On May 23, every single member of the 27-member executive board of the PSC CUNY union — which represents more than 30,000 staff, faculty, and graduate students at the City University of New York (CUNY) — unanimously stood against a resolution in support of the CUNY Gaza solidarity encampment and its demands, including full divestment from and academic boycott of Israel. The board’s argument: supporting these demands would weaken the union and hurt their ability to win a good contract.
This same argument — that the question of the genocide in Gaza is a divisive one that unions should avoid taking sides on — has been used by the leaders of several education unions to apologize for their lack of action since the first encampment at Columbia University was established on April 17. Sadly, many unions have continued to refrain from taking any direct action in support of the students or the calls from Palestinian organized labor to divest from Israel. Although many unions, including the PSC and the United Auto Workers (UAW), have called for a cease-fire, and some have even criticized the violence against the student encampments, few have actually backed up such statements with any kind of action. The leadership of the PSC, for instance, did not organize a single union member to attend the CUNY Gaza solidarity encampment in defense of the students, or to mobilize on May Day to defend the movement for Palestine in New York City. In the absence of such actions, calls for a ceasefire and statements about the right to protest issued by our union leaders are meaningless. Such statements, after all, should be the beginning, not the end, of action.
Thankfully, not every union has been so reticent to stand up for Palestine. Across the United States and Canada, rank-and-file union members have been stepping up to show their support for Palestine and to push their unions to do the same. And it’s working. Despite the failure of the bureaucratic leaderships of academic unions like the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, other unions have heeded the call raised by their members to use their power to take real action to fight for Palestine and to end the genocide in Gaza. In doing so, they are not only building and strengthening the kinds of rank-and-file organizational infrastructures needed to take collective action, they are also building trust within the communities where they work, inspiring their members to become more involved, and expanding the horizons of what is possible for organized labor as a whole.
In Canada, for example, the Ontario Federation of Labor (OFL), which represents 54 unions and over a million workers, did not sit idly by while university officials threatened to dismantle the biggest Gaza solidarity encampment in North America at the University of Toronto. Instead, they called on all of their members to turn out in defense of the encampment, telling the university President, “[If] you decide to move against the students, you’ll have to go through the workers first.” In response to this fundamental act of solidarity, thousands of union members and workers joined an emergency meeting on May 27 to defend the encampment and show their support for the students and for Palestine. This display of power and worker organization may have been a pivotal moment for the movement, since just two days later a Canadian court ruled against the university’s request to disband the encampment, thus ensuring that it would be allowed to remain until at least the middle of June, after graduation ceremonies had ended. This action, however, was a victory not only for the encampment but also for the workers and their unions. Every time workers take action like this, every time they refuse to play by the rules and win, every time they expand their struggle beyond their own immediate interests, they become stronger, bolder, more organized, and more connected to the struggle and the rest of the working class. Thanks to this action, the OFL’s 1 million members can learn lessons from this victory, and take this energy and enthusiasm into their various contract struggles and their ongoing fight against Ontario premier Doug Ford’s cuts to public health care.
Meanwhile, in California, academic workers have begun what can only be called an historic strike in support of the student movement for Palestine. UAW 4811, which represents 48,000 workers across the University of California (UC), has launched what could be one of the biggest political strikes in the United States since the Taft Hartley Act outlawed such strikes in 1947. In response to the repression of the student movement and the ongoing genocide in Gaza, 4,811 members are now striking on five different UC campuses across the state, with plans to strike at more campuses this week if the university does not meet its demands. These demands include amnesty for all pro-Palestine protesters, divestment from weapons manufacturers “profiting from Israel’s war on Gaza,” and full disclosure of all university funding and investments.
While the union is arguing that the university engaged in an unfair labor practice (ULP) when it used police to break up encampments on several campuses, including UC Irvine and UC Los Angeles, where more than 210 students and workers were arrested after a violent raid by the Los Angeles Police Department, this strike isn’t only about the safety of the union members or their right to protest. It is fundamentally a political strike in support of the student movement for Palestine. And this is why it is so important. While the strategic move to strike in response to the ULP has so far protected the union from legal consequences, the members who are on strike know that they are defying the no-strike clause in their contract as well as the federal Taft Hartley Act, which explicitly outlaws political strikes.
As UAW 4811 member and UCLA PhD student Desmond Fonseca told the podcast On The Line last week,
We are going out on strike as part of this movement, to defend our right to be a part of this movement, to defend organized labor’s right to fight for a free Palestine, and it’s such a historic step that I know all of our workers are very conscious of. … We are expanding the horizons of what is possible. And as long as we show organized labor and the country as a whole that unions can be in this fight and can be in this fight seriously, and our members can be active and participate and can grow in their political consciousness about what side we’re on — we’re on the side of workers wherever they are oppressed and exploited across the world — and that to me is a victory … and it doesn’t end when our strike ends.
In other words, these workers know, whether they win their demands or not, that they are standing against the decades-long repression of political strikes in the United States, a struggle that makes us all stronger, and which can embolden other unions to do the same. Indeed, like New York State’s Taylor Law, which prohibits strikes by state employees, laws that limit the power of working people are only as powerful as we allow them to be, and the strike at the University of California is a perfect example of how to fight such laws by breaking them.
As the summer approaches and students head home, it is more and more important than ever that organized labor follow the lead of these workers and take the fight for Palestine into our workplaces everywhere, because solidarity makes us all stronger. But, of course, we cannot expect our leaders to do this for us. If we want to build fighting unions that can win real political demands, we must begin by organizing ourselves as the rank and file in opposition to the fake progressivism of our bureaucratic leaderships, which remain loyal to the Democratic Party and the state.
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