The Los Angeles teachers union voted to support a congressional effort to block $20 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel, providing an important example for the labor movement.
Emma Lee
November 4, 2024
LEFT VOICE USA
United Teachers Los Angeles (UTLA) and Service Workers International Union (SEIU) Local 99 held a joint rally outside Los Angeles City Hall, Los Angeles, Calif., on Wednesday, March 15, 2023. Photo by Caylo Seals, The Corsair.
In late October, the LA teachers union voted to support a congressional effort to block $20 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel. The genocide in Gaza, carried out by Israel and bankrolled by the United States and other imperialist powers, has lasted over a year and has expanded into Lebanon last month. The United States has provided more than 70 percent of the funding for Israel’s military operations since last October. Meanwhile, according to multiple polls, a majority in the U.S. believe that the U.S. should stop sending weapons to Israel.
“The arms named have been used in violations of U.S. and international law, indiscriminately killing large numbers of civilians, many of them children,” stated union materials prepared for a board of directors meeting, according to The LA Times. The motion for the resolution states: “It is our duty as educators to speak up for the protection of education and all young people and their families, especially when it is our tax dollars fueling this destruction and our government providing the arms. Furthermore, this directly affects our members; many UTLA rank and file have loved ones who have lost their lives or livelihoods due to this conflict.”
The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) called for California Senators Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler to pledge their support for a joint resolution which would stop specific arms sales to Israel. The “Joint Resolutions of Disapproval” is expected to be taken up when the Senate reconvenes in November. The joint resolution is sponsored by Senators Bernie Sanders, Peter Welch, Jeff Merkley, and Brian Schatz. The UTLA did not release the vote tally, but it passed easily among those members of the union’s House of Representatives who attended the virtual meeting, according to sources of the LA Times.
A sector of LA teachers have been organizing for Palestine for years. In 2021, during the Israeli onslaught of Sheikh Jarrah, the UTLA chapter chairs passed a resolution calling for an end of U.S. aid to Israel, though the resolution was not passed along to the UTLA leadership or voted on by the rest of the membership. In March of this year, the UTLA joined the hundreds of unions in the U.S., including seven major unions such as the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Auto Workers (UAW) and United Electrical Workers (UE), in calling for a ceasefire.
Zionist Opposition
Unsurprisingly, the resolution was immediately met with Zionist opposition. The Los Angeles Jewish Antisemitism Roundtable, which is a coalition of a number of Zionist groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), issued a public letter in opposition to the teachers union. In the letter, the group expressed their “profound concern regarding ULTA’s recent decision to adopt a resolution taking a one-sided position on the Israel-Hamas conflict.” The letter went on to claim that blocking military aid, “dismisses the complexity of this geopolitical crisis, ignoring Hamas’s well-documented and globally condemned attacks on innocent civilians.”
The group went on to not only dismiss the role of labor in taking a stand against the genocide, but also continue the tired tactic of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism: “Passing this resolution has no impact on the situation in the Middle East but serves to foster an environment of exclusion within LAUSD, further alienating Jewish students, teachers, and allies who feel increasingly unsafe.”
This conflation is taken straight from the playbook of the McCarthyist congressional hearings of higher education officials, and continues the pattern of heightened repression against the pro-Palestine movement by the state since the genocide began last October.
Zionist groups have organized petitions against the teachers union, saying that “UTLA needs to focus on local issues that directly impact our educational system.” The implication here is that the genocide does not directly impact education in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As rank-and-file UTLA members wrote in their letter in response to the Antisemitism Roundtable, “As educators in a nation where the military funding is ten times that of federal education spending, we are directly impacted by the scarcity resulting from American involvement in foreign wars.” Rather than funding crucial public services like education and healthcare for children in the U.S., enormous sums of money directed toward slaughtering Palestinian civilians, including tens of thousands of children. Those who remain have lost one or both parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, teachers, and friends, and bear indescribable psychological trauma. Educators are not only nearsightedly concerned with the physically and mental wellbeing of the specific students sitting in our classrooms; we are deeply aware that the wellbeing of all children of the world is intertwined.
Moreover, by conflating justified outrage over a genocide with discrimination against Jewish community members, the Antisemitism Roundtable is not only suppressing freedom of speech, it is also casting the Jewish community as a monolith and ignoring the diversity of opinion that exists among Jewish people. As the rank-and-file response states, “The resolution in question was authored by a coalition of UTLA members, including Jewish and Middle Eastern educators.” Though the state of Israel uses Jewish identity as a cover for its genocidal, settler-colonial project, Zionism, based on displacement, apartheid, and occupation, does not represent the Jewish people, neither in the U.S. nor the world at large.
The Labor Movement Needs to Go Further
The pro-Palestine movement has energized rank-and-file workers to challenge the Zionist common sense of our union leaderships and demand an end to our unions’ complicity in the genocide. Yet the brutal events of the past year have proved to us that ceasefire resolutions are far from sufficient — and that rank-and-file workers are willing to fight for more.
The action by LA teachers is significant in that it not only calls for a ceasefire, a demand which has met its limits, but goes further by challenging U.S. military funding, reflecting the movement’s extended demands beyond a ceasefire and towards an arms embargo. But why should we limit ourselves to essential but limited measures like this Sanders-sponsored effort that blocks only “certain defense articles and services,” as the resolution states?
Members of UTLA should organize resolutions that go even further — to demand that their unions divest from Israeli companies and to end all U.S. aid to Israel. The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), for example, recently passed a resolution in support of a ceasefire and arms embargo, divestment of pensions from Israel, protection of workers engaging in political speech, and endorsement of only candidates who adhere to their principles. Organizing local chapters can serve to deepen the conversation about how to organize against U.S. imperialism within our unions and the wider labor movement.
There is nothing more urgent as workers in the United States than the task of organizing ourselves independently from the capitalist parties that support this genocide. Our union leaderships spend enormous resources organizing to campaign for Democrats — who continue to fund Israel’s military, as well as the police that crush our protests. The UTLA, for example, endorsed the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket for president, along with other Democrats at all levels. The Chicago Teachers Union, which called for a ceasefire in January, uncritically supports Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who comes from their own ranks but now serves as Chicago’s top cop. Ahead of the DNC, Johnson organized a “labor truce,” in which union leaderships agreed to not strike during the DNC, crushing in advance the potential of what could have been a powerful show of solidarity among the working class for Palestine, and against the Democratic Party’s support for genocide.
When union bureaucracies undemocratically endorse capitalist politicians and organize dues-funded top-down election campaigns, they actively ignore the massive potential in their memberships for campaigns that resist the anti-worker, anti-immigrant, imperialist policies of both capitalist parties. Moreover, they undermine workers’ rights to democratically discuss and decide our unions’ priorities, orientations, and actions. With the upcoming presidential election results, we have to organize now to resist the continued U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians, which will be supported by whichever capitalist presidential nominee who enters the White House in January.
Our Democrat-allied union and social movement bureaucracies go to great lengths to defend “lesser-evil” politics by decrying the impending “fascism” that will sweep the U.S. if Trump takes office. Of course, workers and oppressed groups every have right to despise the repulsive agendas of the Right. Yet these selective campaigns serve to distract workers from the attacks of the Democratic Party, which have occurred during the length of the Biden term, and will surely continue if not deepen under an apparently even more right-wing Harris presidency.
As rank-and-file workers, organizing independently means we have to fight for greater democracy within our unions. Fighting against capitalist exploitation — whether for bread-and-butter issues or against oppression — is inherently political, and therefore our unions are and should be political spaces. But our union leaderships are linked to both parties of capitalism — historically concentrated among the Democrats, but in the case of the Teamsters and other unions, have been turning toward the Republicans in a wave of “dealignment”.
Los Angeles, among other California cities, have provided a powerful example of labor action from just this year. Back in April during the wave of Gaza solidarity student encampments that swept the country, a Zionist mob physically attacked the UCLA encampment with fireworks, pepper spray, bats, and knives while the police stood by. In response, over 1,000 people mobilized at UCLA to defend the encampment and defend students against the Zionist attacks. Members of the labor movement in particular showed up and called for solidarity. How did workers respond? UAW 4811 — representing the UCLA graduate workers — released a statement calling for a strike authorization vote of the local to defend the encampment. Hundreds stayed and forced both the Zionists and the LAPD to retreat from the encampment, and the University of California workers eventually went on strike to defend their students. University of California workers have demonstrated how the labor movement can respond to attacks upon our democratic rights to speech and protest. We should take inspiration from this example in the struggles to come.
Why is the working class so strategically important in this question? Educators in the United States, you might say, have little direct impact on arms sales to Israel. Of course, not every worker is as directly tied to the production and distribution of arms as dockworkers, for example. But we know that our labor — as teachers, healthcare workers, logistics workers, and beyond — makes the world go around. We have the power to demand an end to military support for Israel, withholding our labor until our demands are met. That is why it is so crucial to strive for greater union democracy and fight back against every anti-worker law that tries to defang the labor movement, such as the Taylor Law here in NeYork that makes public sector strikes illegal. The example of the dockworkers in Greece who blocked ammunition to Israel, teachers in Los Angeles, NYSNA healthcare workers, and all those who are fighting in their unions and universities to oppose the U.S.-backed genocide, should serve as an inspiration. Alone, they may appear small, but together provide invaluable examples to workers around the world. Our class has the power to stop the genocide — and we need to do everything in our power to use it.
Emma Lee
Emma is a special education teacher in New York City.
In late October, the LA teachers union voted to support a congressional effort to block $20 billion in U.S. military aid to Israel. The genocide in Gaza, carried out by Israel and bankrolled by the United States and other imperialist powers, has lasted over a year and has expanded into Lebanon last month. The United States has provided more than 70 percent of the funding for Israel’s military operations since last October. Meanwhile, according to multiple polls, a majority in the U.S. believe that the U.S. should stop sending weapons to Israel.
“The arms named have been used in violations of U.S. and international law, indiscriminately killing large numbers of civilians, many of them children,” stated union materials prepared for a board of directors meeting, according to The LA Times. The motion for the resolution states: “It is our duty as educators to speak up for the protection of education and all young people and their families, especially when it is our tax dollars fueling this destruction and our government providing the arms. Furthermore, this directly affects our members; many UTLA rank and file have loved ones who have lost their lives or livelihoods due to this conflict.”
The United Teachers of Los Angeles (UTLA) called for California Senators Alex Padilla and Laphonza Butler to pledge their support for a joint resolution which would stop specific arms sales to Israel. The “Joint Resolutions of Disapproval” is expected to be taken up when the Senate reconvenes in November. The joint resolution is sponsored by Senators Bernie Sanders, Peter Welch, Jeff Merkley, and Brian Schatz. The UTLA did not release the vote tally, but it passed easily among those members of the union’s House of Representatives who attended the virtual meeting, according to sources of the LA Times.
A sector of LA teachers have been organizing for Palestine for years. In 2021, during the Israeli onslaught of Sheikh Jarrah, the UTLA chapter chairs passed a resolution calling for an end of U.S. aid to Israel, though the resolution was not passed along to the UTLA leadership or voted on by the rest of the membership. In March of this year, the UTLA joined the hundreds of unions in the U.S., including seven major unions such as the Association of Flight Attendants (AFA), Service Employees International Union (SEIU), United Auto Workers (UAW) and United Electrical Workers (UE), in calling for a ceasefire.
Zionist Opposition
Unsurprisingly, the resolution was immediately met with Zionist opposition. The Los Angeles Jewish Antisemitism Roundtable, which is a coalition of a number of Zionist groups, including the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), issued a public letter in opposition to the teachers union. In the letter, the group expressed their “profound concern regarding ULTA’s recent decision to adopt a resolution taking a one-sided position on the Israel-Hamas conflict.” The letter went on to claim that blocking military aid, “dismisses the complexity of this geopolitical crisis, ignoring Hamas’s well-documented and globally condemned attacks on innocent civilians.”
The group went on to not only dismiss the role of labor in taking a stand against the genocide, but also continue the tired tactic of conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism: “Passing this resolution has no impact on the situation in the Middle East but serves to foster an environment of exclusion within LAUSD, further alienating Jewish students, teachers, and allies who feel increasingly unsafe.”
This conflation is taken straight from the playbook of the McCarthyist congressional hearings of higher education officials, and continues the pattern of heightened repression against the pro-Palestine movement by the state since the genocide began last October.
Zionist groups have organized petitions against the teachers union, saying that “UTLA needs to focus on local issues that directly impact our educational system.” The implication here is that the genocide does not directly impact education in the United States. Nothing could be further from the truth.
As rank-and-file UTLA members wrote in their letter in response to the Antisemitism Roundtable, “As educators in a nation where the military funding is ten times that of federal education spending, we are directly impacted by the scarcity resulting from American involvement in foreign wars.” Rather than funding crucial public services like education and healthcare for children in the U.S., enormous sums of money directed toward slaughtering Palestinian civilians, including tens of thousands of children. Those who remain have lost one or both parents, grandparents, siblings, cousins, teachers, and friends, and bear indescribable psychological trauma. Educators are not only nearsightedly concerned with the physically and mental wellbeing of the specific students sitting in our classrooms; we are deeply aware that the wellbeing of all children of the world is intertwined.
Moreover, by conflating justified outrage over a genocide with discrimination against Jewish community members, the Antisemitism Roundtable is not only suppressing freedom of speech, it is also casting the Jewish community as a monolith and ignoring the diversity of opinion that exists among Jewish people. As the rank-and-file response states, “The resolution in question was authored by a coalition of UTLA members, including Jewish and Middle Eastern educators.” Though the state of Israel uses Jewish identity as a cover for its genocidal, settler-colonial project, Zionism, based on displacement, apartheid, and occupation, does not represent the Jewish people, neither in the U.S. nor the world at large.
The Labor Movement Needs to Go Further
The pro-Palestine movement has energized rank-and-file workers to challenge the Zionist common sense of our union leaderships and demand an end to our unions’ complicity in the genocide. Yet the brutal events of the past year have proved to us that ceasefire resolutions are far from sufficient — and that rank-and-file workers are willing to fight for more.
The action by LA teachers is significant in that it not only calls for a ceasefire, a demand which has met its limits, but goes further by challenging U.S. military funding, reflecting the movement’s extended demands beyond a ceasefire and towards an arms embargo. But why should we limit ourselves to essential but limited measures like this Sanders-sponsored effort that blocks only “certain defense articles and services,” as the resolution states?
Members of UTLA should organize resolutions that go even further — to demand that their unions divest from Israeli companies and to end all U.S. aid to Israel. The New York State Nurses Association (NYSNA), for example, recently passed a resolution in support of a ceasefire and arms embargo, divestment of pensions from Israel, protection of workers engaging in political speech, and endorsement of only candidates who adhere to their principles. Organizing local chapters can serve to deepen the conversation about how to organize against U.S. imperialism within our unions and the wider labor movement.
There is nothing more urgent as workers in the United States than the task of organizing ourselves independently from the capitalist parties that support this genocide. Our union leaderships spend enormous resources organizing to campaign for Democrats — who continue to fund Israel’s military, as well as the police that crush our protests. The UTLA, for example, endorsed the Kamala Harris and Tim Walz ticket for president, along with other Democrats at all levels. The Chicago Teachers Union, which called for a ceasefire in January, uncritically supports Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson, who comes from their own ranks but now serves as Chicago’s top cop. Ahead of the DNC, Johnson organized a “labor truce,” in which union leaderships agreed to not strike during the DNC, crushing in advance the potential of what could have been a powerful show of solidarity among the working class for Palestine, and against the Democratic Party’s support for genocide.
When union bureaucracies undemocratically endorse capitalist politicians and organize dues-funded top-down election campaigns, they actively ignore the massive potential in their memberships for campaigns that resist the anti-worker, anti-immigrant, imperialist policies of both capitalist parties. Moreover, they undermine workers’ rights to democratically discuss and decide our unions’ priorities, orientations, and actions. With the upcoming presidential election results, we have to organize now to resist the continued U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians, which will be supported by whichever capitalist presidential nominee who enters the White House in January.
Our Democrat-allied union and social movement bureaucracies go to great lengths to defend “lesser-evil” politics by decrying the impending “fascism” that will sweep the U.S. if Trump takes office. Of course, workers and oppressed groups every have right to despise the repulsive agendas of the Right. Yet these selective campaigns serve to distract workers from the attacks of the Democratic Party, which have occurred during the length of the Biden term, and will surely continue if not deepen under an apparently even more right-wing Harris presidency.
As rank-and-file workers, organizing independently means we have to fight for greater democracy within our unions. Fighting against capitalist exploitation — whether for bread-and-butter issues or against oppression — is inherently political, and therefore our unions are and should be political spaces. But our union leaderships are linked to both parties of capitalism — historically concentrated among the Democrats, but in the case of the Teamsters and other unions, have been turning toward the Republicans in a wave of “dealignment”.
Los Angeles, among other California cities, have provided a powerful example of labor action from just this year. Back in April during the wave of Gaza solidarity student encampments that swept the country, a Zionist mob physically attacked the UCLA encampment with fireworks, pepper spray, bats, and knives while the police stood by. In response, over 1,000 people mobilized at UCLA to defend the encampment and defend students against the Zionist attacks. Members of the labor movement in particular showed up and called for solidarity. How did workers respond? UAW 4811 — representing the UCLA graduate workers — released a statement calling for a strike authorization vote of the local to defend the encampment. Hundreds stayed and forced both the Zionists and the LAPD to retreat from the encampment, and the University of California workers eventually went on strike to defend their students. University of California workers have demonstrated how the labor movement can respond to attacks upon our democratic rights to speech and protest. We should take inspiration from this example in the struggles to come.
Why is the working class so strategically important in this question? Educators in the United States, you might say, have little direct impact on arms sales to Israel. Of course, not every worker is as directly tied to the production and distribution of arms as dockworkers, for example. But we know that our labor — as teachers, healthcare workers, logistics workers, and beyond — makes the world go around. We have the power to demand an end to military support for Israel, withholding our labor until our demands are met. That is why it is so crucial to strive for greater union democracy and fight back against every anti-worker law that tries to defang the labor movement, such as the Taylor Law here in NeYork that makes public sector strikes illegal. The example of the dockworkers in Greece who blocked ammunition to Israel, teachers in Los Angeles, NYSNA healthcare workers, and all those who are fighting in their unions and universities to oppose the U.S.-backed genocide, should serve as an inspiration. Alone, they may appear small, but together provide invaluable examples to workers around the world. Our class has the power to stop the genocide — and we need to do everything in our power to use it.
Emma Lee
Emma is a special education teacher in New York City.
No comments:
Post a Comment