@jonny
This is the kind of question that would be so, so easy to answer if you were observing and participating in nature rather than intellectualizing it from isolation.
You wont believe the number of stormtroopers theyre deploying against unarmed students unless you see it. This is just one side: at least 7 police departments with at least two layers at every point of egress, with several layers in back for rear control and rotation. They've got the army out against your kids for having the audacity to do whatever they can to stop a genocide
This authorizes the eboard to call a stand up strike similar to UAW's autoworkers strike last year. Our initial demands include amnesty for all students and workers who are facing any disciplinary action for protest, divestment from "weapons manufacturers, military contractors, and companies profiting from Israel's war on Gaza," disclosure of all investments, and the ability for researchers to opt out from funding from sources tied to the military or oppression of Palestinians (including a transitional fund for those people).
This strike is in response to our employer first allowing a vigilante mob to brutalize our students and workers, and then calling the police to further brutalize them the following night. Our union is responding to a pattern of employer violence that's as old as unions themselves, allying with police-aligned vigilantes to chill and crush organizing.
@jonny **) Some attackers also try to claim that their actions couldn't be illegal because the software allowed them (in a sort of "code is law" argument). While there are some edge cases, my impression is that courts generally don't take those arguments well and will distinguish between what code does and what is its intended purpose and examine whether the attacker sincerely believed their actions were allowed and harmless. A recent case is e.g. https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=avi-eisenberg-convicted
@jonny Hmm. While the Coca-Cola plant could be problematic, I'd want more information as to what the hiring practices are. Are Palestinians employed there? Or is it actually an apartheid-type setup?
Just got chased out of a lab by a PI while doing a Union walkthrough. I feel bad for people in labs like that man, for your boss to be so tightly hovering over you and actively hostile to your rights as a worker must suck a lot.
First of all we have a legally protected right to be here as representatives of the union that represents your workers. Second of all whats the matter with you lmao
I am used to doing the unauthorized guerilla arm of union comms - "the union cant say this, but if some random member said it then we have no control over that..." but trying to pitch in on the "lawyer vetted" side which will be interesting. I dont think I am allowed to call the cops the paramilitary of capital and instead have to say "officers"
I just deleted a post about how edu.us was $5 bc when I went to buy it on godaddy it said it wasnt available... but looking at the whois record, it looks like it was expired, and they just saw I was interested in it and held the registration so I would have to pay a $70 broker fee. That is shady as hell.
Nothing dismays me more in academia than my colleagues excusing themselves from the world because they have internalized their job as their identity, and exist in a separate domain from everyone else. every time I knock on doors with my union I get someone, sometimes angrily, wondering what any of this has to do with them - they're here to just do science.
To the inculcated, the academy is a place of pure knowledge work, uncomplicated by the problems of "normal" workers. From another view, the academy is a means of rapacious industries outsourcing the costs of training to the government, where the myth of exceptionalism prevents meaningful labor organization to prevent the abysmal working conditions from eventually forcing you to take a job at a weapons manufacturer or ad company because that's the only option left.
If you cling to that first view, it should horrify you that your institution is a gigantic investment fund with a side hustle in lab real estate. It should perplex you why you have no power over any of how it works, that students would have to resort to escalating protest to affect how it operates, because surely reason will prevail.
Even to the unconcerned moderate, no matter how you feel about what theyre saying, divestment encampments should be part of your cause, because no enlightened place of learning should be brutalizing its students.