Source: Democracy Now!
Screenshot
Workers around the world rallied Wednesday to mark May Day, with many calling on the labor movement to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian cause. In New York, Democracy Now! spoke to demonstrators who demanded that U.S. unions apply political pressure for a ceasefire in Gaza and to stop their government’s arms trade with Israel. “Workers do have the power to shape the world,” said Palestinian researcher Riya Al’sanah, who was among thousands gathered at a May Day rally in Manhattan.
City University of New York Workers Announce Wildcat Sickout After NYPD Arrests Over 100 of Their Students and Colleagues
By Left Voice
May 2, 2024
Source: Left Voice
CUNY workers announced a wildcat sickout after NYPD raided City College’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment. It’s the first known job action in the PSC union’s 52-year history.
In the evening of Tuesday, April 30, hundreds of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers from precincts all over New York City assembled in Harlem to raid both Columbia University and the City College of New York. The university presidents had invited the police force onto campus to forcibly remove the Gaza Solidarity Encampments at each school and the students at Columbia occupying “Hind’s Hall,” normally known as Hamilton Hall but renamed by student activists after a 6-year-old girl in Gaza who was killed by Israel tanks while surrounded by her dead family members in their car.
The schools are approximately 20 blocks apart. After police finished their assault on Hind’s Hall, entering through an upstairs window with guns drawn before arresting the student activists, many of them moved uptown toward City College. Activists at both schools estimate at least 100 people were arrested from each one, including students and faculty.
City College is normally an open campus, one that requires City University of New York (CUNY) IDs to enter the buildings but not the grounds. A few days ago, the college set up temporary fencing around all of the entrances that had not already been locked, and last night, they began guarding the exit points, allowing people out but not in. Police violence and arrests occurred both inside and outside of campus.
Marc Kagan, an adjunct faculty member at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, described some of what happened outside the gates in an email sent Wednesday morning:
The police presence was overwhelming. A couple of hundred in riot gear massed on Amsterdam [Avenue] easily broke up perhaps twice as many demonstrators, just surging into the crowd and randomly pulling people out for arrest, then pushing the rest of the crowd this way and that at will. Dozens more were deployed on every side street and far more than that at the two ends of Convent [Avenue].
Monday evening, unionized CUNY workers, organized with the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY, AFT Local 2334), had an assembly to discuss the situation and vote on next steps. The most controversial proposal — which passed after much discussion — was to hold a sick-out on Wednesday, May 1, International Workers Day, if at least 250 members of the bargaining unit scheduled to work that day pledged to do so by 10pm on Tuesday.
In Kagan’s view, “The encampment-faculty/staff meeting the night before [the brutality] was, I think, a preliminary and nascent example of the type of real union/student relationships we would need to build to ever realize the prospect of a People’s CUNY. That is, one that is fully funded and substantially less hierarchical.”
Shortly after 10:00 PM, messages went out through email and on social media: the threshold had been reached, the pledge’s signatories had been verified as members of the bargaining unit, and the sickout was on.
In addition to being the will of the assembly, the action responds to the call from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions – Gaza for the workers of the world to mobilize on their behalf for May Day. As one chant heard at the CUNY encampment goes, “Gaza calls, CUNY answers!”
Under New York State’s Taylor Law, which governs labor relations for public employees in New York City and bans public sector strikes, a sick-out counts as an illegal job action. As far as the PSC members we spoke with know, this is the first job action in the PSC’s 52-year history.
One PSC member who preferred to remain anonymous, upon being released from 1 Police Plaza in the early hours of Wednesday morning, said, “I don’t even give a fuck about being arrested, I care about the first ever PSC job action and that it’s for Palestine!”
It remains to be seen whether the university will choose to pursue legal or disciplinary action against workers participating in the sickout. The PSC has already issued a statement disavowing the action and discouraging members from participating, but the comments on the Instagram version of the statement are almost unanimously negative, with one commenter remarking that “These are the most unanimous comments I have ever read. I hope the PSC is heeding this vote of no confidence in the leadership.” Even after the 10:00 PM deadline passed, more members continued to sign the pledge.
CUNY workers are furious and heartbroken, just as their colleagues across the country whose campus encampments have also faced police brutality in the last two weeks are furious and heartbroken. Many intend to mobilize for the May Day march for Palestine at 4:00 PM this afternoon in Foley Square, alongside other sectors of the working class of New York, including UAW members who work at Columbia University, Barnard College, New York University, and The New School.
As PSC members organizing for Palestine love to chant, “Arab, Jewish, Black, and white, workers of the world unite!”
CUNY workers announced a wildcat sickout after NYPD raided City College’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment. It’s the first known job action in the PSC union’s 52-year history.
In the evening of Tuesday, April 30, hundreds of New York Police Department (NYPD) officers from precincts all over New York City assembled in Harlem to raid both Columbia University and the City College of New York. The university presidents had invited the police force onto campus to forcibly remove the Gaza Solidarity Encampments at each school and the students at Columbia occupying “Hind’s Hall,” normally known as Hamilton Hall but renamed by student activists after a 6-year-old girl in Gaza who was killed by Israel tanks while surrounded by her dead family members in their car.
The schools are approximately 20 blocks apart. After police finished their assault on Hind’s Hall, entering through an upstairs window with guns drawn before arresting the student activists, many of them moved uptown toward City College. Activists at both schools estimate at least 100 people were arrested from each one, including students and faculty.
City College is normally an open campus, one that requires City University of New York (CUNY) IDs to enter the buildings but not the grounds. A few days ago, the college set up temporary fencing around all of the entrances that had not already been locked, and last night, they began guarding the exit points, allowing people out but not in. Police violence and arrests occurred both inside and outside of campus.
Marc Kagan, an adjunct faculty member at CUNY’s School of Labor and Urban Studies, described some of what happened outside the gates in an email sent Wednesday morning:
The police presence was overwhelming. A couple of hundred in riot gear massed on Amsterdam [Avenue] easily broke up perhaps twice as many demonstrators, just surging into the crowd and randomly pulling people out for arrest, then pushing the rest of the crowd this way and that at will. Dozens more were deployed on every side street and far more than that at the two ends of Convent [Avenue].
Monday evening, unionized CUNY workers, organized with the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY, AFT Local 2334), had an assembly to discuss the situation and vote on next steps. The most controversial proposal — which passed after much discussion — was to hold a sick-out on Wednesday, May 1, International Workers Day, if at least 250 members of the bargaining unit scheduled to work that day pledged to do so by 10pm on Tuesday.
In Kagan’s view, “The encampment-faculty/staff meeting the night before [the brutality] was, I think, a preliminary and nascent example of the type of real union/student relationships we would need to build to ever realize the prospect of a People’s CUNY. That is, one that is fully funded and substantially less hierarchical.”
Shortly after 10:00 PM, messages went out through email and on social media: the threshold had been reached, the pledge’s signatories had been verified as members of the bargaining unit, and the sickout was on.
In addition to being the will of the assembly, the action responds to the call from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions – Gaza for the workers of the world to mobilize on their behalf for May Day. As one chant heard at the CUNY encampment goes, “Gaza calls, CUNY answers!”
Under New York State’s Taylor Law, which governs labor relations for public employees in New York City and bans public sector strikes, a sick-out counts as an illegal job action. As far as the PSC members we spoke with know, this is the first job action in the PSC’s 52-year history.
One PSC member who preferred to remain anonymous, upon being released from 1 Police Plaza in the early hours of Wednesday morning, said, “I don’t even give a fuck about being arrested, I care about the first ever PSC job action and that it’s for Palestine!”
It remains to be seen whether the university will choose to pursue legal or disciplinary action against workers participating in the sickout. The PSC has already issued a statement disavowing the action and discouraging members from participating, but the comments on the Instagram version of the statement are almost unanimously negative, with one commenter remarking that “These are the most unanimous comments I have ever read. I hope the PSC is heeding this vote of no confidence in the leadership.” Even after the 10:00 PM deadline passed, more members continued to sign the pledge.
CUNY workers are furious and heartbroken, just as their colleagues across the country whose campus encampments have also faced police brutality in the last two weeks are furious and heartbroken. Many intend to mobilize for the May Day march for Palestine at 4:00 PM this afternoon in Foley Square, alongside other sectors of the working class of New York, including UAW members who work at Columbia University, Barnard College, New York University, and The New School.
As PSC members organizing for Palestine love to chant, “Arab, Jewish, Black, and white, workers of the world unite!”
Despite heavy repression, campus protests in solidarity with Palestine have been spreading like wildfire across the US. The support of organized labor can help the movement grow — and increase its leverage to achieve its demands.
May 3, 2024
Source: Jacobin
April 24, 2024 - Texas State Troopers are violently dispersing a peaceful Palestine solidarity protest on the campus grounds of University of Texas at Austin. | Image credit: @RyanChandlerTV
Since April 18, over one thousand students, faculty members, and community supporters have been arrested at college campus protests across the country. Despite fierce repression from university administrators and police, new Gaza solidarity encampments, set up by students protesting Israel’s genocide and demanding their schools divest, are popping up every day.
Students have been threatened with arrest, suspension, and even expulsion for their participation in campus protests calling on their universities to disclose their financial holdings and divest from all financial ties to Israel and weapons manufacturing. On April 30, police in riot gear swept student antiwar encampments at Columbia and City College of New York, arresting nearly three hundred protesters. Violent police attacks on peaceful protesters have gone viral on social media, including harrowing footage of blood being hosed off from the walls at Emerson College in Boston and police tasing a protester while he was pinned to the ground and handcuffed at Emory University in Atlanta.
Last night, a mob of pro-Israel counterprotesters at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) launched an attack on the student encampment, launching fireworks directly into the camp, attempting to tear down students’ barricades, and brutally beating students. Campus security and police officers arrived on the scene but refused to intervene for an hour and a half.
As the situation continues to escalate, the need for support from groups beyond the students is becoming increasingly clear. Organized labor, with its capacity to mobilize wider layers of working people and leverage to shut down universities or even broader sectors of the economy through collective action, can help the protest movement to achieve its demands.
April 24, 2024 - Texas State Troopers are violently dispersing a peaceful Palestine solidarity protest on the campus grounds of University of Texas at Austin. | Image credit: @RyanChandlerTV
Since April 18, over one thousand students, faculty members, and community supporters have been arrested at college campus protests across the country. Despite fierce repression from university administrators and police, new Gaza solidarity encampments, set up by students protesting Israel’s genocide and demanding their schools divest, are popping up every day.
Students have been threatened with arrest, suspension, and even expulsion for their participation in campus protests calling on their universities to disclose their financial holdings and divest from all financial ties to Israel and weapons manufacturing. On April 30, police in riot gear swept student antiwar encampments at Columbia and City College of New York, arresting nearly three hundred protesters. Violent police attacks on peaceful protesters have gone viral on social media, including harrowing footage of blood being hosed off from the walls at Emerson College in Boston and police tasing a protester while he was pinned to the ground and handcuffed at Emory University in Atlanta.
Last night, a mob of pro-Israel counterprotesters at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) launched an attack on the student encampment, launching fireworks directly into the camp, attempting to tear down students’ barricades, and brutally beating students. Campus security and police officers arrived on the scene but refused to intervene for an hour and a half.
As the situation continues to escalate, the need for support from groups beyond the students is becoming increasingly clear. Organized labor, with its capacity to mobilize wider layers of working people and leverage to shut down universities or even broader sectors of the economy through collective action, can help the protest movement to achieve its demands.
Union Solidarity With Palestine
Several international labor unions — including the United Auto Workers (UAW), the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE), and the American Postal Workers Union — have publicly called for a cease-fire, in addition to over two hundred local unions. Many have shown up at local rallies and protests, including a rally organized by UAW Region 9A that marched to support the student encampment at New York University on April 27.
These efforts show that more of the labor movement is recognizing the need for solidarity with Palestine. But unions can have their greatest impact in winning a cease-fire and student demands for university divestment when they use their power to strike and carry out other disruptive actions.
During the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (FSM) of the 1960s, organized labor played a crucial role in supporting the student strike on UC Berkeley’s campus. Joel Geier, a student activist in the International Socialists (IS) during the FSM, recalls:
The local labor movement, including the campus unions — the Building Trades, SEIU [Service Employees International Union], the ILWU [International Longshore and Warehouse Union], and the San Francisco Labor Council — supported the strike. A contribution to shutting down the campus came from an unexpected force: the conservative Teamsters. I led a group of FSMers to meet with Teamster union officials, who agreed with us that crossing our picket lines would be scabbing, and they would prevent all deliveries to the campus. Within an hour, no trucks bringing supplies or food entered the campus, helping to halt the normal functioning of the university. The solidarity of campus workers was outstanding, particularly the underground support from secretaries and clerks of the main university administrators, who acted as part of our intelligence network, providing us with the enemy’s thinking, plans, and memos.
Yet on many college campuses today, union groundskeepers have been tasked with the university’s dirty work of sweeping protest camps, throwing students’ posters and tents in the trash.
Student activists can take a page out of the FSM’s book in building relationships with local unions, especially those representing the groundskeepers involved in universities’ repression of encampments. Many college campuses have pro-labor student clubs that organize solidarity efforts with their local unions, and, increasingly, their own undergraduate student labor unions; these clubs and unions would be the ideal avenues for holding conversations with local unions about supporting the student activists. At the New School in New York City, for instance, student-workers are picketing to simultaneously demand union recognition from the university and to support the Gaza solidarity encampment at the school — a tactic that organizers say has helped stave off more aggressive tactics from police.
As many college students gear up for summer break and a likely demobilization of campus activism, student activists can think of using the summer to develop long-term relationships with local unions, supporting them in upcoming contract fights or labor disputes and in turn sharing why student activists will need their support in the coming fall.
Some union members whose locals or internationals have passed cease-fire resolutions are already starting to take organized action in support of the protests.
Organizers in Los Angeles launched a button campaign, “Button Up 4 Palestine,” on April 30 to show solidarity, while United Teachers Los Angeles members from the rank-and-file-led LA Educators for Justice in Palestine led teach-ins at the student encampment at UCLA. In New York City, bus drivers with Transport Workers Union Local 100 refused to drive city buses to transport arrested protesters from a Jewish Voice for Peace protest during Passover, and public defenders unionized with Association of Legal Aid Attorneys UAW Local 2325 have been providing legal services to arrested protesters. (Local 2325 is itself currently being subpoenaed by Congress for passing a cease-fire resolution last December.) And graduate workers at the University of Southern California organized with UAW Local 872 have filed unfair labor practice (ULP) charges against the university for the unlawful arrest of its members during a peaceful protest on campus.
The Power of the Strike
For most union workers, no strike–no lockout clauses in their contracts restrict them from going on strike over a ULP. But workers who are organizing a union for the first time, fighting for recognition, or working under an expired contract typically can throw up legal picket lines over ULPs. Most union contracts include language protecting workers from having to cross legal picket lines, something often referred to as “secondary boycotts.”
A strategically placed picket line can trigger secondary boycotts that have the power to bring the economy to a screeching halt. On college campuses, this may look like picketing in front of the loading docks of cafeterias, biosciences buildings, and engineering buildings, all of which tend to rely on time-sensitive deliveries. This was a tactic employed by the UAW strike of forty-eight thousand academic workers in the University of California system during their six-week strike in 2022.
Secondary boycotts during an ILWU recognition fight for a small unit of intermodal yard workers at the Port of Tacoma shut down the entire port for a day, costing the company an estimated $5–6 million. The result? The company caved, granting voluntary recognition for the union that eventually won those workers double their pay, up to $80,000 annually from $40,000. The lesson here is that solidarity across bargaining units, job classifications, and unions gets the goods.
Picket lines don’t have to be legal of course. The ongoing Massachusetts public school teachers’ strike wave and the 2018 wildcat teachers’ strikes in West Virginia and Arizona show that sufficiently organized workers can carry out winning strikes even when they are against the law. As West Virginia teachers’ striker Emily Comer said, “It doesn’t matter if an action is illegal if you have enough people doing it.”
Actions don’t have to be as drastic as secondary boycotts or illegal strikes. Both are highly risky, especially in controversial political moments like this one; most workplaces still aren’t at the levels of organization required to pull them off effectively, and governments sometimes respond to illegal strikes with severe repression. But every action counts, like button campaigns or other structure tests that can help union activists build long-term organization of members. Heated moments require flexible tactics, but organizers should be cautious of taking shortcuts.
Workers are behind the operations that keep these universities afloat, from the faculty and graduate students that teach the classes and grade the papers, to the custodial and cafeteria staff that keep the campus clean and fed. If workers choose to stand in solidarity with student protesters rather than the bosses — the universities — they may be able to use their leverage to help students win their demands.
For the students’ movement for Palestine to develop beyond the campus (and to survive the demobilization of summer break), it will have to make inroads into other spheres of society where ordinary people have power. The power of the working class lies in its numbers and its ability to stop the flow of capital through the simple — but by no means easy — act of withholding its labor.
The current student protest wave is a reminder that the shop floor isn’t the only important site of struggles for social justice, as the bravery and courage of student activists facing immense repression has breathed new life into the movement for Palestinian liberation. But to build an effective mass movement for Palestine, we’ll need strategic leverage. We can start with the unions.
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