June 3, 2024
A strike is underway within the University of
California (UC) system — with UCLA, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz all now
participating — as unionized graduate student workers take collective action to
protest the brutalization and repression of fellow union members and Palestine
solidarity protesters.
With academic employees unionized with the United
Auto Workers (UAW) walking out at all three schools, the UC administration has
found itself contending with the consequences of its decision to invite state
aggression upon its own students as they protested the ongoing genocide
perpetrated by Israel in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Those consequences
appear to be piling up, with additional union workforces at UC San Diego and UC
Santa Barbara set to join the strike on Monday, and UC Irvine workers walking off
the job on Wednesday, according to UAW 4881.
The strike takes place in a national context in
which administration crackdowns on Gaza solidarity encampments have encompassed
everything from sanction, expulsion and eviction of students and firings of
faculty (and even top administrators willing to parlay), all the way up to
violent police action, as was on especially ugly display at UCLA. The striking
UC workers, who are members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811 (also
called the Academic Student Employees Union), were provoked to strike after UC
administrators decided to shut down UCLA’s Gaza solidarity encampment by
calling in city police, who stood by while a pro-Israel mob attacked the camp
and beat protesters. The police crackdown led to direct harm to UAW members,
among others. A subsequent encampment at UCLA was similarly dismantled by riot
police — and a similar response is presently underway at UC Santa Cruz, where
on Friday, May 31, police surrounded and cleared protest barricades at the
entrance to campus, detaining an unknown number of demonstrators.
A Stand-Up Strategy
In the wake of the events at UCLA, UAW Local 4811
called a joint council and assembled a list of demands before voting on strike
authorization. The membership’s wishes were made resoundingly clear, with 80
percent of total votes cast in favor of taking action. With Unfair Labor
Practice (ULP) charges already filed against the UC, Local 4811 increased
pressure by executing the first phase of a “stand-up strike,” as organizers are
referring to it, which involves calling on other UC campuses to join in the strike
at staggered intervals, denying employers advance warning and curtailing the
latter’s ability to respond. The stand-up strike differs from a traditional
rolling walkout, however; when other campuses stand up, UCSC will not stand
down. The aim is to hold out in concert, as other campuses join piecemeal.
Because UCSC graduate workers are the first to begin, they will need to hold
out the longest — the expectation is that the strike, which began on May 20,
could run until the end of June.
UAW 4811 itself represents graduate student workers
like teaching assistants, who shoulder the bulk of academic labor: grading,
attendance, and other less-romanticized day-to-day tasks of education. With
48,000 members across the system, the UAW carries significant heft in the
balance of worker and administration power across a public university network
that has for years been roiled by conflict between the diametric interests of
the neoliberal university and the precarious, largely untenured labor force upon
which its pedagogical operations depend.
With this latest strike action, academic workers are
seeking to underscore that they will refuse to accept police violence against
campus protests. On its website, UAW 4811 described the motivations behind the
strike authorization vote:
Academic workers at UC strongly support
the right of the encampment organizers (many of whom are our coworkers) in
their right to peacefully demonstrate. Our union will not negotiate on behalf
of encampment organizers, but we do call on UC to negotiate with them in good
faith. We strongly oppose any escalation by UC to dismantle the encampments
and/or take disciplinary/legal action against organizers.
Rebecca Gross, a graduate student worker in UCSC’s
Literature Department who is also the unit chair of UAW 4811, described the
chain of events that precipitated this strike to Truthout, saying:
Members of our union, my local, at these
other campuses were participating in peaceful protests at and around the Gaza
solidarity encampments. And, especially at UCLA, these workers were brutalized
by a Zionist mob that had shown up, and brutalized again by police officers who
had been called by the university — LAPD, not just UC police…. Workers were
arrested, beaten, maced. After this happened, on a statewide level, we got
together with other members of the union in a joint council meeting and discussed
what can we do around this.
The UAW had already filed an Unfair Labor Practice
(ULP) charge, charging violations of “workplace health and safety and freedom
of speech,” Gross added. Amendments and new ULP charges have been added since
then.
The meeting resulted in a list of demands, which
Gross summarized as follows: “Amnesty for all protestors, emphasizing our free
speech rights, divestment [a demand that was recently won at California State
University, Sacramento], disclosure and transitional funding.” The latter, she
explained, is the idea that workers “who work in say, Department of Defense
labs, if they object to working in those labs, would be able to get funding
from the UC to transition away.” The concept is especially applicable, she added,
to workers in UCSC’s renowned astronomy, astrophysics and physics departments,
who may find themselves working on military projects to which they
conscientiously object.
After the strike authorization vote, the University
of California responded with a ULP charge of its own, alleging to the
adjudicating body, the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), that the union
had no right to strike over what the administration’s charge claimed was a
non-labor issue. In a press release on May 23, the UC commented, “The
University remains disappointed that the UAW is engaging in an illegal strike
in violation of our contract’s mutually agreed no-strike clauses to advance
issues that have no bearing on employment at UC.”
Gross disagreed with that characterization. On the
contrary, she claimed, the act of solidarity with UCLA members has everything
to do with their job — at play are inherent issues of academic freedom, the
right to protest and the obligation of employers to ensure the safety of their
workers. She told Truthout: “The UC has made false allegations that this is not
a lawful strike, and actually in doing so has committed another ULP [violation]
— in that that is not for the university to decide. It’s for PERB to decide.”
Elected representatives from her union, she added, are currently entering
ongoing mediation with the university.
Part of the UC’s claim is that the strike violates
the UAW’s no-strike clause. However, UCLA professor of labor law Noah Zatz
wrote for the UCLA student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, that “a longstanding and
deeply entrenched body of labor law says otherwise.” There exists significant
legal precedent, Zatz argued, establishing that “even broad no-strike clauses
with terms like ‘any strike’ generally do not preclude strikes over issues
outside the contract itself, including serious ULP strikes and sympathy strikes.”
Zatz went on to cite precedents that apply federally, and might very well apply
in the eyes of PERB as well, concluding that, the UC’s illegality claim “is all
bark and no bite on its central point.”
In addition to filing its own Unfair Labor Practice
charge, the UC also sought an emergency injunction with PERB, aiming to stamp
out the impending strike. Administrators took the major and disruptive step of
moving classes online for the week, in a clear attempt to keep students off
campus, staunch the flow of marchers and impede organizing efforts. (In a
telling indication that, contra the UC’s claims, the strike has legal validity,
PERB denied the injunction.)
The UAW is not the only union on campus at UC Santa
Cruz. The school’s lecturers and librarians — many of them contingent workers,
like adjunct professors, without the protections afforded by tenure — are
organized with the University Council-American Federation of Teachers (UC-AFT).
Josh Brahinsky — a UC-AFT member and lecturer in the
History of Consciousness Department at UCSC who was previously on the
bargaining committee of the UAW as a graduate student worker — commented on the
thin justification of safety that the school cited to move classes online. “Our
people are having our working lives thrown [into disarray] — unilateral changes
to working conditions is what [this type of violation is] called,” he told
Truthout. “It’s a pretense; it’s crowd control.”
While a no-strike clause in its own contract
evidently does prevent the UC-AFT from joining the UAW on the picket line, the
UC-AFT did file an Unfair Labor Practice charge in tandem with its fellow
academic workers, indicating a level of tacit support. In a press release cited
in The Daily Bruin, UC-AFT President Katie Rodger said: “This ULP is intended
to bolster the protections our members have to continue their expression of
free speech and make our campuses safer. We will continue to talk together about
the possibilities of future labor actions.”
Tenured faculty at the school, meanwhile, are
collectively represented by the Santa Cruz Faculty Association (SCFA). Members
of the unionized faculty in the SCFA have also voiced support, with some,
alongside many other faculty members throughout the UC system, signing a pledge
that they will refuse to retaliate against any of their graduate worker
colleagues participating in the strike. Per the pledge document, these faculty
members will not assist the administration in punishing any legally protected strike
activity, “including TAs withholding grades, research assistants withholding
research labor, or any other form of legally protected labor withholding …
including additional labor burdens imposed at the strike’s conclusion.”
As Brahinsky explained, UC-AFT members are, at
minimum, planning to show solidarity with the strike by pledging responses to
the same effect. Should the administration pressure them to cover for work left
undone by striking UAW members, many in the UC-AFT plan to refuse.
“We’re in the middle of getting our members to sign
a pledge not to pick up struck work,” said Brahinsky. “A lot of us are leading
classes with teaching assistants that are going on strike. When a teaching
assistant doesn’t do the grades, [UC-AFT lecturers] get pressured to pick up
that work. We’re committed to supporting people and not doing that — it’s not
something we’re legally bound to do. We’re going to hold that line.”
A Continuity of Tactics
While this most recent UAW action is a response to a
particular context of anti-protest crackdown, labor tensions at UCSC are far
from unprecedented, and the nature of the current strike evinces a continuity
with recent years of preceding labor activity. In 2019, UAW 4811 members,
dissenting with the contract that the statewide UAW had settled the previous
year, initiated a wildcat strike (i.e. a rank-and-file action conducted without
the express consent of union leadership). A central issue at hand was the
exorbitant cost-of-living increases that had come for Santa Cruz. Graduate
worker pay, already inadequate (around $18,000 a year after taxes), had become
utterly impossible to live on.
Rent and expense increases had befallen Santa Cruz
thanks to the tech wealth that percolated out of the corporate cauldrons in San
Francisco; in that context, the total pay that UAW members were earning came as
a bitter joke. A long series of less drastic efforts to compel the UC, one of
California’s top three largest employers, to offer more than poverty wages to
the workers who conduct the majority of its academic labor had ended in
failure, and their own state-level union leadership had agreed to only a 3
percent annual wage increase. As such, the wildcat strikers demanded a
cost-of-living adjustment, among other measures to forestall enforced
impoverishment for grad workers.
Workers’ widespread willingness to engage in the
inherently transgressive act of a wildcat strike against a union leadership
contract indicated that a new generation of radical organizers were coming of
age in the UAW. Brahinsky noted that a change in leadership reversed a
reluctance to strike. The unionists who gained experience in the 2019-2020
wildcat strike, as well as in earlier strikes throughout the 2010s, went on to
change the direction of academic worker militancy in Local 4811 and the UC
system. As Brahinsky remarked: “The people who did those changes — some of it
was us in the 2010s. But in 2019, the people who did the wildcat strike went
into leadership statewide in the UAW, and fought for the strike to happen [in
2022], and fought for this one.”
Another contributing factor was the UAW strikes at
Big Three automakers in September 2023. Beyond just being generally
inspirational — as witnessing a major strike of tens of thousands of union
workers can certainly be — that context also provided something of a testbed
for stand-up strike, an evolution of rolling walkout tactics. The deliberate,
calculated and solidarity-based approach revitalized strategy with creative
simultaneous tactics such as the “Create Havoc Around Our System” (“CHAOS”)
method. That approach, with its provocatively amusing backronym, was
popularized by the Association of Flight Attendants.
As an American Bar Association article described it,
the CHAOS method “calls for both intermittent and rolling strikes. The National
Labor Relations Act, which governs the autoworkers, prohibits intermittent
strikes. So instead the UAW used a rolling strike strategy, beginning with a
few strike locations and ramping up work stoppages as bargaining continued.”
The unpredictable upsurges of the UC strike owe their origins at least in part
to these recent tactical experiences, hard-won on the UAW’s more traditional
terrain of struggle against car manufacturers.
At UC Santa Cruz, currents of greater militancy
would continue to swell. After the wildcat cost-of-living adjustment strike in
2019 and 2020, said Gross, “we also had a statewide six-week strike in the fall
of 2022. That was while we were in bargaining for a new contract.”
Gross pointed out that, for some academic union
members, the strike might have seemed an unavoidable necessity because the
administration’s use of police violence against academic workers was absolutely
beyond the pale. She described the broader trend: “There are people in my
department, in the literature department, and they didn’t strike in 2019 or
2020, they didn’t strike in 2022 — but now they’re striking. There’s something
about the idea that violence could take place towards our students or towards
us that’s really galvanizing people, in a different way than, say, a wages
demand might be.”
Poised to Strike
With UC Davis and UCLA walkouts now initiated in
addition to the ongoing strike at UCSC, administrations are likely sensing the
mounting pressure, and rightly so. While immediate connections are not yet
apparent, this week, UCLA’s campus police chief was lightly sanctioned with an
imposed reassignment (though the university described the transfer as
“temporary” in a statement). A slap on the wrist, to be sure — but at minimum,
this could reasonably be interpreted as an appeasement move in response to the
looming strike.
Regardless, the snowballing strike activity shows no
signs of slowing. UAW organizers will continue to urge further actions across
the UC system in the hopes that the walkouts grow to avalanche proportions.
UCSC, with its large union presence and strong tradition of faculty and student
radicalism, is well-placed to hold out the longest, anchoring the strike as
workers on other campuses rise up.
At Santa Cruz, organizers are prepared for what
Brahinsky says they’re calling a “long-haul strike.” Together with the stand-up
tactic, it’s a strategy that has been in development since before the genocide
in Gaza began. So too with the union’s demands — meaning that the current
juncture offers a chance to expound on inter-UC solidarity and apply leverage
to address multiple concerns. As Gross reflected, “It’s been exciting to see
rank and file workers’ demands taken up on a statewide level like this.… Momentum
is building with our UAW comrades walking off the job at other campuses, and
more campuses will be called to stand up and strike if the UC doesn’t come to
the table to resolve these ULPs.”
Given the stakes and the opportunity, it’s no
surprise that there is real determination on display. Gross was keen to
underscore the extent of Local 4811’s resolve.
“We see this as the strike that’s preventing a
precedent from forming,” Gross told Truthout. “If the university can just
arrest and mace its workers for standing in solidarity with students on a moral
or ethical cause that we feel called to use our First Amendment rights to
support, then workers across the state are going to stand up and say, we can’t
let the boss do that. That’s what we’re seeing take place right now.”
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