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Text of Major Declaration following the Kuala Lumpur Peace Forum, 15-17 December 2005

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The woman was shot and wounded after she tried to stab soldiers stationed at the Tapuah junction.

By World Israel News Staff

An Israeli woman was shot and injured after attempting to stab soldiers in the in Samaria on Friday evening, in what appeared to be a suicide attempt, the IDF reported.

The woman, who was dressed as a Palestinian, approached troops stationed at the Tapuah junction and tried to stab them, prompting the soldiers to open fire to neutralize the threat, the IDF said. She was shot in her lower body and was subsequently taken to a hospital in moderate condition. No IDF personnel were injured during this incident.

The incident occurred amid a backdrop of heightened tensions in the area following a series of fatal Palestinian terror shootings, including one in Eli, 6 miles from Tapuah Junction, which claimed the lives of four people on Tuesday.

Friday’s incident at Tapuah Junction comes weeks after a similar case involving a young Israeli woman, Livnat Green, who was shot dead at a checkpoint last month in an apparent “suicide by cop” scenario.

Green was shot dead by IDF troops after she ran at soldiers at the Metzadot Yehuda checkpoint in the south Hebron hills, waving an airgun while dressed head to toe in black, including a hijab, and yelling “Allahu Akbar”, arabic for God is great.
Prior to the incident, the young woman appeared to make her intentions clear to a friend over WhatsApp.

“If someone wants to die, an ordinary Jew, an Israeli, wearing Arab clothes, runs with a fake airsoft gun toward a checkpoint in the territories, shouts Allahu akbar because he wants to be shot because he wants to die, and then they only get shot in the legs and he stays alive, do you [put] them in prison for that? And if so, for how long and for what charge?” she asked the friend, who then reported their conversation to authorities about an hour and a half before the incident.

However, the news did not reach that particular checkpoint in time. “She sent me a picture of her wearing a hijab and a picture of a gun and asked me what would happen if she was only shot in the legs, I didn’t know if she was serious but I said I would report anyway,” the friend told Channel 12 news.

“She told me she was on the bus and going to the checkpoint to carry out an attack and go kill herself,” he said.

“I said I wouldn’t take any chances and called the police, I sent them the photo she sent me an hour and a half before the attack. Maybe her life could have been saved,” he added.

The incident occurred amid heightened tensions after the IDF killed three senior leaders of the Islamic Jihad terrorist organization.

Green, who suffered from mental health issues, had once been taken in by former prime minister Naftali Bennett and his family.

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Nasser Bourita said Morocco rejects settlement construction and stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people. 

By Andrew Bernard, Algemeiner

Morocco’s Foreign Minister Nasser Bourita on Friday announced the postponement of a summit meeting between Israel, the US, and four Arab countries, citing problems with the current “political context” in Israel.

This year’s Negev Forum, named after the desert location of the 2022 meeting of the foreign ministers of Israel, the United States, Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Egypt, was due to be held in Morocco in July. Speaking at a press conference Friday alongside the Swiss foreign minister, Bourita said that given the ongoing violence in Judea and Samaria, the summit could not achieve its intended result of increased cooperation between Israel and the four Arab states.

“The Negev Forum was the bearer of the idea of cooperation, of appeasement, of dialogue,” Bourita said. “And which is contrary to all provocative actions, all unilateral actions, and all decisions made by radicals on both sides, and especially on the Israeli side in relation to the occupied Arab territory.”

“Unilateral actions” is a term frequently used to describe Israeli settlement construction. Israel on Sunday put forward plans to approve thousands of new housing units in Judea and Samaria. Following the Hamas terrorist attack on the settlement of Eli that killed four Israeli civilians, Israeli media have reported that the government will expand that settlement by retroactively legalizing three settler outposts that Israel had previously regarded as illegal.

Bourita said Morocco rejects settlement construction and stands in solidarity with the Palestinian people. While Bourita did not set a date for when the Negev Forum might convene, he said it could be held in the autumn should the political context improve.

The announcement comes as ties between Israel and Morocco had been improving. Israel’s National Security Advisor Tzachi Hanegbi and Speaker of Parliament Amir Ohana visited Morocco on 7 June, one of the most senior Israeli delegations to visit the country since the two established normal relations in 2020. During a visit to Morocco in May, Israeli Transport Minister Miri Regev told i24 news that Israel would soon take a position on Moroccan sovereignty over the disputed Western Sahara territory.

Israel’s domestic politics and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have nonetheless caused diplomatic friction between Israel, the United States, and the signatories to the 2020 Abraham Accords, which normalized relations between Israel and several Arab countries. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has had to cancel or postpone five visits to the United Arab Emirates, most recently in January following Israeli National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir’s visit to the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. Netanyahu has also yet to receive an invitation to visit Washington, DC, with President Biden saying in March that Netanyahu would not be invited “in the near term” as part of US criticism of Israel’s planned judicial reform package.

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Kristel Candelario, a 31-year-old mother from Cleveland, Ohio, was taken into custody on June 18th and has been charged with murder concerning the death of her 16-month-old daughter, Jailyn.

On June 16th, Candelario came home to find her daughter unresponsive. She told police that she had traveled to Michigan and Puerto Rico while leaving her daughter alone at home for ten days. When she returned, it was discovered that the playpen that Jailyn was left in was filled with filthy blankets and was saturated with urine and feces.

A press release from the Cleveland Police Department said that no signs of trauma were observed. The Cuyahoga County Medical Examiner’s Office stated that Jailyn had died due to being left alone and unattended for ten days.

Neighbors told WKYC that they had taken care of Jailyn in the past and wished Candelario would have asked them to watch her instead. Candelario worked as a building substitute at Citizens Academy Glenville, an elementary school in Cleveland, since November 2022.

Upon hearing of the arrest, the school released a statement to the media. It announced that Candelario had been terminated from her position. Candelario is currently held in the Cuyahoga County Jail on a $1 million bond. It is unknown whether she has entered a plea or has obtained an attorney to represent her.

Survivors said Isidor refused to get on a lifeboat when women and children were still waiting to be rescued and Ida stayed with her husband.

By Shiryn Ghermezian, Algemeiner

Stockton Rush, who piloted the OceanGate tourist submersible called Titan that went to explore the RMS Titanic shipwreck and went missing and then imploded, killing Rush and his four passengers, was married to a descendent of a Jewish couple who was among the wealthiest people to die aboard the ocean liner when it sank in 1912, The New York Times reported.

Rush, who was also the CEO and founder of OceanGate, was 61 when pronounced dead on Thursday by the US Coast Guard after his vessel was found in pieces at the bottom of the North Atlantic Ocean near the Titanic shipwreck this week. His wife, Wendy Rush, is the great-great granddaughter of the late retail giant Isidor Straus and his wife Ida. Isidor co-owned the Macy’s department store and was married to Ida for four decades.

One of Isidor and Ida’s daughters, Minnie, married Dr. Richard Weil in 1905 and their son, Richard Weil Jr., who was Wendy’s grandfather, later become president of Macy’s New York.

When the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in April 1912, the Straus’ reportedly chose to go down together, arm in arm, on the sinking ship, The New York Times explained. Survivors said Isidor refused to get on a lifeboat when women and children were still waiting to be rescued and Ida stayed with her husband, insisting that she would not leave him behind.

Isidor’s body was found at sea several weeks later while Ida’s was never recovered, according to The New York Times. Roughly 700 people survived the sinking of the Titanic out of the approximately 2,200 passengers and crew on board the ship, The Associated Press reported.

James Cameron, who directed Titanic, featured a fictional version of Isidor and Ida in his 1997 movie about the sinking ship by including a scene toward the end of the film that shows an older couple lying in bed and embracing each other as the waters rise around them on the ocean liner.

Wendy married Stockton in 1986 and in 2009, he founded OceanGate Inc., a private Washington-based company that provides crewed submersibles for commercial, research and military purposes. This was Titan’s third journey to the Titanic.

After the Titan was reported missing on Sunday night, an international rescue mission was launched immediately. There were additional concerns about the vessel’s passengers running out of their oxygen supply by Thursday morning. Search efforts continued on Thursday for clues to explain what happened to the submersible after it imploded underwater, the AP reported. Rear Adm. John Mauger, of the First Coast Guard District, told the news outlet that the likelihood of finding or recovering remains was unknown.

Others who died aboard the Titan include British billionaire Hamish Harding, French Titanic expert Paul-Henri Nargeolet, prominent Pakistan businessman Dawood and his son. There were no survivors.

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The newly passed HB 2127 is yet another attempt by the GOP-controlled state legislature to impose minority rule over the state of Texas. It’s the working class that will pay the price — and the working class that must organize to fight back.

Texas governor Greg Abbott speaks during a news conference at the Texas State Capitol on June 8, 2023 in Austin, Texas. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)

Just days after Governor Greg Abbott signed HB 2127 into law in Texas, a thirty-five-year-old lineman died of heatstroke while trying to restore power to Texans after a major storm. Another man in Dallas died of heat exhaustion while working for the US Postal Service just days after that. Texas is among the most dangerous places to work in the country. From absent and under-enforced labor laws to the scalding heat, millions of Texans are under threat just trying to make a living. Unfortunately, HB 2127 will make it harder to protect Texas workers.

HB 2127 is a sweeping “preemption” bill that bars cities and localities from passing city ordinances in a huge array of policy areas defined in state code. The legislation’s broad power grab jeopardizes popular, sometimes lifesaving local policies, including water break and heat safety mandates for construction workers in cities like Austin and Dallas.

HB 2127, labeled the “Death Star Bill” by the Texas AFL-CIO, will go into effect on September 1. The bill will block cities and local governments from passing regulations on issues like labor protections, housing, and health care. Effectively, it will bar local governments in Texas from governing, hampering democracy in the state.

The legislation’s specific contours will have to be fought out and defined in court cases. What’s already clear is that it’s part of a larger trend of minority rule, removing power from everyday Texans and concentrating it under Abbott and the Texas GOP. Sweeping preemption stacks onto gerrymandered electoral maps, Republican-controlled legislative committees, the governor’s veto, partisan voter suppression, and conservative-held higher courts.

Despite the heavy blow, it’s imperative for working-class Texans to recognize that they can take advantage of their critical position in the Texas economy. The GOP likes to tout the economic successes of Texas using abstractions like the “business climate.” But it’s workers, not rich politicians and business owners, who make the economy run — and that means workers have power.

What Is HB 2127?

HB 2127 author Republican Dustin Burrow describes the legislation as a “stay in your lane bill,” arguing that regulations passed at the local level put an unfair burden on businesses to comply with a “patchwork” of policies. By creating consistency, in the words of Burrows and his supporters, the bill will ensure that business owners in Texas aren’t overburdened by regulation. The real rationale for the bill is obvious: the GOP has a gridlock on the state legislature, but not on local governments, and the bill shifts the balance of power in the favor of Republicans and corporate elites.

The broadly written bill prohibits cities and localities from passing local regulations on any subject that state code supersedes. Beyond the jargon and economic euphemisms, HB 2127 will undo measures that provide worker protection, renters’ rights, safeguards against lending abuse, and more.

One provision in HB 2127 also threatens local politicians directly. It strips elected officials of qualified immunity and can make them liable for lawsuits. Currently, in a lawsuit over policy, the city would be the party being sued. This change means that individual mayors and city council members can be sued and held personally liable, which will have a major chilling effect on elected officials willing to pursue progressive and pro-worker legislation.

While the Texas Legislature is taking away power from cities and localities, it is empowering the weaponization of courts on a partisan political map. As included in the bill, “change in venue” provisions mean that an elected official in Travis County, which Biden carried with over 70 percent percent of the vote, could be sued in Burnet County, where Trump won with over 76 percent of the vote. Litigation can start in counties contiguous to the original harm — and with the exception of the Rio Grande Valley, a red county touches basically every blue county in Texas.

It’s already difficult to motivate elected officials in safe blue cities to pursue progressive legislation. Personal liability in partisan courts means that even our more progressive and grassroots-based elected officials may be hesitant to put themselves personally at risk, and that movements may lose key allies and their bully pulpit in pushing for ballot propositions.

In a cruel coincidence, Abbott signed the bill during a historic heat wave, with temperatures climbing well above one hundred degrees across the state. The full picture of heat-related deaths in Texas is not known: misreporting of workplace deaths, like the death of Antelmo Ramirez at the Tesla Gigafactory near Austin, obscures the full picture. Even so, Texas leads the country in worker deaths from heat exposure.

Barring a legal challenge to the bill, mandated water breaks in Austin and Dallas are likely to be rolled back once the bill goes into effect on September 1. As for cities like San Antonio, where local movements have been pushing for these commonsense mandates, the bill will likely block them from going into effect. There is no federal standard for protection for workers from the risks of heat-related injuries in labor-intensive work, nor are there protections for workers at the state level in Texas. The bill could mean that the ability to pass labor laws will belong solely to the Texas Legislature, a body that has shown virtually zero interest in workers’ issues.

While Republicans dominate the Texas Legislature and statewide offices, progressives in Texas have been making significant gains in the state’s major cities and largely populated counties. Recent successes range from the decriminalization of marijuana to paid sick leave to water breaks. While the GOP is able to maintain its grip on power at the state level through gerrymandering and the weakness of the Texas Democratic Party, it’s threatened by the growing victories of the progressive movement at the local level.

In the most recent legislative session, there were multiple attempts to curtail local democracy, from a failed attempt to take away home rule in Austin, to the successful passage of HB 17, which will allow Texas courts to remove elected prosecutors (a response to prominent Texas cities’ district attorneys not prosecuting people for abortions). HB 2127 is the most recent — and most brazen — attempt to deny millions of Texans their right to local democracy.

How to Fight Back

The preemption bill will certainly have a chilling effect on the progressive strategy of using local government to get victories that aren’t yet possible at the Texas Legislature. We don’t know yet how local politicians and city and district attorneys will respond. But Texas’s working class can’t wait. We must fight back with various tactics, best when combined, to break the impasse.

HB 2127 has been framed by both supporters and detractors as local control versus regulatory consistency. Accepting the Right’s framing is a losing strategy. HB 2127 is about a minority attempting to overrule a majority. The vast majority of Texans now live in cities; according to the US Census, 90 percent of Texans live in urban areas. While the war on major cities may play well in Texas GOP primaries, it poses a major harm to ordinary working-class people.

Cities across the world have played a unique political role in the last decade, offering unprecedented resistance to exploitation and oppression, and Texas is no exception. Texas cities and local governments are capable of presenting a united front in their dissent against this disastrous bill, as they did when the legislature attacked sanctuary cities, when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, and during the effort to protect mask mandates in schools to stop the spread of COVID-19. Lining up concurrent lawsuits so that HB 2127 is subjected to multiple legal challenges at once is one way to throw this obscure bill into open conflict in front of the public. Coordination of this kind, if done right, can polarize the city-versus-state, majority-versus-minority power struggle in ways that can be capitalized on by community organizations, rank-and-file labor unions, and grassroots media.

Workers must also recognize the special role that they play in the state economy, and the power that comes with it. Texas is a massive economy: if it were its own nation it would have the ninth largest economy in the world, as the Texas GOP loves to point this out. But this success does not come from politicians. It comes from millions of workers, who are predominantly living in the state’s major cities. From Toyota workers in San Antonio, to ExxonMobil workers in Beaumont, to Amazon and UPS employees across Texas, workers from all over the state can win concessions from their employers even if city governments are unable to mandate them.

We should support statewide and national efforts like the Teamsters’ fight to win air-conditioning in their upcoming contract with UPS. And should they strike in the event of a failure to reach a deal with basic safety, fair wages, and dignity intact, Texans should take note of the confrontation. Legislation is not the only way to win protections. Sometimes the fight must take place between workers and employers directly.

Democratic socialists and progressives across Texas will need to link their movements — from El Paso to Beaumont, Brownsville to Dallas — and fight on multiple fronts, including both the electoral and labor arenas. Texas has a radical history, from the pecan-sheller strikes in San Antonio to the Fence Cutting Wars to the early Texas socialist party. These movements all had to take on entrenched capitalists and hostile state governments to win victories for working-class Texans. Our fight today is the same.

At the University of Washington, 2,400 postdocs and academic researchers went on strike and won raises. We talked to two workers about walking out, in the face of what they describe as attempts by UW to intimidate and retaliate against strikers.

University of Washington academic workers on strike, June 12, 2023. (Kerry Lannert / Twitter)

On Wednesday, June 7, 2,400 academic workers walked off the job at the University of Washington in Seattle for six days. About nine hundred postdocs represented by United Auto Workers (UAW) 4121 Academic Workers and 1,400 researcher scientists/engineers (RSEs) represented by University of Washington (UW) Researchers United–UAW were striking in response to what they describe as bad-faith bargaining by the university. Academic workers complained in particular about the university’s trying to unilaterally reclassify some employees as hourly workers in order to avoid paying them a higher minimum salary as required by Washington state law. The strike continues the wave of labor militancy that’s been crashing across US universities, including a massive strike in the University of California system last fall that UW workers say inspired their own walkout.

Workers suspended their strike on Thursday, June 15, after the unions reached tentative agreements (TAs) with the university; on June 20, members of both UAW 4121 and UW Researchers United voted overwhelmingly to ratify the agreements, which included significant pay raises for postdocs and researchers. Jacobin’s Sara Wexler spoke with postdoc Sora Kim and researcher Jai Broome after the TAs were released to discuss why they went on strike, how the university responded, and what the workers won.

Sara Wexler

What led to the decision to strike?

Jai Broome

I’ve been on the bargaining committee or on the organizing committee [for UW Researchers United] since 2020. The administration did its damnedest to slow us down and put us in a less powerful bargaining position every step of the way.

Before bargaining started, we were at majority card check. Rather than a) voluntarily recognize us, which it absolutely could have done, or b), just let the state of Washington count the cards and confirm we were at majority, the university challenged the inclusion of around three hundred workers in our bargaining unit, which happened to be just above the 20 percent threshold that, in the state of Washington, means it couldn’t count the cards; it needed to resolve these challenges before it could determine if we had majority.

That was the end of the year 2021. It took us until June of 2022 to finally win our union recognition. UW was able to drag its feet so long with these challenges that we voluntarily agreed to an election, because we knew we could out organize them. We won the election with a supermajority, and the state has since resolved these challenges. Of the three hundred workers the university challenged, it was only about three workers that ended up not belonging to our bargaining unit. It was just a blatant union-busting tactic by them.

Before the research scientist bargaining team started bargaining, there were a number of former postdocs who had bargained with the University of Washington before and understand the lengths it’ll go to keep us from asserting our right to a democratic workplace. Besides the stubbornness and unwillingness to agree to many articles or versions of articles that would substantially make the lives of research scientists better, the university broke Washington state labor law during negotiations by making unilateral changes to the working conditions of a group of workers in our bargaining unit.

Sora Kim

For me personally, the skyrocketing cost of living in the city of Seattle has been really hard, and the bad-faith bargaining in response to our demands for a living wage. The issue here was that for postdocs in science, we don’t [get overtime pay]. As a postdoc, I’m working at least fifty, sixty hours a week, and the Minimum Wage Act in Washington stipulates that there’s an amount of money every year that you’re going to get if you are overtime exempt. [Every year until this TA, the University of Washington has classified postdocs as salaried overtime-exempt workers, making their salaries above the minimum threshold determined by the state of Washington. This year the threshold was raised to $65,000; in response the university was trying to classify some postdocs as eligible for overtime so it wouldn’t have to raise their salaries above $65,000.]

The fact that the University of Washington’s labor relations team and its bargaining team were not interested at all in following the law made me feel that I needed to take action.

The fact that UW’s labor relations team and its bargaining team were not interested at all in following the law made me feel that I needed to take action and to demonstrate that this is a huge issue. I need to afford rent; I need to afford basic human needs, to make ends meet.

Jai Broome

[The Minimum Wage Act in Washington is structured] to put upward pressure on wages for salaried workers, not just hourly employees. The thinking is, if you earn less than a certain amount, you have to be eligible to earn time and a half.

So, if you’re a salaried employee just above, say, the 2022 pay threshold, you’re not tracking your hours. The threshold was moved up at the beginning of 2023. There’s a group of workers whose salary was in between those two thresholds. Rather than bargain about how to handle these cases, the University of Washington unilaterally moved all of those affected workers to hours tracking. It’s more feasible for certain workers than others in the RSE camp. But it’s just totally not workable for postdocs.

Both units filed unfair labor practices (ULPs) [about this issue]. About the ULP: I think it’s important to talk about how the University of Washington broke labor law, but also, this is a law designed to get more workers a living wage. This was a way for the University of Washington to get out of paying wages to workers.

Sara Wexler

Could you give me a brief timeline of the organizing around this? When did bargaining start, and when did the idea of a strike start to spread?

Sora Kim

Our contract expired in January of 2023. Before that contract expired, there were several months when our bargaining team and the University of Washington admin’s bargaining team were in negotiations. These sessions had been very unproductive. Administration was going through a mediator, a third party — we weren’t actually coming to the table together. Administration was communicating through this third-party negotiator who was trying to communicate to each of the parties asynchronously, so negotiations dragged on, and I think they really only took off in the spring.

So the contract had been expired for now at least three to four months. April is when I started hearing more from our postdoc bargaining team about the situation, and how it felt that it wasn’t looking promising that UW’s bargaining team was even going to consider having the next salary increase be overtime exempt.

In the beginning of May, the union started to come together in true grassroots fashion. I started getting emails informing me about the situation. I started asking more people who were sending those emails, and then I started roping in people around me — people in my lab, people on my floor — and spreading the word through word of mouth. Also, we had a lot of emails go out trying to educate as many of the union members as possible about the situation.

Jai Broome

We had a pretty quick turnaround once we wanted to conduct the strike authorization vote. Both bargaining units conducted their strike-authorization votes concurrently on February 23.

Seeing how little the University of Washington was willing to move on some of the articles that were most important to us, it became very clear that we would need to escalate to the point of a strike and likely beyond. A really encouraging thing for me, watching this as an organizer, is that we had more people vote to go on strike than voted to form a union. It’s hard to gauge exact numbers on the picket lines, but people who were previously in the camp of “Unions are good, but I don’t think I want to go on strike” were ready to keep striking after research scientists got their TA and postdocs hadn’t gotten theirs yet.

We had more people vote to go on strike than voted to form a union.

Sara Wexler

What were your core demands?

Sora Kim

For postdocs, the main sticking point was this overtime-exempt salary, and then a continuance of our existing benefits.

In terms of secondary demands: there are different classes of postdocs in terms of job categories. The university makes a distinction between postdoctoral scholars, postdoctoral fellows who have independent funding — they have fellowships that they’ve applied to, and these fellowships then pay money to the university and the university disburses them — and then a third category of postdocs called “paid direct.” Paid-direct postdocs have the least amount of support from the university by far. These are postdocs whose funding sources pay them directly.

The university has not really treated all three categories of postdocs equitably; I get different benefits than a postdoctoral fellow, and the same is true for paid-direct postdocs. That was also something the union was trying to push for — parity. If we’re all postdocs, we should be getting the same benefits. In our TA, we were able to get fellows at least to the overtime-exempt salary by 2024. We weren’t able to get our full demands there, but we got increases in support for those paid-direct postdocs.

Jai Broome

By the time we went on strike, we had already secured a great improvement to the salary floor of each job class in the research scientist unit. Three things were still on the table for research scientists: across-the-board raises for those whose wages weren’t bumped up by the salary floor, a $90,000-a-year childcare assistance fund, and inclusion in a program that was already won by other bargaining units in my local — it’s a peer-led sexual harassment prevention program, peer-designed, with a very good data-driven track record at making workplaces safer. It’s designed to make workplaces safer, not shield the bosses from liability, which I would argue is the point of any sexual harassment program voluntarily implemented by the bosses.

Sara Wexler

How did the University of Washington respond to the strike?

Sora Kim

There was a lot of misinformation and misrepresentation and distortion of not only what our union representatives have said or have done, but also of the law. One of the things that happened very early back in May, when we were all thinking about when we would strike, was that UW president Ana Mari Cauce wrote a letter to L&I [Labor & Industries, the Washington state agency in charge of labor standards] pleading with it that postdocs are like medical residents and therefore we should be exempt from the Minimum Wage Act requirements.

There was a lot of misinformation and misrepresentation and distortion by the University of Washington of not only what our union representatives have said or have done, but also of the law.

What was really telling was when she received a response — and the union was copied on this response — saying, “No, postdocs are not medical residents because they do not treat patients,” which is true. I am not a licensed medical practitioner. I’ve never gone into a hospital clinic to ever see a patient in my life. The email showed that we are not exempt from this law. That’s one very concrete example that got my unit just perplexed. This is a law that went into effect in 2016, and up until this contract the university had basically played by the rules.

During the strike, hours-tracking employees were retaliated against by the university. Normally, if you’re in an hours-tracking position, you would be logging your hours [in UW’s tracking system]. But multiple people, including postdocs, received emails saying that they should be reporting any vacation time. [What these emails conveyed was that] if you’re participating in any of these strike activities, that you would be taking it as unpaid leave.

People later received communications from the HR system that they had requested unpaid leave, which was not true. Someone on the back end was forcibly overriding their hours reporting and saying that the employees had requested unpaid leave. This sowed a lot of panic among a lot of our unit members, because that has major implications for whether you’ll be paid during that pay period.

The university sent a memo out saying that it had to report any members who were on visas to the Department of Labor for participating in union activities. This drummed up a lot of outrage from the greater community.

The third example I’ll bring up, which received some publicity, was that the university sent a memo out saying that it had to report any postdocs or members who were on visas to the Department of Labor for participating in union activities. That interpretation of the law is very misleading, because nowhere does it say that it has to do that. This really drummed up a lot of outrage from the greater community that the university is really trying to intimidate as many people as possible into not participating.

Jai Broome

One of the articles that the university had dug its heels in the most was about wages and compensation. We actually saw movement; just the fact that we were organizing around turnout for the strike-authorization vote was able to move it. Following the results of the strike-authorization vote, where overwhelming majorities of both units voted to authorize a strike, we saw further movement, but not enough to let the university off the hook and call it a day.

A big part of this process that radicalized people and gave them the strength and endurance to stay on the picket line was when, on the first day of the strike, several departments with a large number of postdocs sent messages that were intentionally vague and threatening to international workers out to workers in both bargaining units. The message they sent out was intended to convey — and was indeed interpreted this way by a large number of the recipients — that if you’re a worker on a visa and you go on strike, the University of Washington will report to the government that you’re on strike.

The law is something like, if you’re a workplace that employs workers on visa and there’s a strike, you have to let the Department of Labor know. It does not say that you have to turn over a list of your striking employees to the government, which is what they intended to convey with this vague language. That was the message received by a good number of the recipients.

I talked with people who at first said, “My union says we’re going on strike, so I’ll go on strike and sign up for picket shifts the first three days. But if it goes on much longer than that, I don’t know how much pay I want to lose or how far I want to get behind on my work.” Then they see that message go out, threatening their international colleagues, and they’re immediately like, “No, I’m staying on the picket line until we get ours.”

At a strategic level, I think it was a pretty clear attempt to drive a wedge between research scientists and postdocs. Very few research scientists are on visas because of the way the University of Washington currently decides how to sponsor visas, but about 40 percent of postdocs are on visas.

Sara Wexler

What was it like being on strike?

Sora Kim

It was scary because this is my first time being in a union period. I didn’t know going into this at all how it was going to play out. This was definitely the longest strike for our local chapter because prior to this, most of the other strikes in our union’s history had been only a single day.

I was thinking about it in terms of, “Well, the UC strike lasted forty days. It was a really long time.” So I was worried about whether I would be able to afford my basic expenses. Our union provides $500 of strike pay per week. But I was worried how long I’d be able to last on that. I didn’t know what to expect.

I feel like I gained more things than I lost through the process. I got to meet so many people; I felt this sense of civic engagement that I, frankly, generally don’t feel. I felt like I was working toward a better good, not just for our unit, but also in the grand scheme of the larger movement of academic union workers and unions striking across the country, and now across the world in the UK and Scotland.

Jai Broome

It’s exhilarating, it’s exhausting, it’s emotionally draining, it’s uplifting. One of those things I’ve had people telling me for years, while I’ve been doing this organizing, is that it’s super important to the success of the strike to have people who have been through the motions before; they have practiced carrying out a successful strike. And I was like, “Yeah, sure, that makes sense.” But actually going through it, it’s just like, “Oh man, this is so damn complicated,” and we pulled it off. I’m so glad that the next time research scientists are bargaining contracts, we’re going to have hundreds of workers in our union who have recent experience carrying out a successful strike.

I’m so glad that the next time research scientists are bargaining contracts, we’re going to have hundreds of workers in our union who have recent experience carrying out a successful strike.

Sara Wexler

Anything else to add?

Jai Broome

Research scientists and postdocs very clearly benefited from being able to bargain at the same time. We were able to do minimal joint bargaining, where both our bargaining teams had people at the tables at the same time, but we collaborated with each other every step of the way. The strength of the RSE contract is made possible by the nine hundred postdocs bargaining concurrently with us. Similarly, the deal postdocs got, I don’t think would’ve been attainable if they’d been bargaining by themselves.

This is a huge own goal by the University of Washington; it could have avoided this entirely. We were at majority at the end of 2021. It could have recognized us, then bargained a contract, and had it ratified before postdocs were bargaining. Instead, UW dragged its feet every step of the way — so long that research scientists and postdocs were at the bargaining table at the same time.

We saw the strength of multiple bargaining units bargaining and striking at the same time in our sibling locals at the University of California: UAW Locals 2865 and 5810. That was a result of a multiyear organizing effort to get the contract expirations to line up. I think it’s hard to overemphasize how important that was.

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