Portside

Twelve thousand academic workers at UCLA and UC Davis are poised to walk off the job Tuesday morning as part of an historic strike in solidarity with Palestine. 

The workers — 6,400 at the University of California, Los Angeles and 5,700 at the University of California, Davis — are members of United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents 48,000 academic workers across the University of California (UC) system. 

“We're taking this ... unprecedented action because of the university's serious, unfair labor practices, which really go to the heart of our rights for freedom of speech and protest, and the ability to take collective action."—UAW Local 4811 President Rafael Jaime

“We’re taking this … unprecedented action because of the university’s serious, unfair labor practices (ULP), which really go to the heart of our rights for freedom of speech and protest, and the ability to take collective action,” Local 4811 President Rafael Jaime told In These Times ahead of Tuesday’s walkout.

The surge in the number of UC academic workers going on strike comes amid international outcry over an Israeli military attack this weekend targeting a refugee camp made up of tents housing displaced Palestinians in Rafah, a city in southern Gaza. At least 45 Palestinians were killed in the assault, including children, with many others injured. Fires caused by the assault engulfed the refugee camp, burning refugees sheltering there. 

The ULP charges were filed earlier in May ​“in response to the university’s gross violation of our rights,” Jaime said.

_{Members of UAW Local 4811 at UC Santa Cruz went on strike on May 20, 2024.PHOTO BY JUSTIN SULLIVAN}

The ULP charge was first filed on May 3, according to the Local 4811 website, and was in response to events on May 1 and 2 when ​“police in riot gear arrested more than 200 peaceful student protesters and academic workers exercising their legal right to demonstrate against the death, destruction and human suffering directed at the people of Gaza.”

Local 4811 noted that ​“many of those arrested had spent the previous night seeking medical care or hospitalization after being physically attacked and maced by a group of anti-Palestinian counter-protesters” and added that ​“though UCLA and LAPD were on noice of the attacks, they deliberately failed to respond.”

The ULP charges that were filed were ​“against UCLA arising from the Administration’s conduct and actions take at their request.”

The charges would then be amended on May 10, May 17 and May 21 to add additional violations, including those at other campuses across the UC system including UCSD and UCI.

UAW Local 4811 is modeling the walkout after the rolling Stand-Up Strike model that was made famous by the UAW and President Shawn Fain during the fall strike against Detroit’s Big Three automakers. The strike officially began about a week ago when some 2,000 academic workers walked off the job at UC Santa Cruz.

“Obviously, it was not something we did lightly,” Jaime said about filing the ULP charges. He said that the university violated workers’ rights ​“by allowing a violent mob to attack workers, to brutalize them, mace them, burn their skin with fireworks. And then the very next day sending in … cops to violently suppress the peaceful protests using rubber bullets and flash-bang grenades.”

The UC-AFT, which represents 6,500 librarians and teaching faculty across the university system, also filed a ULP in May, writing in a news release that ​“charges include the university’s failure to maintain safe working conditions, disregarding the free speech rights of its employees, and unilateral decision making regarding changes in their working conditions in responding to recent campus protests at UCLA and UCSD.”

“Several union members were arrested while attempting to protect their students against violent police responses to the encampments,” according to the news release, ​“and others denied access to their offices and forced to move their courses online on extremely short notice.”

"Several union members were arrested while attempting to protect their students against violent police responses to the encampments."

Hannah Appel, a professor at UCLA, told In These Times that the strike and its justifications were historic and that the political and legal bases for the strike are yoked together.

"Being beat up by mobs at your place of work; being beat up by the cops at your place of work when you are expressing pro-Palestinian speech, are unequivocally unfair labor practices.”—UCLA professor Hannah Appel

“Being beat up by mobs at your place of work; being beat up by the cops at your place of work when you are expressing pro-Palestinian speech, are unequivocally unfair labor practices,” Appel said. ​“If, in the United States, we’re not allowed to participate in pro-Palestinian speech on campus, then those can become unfair labor practices, and can deepen and build the power of the Palestinian solidarity movement.”

UC administration has maintained that the strike is illegal and unsuccessfully tried to get a state labor board to immediately stop it. The UC has also threatened striking workers with ​“corrective action.”

UCLA law professor Noah Zatz wrote in an opinion article for UCLA’s student newspaper, The Daily Bruin, that those attempts by UC administrators’ to halt the strike are unfounded. Requests for comment from UCLA and UC administration were not returned.

“Although the UC’s letter expresses mystification at what any of this has to do with employment, the connection should be obvious: the UC is a workplace,” Zatz wrote. ​“Many people demonstrating at the encampment on our campus, who were then subject to violence by the UC, were UC employees, whether undergraduate, graduate, staff or faculty workers — including UAW Local 4811 members.”

_{There has been heavy repression and violence against students, academic workers, and others at UCLA since a student encampment started there..PHOTO BY MARIO TAMA}

This strike by Local 4811 is the latest — and one of the most dramatic — escalations surrounding what Jaime and others have described as a long-running effort by UC administration to crack down on dissent, especially surrounding students and academic workers protesting on campuses.

“While the events of the past few weeks are the most egregious acts by the university to crack down on dissent, it is part of a long pattern of the university misusing its power to silence workers and students protesting on campus,” Jaime said.