OUR PRINCIPLES

• Student workers’ demands—for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA), an end to wage tiers at UC, full Non-Resident Supplemental Tuition (NRST) remission for international grads, divestment from the Israeli occupation of Palestine, disability justice, and financial support for parents—are serious, realistic demands that we can win if we take a strategic, militant, and democratic approach to contract bargaining and to our next strike. A reformed union can succeed where our current union has failed.

• Union democracy means mass membership engagement—not just mass participation—and this requires full transparency from elected union officials, including open bargaining without exceptions. We’re committed to empowering members to take initiative and shape our union’s strategy throughout bargaining, strike action, and contract enforcement.

• We need a realistic strategy for a winning strike, a strategy informed by our last strike in 2022, by recent strikes at other universities, and by a serious analysis of the role that student workers play in our employer’s operations. Strikes work by causing economic damage to management’s business, not by convincing our bosses that we’re in the right.

• We’re committed to organizing, bargaining, and striking to force UC to end its financial support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine. We understand the obstacles that we’ll face in the course of this struggle, but we also recognize the power that we have, as unionized workers, to pressure our employer to divest—a power that past divestment campaigns at UC did not have at their disposal.