University of California, Los Angeles academic workers from United Auto Workers Local 4811 picket on the first day of their strike on May 28, 2024, in Los Angeles, California.A strike is underway within the University of California 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.
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.
Gross disagreed with that characterization. On the contrary, she claimed, the act of solidarity with UCLA members has everything to do with their job — at play are inherent issues of academic freedom, the right to protest and the obligation of employers to ensure the safety of their workers. She told: “The UC has made false allegations that this is not a lawful strike, and actually in doing so has committed another ULP — in that that is not for the university to decide. It’s for PERB to decide.
The UAW is not the only union on campus at UC Santa Cruz. The school’s lecturers and librarians — many of them contingent workers, like adjunct professors, without the protections afforded by tenure — are organized with the University Council-American Federation of Teachers . As Brahinsky explained, UC-AFT members are, at minimum, planning to show solidarity with the strike by pledging responses to the same effect. Should the administration pressure them to cover for work left undone by striking UAW members, many in the UC-AFT plan to refuse.
Workers’ widespread willingness to engage in the inherently transgressive act of a wildcat strike against a union leadership contract indicated that a new generation of radical organizers were coming of age in the UAW. Brahinsky noted that a change in leadership reversed a reluctance to strike. The unionists who gained experience in the 2019-2020 wildcat strike,, went on to change the direction of academic worker militancy in Local 4811 and the UC system.
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