practice charge against UCSC as part of the settlement, which also includes an agreement to shift student-conduct sanctions to employee warning letters for teaching assistants who deleted grades as part of a strike.

Warning letters issued to 245 students for initially refusing to submit grades can also be removed from students’ files under the deal, at least for the majority of students who eventually submitted the grades.

“As the campus continues to prepare for fall quarter, we can close some of the chapters of a turbulent past academic year,” UCSC Chancellor Cynthia Larive and campus provost Lori Kletzer wrote in a campus message Thursday. The two campus leaders acknowledged that some claims resulting from the wildcat strike remain unsettled, calling the agreement “a small yet important step for our community, one we believe sets us up for a stronger future together.”

Veronica Hamilton, UCSC’s UAW 2865 unit chair and a psychology doctoral student, is among at least 75 students who were dismissed or barred from teaching positions for alleged wildcat strike activity. In an interview Thursday, Hamilton said polling found support for the deal from a majority of union members caught up in discipline related to the strike. But the settlement doesn’t extend as far as she would have hoped.

“The deal ensures some things that we do need, but it is such an incredibly small step,” Hamilton said. “It’s hard to feel proud of this deal when it doesn’t include things like full reinstatement and withdrawing of all discipline.”

According to Hamilton, the path to reinstatement divides fired graduate students into two groups. About 35 students who were barred from appointments they had yet to receive are now eligible for reinstatement, she said. A larger group of more than 40 students that were dismissed from spring appointments, herself included, will still need to go through an expedited arbitration, she said.

“They should have reinstated everybody,” Hamilton said. “And that is something that we asked for and demanded multiple times, and they were sort of unrelenting.”

A total of 75 students have been involved in student-conduct proceedings for alleged deletion of grades as part of the wildcat strike, according to a campus spokesperson...

Full story at https://www.santacruzsentinel.com/2020/07/09/fired-ucsc-graduate-students-given-path-to-reinstatement-under-union-deal/

Note: This article is unclear. If there is expedited arbitration, what will the arbitrator consider? What is to be determined? Based on what criteria? Yours truly is certainly not opposed to ambiguity as a dispute resolution feature. Indeed, he has advocated it.*  But for arbitration to work, the arbitrator needs some criteria, however vague, to hang a decision on.
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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2020/03/have-you-forgotten-grad-student-strike.html.