University of California academic workers voted overwhelmingly to authorize strike action to fight the poverty wages and exploitation imposed on you by the university system, its powerful and wealthy backers and Democratic-controlled state government. But the UAW bureaucracy has ignored this mandate from the membership and prevented you from using your collective power.
The UAW apparatus may think it can override your democratic decision but the final word is in the hands of the rank and file yourselves. I urge UC workers on every campus to organize rank-and-file committees consisting of academic and other campus workers, along with students, to enforce the will of the membership and prepare a university-wide strike.
A strike by more than 40,000 UC workers will give a powerful impulse to the growing movement of educators, healthcare workers and other sections of the working class across California and the US against the corporate and financial oligarchy that the Trump administration speaks for. The fascist cabal in the White House, with the complicity of the Democratic Party, is waging a criminal war against the people of Iran and a war at home against the social and democratic rights of the working class.
It will be the working class in the United States that pays for this illegal war of colonial conquest: in the form of massive cuts to public and secondary education and other core social programs to finance the ever-expanding global war, and the lives of working-class youth sent to fight and die for American imperialism. And, as you know very well, the war abroad will be used to accelerate Trump's plans to impose a fascist dictatorship in the United States.
UAW President Shawn Fain has said absolutely nothing about the war because the UAW bureaucracy supports it. The same is true for the Democrats. But among workers and young people there is deep opposition to war and state repression. To take forward this struggle, I am fighting for the abolition of the UAW apparatus and the transfer of power to rank-and-file workers in the factories, universities and other workplaces.
The working class, in the United States and internationally, has the power to halt and dismantle the military machine and the US government's apparatus of state repression. Only in this way can society's resources be redirected to guarantee high-quality, free education from pre-school to post-graduate studies, for everyone, and economic security, healthcare and dignified working conditions for all academic workers.
