Petition: Bargain to Divest from Genocide
To add your signature, click here or follow this link: https://forms.gle/zfFJhCajpSRMbgpbA
Over the past year, the members of UAW 4811 have made it abundantly clear: we demand that UC divest from firms profiting from and supporting the occupation of Palestine. We, the undersigned members of UAW 4811 and members of the UC community, demand that divestment from the occupation of Palestine and from the U.S. “defense” sector be made a priority demand in the upcoming 2025 contract negotiations.
On October 10, 2023, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions issued a statement calling on international trade unions “to take immediate action … to prevent the arming of the Israeli state and the companies involved in the infrastructure of the blockade.” More than one year has passed since this plea was issued; more than one year of horrors and massacres that nearly defy description. The PGFTU call to stop the arming of the Israeli state is a picket line—as trade unionists we don’t cross picket lines, we walk picket lines. At UAW 4811 we can put this into action.
As of this writing, more than 118,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel and almost every survivor is sick or injured. Currently, 90% of those surviving have been displaced and are without basic necessities. In addition, Israel has been detaining and torturing thousands of Palestinians, including children and medical professionals. In the occupied West Bank, the Israeli military has regularly attacked, besieged, and bombed Palestinian communities, refugee camps, and hospitals. Armed Israeli civilians have also attacked and displaced Palestinians in the West Bank, often escorted by Israeli soldiers. The murderous onslaught has now spread to the entire region. In Lebanon, Israeli bombardment has killed more than 2,000 people, including 127 children so far, causing massive injury and destruction and displacing up to a million people.
To heed the PGFTU’s call, academic workers in the U.S. must target the sites we are best positioned to disrupt: our universities, which after decades of financialization have become in many ways indistinguishable from banks. One analysis by workers in this union put the amount of UC funds invested in apartheid- and genocide-profiteering firms at at least $3 billion—an estimate which was far too conservative, in light of the UC Chief Investment Officer’s claim in May that the university has $3.3B invested in the weapons manufacturing industry, $8.6B in Blackstone, $2B managed by BlackRock, and more besides.
These investments constitute our employer’s most direct ties to the Israeli genocide and occupation. Therefore, they are precisely what we, as workers and supporters of the Palestinian liberation struggle, must aim to disrupt.
In January, workers overwhelmingly supported the member-wide referendum affirming our union’s commitment to BDS. Throughout the spring, workers presented a series of pro-BDS resolutions in campus Monthly Membership Meetings, which passed with supermajority approval (at UCB, UCD, UCLA, and UCSB, among others). In May, the pressure of students and workers organizing across the UC to fight for divestment and the UC’s violent repression of these efforts pushed union leadership to call a strike vote in support of the encampments—which passed with supermajority approval. With minimal preparation and with dwindling leverage heading into the summer, thousands of union members across the state then went out on strike for the encampments and for divestment from corporations and institutions profiting from the Palestinian genocide.
It’s clear by now that appeals to the morality of university administrators fall on deaf ears. Yet as academic workers, we have a weapon they cannot ignore: our ability to withhold our labor. We must now recommit to using this weapon and seriously prepare to throw our union’s full weight behind the struggle to sever the university’s support for the genocidal status quo.
To fight against these ties requires us to brace for a prolonged struggle, likely over multiple cycles of militant organizing and strikes for divestment. We call on all our fellow members in UAW 4811 to support bargaining for, and ultimately prepare to strike for, the following demands.
We demand that the UC:
- Eliminate and prohibit investments in corporations directly profiting from the Israeli occupation, whether through business operations in Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories or the provision of weapons, equipment, and technology used in the enforcement of genocide and apartheid;
- Eliminate and prohibit investments in states or institutions that exhibit consistent patterns of human rights abuses or have been credibly accused of war crimes or violations of the Geneva Convention;
- Eliminate and prohibit investments in all weapons-producing and military services companies;
- Eliminate and prohibit all investments in and portfolios managed by BlackRock, an asset manager with massive investments in companies supplying the genocide in the Occupied Palestinian Territories;
- Eliminate and prohibit all investments in and portfolios managed by Blackstone, a private equity firm that, in addition to directly fueling and profiting from California’s housing crisis, has pledged millions to Israel and just months ago moved to acquire a majority stake in Priority Software, an Israeli enterprise software company;
- Require that for any UC campus foundation to invest in the UC-wide general endowment pool (GEP), the foundation must disclose its holdings and donation history, and commit to abiding by the above stipulations concerning divestment;
- Create a custom fund meeting all the above stipulations and establish that fund as the default investment option for the UC Retirement Savings Plan (UCRSP) and UC Retirement Plan (UCRP);
- Terminate all formal connections with Israeli academic institutions, including study-abroad programs, professional exchange programs, summer/winter internships, and faculty exchange programs.
We call on all members of UAW 4811, and the UC community at large, to join us in signing and distributing this petition, and to back our union’s stated commitment to solidarity with Palestine with action—by bringing the full force of organized workers into the fight for divestment.
To add your signature, click here or follow this link: https://forms.gle/zfFJhCajpSRMbgpbA
In solidarity,
