Why UC grad students are going out on strike

By Mikhail Zinshteyn, CalMatters

More than 1,500 graduate students, teaching assistants and researchers are expected to walk off the job at UC Santa Cruz today, launching the first labor strike over the University of California’s response to pro-Palestinian protests in the past month.

Workers will picket from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the two main roads leading into campus, disrupting package deliveries and transit into the university that’s become a hotbed for labor activity in the past few years.

The union, UAW 4811, won approval from its members last week to call for strikes at select campuses throughout the UC.

While many work stoppages are over pay and benefits, this one is in response to the union’s anger over the UC’s use of police to clear overnight encampments in support of Palestinians that propped up at multiple campuses. Some union members took part in those protests. The largely peaceful demonstrations sought to put pressure on the university to call for a ceasefire in Gaza, divest from weapons companies and cut various other economic ties to Israel. After Hamas, which governs Gaza, killed an estimated 1,200 people in Israel on Oct. 7, the country waged a military campaign in Gaza that has killed an estimated 35,000 Palestinians.

Days after police swept the encampments at UCLA and arrested scores of protesters, the union filed an unfair labor practice violation with a state labor relations agency. The union filed similar violations after police cleared encampments at UC San Diego and UC Irvine that also led to arrests of protesters.

“By summoning the police to forcibly arrest and/or issuing interim suspensions to these employees, the University has violated their employee rights,“ the union alleges. The union says its workers were protesting not just over the war in Gaza but seeking ways to opt out from funding sources tied to the U.S. military and “opposing the discrimination and hostile work environment directed towards Palestinian, Muslim, and pro-Palestine Jewish employees and students.”

The UC Office of the President argues that the strikes are illegal because its contract with the union contains a no-strike provision. Friday the UC filed its own unfair labor practice against the union. It seeks a state order to block the union from striking.

“To be clear, the University supports free speech and lawful protests. Across the UC system, campuses have allowed — and continue to allow — lawful protests surrounding the conflict in the Middle East,” the UC said in a statement last week. “But when protests violate University policy or threaten the safety and security of others, the University has taken lawful action to end impermissible and unlawful behavior.”

The union isn’t buying UC’s anti-strike argument, and in fact submitted another labor violation charge accusing the university of intimidation by telling unionized workers the strike is illegal, which would mean employees could be reprimanded for not completing their duties.

“UC doesn’t get to decide what is lawful,” said Rafael Jaime, UAW 4811 president, in an email to CalMatters. That jurisdiction falls with the state labor relations board, he said. 

“UC has committed serious unfair labor practices which have led to this strike, and we are well within our legal rights,” Jaime added, pointing to a commentary written by a UCLA law professor that argued labor law allows unions to strike over matters not covered in the contract, even if there’s a no-strike clause. 

Members allowed union leadership to call for strikes through June 30 — long enough to potentially snarl teaching and grading at seven undergraduate campuses where finals begin the second week of June. In 2022, graduate students struck for six weeks in pursuit of higher wages and benefits.

Of the nearly 20,000 of the union’s 48,000 members who voted on whether to strike last week, nearly 80% who did vote approved the strike authorization.

Unlike a systemwide strike, this “stand up” strike may see labor stoppages at certain campuses, a strategy popularized by Detroit autoworkers in their successful campaign for increased compensation last year. The approach functions like a slow simmer to put pressure on management before a full boil. 

The union of UC academic workers wants the university to “grant amnesty for all academic employees who were arrested and are now facing disciplinary action, and also to grant the right to free speech and political expression on campus,” said Rebecca Gross, a doctoral candidate in literature who heads the local union at UC Santa Cruz.

The University of California’s leadership “could prevent the other campuses from standing up by coming to the table,” she added. “We’ve had no indication so far that they plan to.”

Response to the encampments has varied across the university system. At UC Riverside, campus leadership and students agreed to peacefully take down the tents; in exchange, the campus’s chancellor promised to create a task force to look into a policy of removing campus investments from weapons manufacturers. That appeared to fall short of the demands students initially sought, which included pulling funds from assets tied to Israel.

The UC Office of the President last month rejected any divestment from funds targeting Israel, but was silent on broader approaches that weren’t country-specific. 

Last week the chief of UC’s systemwide investment portfolio said the university holds about $3.3 billion in financial ties to weapons manufacturers, not directly but through investments in stock and bond indexes that include weapons companies. About $32 billion, out of the full investment portfolio of $175 billion, is in some way tied with weapons, the state of Israel and companies that student protesters take issue with, the UC official said last week. UC’s investment portfolio funds pensions for retired UC employees, campus endowments and short-term capital to help with university operations. No tuition money funds UC investments.

University of California official says system has $32 billion in holdings targeted by protesters

Gross said she expects packages from UPS, whose delivery workers are unionized with the Teamsters, to be rerouted from campus. During the 2022 strike, she said UPS deliveries were instead dropped off at an affiliated store and campus employees had to retrieve the packages. The local union is also expecting that city bus service will stop at the picket lines just outside campus and have passengers disembark there, rather than continuing its route to stops inside UC Santa Cruz. 

UC Santa Cruz is home to more than 2,000 academic workers, but not all union members have a job with labor to withhold. Some are paid with fellowships to support their research. Most workers, though, take part in campus research, student teaching and grading. A strike that lasts into the final weeks of the term is likely to cause chaos.