So, UC strike update. The university admin has been working overtime to shut down the strike via legal means, in addition to all their normal intimidation stuff. They filed not one, but two, complaints to PERB, the union regulatory body, and both were struck down. PERB even filed a complaint against the UC after the second one, due to their gross breach of union protections and norms.

So, what did they do? Decide to just strike break like a normal company? No.

They shopped around California to get a judge to rule the strike illegal, outside of the entire legal chain of how this is supposed to go, after the actual regulatory body has declared it legal, twice. And they just succeeded! A restraining order got signed, of some weird legal justification or another. Of course the crank judge signed off on this, and now our collaborator union executive board just signed off an email to pause striking. The order is to pause it until June 27th, which is coincidentally 3 days before the strike is constrained to end at, June 30th, so it's effectively a full destruction of the strike.

Fucking amazing. There's a strong wildcat strike supporting contingent already, and I can only imagine it's going to get bigger in the face of this obviously farcical judicial order. Now we're going to pressure people to try to stop being pieces of shit at the top end. Because honestly, if they let this slide, what is even the point of a union existing anymore? Like seriously!

There was a midnight raid on the UCSC Palestine encampment. A lot of arrests. From what I’ve heard though, there’s still people in the encampment holding on. Unsure of the details at moment.

Three more UC campuses are going on strike next week. The Palestinian activists are inspiring. Some of the encampments elsewhere have settled for promises of meetings in the future, which has been noticed and refuted by people on the ground. There’s already been meetings between reps and admin staff where those kinds of offers have been refused. While the Union has had made a colossal fuck up that I can’t mention here for opsec reasons, there’s so much good stuff happening. I’m proud to do my part, however small.

UC Strike update. This week grad students at UC Santa Cruz started striking. As this is organized as a standup strike, campuses are getting called in over time. There was some concern about high leadership excessively slow-rolling it, but they announced that UCLA and UC Davis are going to start striking on Tuesday, as Monday is a holiday.

The UC admin filed an injunction to PERB, the Public Employee Relations Board, which is the regulatory body for our union, saying the strike was illegal and should be shut down. This goes with their letter full of lies claiming the same. This injunction however was denied! Despite their repeated claims, the strike is absolutely not legal, and they can't use the regulatory body to stop it.

I'm ready to see what's happening next week. While I won't full dox myself, I will be striking next week, which I am so ready for. There's a lot of people trying to push this to something meaningful.

Strike against the University of California is on! 79% voted yes, with 19,780 voting!

This is structured as a "Stand Up Strike", in the vein as what was done with the recent auto strikes. Basically that means segments of the worker base are going to be called up to strike, with not everyone starting at once. In practical terms, that means one campuses are like, strike-ready, in terms of mobilizng people, they're getting activated. Likely UCLA and UCSD are going to be first, and rather fast to start. They experienced the big violence, and have the most momentum in strike organizing at the moment. But others are pretty ready too! Just doing some planning on the more like mundane part of planning, like local day to day stuff. Hopefully I'll get a chance to strike very soon.

There's around 50k workers in total, so a decent chunk didn't vote. To a degree that's expected though, as this was a fast turnaround event, and you're going to miss people either by not getting a chance to reach them, or them lacking interest. This was actually a very high turnout union election. And the bright side, the 'No' votes are probably all the dedicated Zionists and anti-labor types with enough energy to actually participate, with the larger population more like, open to being reached as things progress and it becomes more obvious that something is happening.

Our strike vote is starting today for UAW 4811, the grad student/student researcher union for the University of California system. For those unaware, this push started back after the raids on the UCLA encampment. It apparently gave the union enough cause to start this proceeding. Which is good! Likely the vote will go through, and then things will get spicy. The vote closes Wednesday afternoon.

On the downside, the highest level of the union leadership still has a bunch of collaborationist fuckers, so they undercut the total power of the strike before it started by declaring it a 'limited' strike, with a maximum deadline of June 30th. Obviously, presetting a deadline for your labor action isn't great. It also undercuts the threat of long term withholding of student grades, which would result in the academic machinery grinding to a halt. That said, it is at the very least past the deadline of the quarter's instruction.

The UC system is weird in that instead of semesters, we use quarters of the year, with a Fall, Winter, and Spring quarter of primary instruction, and then a summer quarter. That means that school goes way farther into May/June than pretty much everywhere else, so the campus won't be empty by any means, and there will be disrupted classes. There will be some form of material impact, and every bit helps I hope.

I was talking with someone, and they think that the University might just play nice and try to wait it out, but I'm really not sure about that. They were pretty chill, in terms of direct force at least, during on more "normal" strike about a year ago, but the harsh crackdowns of students literally just sitting around makes me think it might be different this time. I think it's possible that if our strike materializes, and it has actual material consequences, however mild, they might windmill slam that police brutality button. I feel kind of paranoid typing and talking about this lol. But regardless, I started stocking up on first aid supplies and some protective stuff. I don't know how far away we are from Kent State 2.0.

Got an email from my union president a few minutes ago. UAW 4811, the union of academic workers in the UC system, "voted to hold a strike authorization vote as early as next week to give the Executive Board authority to call a strike."

This is obviously in regards to the attack at the UCLA encampments. My opinion of the highest level of my union leadership is kinda bad, there's still a decent bit of corruption that hasn't been stamped out, but I think this might have been egregious enough for the other organs of the union below to push for this. This could be pretty huge if it goes through, there's 48000 people in the union altogether. This would be a massive amount of economic pressure, so I can only hope.

The strike authorization vote will be across the entire union membership, which is good. The membership is consistently better about things than the highest leadership levels.

The amount of people concern trolling about incitement to violence in the replies. Holy fuck. Look at that US senator’s post about killing protesters. I’m honestly furious.

They aren’t even dangling the idea of giving the Cubans their land back. This is just the pipe dream of the prison closing, not the naval base.

It was so Reddit could sell the info instead of having it freely available

Cuba is a beacon of progress and humanity in the Americas. Fidel Castro was a hero. Also a pro at dodging the CIA's kill squads.

They’re at least building green energy and trains lol. And less wars. Already better.

Even if that shock happens, China will still be in a better situation. Like, they actually manufacture stuff there, and the government builds infrastructure aggressively. That’s two massive benefits to economic security and health.