A strike is underway within the University of California (UC) system — with UCLA, UC Davis and UC Santa Cruz all now participating — as unionized graduate student workers take collective action to protest the brutalization and repression of fellow union members and Palestine solidarity protesters.

With academic employees unionized with the United Auto Workers (UAW) walking out at all three schools, the UC administration has found itself contending with the consequences of its decision to invite state aggression upon its own students as they protested the ongoing genocide perpetrated by Israel in the Gaza Strip and West Bank. Additional union workforces at UC campuses across the state — there are nine in total — may well join in.

The strike takes place in a national context in which administration crackdowns on Gaza solidarity encampments have encompassed everything from sanction, expulsion and eviction of students and firings of faculty (and even top administrators willing to parlay), all the way up to violent police action, as was on especially ugly display at UCLA. The striking UC workers, who are members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811 (also called the Academic Student Employees Union), were provoked to strike after UC administrators decided to shut down UCLA’s Gaza solidarity encampment by calling in city police, who stood by while a pro-Israel mob attacked the camp and beat protesters. The police crackdown led to direct harm to UAW members, among others. A subsequent encampment at UCLA was similarly dismantled by riot police.

In the wake of the events at UCLA, UAW Local 4811 called a joint council and assembled a list of demands before voting on strike authorization. The membership’s wishes were made resoundingly clear, with 80 percent of total votes cast in favor of taking action. With Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges already filed against the UC, Local 4811 increased pressure by executing the first phase of a “stand-up strike,” as organizers are referring to it, which involves calling on other UC campuses to join in the strike at staggered intervals, denying employers advance warning and curtailing the latter’s ability to respond. The stand-up strike differs from a traditional rolling walkout, however; when other campuses stand up, UCSC will not stand down. The aim is to hold out in concert, as other campuses join piecemeal. Because UCSC graduate workers are the first to begin, they will need to hold out the longest — the expectation is that the strike, which began on May 20, could run until the end of June.

UAW 4811 itself represents graduate student workers like teaching assistants, who shoulder the bulk of academic labor: grading, attendance, and other less-romanticized day-to-day tasks of education. With 48,000 members across the system, the UAW carries significant heft in the balance of worker and administration power across a public university network that has for years been roiled by conflict between the diametric interests of the neoliberal university and the precarious, largely untenured labor force upon which its pedagogical operations depend.

With this latest strike action, academic workers are seeking to underscore that they will refuse to accept police violence against campus protests. On its website, UAW 4811 described the motivations behind the strike authorization vote:

Academic workers at UC strongly support the right of the encampment organizers (many of whom are our coworkers) in their right to peacefully demonstrate. Our union will not negotiate on behalf of encampment organizers, but we do call on UC to negotiate with them in good faith. We strongly oppose any escalation by UC to dismantle the encampments and/or take disciplinary/legal action against organizers.

Rebecca Gross, a graduate student worker in UCSC’s Literature Department who is also the unit chair of UAW 4811, described the chain of events that precipitated this strike to Truthout, saying:

Members of our union, my local, at these other campuses were participating in peaceful protests at and around the Gaza solidarity encampments. And, especially at UCLA, these workers were brutalized by a Zionist mob that had shown up, and brutalized again by police officers who had been called by the university — LAPD, not just UC police…. Workers were arrested,........

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