From the Director:
The Center for the Study of Racism, Social Justice & Health stands in solidarity with UC students who are on strike for fairer wages. Like UC Berkeley, UCLA is located in one of the nation’s most prohibitively expensive cities in which to reside. Both the cost and availability of housing matter; even wealthy people looking for places to live in LA may have difficulty finding it. To live and work in Los Angeles requires reliable transportation, especially for people who cannot afford to live in Westwood, the neighborhood in which UCLA is located. The neighborhoods among which the campus is nestled are among the most expensive in the country and in Los Angeles: Beverly Hills, Bel Air, Brentwood, Pacific Palisades, Culver City, Santa Monica, etc. (See the Los Angeles City Historical Society’s online almanac). According to the LA Times’ Mapping LA Project, it is also one of the county’s whitest areas (Figure 1). It is remarkable—and not in a complimentary way--that only 7.0% of the population of Westwood is Latinx given Latinx people account for 48.9% of the population of Los Angeles and 40.2% of the state population according to the census.
Source: LA Times
Employment is one of the social determinants of health, which are known to create the conditions that drive health inequities. To address them is necessary to achieve the goal of public health: to promote optimal health for all.
All workers deserve fair and safe working conditions. The strike by student workers (e.g., research assistants, teaching assistants) and postdoctoral scholars, therefore, serves not only as a call to improve the working conditions for certain classes of workers, but as a reminder of the need to do so for all workers. This includes the university staff. Their contributions hold academic departments and the entire university together. Although they provide direct material and emotional support for students, faculty, administrators and others (e.g., patients), their needs, interests and perspectives are often overlooked, too.
Thank you, students and postdoctoral scholars, for reminding us that all workers deserve fair, safe working conditions and a living wage.
Let us see the student strike as an opportunity to learn more about the actual conditions of workers in the UC system and to work collectively toward creating optimal working conditions.
Resources that students and former students have shared with me are below.
A list provided by a UCLA student (name not disclosed intentionally here):
Read about the strike and workers' core demands
Join a picket line in California
https://www.fairucnow.org/picket/
Donate to the UAW-UC Academic Workers Strike Support and Hardship Fund
https://givebutter.com/uc-uaw
Review the UAW 2865 Bargaining Survey Results
https://uaw2865.org/2022-bargaining-campaign/bargaining-survey-results/
Host a teach-in about the strike
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HTuvtm9TNj6NhbCFVM66enHYdVtS8ZoF/edit#slide=id.p1
Follow UAW Twitter (and Instagram) accounts for live updates
@uaw2865 @UAW5810 @sruuaw
In struggle for health equity,
Chandra
