jonny

jonny, 9 days ago

I was planning to move away from LA for lack of having an organizing community, but now im planning in sticking around. A group of people you fuck shit up with for a better world is as important to life as breathing

jonny, 9 days ago

@aheadofthenerve
A lovely example of the brokenness of these things fs ♥
https://www.aiweirdness.com/chatbot-svg/

jonny, 9 days ago

@photocyte
Aha good questions, have been out all day, ill write more when I get home. Last one is easy though - of course they claim the strike is illegal, the university is an adversary of the union, and so they will claim what is advantageous to them to claim. This is an unfair labor practice strike, which is a logically necessary exception to no strikes clauses with a relatively large body of legal and judicial precedent. If it were possible for the bosses to routinely violate the core of contract but we couldnt strike about it - ie. The contract only is enforced against the union but not the boss - then CBAs and unions become pointless. PERB is the only body that can declare the strike unlawful and they have already denied an injunction to stop the strike. It is legal to be on strike until they say it isnt. The contract being dissolved is not really on the table as far as I know, and that would be disadvantageous to the university bc they like long bargaining cycles with a big institutional knowledge gap in the middle.

jonny, 9 days ago

@photocyte
Here are the ULPs: https://www.uaw4811.org/2024-ulp-charges

jonny, 9 days ago

@photocyte
Ill share a message i sent to my labmates about why i am on strike in a minute after i get some food, but i guess first question i would have is whether you are aware of the police violence invited by the university against the students peacefully demonstrating at the UCSD encampment

jonny, 9 days ago

@photocyte
Up to you i guess

jonny, 9 days ago

@photocyte
Heres what i wrote to my labmates. It doesnt encompass my complete thoughts bc i was trying (failed) to keep it short, but anyway:

hello dear lab, as is hopefully obvious I am withholding my labor until the UAW 4811 strike resolves. while I am aware this is an extremely complicated situation across any number of dimensions for all of us, not the least of which being that our work together is nothing short of “what we do as a lab,” I wanted to share some of the reasons that I am doing so. I’ll keep it as brief as I can (not brief) because i have been up since 1:30AM and walked about a billion miles today.

we are a part of this world - i won’t elaborate on the horror that is the root of this strike, because i am sure we are all aware of it. The thought of continuing business as usual is not possible at the moment, and the later guilt of not having done whatever i can now is similarly grim. We are in an exceptionally privileged situation of being members of a labor union who is engaging in a sanctioned strike with a comfortable strike fund to support us, and we are in an institution with one of the largest publicly held investment portfolios in the world - so i feel that my situation means that i have both the means and responsibility to respond.

the strike is about labor issues fundamental to the continued existence of our union - the official causes of the strike are the unfair labor practices described in the ULP charges files by our union. they describe how the violence inflicted on our students and colleagues by our employer as they were exercising their constitutional rights to peaceful protest strikes at at the heart of what it means for a union to protect the working conditions of us as workers. if you didn’t experience it or haven’t seen footage from April 30th-May 2nd on our campus, it’s impossible to overstate how terrifying those nights were. first they were attacked by a vigilante mob, then by the police, and then in addition to that many of our students and colleagues have been suspended, evicted, and fired. many have permanent injuries and lifelong trauma. regardless of how you feel about their actions, the unilateral decision to resolve a peaceful petition of our employer for a change in working conditions (ie. the way that the product of our labor is used via its investment portfolio) with police violence and mass firings and evictions undermines another core purpose of a labor union: to protect us from arbitrary discipline and dismissal. as an additional bit of historical background, the exact pattern of vigilante violence that serves as a pretext for a massive police response under the guise of safety is a pattern of labor suppression as old as labor unions themselves. If we do nothing, our union suffers a potentially fatal blow as we fail to make good on the basic ability to protect ourselves as workers, physically and professionally, guaranteeing every attempt we make in the future to better our working conditions will be met with hundreds of riot cops. Worse, it sends the signal that even if you are entirely unaffiliated with the university, if you want any picket line to go away, all you need to do is attack it and the police will finish the job for you. This is not theoretical, we can already see it happening in this very strike. We will be failing to protect ourselves by failing to protect our colleagues who have been brutalized, arrested, traumatized, and fired. one of the basic demands in the strike is amnesty for students and workers who have participated in protests across the UC system, and UC has shown no signs of meeting us even on that very simple demand.

this strike is about the soul of the university - do we want to live in a world where our public institutions of higher education are investment portfolios jealously guarded by militarized police with some classrooms and lab real estate as a side hustle? every part of our work at UCLA is impacted by our disempowerment in the face of a gigantic inertial bureaucracy. every fight for lab space, months spent purchasing parts, broken elevator, and delayed visa is a reflection of that disempowerment. in a series of unprecedented labor ‘firsts,’ our statewide union of 44,000, after merging to form a combined grad and postdoc union this last year, has called a historically unprecedented strike, and the first protest strike in a generation. this union - in solidarity with our sibling unions across campus - is one of the strongest, if not the only countervailing force against the corporatization of our university. If we can’t mount a meaningful response to a direct attack on our members, is there any hope for, selfishly, maintaining the working conditions we still have, and more broadly, these institutions serving the purpose they were intended to - public higher education?

it’s unfortunate that the only effective means we have of impacting the direction of the university is withholding our labor, which not only affects each of us directly in this ratrace hellworld of academia, but also our shared work as a lab. I hope you all understand that striking is not an act against any shared work or the lab as a whole, but out of a longer concern for our shared world from local to global. I won’t ask any of you to join me, since that’s your choice alone, but if you had so far been continuing to work or hadn’t given the strike much thought, you can DM me here or via signal or whatsapp. I’ll be in the lab every day to charge my bike battery and fill my water bottle, but otherwise I will see you whenever this strike ends, however it ends. thank you for your understanding :heart:.

jonny, 10 days ago

Wont someone please think of the delivery trucks!!!

jonny, 10 days ago

Thermo-Fisher shipment turned away for a second day. That has gotta be expensive lmao

jonny, 10 days ago

@iANikzad
Am not aware of the work! What is it? And welcome!!

jonny, 10 days ago

@iANikzad
(Thank you for the explanation !!! Im about to be busy for the next several hours but will return later. Welcome again!!)

jonny, 10 days ago

@tdverstynen the fascists comin with a 100% certainty no matter the outcome of any election or lawsuit. those just influence timing and severity

jonny, 10 days ago

@MichaelTBacon
Good good idea... I wonder if I make a javascript bookmarklet or extension to just repeatedly log in and out if that might be costly?

jonny, 10 days ago

@cykonot
Ill take a look to see if canvas has tests I can use to profile expensive actions and also how their cost structure works, good idea.

Also is that /s like "dont go there its a bad place" or "they would be too hardcore for a mass action of mostly non computer ppl"

jonny, 10 days ago

@cykonot
Aha gotcha. Yes extremely effective action would of course never be considered by the fine upstanding members of the UAW and I appreciate the recommendation to steer clear

jonny, 11 days ago

Ill write more later about the rapidly shifting balance of power down here later but for now gotta get down to da line

jonny, 11 days ago

R&F is doing participatory and egalitarian organizing, allowing people to lead independently, making people feel like theyre a part of something. We're not really sure what admin caucus is doing, but I think the difference is summarized neatly by one group coordinating in an extremely active all-to-all groupchat and the other in a very sleepy announcement channel. Rank and file organizing works because people are smart and capable and brave and want to help, not be told what to do by a distant chain of command. A beautiful sight seeing this bottom up energy flourish and take over

jonny, 11 days ago

K now I really gotta go

jonny, 10 days ago

We are getting pretty dang good at holding the soft picket line, where even lots of nonunion trucks are being turned away or being made to unload from the street and pull in extra labor bc of the perception that they wont be able to pass, even if they were persistent we would let em through bc thats the law after all

jonny, 11 days ago

@swelljoe
@RickiTarr
This is the kind of fake where its so good it replaces reality entirely