#nrst

“I have gone through a medical procedure on my finger and have dental procedures lined up. The costs of these are so massive that I may be unable to book my flights to go back home. I am an international student. The fact that I have to choose between healthcare and going back home highlights my pains as a grad student who gets inadequate wages.”

"I am an international student who moved here with $2,500 in my bank account. Inflation has been hard on us all, and that is why I am fighting for a living wage on the picket line, I have been lucky because my landlord has not increased my rent and I have gotten by financially with help from department faculty members. But I don’t want to just rely on the goodwill of landlords and faculty; I want to be protected by a real work contract.”

"As an international student, if we don’t win COLA and better wages, there is a huge possibility that I would have to return home. Coming here, I thought that the UC as a public institution would be more attuned to issues of fair wages, and I have been bitterly disappointed. If you’re an international student, you have no family, no support to fall back on if something goes wrong with your finances. All these activities on the picket; performances, songs, and being in community have really energized us all. It’s an experience for me especially since I come from Singapore, a country where participating in any protest, even a one-person protest can land you in prison. I hope to take some of the organizing strategies I see here back to Singapore in our own fight to unionize the country’s vulnerable workers."

"Coming to UCSC was a decision that I knew would be financially hard, but when I came here, my experience was worse than I expected. I was supposed to move into a place, but a week before I flew out from Colombia, the landlord contacted me and told me that he had given my place away to someone who had been willing to pay a higher rent for a longer period of time. This made me homeless in a foreign country before school even started. My department faculty and other students had to search for my housing and help me out where the university had failed. I don’t understand why the UC system recruits international students if they cannot pay us a living wage. Being here on the picket line has been the first time I have experienced real community since coming here, I no longer feel like a lone international student struggling to survive in the United States."

Law made easy.