Statement in Solidarity with UAW Academic Workers on Strike at the UC

The Palestinian Youth Movement stands in solidarity with UAW academic workers across the University of California (UC) system, who have chosen to remain resolute and forge ahead with the largest higher education strike in U.S. history. As a collective of youth and students committed to justice in Palestine and for the right of return of Palestinian refugees, we understand our struggle as deeply embedded in the struggle for justice for all oppressed peoples everywhere. The UC, founded through land grants displacing native peoples, continues its legacy of exploiting land and labor as one of the largest employers and landlords in the state. Across the UC system today, graduate students confront many barriers and challenges that impede their ability to do their jobs and to live in dignity. From skyrocketing rents to costly childcare, living in California as a UC graduate student has become cost-prohibitive for the majority of students on strike. By carrying on with the strike, students are advancing the bold proposition that another world is possible: one in which public education is truly democratic, accessible, and liberatory; free of displacement, inflation, and debt.

The PYM supports and uplifts rank-and-file student-workers’ demands in confronting the rent burden crisis at the UC by fighting for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA). We understand the implications of this strike are far greater than a simple pay raise. COLA would guarantee that wage increases be directly linked to local rent costs. This ensures that wage increases don’t get eaten up by inflation and disincentivizes the UC from driving up the rent markets that it influences. This demand is a revival of the spirit of the 2019-2020 COLA wildcat strikes which were cut short by COVID. A wildcat strike is a strike that is not approved by union leadership; the 2019-2020 strike came on the heels of a long history of efforts by union members to challenge business unionism, corruption, and bureaucracy within the UAW. Notably in 2015, rank and file members made 2865 the first US local union to endorse BDS, despite top-down officials’ attempts to crush the expression of popular sentiment in support of Palestine.

BDS was not an abstract or far-removed demand when it was brought forward by rank-and-file in 2015. Some of the UC’s largest investments (funded directly by student tuition) lie with BlackRock — an investment management firm whose assets primarily fund weapons manufacturing — and Lockheed Martin — a defense contractor. Both corporations play an active role in the manufacturing and testing of technology that the Israeli state uses against Palestinians living under occupation. The UC Regents, chancellors, and upper administration continue to directly profit off of the death and displacement of Palestinians, as well as other Black, Brown, and Indigenous peoples at home and abroad. Meanwhile, their students and workers are left without a fair education or liveable wages.

The UC Divest coalition — a cross-campus collective of organizations and individuals devoted to dismantling the UC’s relationship with militarism, imperialism, and colonialism — consistently highlights these relationships in their efforts to end the UC’s weapons investments. Oftentimes, the UC claims to be strapped for cash, using financial difficulties as an excuse to hike tuition and withhold fair wages. In reality, the UC’s endowment is currently valued at $19 billion in assets. In 2021, though, the UC only paid out $430 million of that endowment to all 10 campuses combined. The Regents claim their investments in war and policing are made “on [faculty, staff, and students’] behalf,” yet these numbers show that majority of their students and workers will never benefit from the money and labor they are putting into the institution. The UC must divest from the military industrial complex and put its multi-billion dollar endowment to good use by investing it into improving material conditions for its communities at home instead. Money for jobs and education, not for war and occupation!

The Palestinian Youth Movements stands with striking workers and people in the streets demanding a fair contract and fundamental change to business-as-usual at the UC. Strikes work because workers do: we believe in the power of academic workers to leverage their labor and get demands met. Just last year, student workers at Columbia University organized and withheld their labor to great success. After months of threats, and unsatisfactory offers, demands for a minimum pay parity among Ph.D. students, retroactive pay increases, and independent arbitration were met with hardly any concessions. These efforts demonstrate that peak power grows when rank-and-file’s push and choose to strike longer.

Graduate student workers, alongside lecturers and researchers, perform the majority of the teaching and research at the UCs. Without their labor, the university could not continue operating — a fact that the Regents know all too well as grading and evaluation deadlines for the first quarter approach. Individual campuses have already turned to incentivizing undergraduates in an attempt to break the strike. As we near the end of the quarter, the UCs will become increasingly desperate to submit grades, budget and plan for the upcoming quarter, and maintain rankings. It is imperative that strikers receive community support in the days and weeks to come, as pressure to compromise and break the strike will grow, as will intimidation tactics from the upper administration. Join your local picket, donate to strike funds, and spread the word to get others involved and in solidarity with striking workers.

No COLA, no contract.

An injury to one, is an injury to all.

Signed,

The Palestinian Youth Movement

Los Angeles, Orange County, Inland Empire chapter

San Diego Chapter

Bay Area Chapter