SPRING 2025
ISSUE 02

₁ An earlier tent protest was erected at Stanford University in October 2023, lasting 120 days until it was broken up in February the following year.

₂ For evidence of this, see the injunction filing against this strike, wherein representatives of the UC describe the “irreparable harm” we caused the university over the course of our six-week strike at the end of 2022. Especially fascinating is how often research strikes in particular were mentioned as the sources of this “harm.” This makes for worthwhile reading, even if the testimony is framed explicitly in order to achieve an injunction and must be read cautiously. Comrades in the UK have reached similar conclusions about strike strategy among higher-education workers.

₃ Our comrades at the University of Michigan, Dartmouth College, and Boston University have continued to advance this long-haul strike strategy in higher education in their strikes, most recently in Boston University’s seven-month strike that won a 70% raise for the lowest-paid graduate worker.

₄ The symbiosis can take multiple forms: individual Principal Investigators applying for and accepting military research funding (UC received $333 million in 2023 alone), or larger-scale and more formalized channels of collaboration such as university-affiliated research centers, including the Institute for Collaborative Biotechnologies at UC Santa Barbara.

₅ The Department of Defense speaks openly about why so-called basic research is a funding priority. There is even a dedicated term – “future warfighters” – to describe the military assets of tomorrow, springing from the dual-use technologies developed in partnership with university academics.

₆ The first example already exists and is in use. The Active Denial System is a millimeter-wave ranged weapon that causes heating and intolerable pain in its target and has been proposed for use in both active combat and for controlling protesters.

₇ We’ve described the process of organizing in more detail elsewhere and have tried to articulate the lessons we’ve learned through waging these campaigns in the hope it will be useful in other workplaces. Workers at other universities have also taken up this organizing, including in the Stanford physics department. A nascent network of antiwar workers across the country has begun long-term organizing in research laboratories under the name Researchers Against War (RAW).

₈ The following night, the police themselves raided the encampment, finally dismantling the camp where LA’s finest Zionists had fallen short.

₉ In the United States, and especially in California, this is a settled way to strike during a contract despite no-strikes clauses, or at least it was before this strike. Below we discuss the legal dramas and implications resulting from this strike.

₁₀ The invested endowments were $164 billion at the time, swollen to $180 billion at the time of writing.

₁₁ For the autoworkers, this meant the strategic calling out of specific plants with little advance knowledge, causing unpredictable disruption to the companies, relieving pressure on the strike fund, and permitting negotiators to punish or reward each company’s latest showing at the bargaining table. No less important, the beginning of a strike saw workers at some plants take up initiative and self-organize even when not yet called to strike. As in auto, our “Stand Up” strike meant that campuses would be called out as the union leadership saw fit.

₁₂ Such public messaging was backed up with insistent email threats to fill in timesheets – introduced after the 2022 strike and roundly opposed by workers at UCSC, if not elsewhere in UC – as a means of identifying, intimidating, and punishing strikers.

₁₃ See the Day 9 daily sheet here. See also the “supplemental evidence” from UCSC EVC Lori Kletzer describing the effects of the strike on our campus. In these hearings, the employer makes the case that the strike is devastating, and the union presents it as toothless. Her descriptions are, nonetheless, quite satisfying.

₁₄ More recently, on September 19, 2024, the Council of UC Faculty Associations filed an unfair labor practice complaint with California’s PERB. The 581 document details UC’s suppression of pro-Palestinian speech and protest. Such a step undoubtedly represents a milestone, but our recent experience tells us that it will need to have the force of concerted labor action behind it to shift administrative policy. Who could any longer doubt the willingness of university administrations to break laws, flout precedents, and discipline and repress students and workers when Palestine is in the mix?

₁₅ Few, it seemed, cared to distinguish between the actions of the encampment and the actions of the strike, meaning that striking workers were (also) blamed for the disruptions to residents.

₁₆ This, presumably, owes to lessons learned during intensive activism, on and off campus, during the George Floyd rebellion and after more than half a year protesting the genocide in Palestine.

₁₇  Non-compliance with the TRO could have entailed daily fines for the local, potential contempt of court charges for union officials and strikers, and mass discipline from the university.

₁₈  In this way, we conceived WTR as a workaround of the TRO and a way to preserve the effects of our strike to that point rather than as a strategy to pursue independently. At the time, we benefited from the “Inside Strategies” chapter of the first Labor Notes A Troublemaker’s Handbook, but we quickly noticed that, owing to our labor process in the university, WTR strategies are far less likely to cause disruption absent a strike. We also sought guidance from a Massachusetts teacher, who shared her union’s experience with defying legal prohibitions on striking. For a copy of the Handbook, see here.

₁₉ The lecturer in Arts, who had been the lynchpin of most of the withheld grades in his department, held the line through the TRO as well.

₂₀ The retaliation has at times bordered on the ludicrous, such as an illegal (and ultimately abandoned) attempt to refuse to rehire grad workers to complete grading work later for the course they had previously been teaching. It appears that administrators chafed at the idea of paying formerly striking workers despite the obvious convenience of hiring someone already intimately familiar with the course.

₂₁ MIT has restricted access to its internal database of funding sources in response to similar agitation.

₂₂ Since 2012, the unionization of US graduate workers has increased by 133%, with estimates from January 2024 suggesting that more than a third of all such workers are now in unions, contradicting longer and wider trends towards declining union density in the country. This has translated into a dramatic uptick in strike activity, with one report finding that there were five times as many strikes in 2022 and 2023 as there were between 2013–17, a trend that only accelerated in 2024.

₂₃ This was floated during the strike at Boston University as a means of ensuring continuity of operations. It has recently appeared more systematically in the California State University system.

₂₄ For a closer account of cross-unit organizing in the 2024 UC strike for Palestine, see here.

₂₅ Undergraduate students themselves are also increasingly unionized, sometimes in separate units or locals and elsewhere in the same one as graduate workers. These developments hold potential for contributing new dimensions to future fights, which will require the self-organization of all university workers in addition to their support for students.

₂₆ For reflections on the importance of organizing at the department or lab level in the 2022 UC strike, see here.

On the morning of Monday, May 20, 2024, academic workers at the University of California, Santa Cruz (UAW Local 4811), assembled at the main entrance of the campus and raised a picket. Official signs were emblazoned “UAW on Strike: Unfair Labor Practice,” while homemade banners, more numerous, proclaimed messages like “UC Labor for Palestine,” “Strike for Palestine,” and “ULP: UAW Loves Palestine.” These workers joined the wave of Palestine solidarity activism – opposing Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza – that had surged across US universities that spring. Through the withdrawal of their labor, they also contributed a new element to a movement characterized most resonantly by the undergraduate student encampments that had begun roughly one month earlier. At noon on May 20, UC Santa Cruz’s own student encampment surprised striking workers by relocating from a plaza on the hill down to the picket line. As students moved to take over the street and assemble the camp, they raised a banner across the entrance to the campus. It read, “There are no universities left in Gaza.”

Much has been written about the encampment movement and the campus struggle for divestment from weapons manufacturing and Israeli apartheid. Comparatively little writing has appeared on the only university workers who, in the electrified context of the student movement, were able to initiate a strike with nearly identical demands. This piece offers an account of the strike from UC Santa Cruz, the UC campus where the strike started and went longest. We believe that our organizing campaigns in the aftermath of October 7, 2023 – focused on discrete connections between our workplace and the occupation of Palestine – were critical to our capacity to take this action. As the student movement surged, we sought to build up from department-level discussions by mapping areas of strength and ascertaining the possibilities of collective action. This furnished a path forward that had no equivalent among workers in the UC or perhaps elsewhere in the sector.

The organizing trajectory on our campus after October 7th – responding to the call for solidarity from the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) – consciously built upon a foundation of department- and lab-level organization, tested in two recent strikes (and independently of Palestine solidarity organizing). Our experience suggests that such cultures of bottom-up deliberation among groups of workers positioned to take action together and the accumulated experience of past collective labor actions remain the indispensable bedrock for broader political aspirations and possibilities in the labor movement.

For those who wish to bring the worker movement into the Palestine solidarity movement and vice versa, we have learned that discrete but creative shop-floor fights that highlight connections between work and Palestine are the surest path forwards. In our case, the ultimate impetus for our strike action came from the outside – specifically, from the student movement, in a time-honored dynamic. Our firm foundation of small-scale, rank-and-file activity and discussion enabled us to channel the surge of energy from the encampment movement into strike action for Palestine.

In April 2024, students at Columbia University in New York pitched the inaugural tents in what was to be a tidal wave of Gaza Solidarity Encampments that swept across US universities.¹ The “Student Intifada” was the culmination of a new surge of energy in the student movement in the aftermath of October 7, 2023. On our campus, much as elsewhere, membership in Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) swelled. New campus groups also formed, including Jews Against White Supremacy (JAWS) and a chapter of Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP). In addition to hosting teach-ins and demonstrations to show solidarity with Palestine, these groups demanded that the university disclose the details of its investments and cut ties with institutions supporting or profiting from the occupation of Palestine.

Student and faculty action throughout fall 2023 tended to take the form of single days of action. Often originating in Palestine, calls for one-day “general strikes” or “days of action/rage” were taken up by US groups such as Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) and the National SJP. On our campus, academic workers were called upon to cancel class on particular days, while everyone was encouraged to engage in consumer boycotts, skip class, join rallies, or participate in direct actions like road blockades. Many graduate-student workers, looking for ways to act upon these calls, expressed confusion about the haphazardness of these calls for general strikes and direct actions, knowing from experience that successful strikes require significant preparation among a critical mass of the workforce. They also questioned the provenance of such calls and what it meant to heed them, often weighing the risks of individualized work stoppage and the possibility of being the sole striker in their department or lab.

In the years leading up to October 2023, grad workers at UCSC had built a culture of department organizing, collectively making decisions about strategy while metabolizing lessons from previous rounds of struggle in the university. While days of action were a cogent response to the urgency of genocide and many individual UCSC workers participated, workers on our campus have come to understand that our power lies in the cumulative leverage we wield through a prolonged withdrawal of labor, especially across major deadlines and events on the academic calendar.² During strikes in 2019 and 2022, we saw firsthand the UC’s indifference to single-day campus closures (especially in the era of Zoom) or missed classroom instruction time. We struck for five weeks in 2022 before the UC put up any decent offers for us to consider, and only then in the face of thousands of unsubmitted final grades and untold thousands of dollars of lost or compromised research productivity.³ Amid this wider surge of organizing and activism in October, our initial task was to develop a labor strategy that would leverage our power as academic workers, ultimately to disrupt the financial workings of the university.

Researchers Against War

Although they were not anticipating a strike, early graduate-student worker organizing in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) departments laid the foundation for the strike’s eventual demands and provided a model for what department-level organizing against a genocide could look like. Not only were two core demands of our strike – research funding transparency and transitional funding for research workers who wished to opt out of projects funded by the Department of Defense (DoD) – formulated through this department-based organizing, but the process of taking departmental-level action to win these demands later produced unparalleled strike participation among STEM workers in those departments.

STEM graduate-student workers are most proximate to the military-industrial industrial complex. However, it required a gradual process of inquiry and discussion for STEM workers to identify and map the connections between their particular research projects and military funders and collectively commit to divest their labor from the war machine. This process (unwittingly) laid the necessary groundwork for workers to strike for Palestine when the moment came.

Our collective inquiry revealed the quantity of defense-industry dollars that flow through our laboratories. The entanglement between the military-industrial complex and universities is deep but often deliberately opaque – even within campus communities.⁴ In 2023 alone, the DoD spent $9 billion on funding research within US universities; UC Santa Cruz, a smaller UC campus, received $12.6 million in military-funded research grants that year. While federal grants are technically public information, “available” does not mean “accessible.” At the UC, you could walk past a military research facility on your way to work and not even know it.

The funding of seemingly benign basic research entrenches militarism in the university workplace. Military-funded projects at our campus – research on marine mammal behavior, computer vision algorithms, and earth mineral optical properties – all have weapons applications, such as streamlining warship design and refining surveillance and missile targeting systems.⁵ Digging even briefly into the DoD-funded research at UC reveals terrifying examples, not only of basic research with clearly imaginable military application, but also weapons development: models of the response of human skin burned by a millimeter-wavelength ray at UCSC, warship computing systems at UC Santa Barbara, traffic control algorithms for aircraft carriers, and wearable biometric sensors for soldiers in combat at UC San Diego.⁶ This is normalized and rationalized among many STEM workers. 

On October 16, 2023, the PGFTU released an urgent call to stop arming Israel – including the specific request to disrupt military funding and military research. In response, UCSC workers began identifying and contacting research workers in DoD-funded labs, but this largely failed to take hold. Upon reflection, the failure can be attributed to the “outside” approach we employed, where groups of workers from the humanities and social sciences cold-called workers in DoD labs and asked them to call a meeting with their labmates to talk about Palestine, decipher their funding sources, and map the connections between the two. Yet, workers were hesitant to call meetings, and not because of a lack of solidarity with Palestine. Many workers expressed desperate relief that they weren’t the only ones troubled by these military connections. However, an external organizer unfamiliar with their particular workplace could neither understand their circumstances nor provide the collective protection that their coworkers could.

Department-level organizing started to gain traction when conversations were among immediate coworkers from the same lab, department, or research area – people who had shared stakes. After a series of small group discussions, lab meetings, and department townhalls, workers in the UCSC astronomy and physics departments wrote a letter, signed by each of the grad workers individually and presented collectively, to turn down DoD funding and cut all ties between their research and the US military.⁷ At the same time, several other STEM departments began to take up the question of what a labor intervention for Palestine would look like within their department. Weeks of conversation also generated two demands these workers had determined were crucial for actualizing their goal of demilitarizing their research: full transparency of research funding sources in the department and transitional funding to provide financial support for workers who needed time to find a new lab if their lab was participating in DoD research.

Even though this organizing was never consciously imagined as strike preparation, we see in retrospect how it cultivated collective commitment among ideologically mixed departments, articulated specific and urgent connections between the workplace and the broader Palestine solidarity movement, and specified concrete and winnable demands, all of which made taking strike action feel more like an available next step rather than an impossible leap once the encampment movement erupted.

May Day Walkout

Many unions – including our local – had passed Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) and ceasefire resolutions. But on April 11, 2024, PGFTU called directly for worker action on International Workers’ Day (May 1) and Nakba Day (May 15). Columbia University’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment went up six days later, reconfiguring the sense of possibility across US universities. In an April campus membership meeting, graduate workers at UCSC discussed how we, as academic workers, could likewise escalate our tactics and take collective action in solidarity with the call from Palestine.

Seventy workers present at our union’s monthly membership meeting resolved to take this question back to our departments and reconvene on April 30 at a general assembly to determine next steps. Across those five days, workers in 23 departments held meetings with their coworkers to assess the appetite for unsanctioned strike action. The goal was for stewards to leave their department meetings with a sober assessment of possibilities for honoring the PGFTU call for strike action on May Day and the forms such action could take.

When we reconvened as a campus five days later, a clear consensus arose from department report-backs: workers wanted to take campus labor action in solidarity with Palestine. While keenly aware that our potential action could not end the genocide, workers spoke passionately about the bravery and brutalization of the encampments around the country, the importance of solidarity with fellow trade unionists in Palestine, and the scale of death and destruction of the genocide in Gaza. We also discussed the potential and perceived risks of labor action and our own leverage as academic workers.

We ultimately decided to walk off the job on May Day in solidarity with the PGFTU call and the broader student movement, but with an understanding that a one-day strike was unlikely to extract concessions from our employer. However, as we considered the possibility of longer strike action, it became abundantly clear that we could not walk off the job for any extended period without formulating concrete and winnable demands and assessing our power. We formed a working group out of different departments and divisions to develop a set of demands and agreed to reconvene in one week to vote on a strike platform and any future work stoppage.

But events overtook us all. During the May Day walkout, we learned that Zionist vigilantes had attacked the UC Los Angeles encampment the previous night, brutalizing workers and students while UCLA’s massive police force stood permissively aside.⁸ At the same time, we heard rumors that our union leadership was considering filing unfair labor practice (ULP) charges over the raid – a pretense for a sanctioned strike.⁹ It was also on May Day that UCSC’s own encampment first went up.

On May 3, our demands working group presented a baseline platform for any further work stoppage on our campus. These demands responded (1) to the broader movement on US campuses for divestment and disclosure; (2) to the attacks against pro-Palestine demonstrators, for amnesty in UC; and (3) to the lab- and department-level organizing on our campus since October, for the provision of central transitional funding for workers who wished to move out of positions and labs funded by the DoD.¹⁰ The platform was accepted at UCSC, subject to further additions.

Two days later, the statewide union leadership adopted our campus’s demands and confirmed that it would hold a strike authorization vote over the ULPs at UCLA. Representatives from all ten campuses passed a resolution initiating a strike authorization vote among membership and, pending its success, a “Stand Up” strike (explicitly referencing the strike strategy pioneered in the UAW auto sector the previous fall).¹¹ The three-day strike vote closed on May 15 with 70 percent in favor – sixteen thousand workers at the University of California voted to strike for Palestine. Less than a week later, workers at UCSC would be the first to “Stand Up.”

Immediately, the mood on the picket line was more tense than previous strikes. This was first and foremost due to intense intimidation from the UC administration and to the fact that we were, thus far, striking alone as a campus. While the legal basis of our strike (an unfair labor practice) was identical to the contract strike in 2022, the university’s response was supercharged: their permissive messaging leading up to the 2022 strike about respecting our legal rights was replaced by warnings that we were engaging in an “illegal strike” that “sets a dangerous and far-reaching precedent.” On the second day of the strike, UC filed its first injunction request at the Public Employment Relations Board (PERB).¹² Locally, the UCSC administration temporarily closed the campus to all instruction.

In addition to our employer’s intimidation tactics, the strike at Santa Cruz also had to overcome suspicions among workers towards statewide union strategy. At the conclusion of our 2022 strike, 80 percent of UCSC workers voted to reject the tentative agreement and continue the strike, but they were outvoted by the other UC campuses. Now, workers on our campus were called to “Stand Up” first and would therefore strike longest, exposing us to the possibility of intense repression. Some rightly wondered whether we would assume the burden of the fight without any ability to shape its outcome. 

The sense of uncertainty and doubt was deepened by an understandable confusion, not only among strikers but also their faculty and supervisors, about why police violence at UCLA should result in a strike at UCSC alone. This uncertainty was compounded by the impending injunction decision, which complicated easy claims of legal protection for strikers. Facing these concerns effectively required intensive meeting and contingency planning among workers. No one had answers about what would happen on the other side of UC’s legal maneuvering, nor how far union leadership would take the fight. But through these hard conversations and explicit acknowledgements of doubt, we built a resolve to move through the uncertainty together.

While working through these anxieties, our spirits were buoyed by PERB’s rejection of UC’s injunction filing on the Thursday of the strike’s first week. Not only did this save us from facing the difficult decision of defying an injunction, for which we had not prepared in advance (unlike comrades elsewhere who expect injunctions as a matter of course), but it also ensured that other campuses would join us on the picket the next Monday. On Friday, the end of the strike’s first week, workers could feel that they had made a genuine contribution to this sequence of struggle, perceiving that the strike at UCSC had accelerated and deepened the appetite and organization for strike action on other campuses. 

Week Two: Police Sweep the UCSC Encampment

The addition of UCLA and UC Davis to the strike relaxed the spotlight on UCSC, which allowed strikers to pivot to the next major strategic task: assessing and maximizing our leverage. PERB’s refusal to enjoin the strike also delivered an order to enter mediation talks with the union’s representatives, which we hoped would shine a brighter light on worker demands.¹³ But the administration demonstrated with a second injunction filing that their sole priority was strikebreaking. This injunction also failed before the week was out, and new campuses were called to join the strike the following week. 

While these legal machinations played out behind closed doors, UCSC workers assessed our leverage by mapping out the number of grades that we stood to withhold by the end of the term. Grade mapping was not a simple process of tabulation. It required intensive meetings of stewards and department Organizing Committees (OCs), continuous outreach to striking workers to troubleshoot specific situations, and preparing collective guidelines for communicating with coworkers, supervisors, and students. As we learned in the 2022 UC strike, grade mapping galvanized strike organizing by providing an occasion for small-group deliberation around a clearly defined short-term goal of inflicting a measurable amount of damage on the boss. Within several days, we secured 12,500 grades.

Grade withholding necessarily demands a level of coordination and solidarity with other layers of the instructional workforce, including graders, adjunct teaching assistants, and the faculty or lecturer responsible for delivering the course. The segmentation of research and instructional labor (mirrored in the separate unions for grads, faculty, and lecturers) can be a boon to the employer if not confronted in advance. As we saw in Michigan and elsewhere, administrators can enlist these other employees to pick up struck work, submit falsified grades, or change syllabi to nullify the role of teaching assistants. We therefore set out to organize across divisions and, in doing so, ensured that a large number of grades would not be submitted behind our backs.

Throughout this effort, the campus lecturers and faculty unions exceeded their own high bar from 2022 and advanced an independent organizational culture, in some cases even reaching collective decisions at the department level.¹⁴ Their efforts were bolstered by the experience of the 2022 strike, which left behind an archive of documents, policies, and organizational channels that could be quickly reactivated and repurposed to meet the needs of the present struggle. This time, lecturer and faculty organizers formed channels for us to communicate the names and courses of their coworkers who, according to the grads working for them, were unsteady on grade withholding. In this way, our mapping efforts fed into extensive outreach by other layers of the workforce, countering the misinformation and intimidation of administrators precisely where and when it mattered. Faculty members or lecturers with existing relationships to specific colleagues, or even the chairs of departments in some instances, often have a greater chance of reaching and moving their coworkers than a request from teaching assistants (TAs). In one department in the Arts division, a single lecturer was responsible for nearly half of all grades due at the end of the quarter and was feeling duly concerned about his visibility and job insecurity, even telling students that they would receive grades on time. While his TAs were unable to move him on their own, a combination of calls from fellow lecturers, one of whom was a friend, and sympathetic faculty in the department saw him hold the line.

The strides made towards coordinated action among these layers of the university workforce were not matched by the relations between the encampment and the picket, located either side of the main entrance to campus. Most tensions and disagreements between strikers and campers arose from a basic difference in the strategic possibilities of our respective movements. In meetings with undergraduate students in the encampment, campers made repeated calls for “escalation” by striking workers in the form of arrestable actions, which would compromise the capacity to carry the work stoppage through the end of the academic year and undermine our cumulative power.

A major strength of the student movement lay in the capacity for a core of ideologically committed organizers to create a sense of chaos for the university, all while attracting major attention. An encampment comprised of even one percent of the student body (at UCSC, roughly two hundred out of twenty thousand students), could elicit significant administrative headache, event cancellations, campus facility closures, repression, and splashy headlines. UC spent $29 million on private security and external police in spring 2024, with $3 million at UCSC alone. Student organizers, acting as students, were in a position to initiate actions at a scale that we, as workers, were not. Strikers, by contrast, had to address a wider group than those belonging to affinity or activist organizations composed of members predisposed to heed a call for action on Palestine. This demanded slow and deliberate work where little ideological unity could be assumed in advance.

The first weeks of the encampment saw the campus administration respond cautiously, making several unsubstantiated threats of imminent raids but largely tolerating the camp and nominally participating in weeks of fruitless closed-door negotiations with its members. On the first day of our strike, members of the encampment made the independent decision to relocate from a central plaza on campus to a space adjacent to the picket line at the base of campus. Strategically, this made the camp more visible and better positioned to shut down campus, which only has two entrances and exits. However, the new location also brought unique challenges. The camp was in its fourth week and straining under the rigors of round-the-clock private security monitoring, the heat of late spring, and a location a mile away from public bathrooms, electricity, and shelter.

When neither negotiations nor the new location elicited concessions from the university, camp members escalated: as strikers led a bachata class at the picket, campers assembled a blockade across the main entrance to campus with wooden pallets, broken glass and gravel, and strikers’ ULP signs. The new location of the camp and its blockade provoked a sharper response from the administration, which reinstated its remote policy from the first week of the strike and waited four days as real, imagined, and utterly fabricated frustrations rose on campus, particularly among its sizable resident population.¹⁵

In the late hours of Thursday night, May 30, UCSC authorized a police force composed of units from as far as Ventura (nearly three hundred miles south of Santa Cruz) to initiate a 14-hour raid, culminating in several injuries and the arrests of 122 students and workers, including faculty. Collective mobilization for jail support by the broader community was comprehensive and much improved from the last time UCSC students and workers had been beaten and arrested (during our wildcat strike four years earlier).¹⁶ Supporters of the encampment returned to the base Friday afternoon as the final arrestees were processed and released, taking the intersection for several hours in one last act of defiance. This was, however, the end of the encampment at UCSC for spring 2024.

As it concerned the strike, the encampment raid presented an obvious moment to recommit, supplying additional urgency for the strike’s pre-existing demand to drop all charges against UC students and workers for their pro-Palestine activism.

Week Three: The Court Bails out the Boss

The strike’s third week began with an “amnesty” rally calling for the dropping of conduct and criminal charges against encampment members and their supporters. Arrested students took to the microphone, some from across the street due to an administrative ban from campus. By Wednesday of this week, three new campuses (San Diego, Santa Barbara, and Irvine) had joined the strike. Meanwhile, fresh from their successive defeats at PERB, UC attempted another legal maneuver to stop the strike. Circumventing PERB altogether, they filed for a temporary restraining order (TRO) from the California Superior Court in Orange County, a jurisdiction carefully selected for seating the most conservative bench of judges in the state. So offensive was this move that PERB sent a lawyer to Orange County to allege gross violations of state law. Ultimately, Orange County judge (the dishonorable) Randall J. Sherman had a simpler view of things. Reviewing the motions from UC and UAW for approximately 60 minutes, he decided not to entertain PERB’s motion at that time and declared himself predisposed to grant the TRO.

The terms of Judge Sherman’s decision were baldly cynical and explicitly disallowed all strike action by order of the court. The “temporary” aspect of the order meant that a proper hearing would occur later, which the judge delayed for the maximum allowable period. This news reached us on the picket line on Friday afternoon, the last day of our strike’s third week and the final day of instruction, right before final grades were tallied. It was a galling blow to receive on the precipice of the major points of leverage in our strike. The TRO tilted the contested legal status of the strike decidedly in UC’s favor. Moreover, the TRO was tantamount to an injunction because it would have been absurd to return to work, submit the spring grades, and then resume striking at the start of summer. Abiding by its terms effectively meant forfeiting the strike. In this way, UC administrators sought to make common cause with one reactionary branch of the state (the Orange County Superior Court) in order to supersede the “legitimate” authorities of another (PERB). As it happened, both UC and UAW decided there was no point proceeding with the second hearing.

We ultimately found ourselves unprepared to defy the restraining order. While many strikers had assessed the risks of illegal strike activity when contemplating a wildcat action back in April, these conversations had ceased with the ULP charges and statewide strike authorization vote. This shifted the orientation of many workers, who came to rely on an understanding that strike action would thereafter be “legally protected.” Now, with the TRO, an apparently safe job action became fraught with additional legal and employment risks.¹⁷ But this reversal of legal standing was not only bad luck: it revealed a weakness of the organizing, which became clear in hindsight. On both our campus and the statewide level, organizers had framed strike discussions according to the prevailing legal conditions of the moment, working as best we could with information available at the time. In the context of switching legal realities within the two weeks between our May 1 walkout and the culmination of the strike authorization vote on May 15, we ultimately failed to prepare fully for our strike “protections” to vanish at the whim of the state. While such legal rug-pulling is always a possibility, it appears especially likely in a strike that targets third-rail issues such as Palestine.

To assess whether defying the TRO was possible, we held dozens of emergency department meetings and a three-hour campus-wide townhall to discuss the implications of the TRO. As these meetings were unfolding on the campus level, representatives of our statewide union local voted overwhelmingly to comply with the TRO. Any continued strike action on our campus would therefore be without union sanction: a wildcat strike. This further eroded support for defying the TRO at UCSC.

The incommensurability between the specific, and now threatened, leverage of our strike and the horrible scale of genocide opened a path for appeals to moral urgency and complicated strategic deliberation. While no one believed that our strike could stop the bloodshed or alter the course of US policy (at least absent an unforeseen eruption of workers throughout the country), the context of genocide led to pressures and expectations from some workers that we should all escalate and embrace risk, abstracted from any concrete assessment of those actions on the ground in Santa Cruz, California.

It is not necessarily that appeals to the unfolding horrors were irrelevant to the decision at hand, but this did not dissolve the concrete reality and considerations we faced. Those who expressed caution or fear, or even those conveying sober assessments based on perceptions of their coworkers, were met with intense criticism, which was highly destabilizing and corrosive to the formation of a collective strategy. This was, for all of us, the first experience of a strike with such manifestly political demands, and the implications of this development require further reflection. Counterintuitively, the expanded terrain of struggle in this strike seemed to narrow or even diminish the modes of comprehending and intervening within it.

Ultimately, workers were frustrated and disappointed, but there was not a broad willingness to defy the court and risk criminal charges or employer retaliation. Instead, workers at UCSC pivoted to a work-to-rule (WTR) strategy: we would seek to parlay the leverage of three weeks of missing work into missing final grades through “malicious compliance” with the terms of our contract, refusing to work beyond our workloads or our appointment dates and thus relaying some of the disruption of the strike onto administrators.¹⁸

However, the varied landscape of outstanding work that remained and differing levels of supervisor solidarity made it difficult to carry out the WTR strategy. Researchers were faced with questions about what working slowly actually meant and the impact that it could have. Some workers simply accepted the TRO as a return to work, seeing no meaningful difference between working to rule and working for real. Now without the legal protections of an active strike, faculty and lecturers needed to insist upon their own right to refuse administrative demands to complete grading work. We again worked with our lecturer and faculty comrades to hold as many meetings and conversations about the new terrain as possible. The much-changed circumstances naturally eroded a sizable amount of the leverage we had built, but enough faculty and lecturers refused to snitch or pick up work that more than five thousand grades were still missing when the deadline came and went.¹⁹ 

We knew when we committed to WTR that it was an unlikely avenue to win our demands. The UCSC administration ultimately refused our offer to withdraw the charges against arrested students and workers in exchange for the missing grades. It was, however, a way for workers to end the strike collectively and on our terms, rather than reaching isolated decisions in response to this difficult turn.

In response to the strike, and perhaps our show of post-strike strength at the campus level, UC has unleashed a wave of retaliation. At UCSC, this has included widespread employee discipline letters, pay docking, a hiring blacklist of former strikers, and attempts to break our campus’s ongoing boycott of the timesheet system.²⁰ UC attempted to fire six workers statewide for allegedly defying the TRO – four were from UCSC, including a union officer. Only this officer has since been formally fired. As of this writing, the campaign for reinstatement is ongoing while her financial and academic future remains in limbo.

Even as retaliation rained down, the dividends of our strike slowly became clear. Organizers at UC Berkeley noticed that $161 million of UC’s direct holdings – including $6 million of investments in weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and beneficiaries of Israel’s occupation that our strike targeted – disappeared from their financial filings. Soon after, a limited transitional funding program was rolled out at UCLA. In a different kind of response to our demand for funding transparency, UC deleted its public-facing database of research funding.²¹

Overall, this strike represents a shift in the campus administration’s posture towards our organizing aimed at reversing the sequence of worker militancy of the past half decade. In the period after the wildcat of 2019–20, campus administration sought to avoid a repeat of the dramatic escalation of the wildcat, often adopting superficially conciliatory or appeasing postures. The recent strike indicates a return to their harder line – and what we can expect in the future. It is unclear whether the fact that retaliation has landed so disproportionately on our small campus amid a statewide labor action reflects decisions made at the level of campus administrators or above. But what seems certain is that university administrators across the country are defaulting to aggressive discipline against worker organizing, a mirror of their increasingly authoritarian repression of student activism.

The US higher-education labor movement has experienced an “upsurge” of militant rank-and-file organizing since 2012.²² The legal maneuvering and post-strike backlash we are experiencing fits into a broader pattern of attempts to reverse this trend. In direct response to university strikes, bosses everywhere are attempting to claw back control by restructuring the workforce – restricting the enrollment of graduate students, ratcheting up class sizes, and removing course offerings where union members are the principal instructors, to say nothing of the sinister prospect of AI integration.²³ That many managerial “innovations” entail greater surveillance of workers and students is also no coincidence given the existing repression of workers across the United States for simple expressions of sympathy for the Palestinian cause, endorsed by all levels of the US government. The “political” nature of demands by students and workers around Palestine last spring has undoubtedly accelerated this trajectory. Such interventions by university administrators directly contribute to ascendant right-wing efforts to degrade higher education and research, and intellectual life more generally.

As we confront this landscape, our experience demonstrates that workers must prepare to strike without legal protections, which might evaporate at any moment. We leaned heavily on the premise of legal protection to navigate the transition from wildcat action to a union-sanctioned ten-campus strike. In the process, we failed to prepare for the emotional and material realities of an unprotected strike, which undoubtedly contributed to our inability to defy the TRO. Our comrades at the University of Michigan, who prepared in advance to defy an injunction in their 2023 strike, had it right in their solidarity letter to us: “From West Virginia to Newton to the University of Michigan, education workers in the U.S. have shown that we can strike in violation of the law and win.”

The extent to which university workers can coordinate their strategies and fight back together across job titles and union affiliations will also be decisive in what they can win.²⁴ At UCSC, each of our three strikes over the last five years cultivated successively deeper organizing by grads, lecturers, and faculty and forged new connections with non-academic unions on our campus. In a similar vein, that a small group of Columbia University students were able to initiate a nationwide movement that was ultimately translated into a strike by UC workers demonstrates the possibilities of student and worker organizing. While explicit coordination was not possible at UCSC in spring 2024, students and workers on campus could imagine purposefully articulating a shared strategy that takes the material differences in their leverage and preconditions for action as cause for greater strength in the future.²⁵ While we are not yet at the necessary level of cross-unit and worker–student solidarity and organization, we believe this presents the only avenue to counter the forces arrayed against us.

The militancy necessary for successful academic worker struggles begins by developing collective habits of engagement and self-organization at the level of the department and lab.²⁶ Coworkers in departments or labs form organic groups with shared day-to-day conditions, supervisors, metrics for risk assessment, and often social circles. Through multiple sequences of labor action, workers on our campus have developed a learned reflex to turn to each other to make decisions, articulate demands, quantify participation, and assess direct risks of retaliation or discipline.

On our campus, the customary leadership title of “steward” refers not to an entrenched role or shop-floor authority but to any worker who steps up to organize in their department. Over time, networks of trust within departments build a higher bar for what workers feel they deserve, an appetite for winning, a culture of collective deliberation and decision-making, and an analysis of how strike leverage emanates from the direct conditions of work. In the context of grad workers, with a relatively high but gradual rate of turnover, the strongest department networks are anchored by combinations of more and less experienced workers in small, informal organizing committees.

In the 2024 strike for Palestine, department organizing networks, built through previous sequences of struggle and maintained through lower intensity organizing efforts in between, enabled workers to decide to take labor action on an extremely short timeframe. This infrastructure sustained a lengthy strike with rapidly developing events and high-stakes decisions from deliberations about a May 1 walkout, to the mapping of final grading leverage, and then the question of how to respond to the TRO. The most adamant strikers were consistently located in departments with an established commitment to make decisions and take action as small cohesive collectives. “Militant” workers in this strike were defined less by radical opinions they might profess as individuals than by their confidence in taking risky action because they were moving with their closest coworkers.

The experiences of STEM departments reaffirm the importance of worker self-organization and building collectivity at department and lab levels through issue-based campaigns. At UCSC, months before the strike, astronomy and physics workers collectively formulated demands for research funding transparency and transitional funding and pursued department-level strategies to actualize them. Astronomy and physics workers identified specific connections between their workplace and the genocide where their labor was a powerful intervention, formulated concrete demands on the basis of these connections, and brought each other through anxieties about taking action at work over Palestine. This groundwork translated directly into strike-organizing tasks like the coordination of picket shifts, the relaying of the latest information, the mapping of research and teaching disruption, and check-ins with each worker in the department. This activity laid the groundwork for widespread participation in the strike among astronomy and physics workers – who were the only workers on strike truly as departments – in contrast to other STEM departments, which had relatively lower participation.

In other STEM departments with more hostile work environments, workers sought ways to adapt the department organizing models to their own contexts. Inspired by astronomy and physics, a network of workers across several departments in the physical, biological, and interdisciplinary social sciences, dubbed the “Earth, Wind, and Fire Coalition,” emerged organically before the strike to draft their own version of a labor refusal letter. Social isolation and entrenched supervisor hostility (including from a former soldier in the Israeli army) meant that striking workers were a minority in their respective departments. When the strike arrived, the inter-department coalition proved crucial for these pockets of minority strikers, replacing isolation and despair with support and connection, even as their departments largely sat out the strike.

These experiences of department organizing show the ripple effect of resonant issue campaigns: two departments made a novel intervention, not only preparing them to strike, but also encouraging wider layers of workers to replicate their efforts in the strike’s aftermath. We count this outcome, which may appear negligible on the surface, among the more important developments of this strike. It charts a direction for advancing anti-militarism and Palestine solidarity organizing in the workplace, thereby deepening our preparation for the next round of struggle. Such preparation is especially imperative in the face of naked administrative repression and wider political attacks on higher education. It appears almost certain that fights in US universities will continue to unfold, in no small part, through and over the question of Palestine.