What’s New
Thousands of graduate-student instructors and researchers at the University of California at Santa Cruz will strike on Monday, their union said, over how UC-system officials have handled recent protests of the Israel-Hamas war.
Friday’s announcement came after teaching assistants, researchers, and postdocs across the University of California system authorized the union this week to strike over the system’s militarized response to student protests on some campuses. The union described the response as a violation of free speech and an “unfair labor practice.”
The executive board of United Auto Workers Local 4811, which represents about 48,000 workers across the University of California’s 10 campuses, will decide where strikes should occur, and plans to announce them on a rolling basis, union officials said.
The union has said UC-system leaders can avert a strike by “remedying their unfair labor practices and ceasing to commit unfair labor practices.” The union is also calling for amnesty for all academic employees, students, faculty, and staff who face disciplinary action or were arrested because of the protests; for divestment from known investments in companies involved with Israel’s war on Gaza; and for researchers to be allowed to opt out of funding sources tied to the military or the “oppression of Palestinians,” among other actions.
A strike could throw the end of the academic year into chaos. UC-Santa Cruz is entering the final weeks of its spring quarter.
“At the heart of this is our right to free speech and peaceful protest,” said Rafael Jaime, president of UAW 4811, in a statement. “If members of the academic community are maced and beaten down for peacefully demonstrating on this issue, our ability to speak up on all issues is threatened. The UC regents have no excuse to allow campus administration to commit severe unfair labor practices, as was done at UCSD and UCLA and reflected in the unfair labor practices filed by our union.”
Union officials believe this will be the first strike in the nation over how a university system has handled the recent campus protests. A six-week UC strike over compensation issues in 2022, involving the same groups of employees, was among the largest strikes in U.S. higher-education history.
University of California officials said there is no basis for a strike.
“This strike is illegal,” Melissa Matella, associate vice president for systemwide labor relations, said in a written statement. “UAW’s decision to strike over nonlabor issues violates the no-strike clause of their contracts with UC and sets a dangerous and far-reaching precedent that social, political, and cultural issues — no matter how valid — that are not labor-related can support a labor strike.”
A statement from the university system characterized the demands from student protesters and the union as “political demands that are outside the terms of the collective-bargaining agreement.”
Union officials said they could call a strike if the University of California “continues to unjustly discipline or retaliate against workers for exercising their rights to free speech, to protest, their rights under our contract, the changes in campus policies regarding free speech and protest remain in place, or any further escalation or retaliation occurs.”
Incidents on UC campuses over protests continued this week. On Wednesday afternoon, pro-Palestinian protesters broke into and occupied a building at the University of California at Berkeley, according to The Daily Californian, a student newspaper. Hours later, police officers raided the new encampment and arrested at least 12 people. The incident came just a day after some protesters had started to break down an encampment after reaching an agreement with administrators.
Also on Wednesday, the police cleared an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of California at Irvine and arrested 50 people, including faculty members, according to the Los Angeles Times. The university system’s president, Michael V. Drake, released a statement that said several dozen protesters had “illegally occupied and barricaded entrances and exits to an academic building,” which led classes to be canceled and an advisory to be issued to exit nearby buildings due to safety concerns.
The Details
Protests over the Israel-Hamas war have erupted on college campuses throughout the nation this spring, particularly after administrators at Columbia University on April 18 called the New York Police Department to clear an encampment of protesters. Police officers arrived on campus wearing riot gear, loaded students onto buses, and removed dozens of tents.
On April 30 and May 1, a protest at UCLA turned violent when counterprotesters attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment. UCLA’s student newspaper, the Daily Bruin, reported that counterprotesters had thrown wooden planks, cones, a scooter, water bottles, and a piece of metal fencing at the encampment, and that someone had shot fireworks at the protesters. According to an account in the Los Angeles Times, it took the campus police several hours to summon enough officers to stop the violence.
Since then, protests at several UC campuses have escalated. In addition to the incidents at Berkeley and Irvine this week, police officers in riot gear entered an encampment of pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of California at San Diego on May 6 and arrested 40 students and 24 others, according to The Guardian, the student newspaper.
“The University of California must be as flexible as it can be involving matters of free expression, including expression of viewpoints that some find deeply offensive,” Drake said in the statement. “But when that expression blocks the ability of students to learn or to express their own viewpoints, when it meaningfully disrupts the functioning of the university, or when it threatens the safety of students, or anyone else, we must act.”
Anny Viloria Winnett, a union leader at UCLA, said that while the response to protests at UCLA was a catalyst for the union to file the unfair-labor-practice complaint, similar actions have been taken elsewhere. “So UCLA, of course, experienced that first, but we’re seeing it happen in many places, so it’s not just a UCLA a problem. It’s a statewide problem.”
Drake has started an independent review of the university’s response to protests at UCLA, according to the Los Angeles Times.
