Shut It Down – Picket Lines Mean Don’t Cross!

All Out to Win the UC-Wide
Student Workers Strike!

LOS ANGELES, November 19 – As it is about to enter its second week, the strike at the University of California is shaping up as a test of strength between determined strikers and high-handed bosses, with implications for labor and campus struggles across the country.

The streets echoed with the chant of “Shut it down!” as thousands of striking student workers at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) marched on Monday as part of the launch of the strike here and at the nine other UC campuses across the state.¹ With 48,000 on strike from UC Davis in the north down to UC San Diego in the south of the state, this is the biggest strike this year in the United States – and the largest higher education strike in U.S. history. The latest in a series of academic workers’ strikes (including last year’s victory at Columbia University), the battle at UC comes amidst growing discontent in key sectors of U.S. labor, together with organizing efforts at Amazon and the prospect of a nationwide UPS Teamster strike next year. Key to the potential for a major scale labor upsurge is the fight for a class-struggle program and leadership.

The University of California strikers – including teaching assistants, tutors, graduate and postdoctoral researchers, and others, organized by the United Auto Workers (UAW) in four bargaining units – are fighting against poverty wages and enormous rent burdens to live in the expensive cities where they work. According to union surveys, 92% of graduate workers are “rent-burdened,” meaning that they pay over 30% of their income for rent. Given the meagerness of those incomes, the strikers’ demands include a big raise in order just to make ends meet (to a base salary of $54,000 for grad student workers – many now make less than half that), $2,000/month reimbursement for childcare and other key demands. The response of the UC administration has been – and continues to be – to try to stonewall them, in the hopes of wearing them down. By the time the strike broke out four days ago, the union members were fighting mad, as shown in the 98% vote to authorize the strike, as noted in the UCLA Internationalist Club leaflet reprinted below.

Building up to the strike, Internationalist activists organized and agitated to help win undergrad support for and participation in the impending struggle. In addition to tabling and leafleting, this included the UCLA Internationalist Club’s forum on lessons of last year’s Columbia strike (addressed via Zoom by one of that strike’s central leaders), a film showing of With Babies and Banners, the classic documentary on the role of the militant Women’s Emergency Brigade in the UAW’s sit-down strikes in the ’30s, and other activities. Given that for decades, the U.S. labor bureaucracy’s work for the Democratic Party has included undermining the very meaning of picket lines – don’t cross – a basic part of our message has been the need for mass pickets to completely shut down all work and classes – all classes, including online – on the struck campuses.

Pickets and marches of hundreds of strikers have taken up the chant, “Picket lines mean don’t cross!” Some of this has been coming together in efforts like blocking some on-campus transport, stopping trucks, etc. And on a large ungated campus like UCLA, shutting down key buildings with mass pickets could play a significant role in bringing the arrogant UC bosses to their knees. In an academic strike, in addition to being a basic expression of working-class solidarity, bringing in other sectors of labor is particularly essential, as this is a matter of power – the power to shut it all down.

Efforts by union militants and Internationalist Club supporters to appeal for labor solidarity among other workers at UCLA have made important headway. One ironworker told us: “If you set up picket lines, we will honor them. We don’t work behind picket lines.” And they stood by their word. As soon as UAW picket lines were set up outside a key construction site, workers in a range of unions stopped work in solidarity with the strike – including Ironworkers Local 433, Plumbers and Pipefitters Locals 78 and 761, Sheet Metal Workers Local 105, Laborers Local 300. With strikers cheering and welcoming them onto the picket lines, the chant broke out: “No work today at UCLA!” Halting the timelines of multimillion-dollar construction projects is sure to hit the UC administration where it hurts. This needs to spread UC-wide.

At UC Berkeley, workers in a number of unions have also respected the picket lines and shut down construction work on campus in solidarity with the strike. Teamster delivery drivers statewide have gotten authorization from their union to refuse to make any deliveries to struck UC campuses. One Teamster driver announced to a picket line at UC Berkeley that he was refusing to deliver over 100 packages, adding “We’re in the same fight.” Meanwhile, unions representing other sectors of the UC workforce must respect the picket lines and stop work now. Divide and conquer is the bosses’ strategy – workers must stand together to win.

An indication of the widespread support for the strike is that even an editorial in the UC Berkeley student paper, the Daily Californian (11 November), stated: “First, and most importantly, we are urging students to not cross picket lines to attend class.” Yes – and any and all classes must be cancelled completely as part of the fight to turn “shut it down” from a chant into a reality on each campus and throughout the UC system. No more palaver about “soft” (porous) picket lines – each and every picket line means don’t cross. It’s the battle line of the class war. Many UC strikers are inspired by the example of Columbia – in the ten-week strike there, the struggle to turn “Shut It Down” from a chant into a reality was decisive.²

Meanwhile, this week the UC administration claimed it could not conduct negotiations with the striking workers on the ridiculous excuse that it did not have the “space.” In response, striking workers found some empty tables, set them up in large open spaces on the campuses and chanted “We got space, show your face!”

Reprinted below is a leaflet put out by the UCLA Internationalist Club on the eve of the strike to help mobilize support and advance the type of militant, class-struggle program needed to bring it to victory.

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UCLA Internationalist Club Statement of Class-Struggle Solidarity

Victory to the UC-Wide Student
Workers Strike – All Out to Win!

We say: “No Work, No Class, Shut It Down!” – The UCLA Internationalist Club is helping mobilize students and workers in support of the UC-wide strike starting on November 14 called by academic student workers organized in the UAW. Rank-and-file motivation to fight back flows from the desperate situation of student workers and other campus workers who are essential to making the university run, but receive only poverty pay.

The week before last, with almost 37,000 UC academic student employees statewide voting, 98% voted in favor of striking in what was the largest and most decisive strike vote of academic workers in U.S. history. Amid the backdrop of runaway inflation and skyrocketing rent, UC teaching assistants, postdocs, and student researchers are striking for a cost-of-living adjustment which would include an initial wage increase to reduce the rent burden faced by grad students to an average of less than one-third of income spent on rent, as opposed to the current average of two-thirds UC-wide and three-quarters (!) in Los Angeles.

Academic workers organized in UAW do most of the teaching and research work across the UC system, but the most common salary they receive is less than 3% of the salary of the UC president ($23,247 vs. $890,000). To put this into perspective, the government considers low income in Los Angeles to be $66,000, while UC grad workers are typically only paid close to one-third of that amount. Meanwhile, the UC administration has the nerve to claim it can’t pay up while it sits on a $19 billion endowment and grew its assets by $38 billion in just the first half of 2021.

To defeat the anti-union administration and its ruling-class godfathers, it is not enough to be right and have justice on your side – it’s a question of power. On strike means shut it down. All classes should be stopped, and students brought out en masse to the pickets and rallies. Moreover, as shown in one strike after another by grad students, TAs, adjuncts and others across the country, for university strikes to win, all sectors of the campus workforce need to unite in genuine solidarity – one out, all out. Picket lines mean don’t cross!

The Student Workers of Columbia won after waging the longest higher education strike in over a decade, and one of the largest recent strikes in the U.S. From November 2021 to January 2022, they held out on picket lines and escalated the struggle, successfully winning their first contract, which was the first anywhere in the U.S. to win recognition of union representation for all undergrad teaching and course assistants, together with grad student workers. They won significant improvements in pay, health and childcare, measures against discrimination and harassment and other demands.

The Internationalist Clubs at the City University of New York were very involved in mobilizing support for the Columbia strike and in helping raise the class- struggle consciousness needed to win it. It was on the picket lines that these gains were won, and the fight to put “picket lines mean don’t cross” into practice played a crucial role. Sell-out union bureaucrats often call for “informational” picket lines – a contradiction in terms which teaches people that it’s supposedly “OK” to cross picket lines. But as hundreds of Columbia strikers linked hands in large pickets, blocking entrances and chanting “picket lines mean don’t cross,” the point was highlighted that once a strike has been collectively decided on, everyone must respect the lines.

To counter the administration’s divide-and- conquer strategy of dividing university employees into various separate unions with different contract expiration dates, we call for uniting everyone who works on campus into a single union of all university employees. This would clearly not include administrators, campus cops and other enforcers for the employer. Strikers must demand all cops and security guards off campus! They are the fist of capitalist “law and order” used to try to break strikes. We in the UCLA Internationalist Club further call to abolish the Board of Regents and fight for student/teacher/worker control of the university.

Since the ruling class can go quite a while without college papers being graded (whereas a transport strike, for example, can shut things down tight in a day), bringing in active support from other sectors – and large numbers of students – is doubly important.

Reliance on capitalist politicians – instead of the militant mass mobilization of workers power – has brought defeat to all too many strikes and labor struggles. As revolutionary Marxists, we call to break from the Democrats and all capitalist parties and politicians, and to build a class-struggle workers party to fight for a workers government. Then, like the rest of the wealth coined from the labor of the workers and oppressed, the universities will be put at the service of the needs of all, as part of a socialist revolution here and around the world.

All out to win – Picket lines mean don’t cross!