“You are fighting for the right cause, to stop genocide”: Detroit autoworkers back strike vote by University of California academic workers

The Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for US vice president Jerry White visited two auto factories in the metro Detroit area Monday afternoon to speak to workers about the ongoing strike vote by 48,000 United Auto Workers members at the University of California.

The graduate student academic workers, members of UAW Local 4811, are demanding a halt to the repressive attacks on union members, undergraduate students and faculty who are protesting the US-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza. Rank-and-file members have pressed for a strike vote ever since the violent April 30 attack by police and Zionist counter-protesters on a Palestine Solidarity encampment at University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). 

The student employees, graduate students, and academic and postdoctoral researchers are demanding the protection of free speech rights, amnesty for arrested protesters and divestment from companies profiting from the slaughter in Gaza. The strike vote will run through Wednesday. 

The UAW apparatus, which has endorsed President Biden’s reelection, repeatedly delayed the strike vote and has done nothing to inform other UAW members about the vote, let alone to prepare a broader strike, including by UAW members producing tanks, armored vehicles and missiles that are being shipped to Israel. 

White and his campaign supporters distributed a statement from Mack Trucks worker Will Lehman, a socialist candidate for UAW president in 2022 union elections, which called for a UAW-wide strike against the police attack on the campuses. Many workers told White and his supporters that this was the first time they heard about the UC strike vote. 

White told workers that the US-backed slaughter in Gaza was one front in the expanding wars of American imperialism for global conquest and that workers had to oppose this. The UC strike, he said, should be expanded to all UAW members and broader sections of the working class to halt the production and shipment of US military supplies to Israel, as well as to Ukraine and other US client states. 

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“They say we have freedom of speech until we use it, and they persecute us,” one veteran worker at the Stellantis Warren Truck plant told White. Another Warren Truck worker urged the UC academic workers to “keep your heads up because you’re fighting for the right cause, to stop genocide.” She added, “Our rights are up against the wall, and they are taking them one by one.” 

A Ford worker at the Dearborn Truck Plant said she supported the strike and that the UC workers needed all the support they could get. She said the massacre of Palestinians “affected people in my neighborhood,” referring to Dearborn, which has one of the largest concentrations of Arab Americans in the US. “I am very proud of them [UC students], and I stand behind them,” she said. 

“I’m working seven days a week to provide food for my family and to pay my bills,” a Warren Truck worker said, “and you see more of our taxes going for war instead of our hospitals and schools. Plus, look at our streets and our bridges collapsing.” 

Another Warren Truck worker said the UC students were standing up for the free speech rights of their students in California and around the country who have been beaten and arrested for standing up against wrongful deaths.

A Ford worker added, “Money that is funding a lot of these wars could go to help our own people, homeless people. They say there is no money for us, but next thing you are reading that $95 billion is going to somewhere else. You read that and you look confused and say, ‘I thought we had no money for our own people?’”  

A retired autoworker in Dearborn also spoke with an election campaign team and signed the petition to put SEP presidential candidate Joe Kishore and White on the ballot in Michigan. She said, “I worked in auto plants for years and years. My body is ruined from it so I can’t work anymore. We definitely need somebody new in office, because the Democrats and Republicans don’t care about us workers.” 

She had not heard about the death of Tywaun Long, a 46-year-old Dearborn Truck worker who collapsed and reportedly died of a heart attack on the assembly line on April 17. “It’s terrible that people die like that in the plants. I guarantee you the company probably just said, ‘He was a good worker,’ and left it at that. They don’t give a damn about us.”

After the campaign, White said, “We urge UC workers to vote to strike. This will send a powerful message to all workers that they can fight to defend democratic rights against both big business parties and halt these wars. It will be the workers that pay for these wars, with the lives of their children and through massive cuts in social programs. But this fight requires the building a powerful network of rank-and-file committees because the UAW President Shawn Fain and the UAW apparatus back Biden and his imperialist wars. The working class must use its power to shut down the war machine and unify with workers and young people around the world to put an end to the capitalism, the source of war.”