UE Resolution for Demilitarization
For the past several decades, the US working class has been forced to fund the genocidal expansion of the Israeli settler colonial project as it ethnically cleanses Palestinians in the Gaza strip block by block and expands a violent, colonial occupation and apartheid system in the West Bank. UE members have long expressed solidarity with the cause of Palestinian liberation. We have demanded more than a ceasefire, consistently calling for the end of occupation and apartheid, and an arms embargo on Israel. UE members have committed to Boycott, Divest and Sanctions (BDS); they have marched, protested, and taken on various workplace campaigns to end the complicity of our labor—and the labor movement—in the ongoing genocide. However, given that our efforts have not yet succeeded—genocide persists, and the US continues to play a leadership role in destabilization and war-making campaigns in the West Asia and North African regions and the Global South at large. These circumstances call us all to take on revolutionary tactics, not only to end our personal complicity, but to end the reign of US imperial power by demilitarizing the economy.
As the US-Israeli escalation of genocidal settler colonial violence continues to bombard the Gaza strip, Lebanon, Iran, and more; as their settler colony attempts to expand to all surrounding countries, decimating healthcare systems, bombing every last Palestinian university, displacing and starving millions, maiming and killing thousands; as the ruling class, Democrats and Republicans alike scramble to provide intellectual and political justification for continuing to send billions of dollars in weapons and aid to the Israeli settler colonial project, while thousands here at home face devastating climate catastrophe and, left without housing, are forced into unlivable and undignified conditions – we must remain steadfast, principled, and unyielding in our resistance. That starts with recognizing our own complicity and leveraging our labor power for the purpose of demilitarization.
As members of UE, we remind our union and each other that supporting Palestinians requires our awareness of labor’s involvement in this oppression, and our efforts to actively work against it. We fear labor without internationalist politics represents an individualistic furthering of the material conditions for workers in the Global North at the expense of communities in the Global South. We must resist bargaining the terms of our own exploitation and that of others with individual bosses.
We in UE have a long history of standing together with our international comrades. Our union was among the first to organize undocumented workers; we have a long history of advocacy for Black workers during the time of Jim Crow; we challenged xenophobia when we joined hands with Mexican workers in direct opposition to NAFTA; and we have been on the front lines of anti-war efforts from the Vietnam War to the invasion of Iraq—most recently in our call for a ceasefire in Palestine in October 2023 and arms embargo in 2024.
The question of militarization is one with which we are intimately familiar as a working class. At the level of budget appropriations, we see how defense and policing budgets continue to rise with bipartisan support while life saving policies like healthcare and housing, public services, education, and science budgets continue to shrink. As the US funds violence abroad, militarization at home continues to target migrant populations, minoritized workers, and Pro-Palestinian organizers. Under Biden, budgets for CBP and ICE rose to $29.4 billion, a considerable increase from Trump’s budgets in the previous term. And, under the current Trump administration, the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” is expected to increase $5.5 trillion to our national debt over 2034. Under this new bill, Department of Homeland Security will obtain $45 billion through 2029 to detain immigrant adults and families, and $32 billion for immigration agents to increase their deportation efforts. Additionally, $150 billion going toward the Department of Defense (yet only $9 billion of which directed toward the care and well being of service members and military family, while the rest go toward weapons acquisition). Each new presidency builds on a violent legacy of the same mass disappearance and forced deportation of migrant families and communities. This is happening today across the country, led by unidentified federal agents and aided by local law enforcement.
As a labor movement, we face the threat of disappearance off the streets if our political activity threatens the ruling class. We face deportation if our citizenship status does not fit an increasingly narrow definition of ‘legal’. Our workplaces are hyper-surveilled and secured—in many cases, by armed police. Universities act as extensions of fascist federal agencies, collaborating with local and federal agents to militarize campus, brutalize protestors, disappear activists, and impose policies and academic discipline to repress popular movements.
The biggest threats to working people today are not Iran or China. They are our own government’s imperialist policies that time and time again put the profits of war over the material needs, dignity, and safety of people.
In order to lift the boot of imperialism off the necks of oppressed peoples across the world, the entire US apparatus of militarized state infrastructure must be dismantled. Technologies and research formerly used to oppress people at home and abroad must either be ceased in their entirety or reappropriated to service humanity and climate where appropriate and possible.
We, as members of UE, have the moral responsibility and are positioned within organized labor to lead a mass movement towards demilitarization from the shop floor. We must rebuke imperial propaganda and war-making industry and build a world centered on collective liberation.
Many of our shops are uniquely positioned at critical nodes of the military supply chain. Graduate worker shops research war-making technologies and are directly entangled with the interests of the Department of Defense. They are thus well-positioned to build long-term campaigns to demilitarize universities. Shops that directly sell and import goods are positioned to lead boycott movements of products that are produced or sourced from occupied territories. And every shop is well positioned to divest member dues from genocide, settler colonialism, occupying states, and war profiteering corporations.
As members of UE, we must lead the US labor left in building a movement that is positioned to intervene, escalate, and win a working people’s struggle against homegrown fascism and imperialism. Together, members of UE must build capacity for mass political labor action, organize, and lead the political general strike demanding that US labor at large stop production, halt shipments, boycott, divest, and sanction the genocidal state of Israel and work at every level to combat the machine of war-making and imperialism in which we are every day complicit.
THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED THAT THIS 79th UE CONVENTION:
- Calls on the union at all levels to:
- Determine, inform, and engage members on actions that workers can take to change and affect US foreign policy;
- Calls on the National Union to inform and engage members by:
- Creating space in the UE Newspaper for worker articles on internationalist issues and the threat of war to the working class
- Facilitating forums for members to share how they led campaigns organizing around internationalist issues, and lead workshops for member to member education so that other shops may learn from them
- Directing the Education committee to create materials relating US foreign policy to the concerns of the workers and specifically about the history of Palestine and its relationship to US Labor
- Creating a committee to work towards the demilitarization of the economy that among other things is tasked with mapping UE shops in the military supply chain
- Endorses the BDS movement and urges the union at all levels to become engaged in BDS and the movement for peace, justice and equality for Palestinians by:
- Calling on the National Union to create forums for locals that have undertaken campaigns for divestment to lead workshops for member to member education so that other shops may learn from them
- Creating and distributing educational materials related to Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction related to the history of the movement and its effectiveness.
- At all levels identifying areas of investment not in compliance with the BDS list
- Opposes all efforts to outlaw BDS and otherwise punish non-violent critics of Israeli policies;
- Supports the struggle of our sister union Zenroren to halt the repeal of Article 9 of Japan’s constitution, to close all U.S. military bases in Japan, and to halt all U.S. efforts to convert the Japanese Self-Defense Force to offensive purposes;
- Welcomes the adoption of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons by the United Nations, and demands that the U.S. government take all necessary steps to achieve a world free of nuclear weapons;
- Demands the U.S. government invest in peace and build economic security by:
- Reducing the military budget while improving wages, healthcare, and pensions of soldiers and veterans;
- Reappropriating defense savings into transportation, housing, healthcare, education, renewable resource development, or other peaceful infrastructure;
- The creation of a fund to guarantee any worker or soldier displaced by conversion from a war economy to a peace economy up to four years’ living allowance and educational expenses;
- Calls on the union at all levels to pressure the government to win our demands by:
- Educating our members on how US imperial adventures are an attack on US workers
- Building strike power in preparation for Mayday 2028 and leading the front on leveraging political demands
- Coordinating with other national unions and pushing them to take action on demilitarizing the economy
