On 15 May, often known as the “Nakba Day” to commemorate the 750,000 forced to flee their homes in 1948, the UAW 4811 authorized a strike based on an Unfair Labor Practice. Students, academic workers and faculty, enraged by the current genocide in Palestine and their universities’ complicity in the violence, had set up peaceful encampments across the UC System. The UCLA administration allowed them to be attacked by far-right vigilantes before calling the LAPD to forcibly sweep the camp, injuring and arresting 210 protestors.
Faculty such as myself watched these events in horror. Was it possible that the UC administration had actively taken steps to physically harm our colleagues and students? The answer is yes. Even though the encampments have been relatively peaceful on my campus at UCSC, the UAW 4811, which called for a “stand up” strike, began here. UCLA and UC Davis will be “standing up” and going on strike on Tuesday, 28 May.
None of these events prepared me for what has happened this week, which, admittedly, did not involve flash bangs that were deployed at UCLA. As faculty weighed their options, deciding if and how to be in solidarity with the strike, our Chancellor and EVC unilaterally (allegedly “in collaboration” with the faculty senate) decided to move our classes to Zoom. The picket was peaceful, traffic moved on and off campus with no issues, and yet we were told that it was “protest disruptions” that drove their decision to put faculty – and the undergraduates we allegedly serve – back into the black hole of Zoom instruction.
To add insult to injury, some of us, concerned about students who preferred to meet in person decided to teach in our classrooms with an online option. Frustrated that we were once again having to deal with different “modalities,” and the extra labor that implies, some colleagues tried to go to campus, only to find that our classrooms had been locked. I tend to associate being suddenly locked out with relationships that ended badly, not with the actions of my university. Which led me to wonder: is my Chancellor trying to break up with me?
In many ways, the answer is again yes. In this case, it’s nothing personal. I am a member of our faculty union (the Santa Cruz Faculty Association), which has been regularly informing colleagues of their rights and responsibilities during labor actions. At the moment we are involved in a “war of FAQs” (a key weapon in all bureaucratic wars). There were two main battles: whether this strike is truly “unlawful” and whether faculty actions in solidarity with the strike (ranging from refusing to do the grading of our striking graduate workers to withholding our own labor) are protected. There are complicated legal reasons –elegantly laid out by UCLA Law Professor Noah Zatz – why the UAW may have the right to strike over an Unfair Labor Practice even with a no-strike clause. Indeed, just yesterday PERB (the Public Employment Relations Board) ruled in favor of the UAW and against the UC's request for an injunction.
My union (the collective bargaining unit for senate faculty) also maintains that faculty have the right to be in active solidarity, which is a protected right under HEERA (the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act). Yet myself and my colleagues have received a barrage of confusing, and intimidating, messages implying otherwise.This labor strike, which builds off the momentum of the encampments, is a historic strike in that it resists the Cold War logic (inscribed in the Taft-Hartley Amendments to the NLRA) to depoliticize labor and limit it to economic demands rather than political grievances. As those who study the Middle East and Arab Uprisings know, this line has always been spurious; there is no such thing as an apolitical economic demand.
Yet I will concede the following: this strike is political in a new way. It connects American foreign policy to the laboring conditions of academic workers and demands not only the physical safety of those of us who work in universities, but also calls for disclosure around the financing of higher education so that we may work for a university which is not complicit in arms manufacturing and war. The UC is quite happy to brag about student activism and divestment when it comes to Apartheid South Africa, or even fossil fuel divestment, but once again, we are faced with a “Palestine exception.”
Some of this background may explain my Chancellor’s desire to lock me out of my own classroom. But let’s be clear: this decision was not taken to handle “disruptions” created by those at the picket, it was a strikebreaking tool. Except that the "break-up note" from my Chancellor, normally expected to offer closure, will likely take the form of another misleading FAQ.