"Today’s strike at the University of California challenges us to think big about what a labor movement is, and what it should do. [...] Graduate student employees at the University of California, in striking against UC-led police brutality and against their employers’ support for the war in Gaza, are [...] reminding us of the labor’s movement’s best self, when it links workplace issues at home, with civil liberties, with police repression, and with foreign policy and the fates of other working people abroad. That’s what solidarity looks like."
For the record postdocs and academic researchers are also in 4811, not just the grads. We amalgamated 2865 (TAs and grad researchers) and 5810 (postdocs and ARs) last winter
@tdverstynen
Unfortunately an alliance between brownshirts and law enforcement is a stable and flourishing mode of fascism. gangs like the proud boys both have a ton of law enforcement in their ranks and serve to do their dirty work for them (or provoke situations where the cops need to "restore order"). The cops are not gonna save us on this one, and our only hope is counterorganizing and directly opposing them ourselves.
#SJP at #UCLA has led a walkout through campus, now occupying Westwood north of Le Conte, one of the main entries to campus, and is holding People's University in the street. Part of a week of planned escalations across from #UAW4811 on strike
No pics bc I cant blur faces on the go but it was beautiful and a little sketch. Holding a street with the numbers we had is hard, this is los angeles and we're in an area thats very opposed to student organizing, so I kept clutching my heart as enraged drivers were revving and honking right at the security ppl, but nonetheless peoples university was held out in the street, everyone fed, got a bunch of people out of their classes by marching through the buildings, and hopefully we have a new batch of ppl to come picket delivery docks tomorrow morning.
Anyway thats enough for me. 12 hours of solid walking and yelling. Time to do some power mapping for some targeted TA labor withholding recruitment tmrw and then go to slep
I am like so full of thoughts about how the official organizing channels of our union are failing but rank and file is stepping in, but I feel like I need to hold onto them until this is over and write them all down at once.
Bottom line is like very few people are showing up to "official" strike duties because there is nothing for them to do, and as usual they have made no means of how to be involved - no "here are the 5 committees you can join and contribute to" but "do this sort of pointless thing we planned with no input".
Meanwhile rank and file has made a very participatory do-ocracy where everyone is finding and inventing their role on their own, with mutual encouragement for autonomous action all around. Main leadership repeatedly is trying to claim or clamp down on rank and file stuff and then wondering why there is animosity/ppl dont want to collaborate with them - like the entire reason this secondary organizing group exists is bc everyone feels shut out of a barely functional system, so maybe theres a reason we arent falling in line.
The admin declaring the strike isnt the strike, we are the strike.
@moira there are some movies that i don't like, and there are movies that don't make sense, but this was a movie that contained so little anything that i have no emotion about it at all #monsterdon
like that is classic humans, after being told for like 2 minutes using silverware as props that they use magnets somehow, they decide they know enough to try and capture a completely unknown but highly sophisticated apex species from another planet. if they have the last 5 minutes just be an all out SFX barrage of the humans trying and failing to wrangle a flying saucer i wouldn't mind that at all. #monsterdon
you were ramping up to alien invasion energy and then choked the life out of it by literally showing someone say "yes" over and over on the phone while someone else prays. what are you DOING out there #monsterdon
venusian comes to earth to let them know 'hey don't knock your planet out of orbit because it messes with ours,' earthlings try and trap them, but the venusian manages to warn them and then they leave. venusian goes out in the field and dies. roll credits. nothing happened in this movie in a way that is even more nothing happening in a movie than usual for #monsterdon