The student-worker strike seems to have stimulated similar demands for child care provisions among faculty at UC-Santa Cruz. From the Santa Cruz Lookout:
...UC Santa Cruz is the only University of California school among the nine residential campuses without a child care program that serves faculty and/or staff – the UCSC program currently serves only undergraduate and graduate students and has about 62 slots. Faculty mothers at UCSC say they face unique challenges compared to some other UC campuses, driven by the region’s high cost of living, expensive child care and limited day care spots. And they say it’s affecting their career prospects as many female academics feel pressured to choose between caring for their children and furthering their careers. And while graduate students saw a nearly 27% increase in child care reimbursements — to $1,400 a quarter — this past October after a 2022 strike, UCSC faculty don’t receive any child care subsidy.
The result is that many of the school’s faculty mothers, particularly with children under 2½ years, simply can’t afford to pay for child care and end up scaling back their work hours when their children are young, hampering their efforts to progress in their careers, said Lindsey Dillon, an assistant professor of sociology at UCSC. “They’re working 15 to 20, maybe 25 hours a week, and they’re doing a job that is an over-40-hour-a-week job,” she said. “So what that means is that it might take longer to get tenure, people aren’t getting promoted at the same rate as other peers.”
The challenges of accessing affordable local child care in Santa Cruz have inspired more than 60 faculty members, known as the UCSC Academic Mothers, to push for a child care subsidy for tenured and tenure-eligible faculty. The group originally formed in 2016 to advocate for better policies for faculty parents — specifically mothers.
After finalizing their proposal during a group meeting Monday, Dillon, who chairs the group, says they plan to make a proposal similar to what graduate students recently won through their strike at the end of 2022. Until the campus provides staff and faculty child care – through the center that will be built at Student Housing West – faculty are requesting a $1,350 child care subsidy to offset costs of finding care for children under 5 years old.
Dillon said the faculty union will present the proposal at the union’s next labor relations meeting with campus administration in about a month...
Full story at https://lookout.co/uc-santa-cruz-faculty-mothers-say-lack-of-child-care-hurting-their-academic-careers/.
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