Editor’s note: The following is excerpted from a speech given recently by Isabel, a graduate student researcher at the University of California Santa Cruz. She is a member of UAW 4811, which as of this writing is currently on strike in California. There were 48,000 academic workers across the UC system on strike as of May 25 over labor practices. Union members say their free speech rights were violated and their work environment became unsafe when UC system leaders called on police to remove pro-Palestinian encampments on several campuses. Workers at UC Los Angeles and UC Davis joined the strike May 28. Isabel spoke May 25 in Santa Cruz at Soupstock 2024, a celebration of the 44th anniversary of Food Not Bombs.
In this current moment where we have had 76 years of occupation in Palestine and more than 200 days of the most recent branch of the genocide, Palestinians have been calling for solidarity from workers around the world since the beginning, since 76 years ago. In this most recent moment, it was our students, not workers who actually rose to that call. As I speak right now, there are nearly 200 Palestine solidarity encampments that have sprung up at campuses across the globe, including at UC Santa Cruz in our own town.
And the story of how workers, my colleagues, have stepped up to join the current moment starts with these student encampments. On May 1st, the UCLA Palestine solidarity encampment was attacked by a mob of Zionist counter protestors. Those students and workers in the encampment fought for hours against counter protestors armed with bear spray, with sticks, trying their hardest to break up the camp and physically hurt the campers. The UC refused to protect these workers and students, refused to call police to prevent these counter protestors from attacking the encampment for hours. For two hours the UC refused to protect their workers. When the cops were called, they [the cops] stood by for another two hours and watched the violence unfold, again refusing to protect students and workers standing up for Palestine. The next night, the cops were very prompt in sweeping the encampment and making more than 200 violent arrests.
My union, UAW 4811, has filed an unfair labor practices (ULP) charge against the UC for this gross mishandling and the police brutality that flowed from it. And this ULP has unlocked the current moment where 48,000 academic workers are standing up on strike to protect our right to free speech on our campuses, our right to not be brutalized by the police for demanding changes in our workplaces and demanding the right to stand up for a free Palestine.
I want to point out that universities are not at all separate from the military industrial complex. I’m a worker in STEM [science, technology, engineering and mathematics]. . . .and a lot of my STEM grad students may also recognize that we researchers at universities are at the very beginning of the military supply chain. Our research creates the killing machines of tomorrow. When this genocide was renewed in October, a group of grad workers started to trace what Department of Defense funding is coming into our departments and what kinds of research is it supporting.
We found that in 2021 alone, the Department of Defense has poured $7.4 billion into basic science and engineering research in American universities. That’s not weapons development, that is basic science and engineering. The University of California system has received $294 million of that, again, just in 2021, and our campus [Santa Cruz] received $6.5 million of that funding that year. That number goes up every year. Most recently, it was $10.5 million going into UC Santa Cruz.
Our research that is funded by the DOD goes on to harm the world. As an example from my own department, we have grad students using a particular computer code to look at the shapes of galaxies — galaxy morphology. The same code is also used by ICE to surveil the border. We are intrinsically tied to the harm that is done to our colleagues around the world. I’ll give another example from a sister department at Santa Cruz. This research is called “mathematical analysis of human response to millimeter wave heating.” This studies the effect of a currently existing weapon called the Active Denial System or ADS, which has been at least proposed for use, both in active combat situations and for suppressing protestors here domestically. I want to point out that there is no such thing as other people’s suffering. No such thing. And so the work that we do in our labs goes on to harm the world, and it was workers’ prerogative and students’ prerogative to stand up and protect our comrades, even if they’re on the other side of the world who are suffering from this genocide. So, thank you. Long live the strike!
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