“Students, unite — walk out and join the fight!” echoed across campus grounds as students walked out of class last Thursday. After a year of aggressive escalations by the UC, from its violent crackdowns on student protest to extortionate nonresident tuition hikes, demonstrators moved to reclaim UCLA for its students, faculty and staff. As they chanted in solidarity with the UC’s workers, the walkout sent a clear message: students will not accept a university that operates solely for profit, not for its community.
The day before, over 37,000 service and patient care workers with AFSCME Local 3299 went on strike, standing up to the UC over its continued disregard for workers’ welfare. The university’s response to worsening housing crises and deteriorating workplace conditions was not to reverse the decline of workers’ real wages. Nor was it to divest from Blackstone, a primary culprit in California’s climbing rent prices. Instead, the UC unilaterally raised its workers’ healthcare costs by 9-11% and refused to bargain in good faith — all while approving hefty salary increases for its most senior administrators.
The UC administration’s priority has never been clearer. To them, our university is not a space for education. Nor is it a space for uplifting people, exchanging culture, or cultivating new ideas. Instead, it is nothing more than a corporate entity whose day-to-day operations depend on extracting wealth from the students it ostensibly serves and the workers it depends on. Administrators sit in their offices, simultaneously distancing themselves from us but making decisions about our own lives, and we are left to face the consequences.
When students and workers bear the brunt of the UC’s violences, there is power where our struggles converge.
In the end, we are all working towards a university that truly cares for its people. Divestment is more than just withdrawing funds from corrupt, militaristic and exploitative firms. Divestment is about reallocating the UC’s investments back to the people it depends on: our communities, our neighbors, our families. Us.
For over a year, AFSCME 3299 has campaigned for the UC to divest from Blackstone Real Estate Investment Trust, a predatory company that has hiked rents for thousands of people and then evicted those who could not pay. Despite these clear displays of callousness, in January 2023, the UC invested over $4 billion in Blackstone to promises of a minimum 11.25% annual return.
This money will not be returned to the UC’s workers or students. It will only drive up our rent as Blackstone extracts this minimum return — amounting to hundreds of millions of dollars — from its tenants, worsening the same crises that our community is demanding the UC recognize and combat. At a time when career workers are forced to take hours-long commutes, even sleeping in their cars between shifts, university investment in Blackstone is not just a burden on taxpayers: it’s a cruel display of disregard for its workers.
Simultaneously, Blackstone continues to fuel the ongoing Nakba from its newly opened office in occupied Jaffa. Directed by a former Lieutenant in the Israeli Ministry of Defense, this office seeks to tap into Israeli technology firms operating on stolen land, profiting off of the surveillance and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. In the United States, Blackstone’s President donated at least $1 million to AIPAC in the past year, a lobbying group that works to stifle dissent against American unconditional support for the genocide in Gaza.
Divestment from Blackstone is only one of many alignments between the demands of UC workers rallying for fair contracts and students marching for Palestinian liberation. The over $8 billion now invested in Blackstone by the UC is not only denounced by AFSCME 3299, but is among the assets targeted by the UC Divest Coalition.
The UC has previously conceded to student-worker pressure, divesting from private prisons and fossil fuels in the past decade. It even boasts about its 1986 divestment from South African apartheid, an ironic discrepancy when it continues to fund the Israeli occupation’s apartheid regime in Palestine. But with students and workers standing together, it will have no choice but to divest from Blackstone — and soon all investments in dispossession, occupation, and the imperial war machine.
When chapters of SJP mobilized to strike against genocide across North America last week, UCLA’s students remained steadfast in their demands, but also uplifted AFSCME 3299’s. As students chanted “Free, free Palestine!” in Bruin Plaza, they also bore signs that read “Long Live the Workers” and “Estudiantes y Trabajadores Unidos” (Students and Workers United). UCLA watched as protesters for the liberation of Palestine found power in solidarity, uniting with workers against the localized injustice of the UC’s refusal to treat its workers with dignity and respect.
UCPD’s response was an unusually brazen escalation. Officers marched down Bruin Walk in full riot gear, lining the walkway and stationing a police car uphill from the picket for Palestine. The police then identified and followed four individuals, arresting them in remote parts of campus hours after they peacefully dispersed from the scene. While our campus is unfortunately no stranger to militarized police repression, protests of this nature have not drawn such a forceful response in the past. Facilitated by the impunity that law enforcement enjoys within not just UCLA, but the entire US carceral state, the university’s disproportionate response to protesters was a cowardly reaction to their invocation of student-worker solidarity.
We know that this solidarity is the UC’s greatest fear, because it poses the most powerful threat to their assets. Just as they disregard the constitutional rights of protesting students, they have long acted to subvert labor law when unions and students threaten the corporate ordering of our university.
Just half a year ago, the UC convinced an Orange County judge to halt UAW 4811’s strike after being twice denied by the California Public Employment Relations Board. The union voted to authorize its strike after UCLA not only allowed a terrorist mob to brutalize its students and workers at the Palestine Solidarity Encampment, but capitalized on the attack to violently sweep the area. The UC has a shameful, but unsurprising, pattern of escalating its attacks on our communities when social and labor movements converge in challenge to its profit-driven operation.
The UC’s repression of Palestine solidarity protest and neglect of labor rights are not disparate injustices; they both serve and uphold the institutional structures that see our universities as private equity firms and our campuses as profit extraction zones. It is through this warped lens that they can fund the displacement and dispossession upon which both local and global exploitation rely, from Blackstone evicting our neighbors to BlackRock fueling genocide in Gaza. Only by rejecting these structures can we forge a path to justice, dignity and liberation for all.
Students and workers: we are one in this struggle. So stand up, stand together, and join the fight.
For students who wish to join the campaign for divestment from Blackstone and other companies complicit in the genocide in Gaza, we recommend getting involved with member organizations of the UC Divest Coalition such as the Student Labor Advocacy Project (SLAP) and Students for Justice in Palestine.
The views expressed in this article represent the majority opinion of the UCLA Radio Editorial Board. Editorials do not necessarily represent UCLA Radio as a whole.
