Harvard University graduate student workers have voted 88 percent in favor of strike authorization. In addition to demands on wages and conditions, they are fighting in defense of international and non-citizen workers.
Imperialist wars abroad are coupled with class war at home. Students will graduate into a society ransacked by the capitalist oligarchy.
Academic workers now account for roughly one quarter of UAW membership. In recent years, graduate employees, postdocs, adjuncts and other university workers have carried out major strikes and repeatedly voted by overwhelming margins for strike action over wages, housing, insecure employment, immigration, democratic rights and the Gaza genocide.
The students of Rayen Mapu, their parents and their teachers have demonstrated courage and democratic conviction in the face of state violence.
The vote is a devastating blow to the United Auto Workers and the majority of the GWC Bargaining Committee, who endorsed the contract despite overwhelming opposition from the rank and file.
There are fundamental political considerations behind the media blackout, in addition to Columbia University’s financial and public relations interests.
The struggle at Columbia, like all struggles of the working class, poses the question: Who should control the resources of society?
The UAW is not a workers organization but an arm of corporate management that works to isolate and suppress all opposition to the policies of the ruling class.
After a month long struggle against their union and Columbia graduate workers officially rejected the concessionary Tentative Agreement pushed by the UAW.
Throughout the course of the strike, many students admirably asserted that their fight was not only about the health and safety of themselves, but of the community as a whole.
Opposition to the resumption of classes at the University of Michigan is part of a broader struggle of workers against the homicidal policy of the ruling class related to the pandemic.
Like the herding of workers into the auto factories, the drive to reopen schools and colleges even as the pandemic continues to rage is entirely driven by profit interests.
The issues being fought for by graduate students—a living wage, job security, better health care coverage and improved working conditions—are the same issues that confront students, young people and workers across the country and around the world.
Lacking any viable political strategy, the leaders of the UC grad student strike capitulated to the United Auto Workers, the same union teaching assistants rebelled against.
Janet Napolitano, the UC president and Obama’s former director of Homeland Security, has fired 54 striking grad students for daring to fight for living wages and affordable housing.
UC president and former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano threatened to fire striking workers and demanded that they honor the contract imposed by the UAW.
The shutdown of the strike is a complete capitulation by the UAW, which exploited the genuine anger of graduate student workers over their exploitation by Harvard in a nearly month-long stunt that achieved virtually nothing.
The UAW’s isolation of the strike is part of a deliberate strategy to defeat the struggle of graduate students.
Several academic departments have informed graduate student teaching staff that they are responsible for reporting whether they are working, and that those who are striking should not expect to be paid.
The HGSU-UAW has made only token appeals to other sections of workers at Harvard to support the grad student workers’ strike and has offered substantial concessions to the university on virtually all issues.
Harvard officials’ hard line in relation to collective bargaining on grad students’ pay is in line with a recent NLRB proposal that would curb the establishment of graduate student unions at private universities.
