Interview: Inside the First Authorized Pro-Palestine Strike

Note: This interview was conducted on Tuesday, May 14th, the second day of UAW 4811’s Strike Authorization Vote.

Jeff: We are excited to have three guests with us today from UAW Local 4811, representing over 48,000 academic workers across the entire University of California system. We're going to be talking about their historic fight across their campuses, where members peacefully protesting for divestment from Israel have been under attack by their campus administration and the police. The membership is currently taking a strike authorization vote as we speak. We're joined by Rafa Jaime, President of UAW 4811 and Academic Student Employee in the English department at UCLA, Anny Viloria Winnett, Graduate Student Researcher and ASE Unit Chair for UAW 4811 in Los Angeles, and Mohammed Alyaseen, Academic Student Employee at UCSD and UAW 4811 member.

A lot of people are watching and wondering, why is it that 48,000 workers are voting to go on strike across the entire UC system? How did we get here today? 

Rafa: Since October, workers and students across the entire UC system have been engaging in peaceful protests to speak out against the ongoing war on Gaza. It started to escalate recently with the establishment of encampments across the UC system, including here at UCLA. These encampments were completely peaceful. Despite the very serious and moral concerns that the encampments represented, the university decided to respond in a brutal way against the participating students and workers. Rather than meeting with them and trying to negotiate over the students’ concerns, the university decided to discriminate against them by instituting policies against pro-Palestinian protesters. They then allowed a violent mob to attack them on April 30. 

Finally, after just standing by as the encampment was attacked – as many of my coworkers and fellow students were brutalized by these anti-Palestinian agitators – the university sent in the police, including hundreds of riot police officers, into the student encampment to brutally suppress it. The cops were using flashbang grenades and rubber bullets against the peaceful protestors. 

Many of my own coworkers were there and were arrested by the police. They are now facing criminal charges and threats by the university. We are taking this strike authorization vote because the university has repeatedly tried to undermine our rights as workers to engage in peaceful protests and to engage in our fundamental right to exercise our freedom of speech. 

Jeff: We’ve been seeing something similar across the whole country, where many university administrations are using a similar playbook. As you were saying, rather than engaging in any kind of dialogue around reasonable demands themselves, they've turned to violent repression. 

Mohammed, how have your coworkers been responding to these attacks and feeling on the ground?

Mohammed: I was actually in the encampment at UCSD and was one of the students who was arrested, spending a couple of hours in prison. Even before the removal of the encampment, UCSD canceled the yearly Sun God Festival to try to turn the university’s community against the encampment.

However, many students continued to show support for the encampment despite this. After the crackdown on the encampment, the students who were brutalized and taken to prison have been organizing to fight back. It's not just something happening across the street or in another city – it’s something that's happening to us personally. I am facing misdemeanor charges and interim suspension. This unfair treatment has garnered the support of students around me, fighting to remove the punishment that the university has chosen to give us for our protest activity. 

Jeff: Do you feel that the mood on campus has changed after the brutal response from the university and the plans to fight back? 

Anny: As workers, we have always been under attack on many fronts. Even since we won a historic contract in 2022, we've been fighting to enforce our hard-won rights. We have been facing retaliation, in San Diego in particular. Some of our coworkers were arrested there last year because they were protesting the university’s failure to respect the contract.

At every point we knew that coming together through collective action and standing together in solidarity was going to be the solution. Our San Diego retaliation campaign was successful. That was energizing to all of us because it reminded us of the power of our union. It's not just when we negotiate a contract, but when we come together around any kind of issue that pertains to all of us.

And we can see that playing out right now. The strike authorization vote was announced a week ago, and we only had about five days to prepare for it statewide. On day one of the vote, we already knew people were excited to vote, were ready to vote, and were looking forward to getting that ballot in the email. Part of it is just a reminder that despite what we faced – even though it was an extreme form of violence and repression, which we saw personally firsthand in the encampment – that the steps that we're taking forward are energizing because it reminds us of what it is that a fighting union can do.  

Jeff: In many ways, this is a very unique action for a union to take around a political issue, defending their members who are being attacked for their pro-Palestine solidarity actions. This is not only defending their free speech rights, but calling on the university to meet students’ demands around divestment. This action falls within a broader national and international context of a major resurgence of the student movement, unlike anything that we've seen since the anti-Vietnam War protests. Of course, it's also worth mentioning that this historic protest movement in the United States is in response to the horrific genocidal campaign by the Israeli government that's taken the lives of over 40,000 Palestinians at this point. 

With that context, some people may question why a union should be taking what they see as political action, preferring to stick to fighting for issues like wages and benefits. What do you see as the importance for the union to take action around a political issue like this?  

Anny: I would argue that all of our fights are political. For example, we have waged fights for the parents in our union who cannot meet their childcare responsibilities because they're underpaid by the university – I think that in itself is a political question. We as workers should have the right to access basic services and benefits. These issues are simply not disconnected from politics. 

When we see and hear our students, our colleagues, our coworkers – especially those who have been very active in the last few months of organizing around the Palestine question – they understand that the money that is not going towards fulfilling our contracts and what is needed to survive and exist in this country is instead going towards war. That connection is really obvious to people.

If you live in Los Angeles and you walk around and see the numbers of people who have to sleep in the street – all because there is no kind of housing subsidy or any way to guarantee people's right to have a home – then you understand that the things that we fight for in our contracts are things that pertain to all of us workers outside of the university too. You realize that these problems have a solution that is always political and that is tied to the political life of our union.

We have 48,000 workers across the state of California coming together and exercising our collective power to fight for changes for the entire working class in California, which is exactly what we should be striving for.

It's not necessarily that this is a unique fight in that it's something that we should not take on, instead it's showing a different facet of the political fights that we take on every day as a union. 

  

Jeff: It's worth mentioning that we're seeing parallel movements here – there's both the massive wave of labor organizing across higher education in recent years, as well as in the last seven months nonstop organizing in the streets for Palestine. Both of these movements have been led primarily by young people. And we can see that these movements are now coming together in the form of young workers taking action on the job to advance political demands. 

What significance does this hold for the future of young workers in the labor movement and their political aspirations beyond more traditional workplace issues?

Rafa: Over the last couple of years, you've seen a massive wave of organizing on campuses across the country. Everybody has been well aware of the student movement protests on campuses. It's been a very well-known feature of campuses for many, many years. But one thing that really lacked in all of those movements was organized labor as a real force to enhance the power of those protests. 

Now that you're seeing this massive organizing wave of workers on virtually every campus – forming unions with the legal right to withhold their labor – I think it's just going to add an entirely new dimension to what the student movement at a university looks like. This will change the kind of things that we're able to demand, and not just demand, but actually win with our ability to withhold our labor.

We're seeing a real turning point. We're seeing the making of the academic working class with the power to actually make fundamental changes in our universities, including the way that universities are operated and the way they set their priorities. This is really exciting for the future of not just higher education, but the future of our country. 

 

Jeff: That reminds me a lot of something that your regional director, Mike Miller, was saying to us when we had an interview with him recently about the origins of 4811. He mentioned how many of those early organizers in 4811 had been organizing previously in the anti-war movement. They found that their role as student organizers – while it could be potent at times as they were very committed to their politics – often ran into limitations on the kind of leverage and the power that they had as students. But that organizing through a union, organizing through a new vehicle really unlocked all of those possibilities.

What did it take to build the unity around these positions and action by the membership in the union? 

Rafa: We have been organizing for a long time. Our union was founded in 2000. We won our first contract and found that organizing and forming a union politicizes workers in and of itself. Our fight in 2000, in 2022 by forming student researchers united, our contract fight the same year, just completely politicized an entire new generation of workers at the University of California. They now understand that the fights that we have at the university to win better working conditions are all political. These are all political fights when we are shifting the way that the university operates.

More specifically on this issue, we have been at the forefront here for a long time. In 2014 we had a referendum to endorse the BDS movement, which passed. When the war started back in October, we were one of the first local unions to issue a statement in support of a ceasefire and we continued to organize around support of this. We worked closely with our international union for them to become the first major union in the United States to come out in support of a ceasefire. This was really exciting for members and the broader labor movement. 

Then we held a referendum in January on our position on this issue and continuing to fight for justice in Palestine, which passed with over 90% of the vote. Thousands of members voted and it was a very short timeline and it passed with a 90 plus percent margin – which is massive. This was really important for members to understand why this is an issue that we must take on as organized workers. Now we're engaging in this strike authorization vote to protect our rights as workers to exercise our right to freedom of speech and protest. People understand this is a fundamental issue that we must fight for as a union. 


Anny: What Rafa mentioned is the zoomed out version of the day-to-day grind that is required to get to this point. I think it's worth mentioning that we are all young people of a generation that maybe didn't grow up with the built-in knowledge or lived experience of what it takes to build a union or how to take effective collective action. 

We are learning about how to convince people around us that waging seemingly small fights around day to day work issues, fighting to improve that one contract provision, can be the building blocks that allow us to expand and win broader, larger, and more powerful gains. Of course, this didn't come out of nowhere. It came from young people who have been building up this skillset for years and learning as they go how to move people and how to move their coworkers.

Along the way, we have learned that we can actually aim higher than we thought we could. This is now a fight that we are ready to take on because we have been training on the ground on this one-on-one organizing model. That is the only way we can convince people to take this leap of faith and participate in a vote that maybe would have seemed impossible when folks were organizing 10 years ago before we even came to the university.

There's a human element to this that is about having faith in the process and actually trying it out, putting time and effort into it. 

  

Jeff: That process of building people's confidence through those successes along the way to be able to dream bigger is so critical. The 2022 wins that you made with 4811 built confidence for workers across the country, especially for academic workers to be able to demand more.

Mohammed: If you're trying to measure the change that happens due to this kind of movement in the younger generation, I am an example of that change. I came to the United States in 2019, and the concept of the union was new to me. I was even skeptical about it.  

I was wondering, how will the union handle the fight with the university for better wages, for example, through the strike? I was really shocked. This is not something that happens, at least in my home country. And I think it's even new here in the U.S. for students to fight as unionized workers. I only grew in belief that the union is actually powerful and is a good means to achieve ends that are beneficial for the students. I am the kind of change we are talking about.

Jeff: Let’s look back to the history of UAW now. People may see this as coming out of left field, but we know that UAW actually has a very rich history of standing up, not just against exploitative bosses on the job, but also against systems of racist oppression, both within the United States and abroad. Can you share some of this history with us?

Anny: This history is so rich that there's probably not enough time to share all of it. One example that many of us have studied and learned form is the role of the UAW in the fight against apartheid here at home. We know that the UAW and the AFL-CIO more broadly held an anti-apartheid stance as early as 1950. Our union had been engaging in work from that time onwards by mobilizing people to anti-apartheid rallies and engaging in coalition building – but also materially by withdrawing funds from banks that made loans to South Africa starting in 1970. 

One campaign in particular that the UAW had played an important role in was demanding freedom for Moses Mayekiso. He was a leader in NAMSA, which is UAW's sister union in South Africa. He was arrested and charged with treason upon leading an anti-apartheid rent strike. In the campaign to free Mayakiso and to fight apartheid more generally, we can see in many ways that our work at home, our organizing our union, is continually about political fights as well.

The kinds of things that we talk about in our political organizing committees – how to engage with local politics and state politics in a way that advances our fight – are the same tools we used back in the 50s and 70s when we were fighting against apartheid as a union. We mobilized our workers to talk to the council people to fight for divestment from South Africa's oil industry. Workers across the U.S. came together to organize the Labor Network Against Apartheid. They organized pickets and rallies around the cause of freeing Mayakiso and boycotting Shell – which at that time was doing business in South Africa. 

We had UAW members who went on a 48 hour fast to protest the unjust detainment of Black workers and activists in South Africa. Even our siblings in Canada, UAW workers at Ford and GM, won the right to list a number of corporations that would be excluded from their pension portfolio around the same fight.

Eventually, these campaigns altogether and the pressure of UAW workers across the U.S. supported the fight that ended up with the charges against Mayakiso being dropped. We look at this example as just one moment in our proud history when we have stood up on the right side. 

We have deployed every tactic that we know how to use – from advocating at the legislative level to collective action in the street, rallying, and mobilizing people. More broadly, simply raising consciousness about how the fight for a political prisoner – a labor organizer in South Africa – is connected to our own ability to organize as labor organizers in the U.S.

There are many more examples of this, but I think our history as a union is a fighting one. It's one that we are proud of and one that we continue to build through this vote and this moment, with many more to come in the future as well.

    

Jeff: Such an incredible history. I really appreciate you sharing that example of just one of the instances where UAW was squarely on the right side of history. We know that 50 years from now, everybody will look back and see that once again, the UAW was on the right side of history and that these student encampments protesting against a genocide are as well.