The Labor and Working Class History Association has published a thorough and very helpful essay by labor scholar Dana Frank on political strikes. Sister Frank takes the current strike underway among graduate students at the University of Californmia as her point of departure. A link to the entire article is below.
UC Graduate Workers and the History of Political Strikes
On Wednesday, May 15, 79% of 48,000 graduate student workers at the University of California who cast their ballots voted to authorize a strike. Their demands include UC divestment from weapons manufacturers and contractors who profit from the Israeli war on Gaza, protection of campus free speech in the aftermath of police repression at UCLA and amnesty for those facing discipline for protesting. Members of the United Auto Workers, the graduate students have launched a sequence of selected strikes targeting different campuses. They began on Monday, May 20, with UC Santa Cruz, where 1,500 members have walked out, and where I taught labor history for 27 years. On May 28 graduate workers at UC Davis and UCLA joined them, and other campuses appear to be joining soon. This is a big strike, with big import for both the solidarity movement with Palestinians, and for the labor movement.
For some observers, the graduate workers’ objectives can appear far away from what are commonly understood to be the function of labor unions such as addressing concerns about pay, working conditions, or vacations. But what are known as “political strikes” have a long, creative, and often powerful history in the United States. Today’s UC strikes, smack in the middle of a national uprising protesting US support for the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, challenge us to think more flexibly about what a labor movement is, and can be, today–and its relationship to broader demands for social justice.
Members of the International Longshoremen’s International Union (ILWU) are famous, for example, for refusing to load cargo in solidarity with resistance movements overseas–to Franco’s Spain, to South Africa under Apartheid, to Chile under Pinochet. Most recently, on Juneteenth 2020 they joined Black Lives Matter in a mass national protest against racist police repression and shut down all the ports on the West Coast.
In many political strikes, union members have walked out as part of a broader national protest, as on Juneteenth. Some of these strikes have been officially sanctioned by unions; more often, workers simply walk out en masse. On May Day 2006 tens of thousands of Latinx and other workers simply skipped work to attend a national protest against a proposed repressive federal immigration law. Meatpacking plants shut down for the day rather than confront their workers. Port truckers in Long Beach and Los Angeles refused to load cargo. Over a million people came to demonstrations.
In 1963, A. Philip Randolph, president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, made sure that March on Washington for Civil Rights took place on a Wednesday, not on a Saturday. That way, things would be shut down… but not in an obvious way. Government workers just couldn’t get to work.
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