The average United Auto Workers training session involves discussions on how members can negotiate strong health programs, meet federal safety standards, and investigate work accidents. For UAW chapter 4811, which serves the University of California, it involves a panel with the Palestinian Youth Movement, a leading anti-Israel group that's organized protests across the country condemning the "brutal US-Israeli genocide."
The chapter held that panel last summer as part of "four days of classes, conversations, and workshops" through which "members learned about the critical tasks ahead of us: winning strong contracts, helping hundreds of thousands of new workers form unions, and continuing to fight for justice in Palestine." Those classes came in the wake of a UAW-backed strike within the UC system that centered not on wage or working hour disputes but rather on the arrests of illegal anti-Israel protesters at the University of California, Los Angeles, months prior. A judge halted the strike in June, roughly two weeks before the UAW chapter's summer workshops.
The ordeal reflects the growing influence unions like the UAW and American Federation of Teachers have on anti-Israel campus unrest. Those unions typically represent graduate students who work for their universities—a far cry from the high-paid administrators who determine school rules. And yet, they've increasingly provided institutional support for controversial activism.
"You basically have auto workers across the nation subsidizing these trust fund graduate students who happen to be members of the UAW," said Ted Frank, the director of the Hamilton Lincoln Law Institute, which represented a Jewish graduate student within the UC system who filed an amicus brief opposing the "Palestinian Solidarity Encampment" strike.
Those grad students, Frank notes, launched a strike in 2022 to obtain significant increases in wages, childcare subsidies, and paid leave—provisions that he said are "bankrupting the University of California." Shortly thereafter, "they tried to go on strike again, but this time, it's for the right to discriminate against Jews with these protests."
A similar dynamic has emerged at the University of Michigan. There, the Graduate Employees' Organization (GEO), which also represents grad student workers, has promoted and endorsed anti-Semitic Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaigns on campus. It's done so in part thanks to support from the American Federation of Teachers, the country's second-largest teachers' union, which provides the GEO with legal defense and strategic support and collects 18 percent of union dues in exchange.
Last March, the GEO campaigned on behalf of "SHUT IT DOWN," a student political party that aimed to halt all Central Student Government activity until the University of Michigan agreed to divest from Israel. The party won control of that government and promptly withheld funding for all student groups and activities, leaving "an Ultimate Frisbee team without money to compete" and "a ballroom dance team unable to rent rehearsal space," the New York Times reported at the time.
Student government officers voted in October to restore the funding. They also voted against a "SHUT IT DOWN" measure that would have sent funds to a Hamas-associated university in the West Bank. When that measure failed, protesters stormed the student officers, calling them "f—ing Zionists" and "race traitors," the Washington Free Beacon reported. The GEO endorsed "SHUT IT DOWN" through a statement that read, "If central student government cannot be used to support our pursuit of divestment, we will take decisive action to disrupt the status quo."
Such rhetoric is par for the course for the GEO, which has directed its members to participate in "die-in demonstrations" meant to "remind [the] admin of their complicity in genocide" and push them toward "complete divestment from the zionist entity."
It was in Michigan, meanwhile, that the UAW rose to power representing the state's once-thriving auto industry. Now, the union is undergoing a seismic shift. Roughly 100,000 of its registered members—about 25 percent of the UAW's total membership—are academic workers. The graduate students and postdocs have helped revive the union, which has consistently bled members since the 1970s.
"The UAW is shifting its focus from blue collars to white ones," said Jarrett Skorup of the Michigan-based Mackinac Center for Public Policy. And while that shift can be seen at the national level—the UAW as a whole endorsed an Israeli ceasefire just weeks after Hamas's Oct. 7 terror attack—its University of California chapter has taken its activism further. During the 2023 strike, for example, the union's website hosted pages that read, "How can UC engage in the broader protest movement?" and alleged that UC "unilaterally changed its policies to crush" illegal encampments.
The union nonetheless maintained that its strike centered on working condition concerns, arguing that new protest restrictions violated its contract with the UC system. Tenured professors like Gabriel Rossman disagreed. Though Rossman said faculty members generally supported the union's strikes in the past, they reacted differently during the anti-Israel strike.
"I was hearing a lot of like, 'This is bulls—t,' kind of quiet grumbling, you know, about the second strike," Rossman told the Free Beacon. "It was not about [labor]. It was about basically having the university drop all charges against SJP," a reference to the notorious anti-Israel group, Students for Justice in Palestine.
The UAW has significant influence on the UC system, particularly at UCLA. UAW 4811 boasts 48,000 members across the 11 UC system campuses, including 36,000 student employees, 7,000 postdocs, and 5,000 academic researchers.
"They have a huge amount of power at the university," Rossman said. "You know, whenever you look at official communications from the university administration, they always refer to our partners at the UAW."
"There's a recognition that—given the reality that TAs, post-docs, RAs will generally follow a union vote on striking or not, and given the realities of labor law, that can cause a lot of legal trouble for the university if the university pushes back against that in some way—the UAW has a lot of power."
UAW Chapter 4811, UAW national, GEO, AFT, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the University of Michigan did not respond to requests for comment.