Category: Israel, Free Speech, Current Events, Higher Ed;
Reading Time: ~4 minutes
Labor unions are known for flexing their political muscle. The recently averted port worker strike that threatened to paralyze the eastern seaboard, and rustbelt divisions between pro-Trump workers and Democrat-backing union leaders highlight the political influence of organized labor. One labor sector that seldom receives public attention is graduate students and academic workers. Despite this lack of public awareness, graduate student unions are a hidden force behind the scenes of campus anti-Israel protests and the ivory tower politics of college administrators.
The United Auto Workers (UAW) is a household name due to its traditional affiliation with machinists and heavy industries. However, as one of the largest unions in the country, UAW includes state and local government employees as well as college workers among its more than 400,000 members. On the West Coast, UAW Chapter 2865 is made up of over 36,000 graduate student teachers, researchers, teaching assistants, and tutors at the University of California (UC). Let that sink in. Almost 10 percent of the UAW’s membership is graduate students working in universities in one single state. Less than one week after the October 7 Hamas attacks on civilians in southern Israel, UAW 2865 called for the “dismantling of the occupation and apartheid system in Israel-Palestine” while lauding its own organizational history of standing up for the “oppressed and working classes.” By the end of October, it was calling for #CeasefireNOW. At UCLA, where anti-Semitic protests turned into violent confrontations with the Los Angeles Police Department, UAW Local 4811 announced a strike in response to the university’s crackdown. The strike itself went far beyond UCLA, and included UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC Santa Barbara, and UC San Diego.
The labor movement’s antipathy towards Israel is historically surprising. Jews are indigenous to Israel and hold millennia-old ties to the land; however, modern Zionism’s settlers in the 20th century enjoyed significant levels of support from the labor movement. Modern Jewish settlers returning to Israel in the context of the Holocaust had their own labor organization, Histadrut, which received millions of dollars from the 1920s to the 1940s from labor groups in the United States. American labor leaders, such as American Federation of Labor president William Green and Congress of Industrial Organizations leader Philip Murray advocated for a Jewish state alongside International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union president David Dubinsky. Given the secular socialist leanings of many Zionist organizations and early Israeli governments, this affinity was not surprising. The infusion of identity politics into unions as early as the 1970s began to change this orientation, as Arab autoworkers within the UAW in Detroit protested their own union’s holding of $785,000 in Israeli bonds. The Arab Workers Caucus, and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers began mobilizing across the union for divestment from Israel.
The UAW’s student reach is far from confined to California, as it includes Harvard’s Graduate Student Union-UAW Local 5118, the University of Washington’s UW-UAW Local 4121, researchers at Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine, New York University, Columbia, The New School, Northeastern University, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Unions are not only prevalent at many American colleges and universities but serve as a cover for the anti-Semitic mobs that have openly plagued campuses over the past year.
In May, Unite All Workers for Democracy, the “rank-and-file caucus in the United Auto Workers,” stated its “solidarity with the student movement for Palestinian liberation.”
In August at Columbia University, the Student Workers of Columbia-UAW Local 2710 issued a statement to the college’s administration demanding it drop disciplinary actions against anti-Semitic student protestors while condemning “Israeli apartheid.”
The union’s national leadership is not immune from the campus antics. In response to campus protests and sporadic crackdowns by administrators and police, Shawn Fain, UAW International’s president, stated that “we call on the powers that be to release the students and employees who have been arrested” and to “stop supporting this war.” In July, the UAW headed a group of seven different unions that included heavyweights such as the National Education Association (NEA), the Service Employees International Union, and even flight attendants and postal workers to call for an embargo of American weapons to Israel.
Both the UAW and NEA have endorsed Kamala Harris for president. America’s education system is heavily unionized, and those unions are actively working to cut off support for the only Jewish country in the world. For parents out there worried about the cost of college tuition, rest assured that some of your money is going toward political activism and anti-Semitism that stretches from the classroom to the ballot box.
Until next week.
Ian Oxnevad
Senior Fellow for Foreign Affairs and Security Studies
National Association of Scholars
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