Friday night, I booked my flights and hotel. Sunday morning, I woke up at 3:00 am to head to the airport.
Last week, UAW 4811, representing graduate student workers and postdoctoral workers across the University of California, announced that its strike authorization vote had passed — its members wanted to strike for the demands of amnesty, free speech, divestment, disclosure, and the ability to opt out of funding sources tied to the military and Palestinian oppression. On Friday, union leaders met to discuss which campuses, if any, would be called to strike on Monday, in a replication of the “Stand Up Strike” model used by the Big 3 automakers last year. They chose UC Santa Cruz. And so I was getting on a plane to join them.
Around 1:30 pm Pacific Time, having been traveling for over twelve hours, I rolled my suitcase into the art collective where the UC Santa Cruz workers were holding a pre-strike art build. I was nervous — the worker I was in touch with wasn’t there yet, since he was in a departmental strike prep meeting, and I didn’t know if anyone else knew I was coming or what they would think about a worker from a university on the other side of the country showing up to do some socialist labor journalism.
I needn’t have worried.
Here in Santa Cruz, I am very much what the university would label an “Outside Agitator.” I have no student or employee ID number with the University of California, which is how my own university has been determining which arrestees are “outsiders.” But as we know, the university community extends far beyond who is a student or employee. At City College of New York (where I work,) one of the arrestees was a worker’s fiancé. Another was a Fordham student who was supporting the other encampments since her school didn’t have one yet. My own student’s brother was pepper sprayed. Are these people not part of our community?
At the sit-in that City College SJP hosted on Nakba Day, the students proclaimed, “we are all outside agitators.” In their framing of the matter, those who are protesting against the university’s complicity and investment in genocide will always be deemed “outsiders” because they are challenging the imperialist and repressive nature of modern universities. In contrast, student organizers at Emory University released a statement claiming no one is an outside agitator, because the university impacts people from all over the country and the world. I find both frameworks compelling, just as my own union sweatshirt, which I’m wearing right now, proclaims: “Everybody loves somebody at CUNY.”
So despite being an “outside agitator,” I felt immediately at home when I walked into the art build. The very first person I spoke to asked if I knew a particular PhD student in geography at CUNY — I did. He and I work together closely in our union, as part of CUNY On Strike, and this person knows him via their DSA caucus. Other workers offered me pizza and fruit — it felt good to be eating free “movement pizza” once again, as that’s now something I associate with our encampment and the sadness of that space being violently destroyed. Someone even offered to pick me up from my hotel to bring me to the picket so I could save on rideshare costs.
Several people recognized my Left Voice hoodie, and one asked if I was there to cover the strike. One worker and I shared our respective experiences of watching the repression at each other’s universities via reporting and social media. Although the police haven’t yet attempted to dismantle the UC Santa Cruz encampment, nor have the students been threatened with academic penalties so far, the workers I spoke with feel the repression at the other UC schools in their hearts, as violence done to their own comrades, despite the geographic distance. One large sign painted at the art build says: “DO UCLA NEXT,” a call to the union leadership which reflects workers’ outrage over the heavy repression from both police and mob violence.
While we were drawing and painting on the back patio of the art collective, other workers were gathered around laptops inside, on pre-strike organizing Zooms with their departments. This, too, made me feel at home — on the other side of the country, academic workers are doing all the same things we do. One worker I spoke with at length, a steward in the sociology department, shared with me some of the organizing dynamics, challenges, and disagreements they are facing on their campus — many of these are similar to what we are experiencing at CUNY. Some of these issues relate to what the political relationship should be between the encampments and the campus labor unions. The worker I spoke with said he views the strike as “opening another front in the same battle” that offers a different strategy (mass action) and source of power (withheld labor) over the university from the student-led encampments, but there are others within the union who believe the union’s actions (even on matters like where to hold the pickets) should be determined by the wishes of the encampment, rather than collective decision-making by rank and file workers. This type of disagreement is very much present at CUNY as well.
But there are also key differences between our contexts: according to this worker, at UC Santa Cruz, there has been very little controversy in union meetings over divestment from Israel as a demand, and significantly more disagreement over “Cops Off Campus.” My own union is deeply divided on divestment, and all of the other encampment demands relating to Israel, and while “Cops Off Campus” is not a particularly active campaign at CUNY right now, anger at the present militarization of City College, the decision to ask the NYPD to intervene, and the decision to spend more than half a million dollars per week on new private security contractors, is much more widespread. The 48,000 workers in UAW 4811 are also exclusively student workers and postdoctoral researchers, whereas our union includes much greater diversity in job titles including faculty of all types and several academic staff titles. While many faculty members joined the picket in solidarity on Monday, the strike is limited to UAW 4811 and the job titles it represents. Their department town halls and general membership meetings generally include only the student workers and postdocs, while ours by necessity include people of almost all of the job titles working within academic departments, because we are all members of the same union — and CUNY On Strike’s assemblies explicitly invite CUNY workers from other unions to join us as well.
On Monday morning, I started my day by Zooming with students — because I am not on strike, and we’re in finals week — and then headed up to campus for the picket. Early in the day, two groups of workers with picket signs stood on either side of the entrance to campus and walked across the street with the crosswalk signal. Later in the day, after the crowd grew significantly for a 12pm rally, there was a group on all four corners of the intersection; and even later, the entrance to campus was entirely blocked by picketers, some of whom attempted to raise an enormous banner from the street light poles that read, “There are no universities left in Gaza.” I saw banners for UC Faculty for Justice in Palestine and the Santa Cruz Faculty Association, and people wearing UC-AFT shirts; shortly before the rally began, an enormous contingent of students marched out of campus to join the picket.
At the rally, the most common refrain among the UAW 4811 speakers was calling for their comrades at other campuses to join the strike, including a call and response in which the chant leader named the various other University of California campuses and the crowd responded with “Stand Up!”
About an hour after returning to my hotel to write this article, I read on social media that apparently the undergraduates had moved their encampment to a parking lot next to the picket site. This is a powerful statement of solidarity between different sectors of the university community and a symbol of the unification of students and workers in a shared struggle.
The workers here in Santa Cruz don’t know for certain what motivated the UAW 4811 statewide leadership to choose their campus as the first (and for now, only) campus to strike, but many suspect it’s due to their deep and strong department-level organizing, which relies on a stewards network currently representing nearly all of the departments. This was evident even in the signs some workers brought to the picket, with many specifically framing the workers who carried them as not just workers on strike, but members of a particular department who were striking together. I saw signs for literature, environmental science, sociology, psychology, and physics, and Stefan Yong, the recording secretary for the UC Santa Cruz chapter of 4811, proudly proclaimed in his rally speech: “A lot of people ask me, ‘what the hell is the history of consciousness department?’ Today, I have one answer for you. History of Consciousness is a 100% strike ready department!”
“There’s a lot of things to be afraid of [about being the first and only campus to be on strike],” he said, “but solidarity means not being afraid alone. […] These other campuses, they are looking at us. They’re getting ready like demons right now. They’re getting ready to go out, and we want them here with us.” He then led the crowd in a powerful chant of “Spread the strike!”
The UC Santa Cruz workers understand that their power comes from mass action, and they’re itching for their colleagues at other campuses to join them. While the approach of the summer creates organizing challenges for campus-based movements, since fewer people work during the summer sessions, we can only hope that just as UC Santa Cruz is the tip of the UAW 4811 spear, that the UAW 4811 strike will be the tip of the spear for labor action for Palestine across U.S. higher education and other sectors as well — hope, and organize to make it happen.
Originally Published: 2024-05-22 17:00:17
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