Workers On Strike Find Abundance Through Mutual Aid
by
How do tensions between refuge and its refusals shape the nature of university labor, especially in light of recent upheavals? From the protest encampments on UC campuses to memory landscapes of Iran and trans activists in South America, UC PhD students in UCHRI’s 2023-24 professionalization program map the search for refuge from local to global.
With basic needs met, real organizing can happen. Full bellies, it turns out, are a prerequisite of consciousness-raising.
With a heave, I hoisted my backpack, first over my right shoulder, then my left. The nylon squeaked as the weight settled. Just as I had done each day for the last three years, I cinched the harness, clipped my helmet, straddled my bicycle, and pushed off on my commute to UC Davis. Instead of heading to the linguistics department, or to teach in a classroom across campus, this morning I made my way to an intramural sports field. As I approached, I spotted a gathering of bodies across the expanse of damp grass. I made my way towards them as the first rays of sun singed away the dew. This time, instead of books tugging against the straps across my shoulders, a few hundred firm, red persimmons pressed at the seams.
By the time I reached the people ferrying items onto a blue camping tarp from a small truck and a collection of homemade bicycle trailers, I was slick with sweat and hunched against the weight of the fruit. A few of my colleagues waved but most carried on with their tasks. Like a colony of ants dressed in jeans and fall jackets, they maneuvered to assemble tables and stoves in rows according to the shade and the day’s events.
I unloaded the persimmons next to a growing pile of food: Giant black Costco totes filled with butternut squash. Heaps of bagels and flour for pancakes. Jugs and coolers in various shapes, sizes, and colors. Day after day, dozens of workers came together to assure that a kitchen sprouted, bloomed, and retreated from the field. Before long, each flowering of the strike kitchen fed breakfast and lunch to thousands of workers like me, and anyone else who needed a meal.
The strike kitchen wasn’t the only place where I had stood in line for free food in 2022. While working as a teaching assistant, I frequented the on-campus food pantry that opened specifically to support graduate students after a 2015 report found that 42% of UC students experience high levels of food insecurity. In these lines, I was on the receiving end. At the same time, as a researcher studying how people in mutual aid groups communicate, I was also on the giving end.
The UAW academic worker strike in the fall of 2022 coincided with my ethnographic dissertation fieldwork with a migrant mutual aid and advocacy organization. Since 2016, the organization has been focused on meeting the immediate needs of migrants who arrive in Sacramento seeking asylum. Composed of a network of volunteers and funded by donations and the occasional grant, the group organizes to provide free goods and resources at events around Sacramento, no strings attached.
Throughout 2022-2023, I observed the group’s work and studied their interactions as I joined in distributing food, accompanying people to immigration court hearings, and helping migrants complete applications for asylum. At the same time, I taught undergraduates at UC Davis and served as a head steward with UAW 2865. This was my bargaining unit at the time, which included teaching assistants, readers, and tutors. UAW 2865 has since merged with bargaining units of postdocs and other UC researchers in contingent positions to form a new unit, UAW 4811. My experiences observing community organizing in these varied settings before, during, and after the strike helped me see that despite the scarcity model that shrouds graduate studies, organized mutual aid like the strike kitchen proves that there is plenty to go around.
The mutual aid group showed me that there are ways we can provide for each other when institutions aren’t the refuges we thought they’d be.
After all, some of the greatest challenges graduate workers face are issues that I watched the migrant mutual aid group come together to solve every day from a position of care and abundance. Academics or not, workers who arrive in California from around the world seeking opportunity share many struggles: affording to live in the communities in which we work; navigating unfamiliar bureaucracies when the stakes are high; and competing regularly for temporary employment. All while respecting the institutional stipulations that the US immigration system and the University of California place on our ability to remain here, like visa requirements and full-time student status.
Mutual aid, it turns out, has a lot to teach those who pass through the modern American university. For the migrant families I worked with who made their way to the US in search of refuge, many of whom were detained and incarcerated in the process for no other reason than being born abroad and running for their lives, community organizing met their needs when the laws and systems meant to protect them failed. The mutual aid group showed me that there are ways we can provide for each other when institutions aren’t the refuges we thought they’d be.
Academia as Refuge and Refusal
At dusk the day before, I had picked the persimmons from the lone tree in the backyard of a small house a few of my colleagues rented. This is the biggest persimmon tree I have ever seen. It’s the biggest fruit tree I’ve ever seen. Surefooted and eager to see inside the vast canopy, I offered to harvest as many persimmons as I could carry and take them to the picket line. The tree had long since proven it could feed more than the five people that lived there could eat or reach on their own, and the persimmons would have languished in the tree otherwise. Even after climbing a ladder, I could see hundreds, maybe thousands more, hanging ripely just out of reach.
“Money doesn’t grow on trees,” the saying goes. That’s the message from UC admin to faculty and grad workers whose departments have been left to fend for themselves to fund wage increases won in the 2022 strike while UC admin skims 25-33% of grants earned by workers. Yet in 2022 the administration gave $800,000 in raises to chancellors and in 2023 invested 4.5 billion in the private equity firm Blackstone, known for buying up properties near UC campuses to limit the housing supply and raise rents. In Sacramento, for example, where average rents rose 19.5 percent in 2021, Blackstone is the largest landlord.
Faced with the reality of being an indentured academic worker until graduation day, we shouldn’t be shy about how to transform universities into spaces that offer real refuge to their workers.
In eastern South Dakota where I grew up, the saying could just as well be, “Fruit doesn’t grow on trees.” The state’s continental climate may be harsh on produce, but so are its politics. In 2023, state leaders chose not to apply for $7.5 million in federal funds offered through the Pandemic Electronic Benefits Transfer (P-EBT) program, which would have helped an estimated 63,000 South Dakota children receive healthy food during summer 2023. Now that pandemic-era food benefits have expired for residents of the state, food insecurity there has risen.
Yet in Davis, California, food I once thought could only be bought from a store can be picked straight from the trees in my neighborhood and outside my campus department, such is the abundance. Grapefruits, figs, plums, feijoas. The manifold peoples and harvests presided over by the University of California system always seemed like a natural foil to the sameness of the endless rows of corn and soybeans I was used to. Deep down, I guess I always felt like a fruit tree amongst the cornstalks.
I’ll admit I expected life as a grad student in California to be a refuge. It’s one of the few places where people speak of “the California dream” like they do of the plain old American one. As a queer kid on the prairie, it was hard not to let that popular message seed itself into my imagination of the future. In many ways, daily life at UC Davis has been a refuge since I was hired in 2019, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic. The worst days I spent during the pandemic in Davis, with its gardens and trails and walk-in rapid testing, were surely better than many, many peoples’ best pandemic days.
Though schools are too often dangerous places for trans and gender nonconforming people, academia is often a refuge for gay men like me. For queer people in rural places like South Dakota, or who need a visa to enter the United States, or who don’t have a place to live beyond university housing, getting into graduate school is about more than an education or a salary. It’s a ticket to a safer place that comes with permission to be there.
However, “being” at the UC is distinct from “belonging” there, and many grad workers never receive the rights and benefits of full belonging. With the mission of higher education becoming increasingly dependent on the labor of temporary workers and the cost of living in UC communities skyrocketing, can the university still be a refuge? In a broader culture of austerity, outsiders will continue to line up to enroll in graduate school even in the face of low wages and uncertain success. Alexandre Afonso argues that the academic job market resembles a drug gang where street-level dealers take on great risk for the unlikely prospect of becoming a kingpin. The widely accepted scarcity model of higher education, he claims, only strengthens the dichotomy between stable insiders with careers and temporary gig workers clamoring to get inside.
Many hardworking, rule-following young thinkers who come to PhD programs are lured by the prospect of an esteemed title, a de facto professional career, and all of the proverbial greener grass that comes with these assets. Tenured mentors often guide them toward that imaginary result and scoff at graduate student workers’ unionization efforts despite soaring tuition rates that force grad students today to take on more debt than ever before; meanwhile, their wages have stagnated compared to those with lower degrees, a 2023 report by the US Department of Education showed. Many aspiring grad students are choosing, perhaps naively, to defer living wages that other employment sectors offer, especially to people who already hold bachelor’s and master’s degrees. As a result, full-time administrators and tenured faculty, the university “insiders,” can outsource more and more of their labor, like teaching undergraduates, managing departments, and researching, to “outsiders” like teaching assistants and student researchers who are employed on contingent and temporary contracts and depend on the insiders’ approval to graduate. Yet as the core group of insider employees shrinks and shifts from teaching to administrative roles, it is more and more dependent on the outsiders who work in classrooms and labs and serve the core mission of universities.
Regardless of the working conditions, as long as transphobia and homophobia exist, queer people will keep coming to academia searching for more stable, protected, encultured, and wealthy futures. Faced with the reality of being an indentured academic worker until graduation day, we shouldn’t be shy about how to transform universities like the UC into spaces that offer real refuge to their workers through affordable housing, living wages, and freedom from harassment. When the strike began in 2022 in the middle of my dissertation research, my increasing precarity as a third-year graduate student helped me build solidarity with people from many different backgrounds who also needed refuge and found it through mutual aid.
Realizing the Power of Mutual Aid
One day early in the November 2022 strike, I didn’t go to the picket line. Instead, I accompanied an asylum-seeking couple to their immigration court hearing, the pharmacy, and the supermarket. They had connected with the mutual aid organization at a pro se clinic where volunteers help applicants without lawyers file their asylum claims. For applicants who must narrate their trauma in English, the volunteers who listen, translate, and document their stories provide a lifesaving form of mutual aid. The difference between the acceptance or denial of their asylum claim can mean the difference between a path to legal residence, employment, and citizenship, or deportation, persecution, and even death in their countries of origin. Filing an asylum application allows the applicant to temporarily remain in the US, but prohibits them from applying for a work permit for five months. The policy is designed to increase precarity as a way to deter people from seeking asylum here, of facilitating refuge for only the most connected. International graduate students in the US, who don’t have permission to work outside their part-time university appointments while on student visas, face a similar challenge in providing for themselves.
I had originally worked with the men at the clinic to begin the difficult process of documenting the fear they felt for their lives as gay men in a country where gangs torment and kill queer people while the state turns a blind eye. In addition to the assistance they received at the clinic, the mutual aid organization worked with them the months and years after their arrival in Sacramento, providing them with emergency funds to buy groceries, make rent, or attend a court hearing.
For asylum seekers like this gay couple, support to buy food, access medication, pay rent, or ask the right questions at a government office can make all the difference to day-to-day survival. Prioritizing actions that fill bellies and calm nerves is necessary to expose the root causes of inhumane precarity that stem from the distorted priorities of state institutions. That’s what mutual aid is: Building a social movement by working together to meet the survival needs of people in our community.
On the day I accompanied the gay couple, one had recently been denied his prescription to treat a chronic illness by the pharmacy. He had missed a lab appointment because he didn’t have a way to get to the free clinic in the city from his shared apartment in a more affordable suburb. With his prescription denied, he had missed doses and his health was suffering. A ride into the city, a conversation, and assistance in their interaction with the pharmacist was all it took to coordinate future transit to the doctor’s office and arrange that their prescriptions be delivered by post.
As a graduate student employee whose health insurance was contingent on my position at the UC, I have also been denied medication from the pharmacy several times due to clerical lapses in my registration and employment status over the years, the renewal process for which is contingent on a 10-week cycle of convoluted administrative tasks. Fortunately, the delays never impacted my health. In fact, the health insurance that came with my UC Davis acceptance covered medications that would have cost more than a thousand dollars per month while I lived and worked at a South Dakota university.
For me, like so many others, migrating to California gave me access to resources and opportunities that I didn’t have before. Studying the migrant mutual aid group and going on strike showed me firsthand the privileges that have enabled my own movement across space and social environments and which facilitate the academic ascendance of a select few. A supportive family, US citizenship, and native English proficiency paved my way to graduate school at the UC, and to recovering my health benefits when they lapsed. Yet my conversations with migrants and fellow workers in 2022 also revealed how precarity pervades the lives of UC employees, who risk not only losing wages while on strike but also health insurance. Temple University administrators cut health care benefits for striking graduate workers just weeks after our own strike ended.
Before we are workers or students, we are people.
For the UC to become a refuge for, say, bright-minded queer people who also happen to be poor, lack US citizenship, speak English as a second language, or have a chronic illness, more privileged workers must hold administrators accountable when the university fails to meet its employees’ basic needs like housing, food, and healthcare. It’s up to us to help ourselves to the abundance.
What Universities and Unions Can Learn from Migrant Mutual Aid
Not long into the strike, I recognized a familiar face among the line of workers serving lunch from the strike kitchen. She was not someone I knew from campus, but another volunteer with the mutual aid group I studied, who also happened to be a temporary academic worker on strike. Though we only briefly interacted while on strike, I interviewed her recently to hear how she compared the tightrope of precarity and abundance that both workers and migrants walk. I was curious to understand her thoughts on food as a conduit for organizing both her colleagues at the university and migrants in the community.
My colleague’s participation in the mutual aid organization largely consisted of outreach to day laborers and tending to the organization’s small farm, which grows fresh produce for the monthly distributions. With these programs and the strike kitchen, she pointed to how communities can come together to alleviate the vulnerabilities that people face head on. These efforts to redistribute the abundance of food in California to those who need it share an ethos of unconditionally meeting the needs of people who fall through the cracks of institutions and policies meant to protect and uplift them.
Sharing food also served as de facto political organizing. My colleague told me she was amazed by the broader community’s generosity in feeding striking workers. As people came to the picket line to eat, commune, and serve each other, we observed how our colleagues—who at first expressed confusion about how fresh, healthy food could be given away for free, were skeptical of hidden strings, and felt ashamed to line up for handouts—came to feel like more than just a line on a university or union spreadsheet. When faced with choosing between working extra jobs to pay our bills now or advancing our research to earn a degree and a higher salary later, graduate student workers often have no choice but to do both at the expense of the things that nourish us: food, sunlight, face-to-face human conversation, and community. Mutual aid efforts like the strike kitchen nourished us when the university failed to.
I myself didn’t expect a bag of persimmons to have such a radical effect. Yet the day of my delivery I overheard one colleague tell another that they were just like the kind on the tree at her grandmother’s house. In turn, another worker overheard this and ran over to get some immediately. “Persimmons!?” she exclaimed, shocked with delight. “I love persimmons!” The fruit fed my colleagues and me for days. The giant tree and its yearly spoils had been there for ages, just out of reach for all but a few.
Many workers reported that communal meals kept them coming back to the picket line each day. With the abundance of free food provided by the strike kitchen, my colleague commented that for striking workers, the risk of lost wages “seemed like an afterthought to this abundance model of care.” With basic needs met, real organizing can happen. Full bellies, it turns out, are a prerequisite of consciousness-raising. Perhaps we should have expected this, since academic workers who already hold PhDs and work at universities routinely rely on food stamps.
However, my colleague also lamented that the way our union addressed precarity too closely relied on the UC administration’s language and paralleled the limited term of the employment contract. The rapid expansion of the strike kitchen and its ability to keep workers on the picket line showed that mutual aid efforts provide the energy we need to endure the risks and conflicts that come with a long strike.
As one of the elected UC Davis head stewards deeply involved in campus organizing in the year leading up to the strike, I admit we gave little attention to meeting the needs that would get us through each day while picketing. We focused on becoming visible to the UC administration, on growing numbers and raising figures, and on turning people out to the picket line. Only when the strike began did we consider what we would eat, where we would go to the bathroom, how we would care for each other in the face of the real physical challenges that inevitably come when your desk job becomes a month-long march.
Not all of my colleagues approached organizing in this way, however. Each day, a small group of workers set up a tent on the grass, further afield from the kitchen, the sound system, and the shouting picketers. It was a place for sensory de-stimulation, a place to relax in the shade. “Rest is Resistance,” said a hand-made sign affixed to the tent. Colloquially, the space became known as the “mutual aid tent” because it was a place for people to rest, to listen at teach-ins, and to find sustenance. Marching in line was not a requirement. Perhaps it’s no surprise that after the strike, the organizers who provided the mutual aid tent became the locus of a burgeoning movement to shift the UC Davis union leadership’s priorities.
It’s up to us to help ourselves to the abundance.
At the end of the interview, my colleague and I agreed that although many of our fellow workers were accustomed to a scarcity model, the strike kitchen and mutual aid tent showed people how we can meet each other’s needs in a new way. Sometimes all you need to do is ask and share. An abundance that had always been there emerged, and workers, many for the first time, decided to help themselves. When I asked her to give advice to future mutual aid volunteers, my colleague said, “Show up and you’ll figure it out as you go along. Most people are starved for some kind of community, and you shouldn’t expect that community to just exist. You have to co-create that community. And that’s what you can do by just showing up.”
Waiting until an authorized strike to organize a community around meeting needs, however, is too late. The same forces of food and friendship that kept us on the picket line are the ones we must rely on when it comes time to give something up. Fueling those forces for the first time at the picket line is too late. It has to be done before. To face powerful institutions that manufacture scarcity for workers like the UC, with endowments in the tens of billions and investments whose value has doubled over the last ten years, we must show up now to ask, listen, and feed our community members. In so many ways, food and community hold us together while the hierarchies that structure academic workplaces pit us against each other. Before we are workers or students, we are people. Coming together in this way is what will keep us together in the next struggle. Only when we take the time to sit and listen to others who struggle to find refuge in California can we see the world for its abundance.
Like the chambers of a nautilus shell, the alternations of a fern’s leaflets, or the tributaries of the San Joaquin Delta, the artificial lines and physical barriers humans impose on the landscape echo at both smaller and larger scales. Only from a distance can one see the fractal patterns of inclusion and exclusion, precarity and abundance. Only by taking the time to listen in different ways can one truly hear the voices of the people within and beyond the categories we have constructed. Studying the migrant mutual aid group while on strike gave me insight into my own precarity and abundance in this way. As universities become increasingly corporatized, the growing class of administrators, the shrinking class of faculty, and the workers who sustain them all have something to learn from mutual aid models of meeting peoples’ needs.
I don’t profess to have a roadmap to successful leadership of a university or a collective bargaining unit, but what I can say with confidence is that workers won’t get through the next bargaining season or build a movement that can survive the next strike without the resilience and trust that mutual aid can give us. To reach higher into the persimmon tree, we’ll have to work together.
This publication was supported in part by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of California Office of the President MRPI funding M22PS5863. UCHRI thanks editor and writer Michelle Chihara for her developmental work with the series contributors.
