12 Months, 6 Years
What is 12 Months, 6 Years funding?
A demand for guaranteed 12-month funding for 6 years would transform the lives of graduate workers, providing financial security across departments, campuses, and immigration status. At UC, not all workers have access to summer fellowships or TAships, and many still struggle to cover basic expenses such as rent and groceries. International workers face even more precarity, given their lack of access to employment outside the university and higher expenses associated with travel, visa applications, and non-resident tuition. Six years of guaranteed 12-month funding would not only provide financial security to international graduate student-workers across the UC. It would also address the pressing choice between personal safety by staying in the country to avoid the ports of entry, and financial security by leaving the country to avoid the rent.
In California's rental market, even one quarter without funding can spell economic and academic disaster for student-workers. Funding for 6 years (the average normative time for degree completion) can respond to the volatility of the present moment. This can provide a backstop particularly for those workers in STEM and adjacent fields, as the recent wave of NSF/NIH cuts executed by the Trump administration have placed the employment of many in peril. The UC must provide bridge funding for labs whose grants are cut, to protect the financial security of affected workers and allow their essential research to continue, and a funding guarantee can push the University to do this. To win against the UCs austerity program and guarantee 12-month funding for 6 years will require all hands on deck in the fight.
Why do we need 12 Months, 6 Years now?
If the skyrocketing rents eating our wages weren't enough, the UC's austerity-minded budget cuts have added yet another layer of precarity to graduate workers' lives. Each Spring, graduate workers hustle to piece together summer employment to make up the difference between 12 months of rent and only 9 months of wages, sometimes finding their summer appointments canceled without recourse. International workers, already under strict work limits, now face an impossible choice: return to their home country and risk detention at the border, surveillance of their electronics, and being barred from reentering, or live without an income for the summer months.
Furthermore, multi-year funding guarantees are shrinking or disappearing altogether: for instance, UCSC's 5 year funding guarantee (won for PhD and MA students in the 2019–2020 Wildcat Strike) is being quietly discontinued, while other campuses had no guarantees to begin with. Incoming students will need to compete for increasingly rare TAships with larger class sizes and increased responsibilities.
Researchers anxiously hope to have their jobs spared amid federal grant freezes, with the University failing to provide backup. UC tuition remission depends on employment, and these labor cuts come right as Admin is pressuring departments to push students out in fewer years. As bargaining for our new contract begins, graduate student workers now have to fight on two fronts: not only struggling to be paid enough to live where they work, but increasingly, struggling to be paid at all.
A demand for guaranteed 12-month funding for 6 years would transform the lives of graduate workers, providing financial security across departments, campuses, and immigration status. At UC, not all workers have access to summer fellowships or TAships, and many still struggle to cover basic expenses such as rent and groceries. International workers face even more precarity, given their lack of access to employment outside the university and higher expenses associated with travel, visa applications, and non-resident tuition. Six years of guaranteed 12-month funding would not only provide financial security to international graduate student-workers across the UC. It would also address the pressing choice between personal safety by staying in the country to avoid the ports of entry, and financial security by leaving the country to avoid the rent.