Bay Area workers face retaliation for Palestine solidarity
By SANTIAGO ITLIONG
The genocide in Palestine committed by the state of Israel has horrified global onlookers over the last 10 months. While the violence is intensely concentrated in Gaza, many working people in the U.S. have taken it upon themselves to oppose the slaughter and specifically our government’s active participation in and funding of it.
Members of the capitalist class, regardless of sector or industry, will either be aligned with the U.S. support or indifferent to it. But historically, one thing they will never tolerate is working people coordinating amongst ourselves for any kind of goal.
There are too many stories of workers being retaliated against for standing in solidarity with the Palestinian people to be counted, and especially if they took any kind of action, be it material or symbolic. In an attempt to document and educate about such experiences locally, on July 7, Bay Area Labor for Palestine put on a forum by four workers who have been retaliated against or suppressed at work for their support of Palestine during this dark time. Bay Area Labor for Palestine is a network of workers in the Bay Area who have committed themselves to organizing within and across industries in support of the besieged Palestinian people.
Kevin, Felix, Mark, and Cameron, along with moderators Jake and Rosita, all shared the stage before an audience of about 60 people to voice their different experiences in being selectively targeted or retaliated against, with varying success, by their employers.
Kevin is a former tech worker who became a public school teacher of computer sciences in Oakland and a member of the union, Oakland Educators Association. He assisted in organizing a mass convention at an Oakland school during a weekend in February for Bay Area workers who wanted to coordinate among themselves in organizing the most effective ways to oppose the genocide. Despite a great relationship with his students and colleagues, his contract was not renewed in obvious retaliation for his efforts. Upon hearing the news of their looming termination, many of Kevin’s students and their friends independently organized a march on the principal’s office to protest the mistreatment. He has thus far been unable to regain his position.
Felix is a nurse and union shop steward at an Alameda hospital and in SEIU 1021. He and his coworkers were individually processing the industrial slaughter broadcast onto our phones with no accountability for the perpetrators. Many of the slaughtered have been health-care workers themselves. Some of Felix’s coworkers, in coping with this, began to organize discussion groups during their lunch hours in a worker’s lunch area. These informal groupings grew rapidly in the following weeks, revealing and nurturing a vibrant community of compassionate and outraged people. They did not disrupt the work of the hospital in any way, but the administration of his hospital eventually demanded they stop gathering, on punishment of termination.
Being a shop steward, Felix was well aware of their contract details, and knew that meeting with coworkers to discuss whatever they want during non-working hours was perfectly legitimate conduct. He exposed the administration of using illegal tactics and was able to defend their gatherings.
Cameron is a Department Steward for UAW 4811, the academic workers’ union, at UC Santa Cruz. He and his colleagues were deeply disturbed by the University of California’s treatment of peaceful student protestors. They began showing up to demonstrations and encampments in solidarity with the students, and eventually launched a strike in protest of their treatment. He utilized the network that the union provides, but he also stressed that the crisis itself spread and deepened the connections between stewards. This became crucial for organizing their own actions, and remains a positive gain from their experience organizing against authoritarianism.
Mark is a former Google engineer and a member of No Tech for Apartheid (NOTA), an organization of tech workers who do not want their hard work and innovation to serve imperial conquest. Mark was outraged by the fact that his employer, Google, a multi-billion-dollar titan of the tech industry, is supporting the state of Israel in its attacks on defenseless, impoverished Palestinians. He and some of his trusted coworkers, 19 of them, in protesting Project Nimbus—Google’s AI system used heavily in coordinating attacks on civilians in Gaza—organized a sit-in in Google’s offices. They were promptly fired. Not only the 19 of them were fired, but over 10 of their coworkers who simply visited the protest out of curiosity or solidarity, with no active participation.
One key lesson that the speakers drew was that solidarity work is a workers’ issue because so many of their coworkers and community are directly affected by these military campaigns: Mark has friends and coworkers who are Palestinian and are being silenced and dehumanized in the face of the slaughter. “We do not want our labor to be used for something so violent,” he said.
“Being a shop steward can be thankless and even annoying work, but Palestinian solidarity is a moral and ethical exercise of the best of what a union can do,” Felix said.
Kevin reminded us that as Bay Area residents, being from sanctuary cities, we should really question why so many of his students and their families leave their home countries. If we peel back enough layers, most of our questions lead to international political issues.
When questioned by the audience about why employers and university administrators care so much about this issue, Felix suggested that he thinks his hospital’s administration actually doesn’t care that much about the conflict, but are instead instinctively threatened by workers making a fuss about anything.
Mark, on the other hand, has seen Google react poorly to economic demands, but thinks also that the tech giant’s heavy-handed response to their protest is designed to set a precedent for future military contracts. He believes they are striking hard at the first hints of workers’ moral protest in order to preempt such movements in the near future.
The event was held in a beautiful, hip cafe with big, dazzling art pieces on every surface aside from a huge north-facing window. The audience was a diverse group of community members, both students and workers. While the thrust of the event was for more worker solidarity, Kevin reminded the many university students in attendance that their contributions occupy a unique and invaluable position in the way forward. They contends that students like their high schoolers, while much younger than the students there, have the potential to disrupt in more visible ways than workers, whose livelihoods are beholden to their employers.
Ultimately, Felix and Cameron can thank their unions for protecting their positions and their freedom of expression. But membership was not a cure-all; they found that meeting coworkers in struggle and deepening themselves within their community of workers motivated them emotionally and also led to lasting connections and protection. They emphasize that while union membership is ideal, personal connections within the union are necessary, as well, to mobilize.
We as workers all have the same interests, and an injustice to one should always be taken as an injustice to every worker. Beyond intra-workforce connections, the movement’s next step to support a free Palestine and end the siege by Israel is to promote workers across industries affirming and protecting each other.
