Student Workers Strike Against Repression of Pro-Palestinian Protesters (original) (raw)

As Mass Arrests Hit Gaza Solidarity Encampments Across U.S.

In early morning hours of May 2, Los Angeles Police and California Highway Patrol face off with pro-Palestinian protesters at UCLA, then drive them out and raze Gaza solidarity encampment, arresting 210. (Getty Images)

By Amalia and Jacob

LOS ANGELES – On the night of April 30/May 1, the Gaza solidarity encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles was subject to a vicious attack by Zionist and fascistic thugs. Videos of the violent assault have been widely viewed on social media. Campus security guards coolly looked on as the gang of violent right-wingers and racists assaulted pro-Palestinian demonstrators with poles and other blunt objects, launched dangerous fireworks into the encampment, filled the air with pepper spray and bear mace, tried to drag protesters out of the barricaded enclosure and beat them bloody with martial arts kicks and punches.

Reactionary provocateurs had menaced the student protesters since the occupation began five days earlier. At first, they tried to infiltrate the encampment while trying to provoke incidents on the perimeter. The rightists were permitted to erect a jumbotron and PA system – paid for with tens of thousands of dollars raised on GoFundMe – to torment protesters, blaring loud music and video at all hours. Across the country, there were pro-Zionist counterdemonstrations at several encampments, mostly relatively small and mainly engaged in verbal provocations (and feeding the media claims that they felt threatened by the peaceful protest). But this was different.

What happened at UCLA was an organized goon squad attack by dozens of trained ultra-Zionist fighters, and some fascists in Proud Boys attire. And it was carried out in tandem with the university authorities. The rampage against the encampment came hours after UCLA chancellor Gene Block gave the green light, with a statement repeating the lie that the pro-Palestinian protesters had made people feel “bullied, threatened and afraid,” and put “Jewish students in a state of anxiety and fear.” Then came a statement from the statewide UC president saying that the chancellor’s statement had declared the encampment “unlawful” (which, actually, it didn’t).

The assault on the UCLA protest also began just hours after high-profile police raids of encampments of Columbia University and the City College of New York on the East Coast. Protesters at UCLA had courageously defended the encampment against the onslaught of the fascistic goons for several hours when Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) arrived at around 1:45 a.m. on May 1, greeted by the rightists’ chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” The LAPD cops stood by watching the assault for a full hour before intervening, and shortly afterwards the assaulters began to disperse. Organizers reported that 25 demonstrators were hospitalized for injuries inflicted by the fascistic attacks.

The following evening, the LAPD declared the encampment an unlawful assembly and issued a citywide “tactical alert.” Cops decked out in riot gear returned to campus, presenting demonstrators with a final dispersal order at 12:30 a.m., May 2. Officers from the LAPD as well as the Special Operations Unit of the California Highway Patrol (CHP) converged on the student demonstrators, attacking them with batons, tear gas, “flashbang” stun grenades and rubber bullets. Video footage of the raid show CHP cops taking aim at the demonstrators’ heads and firing their grenade guns’ 40mm “less-lethal” munitions at close range. The police raid to clear the encampment lasted for several hours. In all, 210 protesters were arrested.

The union of graduate student workers at the University of California, United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811, responded to the outrage of the rightist attack by announcing on May 1 that it would prepare to hold a strike authorization vote. Following the brutal dispersal of the encampment by the police, Local 4811 filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint on May 3 charging that the UC Board of Regents had violated the rights of its employees to free speech and protest in defense of the Palestinian people. Ultimately the union, representing 48,000 members across the UC system, took its grievances to the picket line. At that point, all campuses of the University of California should have been shut down, then and there, by strike action.

Against the assault on Gaza solidarity encampments by police – and in L.A. organized rightist squads – the Revolutionary Internationalist Youth (RIY) and the Internationalist Group called for workers action in defense of students protesting genocide. University administrators, police and their bosses and capitalist politicians of both major parties intensified repression nationwide. This was the “home front” of this U.S./Israel war on the Palestinians, waged by the Democratic administration of “Genocide Joe” Biden. Last spring over 3,100 people were arrested by the police at university encampments across the country. We demand: Drop all charges and disciplinary measures against pro-Palestinian demonstrators! Cops and security guards, off campus! Mobilize the power of labor to combat this “war censorship drive.”

Tens of thousands of academic workers at the University of California took strike action to defend democratic rights and to show their solidarity with the besieged Palestinian people. But instead of striking the whole UC system, the UAW leadership called on select campuses to be shut down while keeping large parts of the membership at work. It took Local 4811 leaders an entire week to call out UCLA, and then only because of militants’ demands, when it should have been struck on the first day. This “strategy” of “stand-up strikes,” only striking piecemeal, was brainstormed by UAW president Shawn Fain, who used it the 2023 auto strike against the “Big Three” auto companies. In doing so, he undercut the strike and ingratiated himself to war-criminal-in-chief “Genocide Joe,” who Fain endorsed in the presidential election.

The Local 4811 strike all but formally came to an end on June 7 when the notoriously conservative Orange County Superior Court issued a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the UAW. With the union leadership having fixed a June 30 deadline for the end of the strike in advance, the 20-day court injunction declared illegal all further strike activity. The 4811 tops obliged, and declared the first and only strike action nationally in defense of the pro-Palestinian encampments suspended. Of course, resisting the TRO would have required serious mobilization to actually shut down the whole UC system. In contrast to the bureaucrats who kept thousands of their members working, and then ended the struggle at the first opportunity, revolutionary Marxists say: Shut it down – one out, all out!

Taking strike action against the repression of the pro-Palestinian encampments was a novel move. But in an effective strike, all sections of the workforce would stop work and put all facilities out of operation. This should be enforced by militant picket lines that no one dares to cross. In contrast to the labor bureaucracy, which constrains the struggle by subservience to the ruling class, the fight against the fascistic violence and police repression requires bringing out the power of the multiracial working class. Class-struggle militants call on labor to defend the student protesters, and to use their power to stop the shipment of arms to the Zionist war machine.

The capitulation of the UAW leadership, which from the outset sought to restrain union militancy, and which in the end allowed the strike to be broken by decree, points to the need for uncompromising class-struggle leadership prepared to go all-out in defense of the oppressed. That means taking on the capitalist state, its cops, its courts, and the politicians who administer it, Democrat or Republican. But this is very far indeed from the outlook of the reformist leaders of Local 4811, and even less so of the UAW officialdom.

Grad Students Strike to Defend Free Speech

Following the cop raid on the UCLA encampment, police repression quickly spread across the UC system. Just three days after the ULP was submitted, the UC San Diego encampment was dispersed by a 200-strong police force. Of the 65 people arrested, 40 were students, all of whom were put on interim suspension pending disciplinary hearings. On May 8, the UC Irvine administration announced suspension of participants in the encampment there, which was cleared by police a few days later. Under pressure from the ranks, Local 4811 resolved to take action in defense of the democratic right to speak out against this genocidal war and stand in solidarity with the Palestinians. The union opened a vote for strike authorization on May 13. Two days later it announced that strike authorization had passed resoundingly, with 79% in favor.

The UC administration responded by contesting the legality of the impending walkout. It invoked the “no-strike” clause embedded in the contracts of academic workers, and most other union contracts nationwide. It also claimed that Local 4811’s grievances were “non-labor issues” of a political nature. So violating the constitutional right to free speech is not a “labor issue”? Opposing disciplinary action against strikers, including suspension, withholding pay (wage theft) and firing academic workers – all of which have now occurred at UC Santa Cruz and will no doubt soon spread systemwide – is a “non-labor issue”?! Those are all key points in Local 4811’s ULP. The UC tops of course went along with the star chamber proceedings by the witch-hunters in Congress. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times (18 July) revealed, “The University of California shelled out more than $29 million to handle this spring’s protests,” almost all (90%) for police, private security guards and the like.

Defending students, faculty and academic workers who demonstrated in solidarity with Gaza against the genocide being carried out is defending the most basic rights of the working class and the oppressed. The police repression took place at the behest of an employer, at the workplace, and was instigated by Democratic president Biden’s slander of pro-Palestinian student demonstrators as “antisemitic.” This comes after months of witch-hunting by the federal Department of Education, which in December launched “investigations” of UCLA and UC San Diego in its nationwide probe of universities and public schools on the bogus charge of antisemitism. When UCLA then-chancellor Block (who has since stepped down) testified in Congress on May 23, he said he regretted not repressing pro-Palestinian demonstrators sooner.

Upon the launch of the strike, the UC administration sought to have the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB), an administrative agency of the bosses’ state which “arbitrates” public sector labor disputes, issue an injunction to halt the strike. Under pressure by the widespread disgust with the attacks on the pro-Palestinian protesters, even this tool of the ruling class twice denied the UC administration’s request for a strikebreaking injunction and conceded that the union’s premise for the strike was “legitimate.” While defending the union and the strike in every venue, as class-struggle unionists rightly emphasize, in a hard fight it’s important to understand that the organs of the capitalist state are not on the workers’ side. And in fact, the PERB responded by advancing its own complaint against the UAW for supposedly not giving the UC administration “adequate advance notice” before striking to protest the police repression and fascistic attacks.

While some liberal commentators have questioned the legality of the UC strike, Marxists reject all anti-worker laws which seek to criminalize the basic right to withhold labor and protest injustice, be it economic, political or otherwise. Marxists oppose all no-strike clauses and union-busting laws like the 1948 Taft-Hartley Act that was used to purge the labor movement of the “reds” who built it, and to outlaw powerful labor tactics like secondary strikes. The fingerprints of union lawyers are all over the many instructions and FAQs issued during the strike, as they are intent on playing by the bosses’ rules. Instead, class-struggle activists in the unions look to bring out the power of the workers movement independent of, and against, the capitalist state.

UAW Bureaucracy’s Stand-Up “Strategy”

The strike of graduate student workers at the University of California began on May 20. But the union bureaucrats endeavored to severely limit the struggle before it had even started. At the outset, the authorization vote called by the leadership of Local 4811 predetermined that the strike would end no later than June 30. Such a limitation is an invitation to the bosses to wait it out. Then, once strike authorization was passed, the 4811 leadership limited the strike to only one campus, UC Santa Cruz, telling UAW members elsewhere to continue working even as the administration carried out reprisals against students and faculty. Speaking at the UCSC encampment on the first day of the strike,Will, a RIY supporter was part of the successful union organizing drive at Amazon in NYC, pointed to the need to spread – and militantly enforce – the strike, across the UC system:

“All UC campuses need to be shut down now! This is a basic working-class principle. On strike means shut it down. Militant picket lines should be organized to do that. That means no tests, no grades, no research, no classes, and especially no Zoom classes! Many students at the encampments want to shut the campuses down. Many union members want to shut the campuses down. But what’s holding them back is the conservative union bureaucracy. They couldn’t hold back the desire of the members to strike against the egregious repression at UCLA and San Diego, but the bureaucrats are doing what they can to put a leash on this strike.”

Refusing to shut down the UC system, the Local 4811 leaders instead announced that they were adopting the “stand-up strike” model of UAW president Fain against the “Big Three” Detroit auto companies in 2023, where they started out with only a handful of struck facilities and then added a few more bit by bit. Fain tried to portray this as a continuation of Depression-era labor militancy, invoking the sit-down strikes of the 1930s when striking workers shut down production and occupied the factories. Helping him to peddle this ploy were various self-described socialist commentators at Jacobin, Labor Notes and The Nation who have been hailing Fain as the latest, greatest union “troublemaker.” But the militant sit-down strikes of the ‘30s were were very far from the “stand-up” partial walkouts, as the very names suggest.

In 2023, the stated goal of the UAW strike was to get rid of the “tiers” system, introduced in the 2007-09 financial crisis when the Democratic administration of Barack Obama bailed out the bankrupt Chrysler company (now Stellantis) and demanded concessions from the union. By 2023 this meant that some veteran workers were making double the pay of new hires. An Internationalist Group leaflet on the first day of the auto strike warned:

“Instead of mobilizing the membership for a knock-down, drag-out battle with the bosses, the union tops are using pin-pricks to needle them. **This ‘strategy’ can never win.**We’ve said it many times, and it’s still true: if you play by the bosses’ rules, you’re sure to lose – labor’s gotta play hardball to win.”

–“For an All-Out Auto Strike to Shut Down the Big 3,” The Internationalist No. 71, June-October 2023

Rejecting such a program of all-out struggle meant that while the union made some gains, they left the tier system intact and just speeded up the transition from lower to higher rungs.

The leadership of Local 4811 replicated this same losing “strategy.” the UC strike’s peak just six of the eleven campuses (counting the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory) were shut down, and only 31,500 of Local 4811’s total 48,000 members stopped work. It was more than a week since the strike began at UC Santa Cruz before it was extended (on May 28) to UCLA, the flashpoint of the police repression and fascistic attacks, and to UC Davis. After nearly another week UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara were called on to “stand up” (June 3). Finally, UC Irvine walked out (June 5). This bit-by-bit approach tells UC administrators that the union leaders weren’t serious about shutting down the system. It was a halfway measure, at a time when the constellation of political forces nationally made it clear that the university would not back down of its own volition. It would take a full-on struggle, which was possible, as the ranks were itching to fight.

Speaking at Santa Cruz on May 24, veteran Bay Area longshore union activist and supporter of the Internationalist Group Jack Heyman stressed the urgent need for the struggle at UC to be extended across the university system and beyond. He highlighted the importance of the resolution of International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 10 to boycott arms to Israel and of defeating the U.S./Israel genocidal war,1 and compared the UC strike to the years-long efforts blocking Israeli cargo at West Coast ports during Israel’s endless war on the Palestinian people.

“This strike should be all of the campuses out at once. I know that from experience. When we took action against [the Israeli] ZIM line, we blocked the boat year after year after year. They don’t come into Oakland anymore! But they go into other ports. _Your power is when you all go out together._”

4811 Ranks Push Struggle Forward

It was the militancy of rank-and-file members of Local 4811 that goaded the leadership to act, even as it bowed to the to the slew of anti-labor laws intended to hamstring militant union struggles. Two years ago, academic workers at the University of California waged the largest higher education strike in U.S. history. And it’s no coincidence that the first campus to be called on to stop work was Santa Cruz, the site of the 2020 wildcat strike where graduate student workers took action to demand a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) in defiance of the union bureaucracy, which had refused to authorize strike action.

This year, soon after the strike began, members of 4811 began demanding that the struggle be extended to the flashpoint of the repression, UCLA. Speaking at a rally there called by the union on May 22, Joe Wagner, an L.A. transit worker from ATU Local 1277 and supporter of the Internationalist Group, backed the rank-and-file demand for an immediate strike at the campus, called for the dropping of charges against protesters, and for workers action against repression of the encampments. He emphasized that, “Los Angeles labor needs to be mobilized to defend the Palestinians, to defend free speech on campus.”

The spirit of struggle in Local 4811’s ranks ultimately could not be contained. On the morning of May 23 while graduate student workers at UC Santa Cruz continued to strike, and simultaneous with UCLA chancellor Block’s groveling testimony to the Congressional witch-hunters, protesters at UCLA moved to erect a second Gaza solidarity encampment. A contingent of Local 4811 members with signs reading “UAW Rank and File Workers for Palestine” picketed in defense of the student demonstrators as LAPD police showed up to disperse the encampment. A few hours later, the UAW leadership announced that the strike would be expanded to UCLA and UC Davis.

The threat of continued police repression did not stop the extension of the struggle. The strike at UCLA began as scheduled on May 28, with academic workers moving to stop deliveries and block traffic to campus parking structures. The next morning at 4 a.m., strikers established pickets to halt early deliveries. The strike was given official sanction by both the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and Teamsters Joint Council 42. In subsequent days when truck drivers attempting to enter the campus were presented with printouts of these statements, most readily turned away from the UAW picket lines, honoring the strike.

Capitalist Court Decrees End of Strike, Union Tops Don’t Fight

At the same time as the Local 4811 bureaucrats gradually and reluctantly ceded to the demands of the membership to broaden the struggle to other campuses, all the while keeping the strike within the bourgeois legal restraints, the UC authorities continued to maneuver to have the strike quashed in the courts. After having two requests for an injunction against striking UC academic workers turned down by the PERB, the Board of Regents turned instead to the Superior Court of Orange County, notorious as a historic bastion of conservatism, to sue the UAW over breach of contract for defying “no-strike” clauses.

On June 7, Judge Randall J. Sherman rubber-stamped the administration’s “prayer” for “injunctive relief,” issuing a temporary restraining order (TRO) against the UAW to end all strike activity pending a hearing later that month. Defy the strikebreaking injunction? The union leadership was utterly unprepared to do so. Two days later it decided to comply with the TRO and that all strikers would return to work that Monday. This effectively brought an end to the strike, particularly as the 4811 tops went along with the extension of the TRO to June 30, when the strike was scheduled to end anyway. The hearing on the suit against the union how now been put off until November, with the UC administration calling on the court to provide “clarity that our no-strike clauses are enforceable and that we can rely on our contracts to provide labor peace through the term of our agreements.”

Then in mid-August, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction barring pro-Palestinian protesters at UCLA from defending their encampment against Zionist attackers and infiltrators. To justify this, the judge grotesquely claimed that “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the U.C.L.A. campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” Nonsense. And many of the pro-Palestinian protesters in the encampment were Jewish. The injunction in fact gave judicial approval to the violent thug attack on the anti-genocide protesters. The UC administration promptly issued an order banning encampments, blocking walkways and masking. And currently making its way through the California legislature is a bill that would require students to agree not to engage in conduct that “creates a hostile environment on campus,” which could mean just about anything. (The bill was already passed by the state in a near-unanimous vote.) Students who refused to sign the pledge would not be admitted, and any deemed to have violated it would be expelled. There are also a number of draconian bills in Congress to force universities to repress student protesters.

Meanwhile negotiations for UC academic workers’ next contract are approaching. Fearing that UAW Local 4811 will again mobilize, as the membership demands more militant action, the administration is retaliating by going after the basic right of the union to strike. With legalistic arguments that the Orange County Superior Court “usurped” the authority of the Public Employment Relations Board, the union’s leaders are hoping to resolve their outstanding ULP through the PERB, which as noted above issued its own complaint against Local 4811. A July 17 rally outside a Board of Regents meeting at UC San Francisco was focused entirely on the ULP, with nothing about the November hearing on the no-strike clause, or about the criminal charges against student protesters.

And it’s clear that the unionists can’t count on winning at the PERB either. The courts are not neutral; they are an integral part of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state. Their job isn’t to “arbitrate,” it’s to keep the working class in check, by threat of force if necessary. Neither moral appeals nor procedural maneuvers will end the onslaught against democratic rights being waged by the ruling class as part of the U.S./Israel war on the Palestinian people. To fight back against the “war censorship drive” and tear up these anti-union injunctions would require moving beyond the academy to mobilize the working class. Playing by the rules of the capitalist state is a sure way to lose. The whole game is rigged.

Now the University of California administration has issued notices of “intent to fire” four graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz and has garnished the wages of hundreds of workers systemwide. As of late August, the UAW leaders have not raised any protest, much less a call for action. Local 4811 at UCSC has issued a “Request for Solidarity” from other unions, which should be energetically pursued. It should be supplemented with the call for criminal charges against more 120 Santa Cruz students, faculty, staff and community members arrested at the Gaza solidarity encampment to be dropped. The same goes for the hundreds of arrested pro-Palestinian protesters elsewhere in California. But although the arrests were cited in UAW strike materials, and their prosecution depends on requests by UC campus administrations, this call was not in the formal strike demands of the strike, nor did the union leaders demand cops off campus or seek to mobilize labor to demand “Drop all charges now!”

Class-Struggle Program Key

Striking in defense of freedom to protest and against repression is something unheard of in decades, going back to the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) “free speech” fights against World War I. But with its “stand-up strike” strategy, the leadership of UAW Local 4811 guaranteed that the walkout would not achieve its demands, or anything close to that. If you set a high goal, taking on the universal demand of capitalist financiers, bourgeois politicians, university administrations and the “mainstream” media that the encampments be ended forthwith, you can’t win that fight with half-measures. And by failing to go all out, the union bureaucracy may end up with the “no-strike” strictures reinforced, with a possible court ruling that only specified issues can be the basis for an Unfair Labor Practice action.

The alternative was to wage a militant class battle bringing in other sectors of labor and the oppressed. It meant facing the prospect of mass jailings, as the IWW “Wobblies” experienced in WWI – and Gaza solidarity encampment participants faced this spring. Pressure from below forced the union bureaucracy to reluctantly undertake this struggle in solidarity with student demonstrators and the besieged people of Gaza. A Rank and File for a Democratic Union caucus at UCLA pushed for more strike militancy, but did not seek to cohere a class-struggle leadership prepared to fight it out until victory. That would have required shutting down the entire UC system – one out, all out – to defend the democratic and union rights of all, in conjunction with the call for mass workers action to stop the shipment of arms and other war materiel to U.S. imperialism’s Zionist ally and client regime in order to defeat the U.S./Israel genocidal war on the Palestinians.

This is indeed a political fight, against the UC bosses and the rest of the ruling class. Yet in California and nationwide, the UAW leaders are bound hand and foot to the Democratic Party of genocide and racist repression. To win it’s crucial to break with the Democrats, Republicans and all capitalist parties and build a class-struggle workers party to lead the struggles of all the exploited and the oppressed. ■