LOS ANGELES: Discord stemming from last month’s ‘mob attack’ on pro-Palestinian student activists encamped at the University of California, Los Angeles, ‘flared again’ on Tuesday. This came as ‘academic workers’ staged a strike on campus, protesting UCLA’s response to the violence.

Unionised academic researchers, graduate teaching assistants and post-doctoral scholars at UCLA walked out off their jobs over what they regard as ‘unfair labour practices’, in the university’s handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations in recent weeks, organisers’ stated.

They were joined by fellow academic workers at two other University of California campuses’, UC Davis (near Sacramento) and UC Santa Cruz, where the protest strike began on the 20 of May.

Strikers demand amnesty for graduate students and staffers facing disciplinary action for previous protests

The strikers are demanding amnesty for graduate students and other academic workers, who were arrested and/or faced with disciplinary charges, for their involvement in the protests. Union leaders say these protests were ‘peaceful’, except when ‘counter-demonstrators’ and other ‘instigators’, were permitted to ‘provoke unrest’.

The state ‘Public Employee Relations Board’ had ordered the University of California and the strikers to take part in ‘mediated talks’. A representative for the strikers said the parties met just once over the weekend.

The strike was organised by the ‘United Auto Workers Union Local 4811’, which represents around 48,000 non-tenured academic employees in totality, across 10 University of California campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The UAW local includes about 6,400 academic workers at UCLA, 5,700 at Davis and about 2,000 at Santa Cruz. A union representative said that thousands were ‘withholding their work’ (as of Monday). Several hundred people attended a march and a midday rally, within the UCLA campus on Tuesday.

The expanding work stoppage marks the first union-backed demonstration, in solidarity with the recent wave of student-led demonstrations on dozens of US campuses, against the Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip.

Union leaders say a major impetus for the strike was the arrest of 210 people, including campus-employed graduate students, at the scene of a Palestinian solidarity protest camp, which was ‘torn down’ by police at UCLA, on the 2 of May.

Around 24 hours earlier, on the night of April 30-May 1, masked assailants armed with sticks and clubs attacked the encampment and its occupants. This sparked off a bloody clash, which continued for at least three hours, before police moved in. Since then, the university has reassigned the chief of the campus police department and opened an investigation into law enforcement’s reaction to the violence. Last week (three weeks after the melee) campus police announced their first and so far only, arrest of someone accused of taking part in the attack, a man they say was seen in video footage ‘beating victims with a wooden pole’.

Published in Dawn, May 30th, 2024