During these deeply dark times for human rights and our ecosystems in our nation, many are wondering what possible group of people or organizations might be able to stem the rising tide of authoritarianism and malignant narcissism we are facing. Likely, the answer is that resistance must come from many groups, from the courts to the ACLU to universities to activists, educators, artists, journalists and, really, all of us—in one capacity or another.
But May Day is International Workers Day, and the power of workers, collectively, to withhold labor and make demands on institutions, government and employers seems to hold out a more robust kind of hope for effective, mass resistance.
As Jaz Brisack, a Starbucks Union organizer, wrote recently in The Nation:
If you want to fight the rise of fascism, organize a union in your workplace—or get a job and help your coworkers organize. There’s a reason that authoritarian regimes often make crushing unions their top priority: Free and independent unions are the best safeguard of democracy.
Unionizing provides workers with the means of building power outside of capital and the state. A strong labor movement could launch a general strike in protest of a repressive regime that would shut down the economy and force concessions—or at least galvanize resistance and turn popular opinion against the state, as the 1943 strike at the Fiat factory in Mirafiori, Italy, which helped bring down Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship, demonstrated. The threat of a general strike has not lost its power: In 2019, during the first Trump administration, Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants union, helped end a government shutdown by calling for one. After flights were grounded in New York City, politicians reached a deal to reopen the government within hours.
May Day by the Bay
May Day, or International Workers Day, in our seaside county started with coalescing union marches and rallies at the University of California at Santa Cruz campus. The UC lecturer and librarian union, UC-AFT (American Federation of Teachers) marched down from Coolidge Street with several other unions* to the base of campus at High Street to join with the AFSCME, representing custodial, patient care, transportation and food service staff, and the Union of Professional and Technical Employees (UPTE). Even a half dozen members of the local Carpenters union (646) showed up to express worker solidarity and warn the crowd about the current construction company building the university’s new housing complex on the East Meadow site at Hagar and Coolidge.
“When we came here to rally with our members to support free speech rights, the police didn't do anything,” Harvey McKeon, of the Carpenters Local, said in an Irish brogue, wearing a red Liverpool Football Club scarf. McKeon was referencing a rally on campus this past February, supporting student protestor rights.
“The motto of the Liverpool football club is ‘You’ll never walk alone.’ That motto applies to today!” he yelled to the crowd. “As long the Carpenter’s union is around, you’ll never walk alone. I am here to tell you, whenever you need us, we will be here!”
After his speech, McKeon told me that rights to protest and free speech were a big part of his union’s priorities. “We’ve always been fierce defenders of free speech. It’s always been in the DNA of our union.”
McKeon had marched down Hagar Street to the rally with the group of on-campus workers from UC-AFT, UAW 4811 (graduate students, post-grads) and SSAP-UAW (student services and advisors), just a short distance from the new “Student Housing West” development on the formerly undeveloped East Meadow.
The Carpenter’s union says W.E. O’Neil Construction and its affiliated companies have an “anti-worker, anti-safety, and anti-truth track record which does not align with the university’s—or the student body’s—values,” and their website lists several damning charges against the company, including four job site worker fatalities the union “is aware of.” Also listed: four OSHA violations for fire safety and a suit brought by a client due to a fire. The union also accuses W.E. O’Neil Construction of NorCal of failing to disclose a worker fatality it was required to disclose in its bid for the UC housing project.
UCSC Restrictions on Protests Galvanize Campus Unions
The UC Santa Cruz campus has instituted onerous “time, place and manner” restrictions on rallies and protests since pro-Palestinian, student protestors were arrested after a night-and-day-long stand off at the campus entrance with hundreds of police officers—literally, from all over the state—shortly before the end of the school year last year.
Some of these protestors are still dealing with criminal charges in our county courthouses, filed by the university. Most recently, Judge Erika Ziegenhorn found the UCPD did not have the right to seize a student's phone and search its contents, going through her online history back to the age of five. Arguing for the university, lawyers from the firm Munger, Tolles and Olson “shamefully attempted to argue that the seizure of the phone did not represent an incursion on the right to protest. If they had prevailed, this would have signaled a broad expansion of police powers during a time of unmasked state terror,” said Christine Hong, professor at UCSC and a lead for Santa Cruz Community Student Solidarity, which is supporting the protestors.
Yesterday’s union rally did not seek the permits for “events” (including protests) the university now says are mandatory.
Union members also used a bullhorn without a permit, ostensibly violating yet another university restriction and a handful of rally goers wore masks (also banned by new policies). In fact, a smaller contingent of students gathered at the end of the union rally to march down High Street for workers and Palestinian rights, all of them masked. Police presence was minimal.
Students march from the base of campus on High Street, toward downtown Santa Cruz after a rally for multiple unions on May Day
AFSCME represents roughly 40,000 University of California employees. The UPTE represents about 20,000 UC employees statewide, including physicians assistants, pharmacists, mental health clinicians and information technology professionals.
Combined, the two unions represent 753 workers at the UCSC campus. Yesterday was the third full, non-contiguous day of striking by these two unions to end a hiring freeze that is impacting their jobs and causing stress in the workplace, as custodians are expected to cover more territory than before and campus-based mental health counselors and various departments are critically short staffed. (The union cannot discuss wage increases and other matters currently part of ongoing contract negotiations.)
According to rally speakers, the UC system holds billions of dollars in reserves that could be used to ensure adequate staffing, unlock the hiring freeze, provide ample resources to fight the Trump Administration across critical issues, and provide cushion if federal research funds are cut. The AFSCME website says that, instead of using such funds for these essential purposes, the university has increased the ranks of “highly paid executives” by 42 percent.
One speaker at the coalition rally said the UC system has at least $8 billion in reserve just for emergency situations, like, perhaps, the raging dumpster fire we are currently sitting smack in the middle of.
Jeffery Smedberg of the Reel Work Labor Film Festival, which is in the midst of festival showings now, said that seeing multiple unions come together in solidarity was rare at the university and had not happened for some time.
“That is really great to see,” he said, “It’s significant.”
“We’ve had coalitions on and off,” says UC-AFT Vice President for Organizing Joshua Brahinsky, “but we all got together and decided to work together more consistently when they came out with the time, place and manner restrictions … It’s all very clearly designed to constrain protest as opposed to expand it.”
Brahinsky says the current coalition is comprised of all the on campus unions (only two are striking now) and even the Carpenters union, which is off site. Participating unions include: UPTE, AFSCME, UAW (grad students, post docs, researchers and staff) and UC-AFT, SCFA (Santa Cruz Faculty Association) and the Worker-Student Solidarity Committee. (See below for more on each union.*)
Brahinsky describes “three levels of crisis” the UC Santa Cruz community is facing. “One, the federal government doing wild and wacky things. Two, the state government is planning for eight percent cuts to (only) higher education,” thereby putting the overwhelming onus on university and college systems to save the state budget and, “Three: our university doing its own weird version of austerity,” he says.
To push back, leadership across all these unions has been busy formulating their own plans.
“We have a whole list of demands we’ve been developing,” Brahinsky says. So far, those demands, in rough form, include:
Solidarity and protection across status of persons, including Transgender members of the campus community, immigrants and migrants
Build a firewall against fascism to protect and preserve DEI, ethnic studies and all related programs
Fight back against the Trump administration by joining an alliance of universities, nationally
Restore and protect constitutional rights on campus, rescind recent protest restrictions
Allow unions the ability to organize freely in sympathy strikes, with no retaliation for organizing
No more layoffs, “speed ups” (increasing work loads, which force workers to move faster on the job and risk injury) and an end to what Brahinsky called “idiotic, top-down decision making.”
UC—Boss, Landlord and Mortgage Lender—Raises Rent on Underpaid Graduate Students
Besides union demands, UC graduate student tenants who spoke at the May Day rally had choice words for the UCSC administration about planned, huge rent hikes for students now living at Family Student Housing on Koshland Way, slated for demolition. The new housing being constructed on the East Meadow, to open in the winter (opening dates have been getting pushed back), will see a net loss of 80 apartments, and a huge rent increase for student tenants.
Larkin Nicholls, with the Santa Cruz County Renters Union, says the rent hike for family housing will be 30 percent, which is actually, technically illegal—but tenants say the university has worked around this—as a university, claiming exemption, and because tenants are moving into a brand new building (although this will be a forced move). As reported locally over the last year, that means $600 more in rent per month for these families, and, for some, a 75 percent rent burden (percent of income used for rent) for students and families often surviving on just one income.
Maria Hele is a graduate student, single mother, and member of the new Family Student Housing Tenants Association, living at the old housing site. She has an eight-year old child.
“It’s been a slow pot of boiling water for the last couple years. The university was increasing rent on us at just under $100 a year. We started fighting those increases last year, and formed a tenant’s association to fight the increases, plus all the habitability issues: mold, windows that don’t seal properly. People have been getting sick.”
Nonetheless, even with these issues, Hele says, if she could stay at the old buildings, she would: “Overwhelmingly, that would be our choice!”
“I’m a single mom on a TA (teaching assistant) salary. I get $3350 a month. My rent now is $1893. I’m already 50 percent rent burdened. The new rent is going to be $2500 and the building plans that have circulated [for the new housing complex] say ‘a minimum’ of $2500. For 75 percent of my paycheck to go back to my employer is just insane. And we work so hard!”
Hele says some of her colleagues are in a worse position, for example, another single mother she knows, with two children. On top of all this, the new units will actually be smaller.
“The units are going to be 30 percent smaller–from 1,000 to 700 or 750 square feet,” Hele says. She adds that as units empty at current Family Student Housing, the university has not been allowing new tenants to move in, despite a long wait list. Hele believes this is so the university can claim it has housed and moved every student from the old complex.
“At every point, this has been a terrible project,” Hele continues, citing the ecological sensitivity of the East Meadow, sink holes purported to be there, and what has appeared to reviewers of the project’s building plans to be cheap construction materials.
Because families with children will be prioritized at the new site, many who now live in family student housing will be elbowed out of new housing. The new childcare facility at the new housing complex is also expected to charge higher childcare fees when it opens.
“There’s no way I can possibly tighten my belt enough to make those numbers work. We have to fight this,” Hele concludes. “It’s a matter of survival.”
UCSC is the largest landlord in the state of California—as well as a mortgage lender, providing funds for faculty to purchase homes the university itself sells to them and profiting off the interest—and questions arise perennially about how their housing policies, rents and incomes are enriching the UC system, as tuition also rises year by year—while the UC also increases rents in communities like Santa Cruz across the state, already experiencing high rents and housing shortages.
Elsewhere in Santa Cruz County on May Day …
Protestors and May Day rally goers also gathered along the central thoroughfare of Ocean Street in Santa Cruz, stretching from Water Street at Starbucks to the Resource Center for Nonviolence. Hundreds of people brought signs for May Day, to support workers and to protest the Trump Administration and its dictatorial power grabs. The public workers and county employee union SEIU joined the Ocean Street protest and, in Watsonville, estimates of from 500 to 700 people rallied downtown under the banner of the Monterey Bay Central Labor Council-AFL-CIO. See photo galleries below.
* Unions involved in the UCSC march and rally at the base of campus
Two unions currently striking and trying to negotiate a contract:
AFSCME: is the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (custodial, patient care at hospital universities, transportation and food service)
UPTE: is the Union of Professional and Technical Employees, including physicians assistants, pharmacists, mental health clinicians and information technology professionals
Unions in support and at the May Day Rally
On-Site
UC-AFT: is the University of California American Federation of Teachers, which includes lecturers and librarians on UC campuses
UAW-4811: graduate students instructors, TAs, course assistants, post-doctoral researchers, etc.
SSAP-UAW: student services and advisors (advising professionals)
Off-site
Local Carpenters Union 646: carpenters, construction, trades
Note: This article may be updated as we learn more. Your comments, likes and shares help get eyes on this and all our articles.
Further Resources:
Another article on this rally and strike from the Santa Cruz Sentinel.
Video footage of Local Carpenters Union 646 at the free speech rally on the UCSC campus, this past winter quarter.
The power of unions in Florida under Ron DeSantis, In These Times article.
Tokata Iron Eyes on the history of the labor movement in the United States and the Chicago Haymarket uprising.
Lakota Law spokesperson Tokata Iron Eyes outlines the roots of May Day — a global celebration of labor and resistance — in 1886. During Chicago’s Haymarket uprising, American workers (including many immigrants) demanded fair conditions like an eight-hour workday — but were met with violence and propaganda from police and politicians. Sound familiar?
Article by Jaz Brisack on the potential power of unions at this moment in the US, in The Nation.
Great photos of all those clever protest signs!