UC Regents approve 8% fee hike. UC's 100,000 workers and students united can reverse this.

Left: protesters at yesterday's regents meeting.
A cop drew his weapon yesterday as students, and a few workers protested at the UC Regents meeting at the UCSF Mission Bay campus. According to the cops, the students “rushed the officer and disarmed him of his baton”. “The officer then heard students say they planned to take his gun, so he drew his weapon” the police spokesperson says.

Now this is America folks; unless you hare completely psychotic, you know the consequences of going for a cop’s gun. I wasn’t there yesterday and wasn’t there for the demos today but I have been with many of these students over the last year in occupations and protests and brave, angry and dedicated as they are, they’re not psychotic. I don’t believe for one minute that this police spokesperson’s statement is true. He has to justify his subordinate drawing his pistol. The Regents today voted to approve an 8% increase on top of last year's 32%.                                                            Below: Seattle 1999

There are two things that come to mind when I see this. First, I am reminded of the aftermath of the shutdown of the WTO in Seattle in 1999. This event shocked the US capitalist class, happening in a major city in the leading industrial economy during a boom. The capitalist class and their state forces learned from Seattle and at the subsequent meetings and protests fought back with a heavy hand, killing a young man in Genoa and whipping ass in Quebec, Philly and LA. They reacted to Seattle with more aggression; the movement, or what could have become one, died. The youth in Seattle also had a powerful influence on a section of organized Labor’s rank and file that were not going along with AFL-CIO chief, John Sweeney’s candlelight vigil approach to class war. This terrified the heads of organized Labor and after Seattle they sent into the movement an army of staffers with all the correct liberal views on numerous issues in order to hold back the movement and temper the militancy and boldness of the youth.

There were very militant student responses in California to last year’s attacks and the 32% increase in fee hikes. The Regents meeting in LA almost got out of hand for them as politicians and others were harassed by angry youth. They are determined not to allow this to happen this time and will respond more aggressively. One of the failures after Seattle was that a lasting and diverse mass movement was not built. One of the major factors in this failure is the role the trade Union leaders play which holds back the development of a genuine independent mass movements. They generally agree with the bosses that sacrifices have to be made, that the system needs to be propped up, so the idea of mobilizing the potential power of their million of members as well as workers and youth in general is terrifying for them; it can only lead to chaos. They will only act when a movement from below forces them to do so.

But I also feel that what also holds back the development of a mass movement is the role played by the hundreds of various left and anti-capitalist groupings who practice what we would refer to as left sectarianism. Organized groups enter these movements for the purpose of using the movement to recruit and increase the membership of their particular grouping. They enter in to fierce competition with each other in the process. This is not to say many of them do not play positive roles at times, but in the last analysis, if the goal is to use the movement as a recruiting ground for the “vanguard building” then the building of the movement suffers; it eventually dissipates, each group leaves with what they can and waits for another opportunity. When a movement that challenges the capitalist offensive arises, all anti-capitalist, socialists and others that participate in it should have as a first priority the building and strengthening of that movement. Every individual has the right to maintain their views and have them openly, but whenever it is clear that a group or individual is present simply to use the movement, this should be brought in to the open and challenged by all.

So we have to have an open strategy against left sectarianism, but we also must have a strategy to deal with the Labor hierarchy who will do their best to undermine the movement and render it harmless while at the same time offering assistance. Fighting the boss is not our only task.

From what I can gather, there were 300 or so protesters at the Regents meeting yesterday. The UC system has some 100,000 workers in it statewide. Given that the union workers are under vicious attack and the Union leadership claims to be in this fight, 300 (maybe 50 were workers I don’t know), is not an impressive number. All organizations in the university system must have a strategy that can begin to build rank and file caucuses and oppositions within the organized workers.

In any situation like this we have to have an opposition caucus that puts something forward other than simply “Union democracy”. And a program should not simply be a defensive one. Free education for all at all levels, increased vacations, pay, childcare, a shorter workweek. Society can afford all these demands. But we have to force them.

One Hundred thousand workers are a potentially powerful force that, joined with students, can drive back the attacks waged on them by the moneylenders and speculators that run the California public university system. It is also a force that can unite with our communities and all these issues we face there. A first step it would seem to me would be to form an intra union rank and file caucus around some of the demands like those above and flooding the workplaces and lunch rooms, anywhere workers congregate asking them join and build such a caucus. Each workplace could form a workplace committee and elect a rep for that workplace. It would begin to give the Union a presence at the point of production. This is something that the Union leadership should be doing but will actually work to undermine; this struggle must be conducted openly so that rank and file workers can see that they would be joining a caucus that has an alternative to the leadership’s policies and is willing to campaign openly for it.

Having six Unions in one workplace hinders rather than helps workers in our struggle against the employers as does having different contract expiration dates. The average worker knows this in our gut. A caucus must openly challenge this set up as well as the clauses in contracts that forbid inter Union solidarity. The Union hierarchy will find all sorts of reasons as to why this can’t happen but their opposition must be openly challenged which will be respected by rank and file workers who will see a serious opposition out in the open.

Mark Yudof, UC president and corporate mouthpiece says with confidence as all employers do in these times that if the fees aren’t raised, “You’ll have to abolish programs. There would be more layoffs—probably 50,000 to 100,000. You’ll have to reduce enrollment targets.” They always make statements like these as if they are established facts.  The money is there, there is no set amount, what they can do depends on the balance of class forces. 

Yudof says he will try to work out a better deal through collective bargaining. “My dad was an electrician” he says, “I understand.” So what. It’s not the class he’s from that matters; it’s the class he’s in and the class interests that he represents. He is confident about the collective bargaining process because the officialdom of the six Unions (one of them, AFSME, spent $91 million on the recent elections) refuses to bring the power of the worker to the table. They can never win as long as they are separate and as long as they continue to meekly obey the no sympathy clauses, or more aptly, screw all other worker clauses, in their contracts. The Union leadership will supply a bus here and there and print leaflets and let the students take the lead.  They use them as a pressure group but will hastily abandon them if they go too far. It is their failure to mobilize the united power of the workers and students, a power that can render solidarity destroying contract clauses irrelevant that allows the employer to feel so confident.

I was at a retirement in my former workplace today. I really miss the workplace (not enough to go back there though). Mine was very diverse, Latino’s black folks, Chinese, Samoans, and Iranian guy too. A number of them saw the news and the baton work and pepper spraying and asked me where was I? Where were you? I said to some of them? They saw one of the activists from CAL interviewed and all of them liked what he said, he articulated the position very well and was clearly on the side of the worker; I showed them a picture of the same person in my I phone and that I was proud of being with them when we went in to the Chancellors office earlier this year. There’s a lot of support out there. There’s a lot of anger and hatred of the rich out there.

Housing, rents, racism and police brutality, education and jobs, these are all issues that a movement must take up if we are to widen the movement and draw in the rest of our class. We can’t win unless this happens.

Earlier this year, there was a campaign by a number of Unions in the UC system to win the 14,000 members of another Union. This is another example of policies that serve to weaken and confuse workers and strengthen the employers; policies that any opposition must openly condemn if it wants to be taken seriously by workers looking for a way forward. We commented on this here.