At 8 a.m. on Monday, UC Santa Cruz graduate student workers stopped working.
They’re now on strike — the first campus across the University of California system to walk off the job. The labor action is a response to police’s use of force at encampments supporting Palestine at UCLA, UC San Diego and UC Irvine earlier this month. Over 15,000 UAW 4811 members voted in favor of authorizing a strike last week.
Third-year PhD candidate Robin Jones is a rank-and-file member of United Auto Workers 4811, which represents academic researchers and graduate student workers across the UC system.
He says he's "outraged" by the police violence at other campuses with encampments.
"We're out here, on strike, to, first off, to defend ... the rights of ... workers within our union and students to free speech and to call for an amnesty for protesters who are participating in this movement who've been arrested," he said. "And then, to call on UC to divest from its holdings in military contractors or companies that are profiting from the Israeli military occupation and the war in Gaza right now."
Those investments total up to $32 billion of the University’s $175 billion portfolio, the UC disclosed last week. A university spokesperson reiterated the system has no plans to divest.
The union is striking under unfair labor practice charges. It argues that UC prohibited free speech, particularly by having “forcibly arrested” participants in “nonviolent political protests”, and violated the Higher Education Employer-Employee Relations Act prohibition on retaliating against employees for engaging in concerted actions related to working conditions.
UC filed an unfair labor practice charge against UAW 4811 on May 17, alleging that it has violated the “no strikes” clause of its current contract. UC Santa Cruz campus provost Lori Kletzer said in a same-day message that the university is “committed to ensuring that all people may exercise their constitutionally protected rights of free expression, speech, and assembly.”
The university has responded to the strike by moving all classes online for at least the first half of the week, and publishing updates on campus operations to its website. According to a Monday morning dispatch via the UC Santa Cruz Police Department scanner, some officers from UC San Francisco were moved to the campus as back-up.
While the labor action is distinct from the campus’s Gaza solidarity encampment, which started on May 1, it has published its five major demands “in support of the Palestine solidarity movement.” Aside from the three demands Jones mentioned, they include public disclosure of investment and transitional funding for workers whose funding is “tied to the military or foundations that support Palestinian oppression.”
UC Santa Cruz’s third strike in five years
The strike that began Monday marks the third researcher and academic student worker strike in five years at UC Santa Cruz.
From late 2019 through early 2020, student workers engaged in a “wildcat strike”, pushing for a cost of living adjustment. The movement spread across all undergraduate UC campuses, despite not being authorized by the union.
And in 2022, workers across UC — including at UC Santa Cruz — mounted the largest academic worker strike in U.S. history.
The university switched to remote instruction on Monday, said UC Santa Cruz spokesperson Scott Hernandez-Jason, after entrances were briefly blocked in the morning by demonstrators acting separately from the main labor union picket.
“Our primary goal is to minimize the disruptive impact, especially given the many educational and research challenges that have affected students and researchers in recent years,” he said via email. “Academic and operational continuity is essential to the University of California’s education and research mission and a core responsibility to our students.”
The strike vote for this labor action had lower turnout than the strike in 2022. While it passed by a margin of 79% among the nearly 20,000 workers who voted, less than half of the 48,000 academic student workers represented by the union returned ballots. The vote to strike in 2022 passed by a margin of 97.5%, with over 36,500 workers voting.
Jones, the UC Santa Cruz PhD candidate, attributed the difference to the much shorter timeline for preparing this strike.
“It’s just a way different ballgame, planning a strike in two or three weeks versus having a full year to prepare for it,” he said. “I’m hoping to see kind of a cascade effect as different campuses are called on to join in.”
The union is following the “stand up” model, with other campuses being called to join the strike on a rolling basis to increase pressure on the university.
Strike distinct from — but aligned with — solidarity encampments
While the labor action is distinct from the Palestine solidarity encampments that have sprouted across the University of California system, the two movements are connected.
The encampment organizers have their own set of demands, which are similar to but not completely in lockstep with UAW 4811 demands. Distinct differences include encampment organizers’ demand that UC remove police from its campuses and UC acknowledgment of the “ongoing genocide of Palestinians.”
The International Court of Justice has found it “plausible” that Israel has committed acts violating the Genocide Convention, while Israel has strongly denied it is committing genocide.
Still, both sets of demands center on solidarity with Palestine, amnesty for protestors speaking out about Palestine, and a push for the University of California to distance itself from Israel through divestment around Israel’s war in Gaza.
Over 200 days have passed since Oct. 7, when Israeli bombardment began on Gaza after a Hamas attack killed over 1,200 in Israel.
As of Monday, over 35,000 Palestinians have been reported dead per the Health Ministry in Gaza.
Sophia Azeb, a professor of race and ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz, has led teach-ins at the encampment on Palestinian scholars and cross-cultural solidarity.
Speaking from the picket line on Monday, she said she’s hoping the University will follow the precedent UC Regents set in 1986 when divesting from South African apartheid educational institutions.
“Our students are merely asking for the university to apply that same metric towards human rights, in the case of Israeli institutions,” she said.
The UAW 4811 strike has an end date of June 30. The end of the spring quarter is June 14.
The union representing librarians at UC, UC-AFT, also filed an unfair labor practice charge against UC last week alleging the university system disregarded faculty free speech rights at UCLA and UC San Diego protests.
The California Public Employee Relations Board could take up to six months to determine which unfair labor practice charges, between the unions and the UC, take precedence.
