Recollections on the March 4th Experience in Santa Cruz
March 4th, 2010 saw the most widespread coordinated resistance to the advance of neo-liberal capitalism in the U.S. to date. The associated press estimated that millions of students, workers, teachers, and community members took action to fight back for a defense of public education. These masses were centered in California, which gave the call for a statewide day of action, but solidarity poured out from around the nation and around the globe. Uncountable more are facing the same conditions of cutbacks, fee hikes, and layoffs: all symptoms of the privatization of public systems in an organized attempt to increase the rate of accumulation for the ruling class in the midst of stagnant production; not just in education but in the entire global public sector.
However, the call for March 4th, made at a conference of over 800 students, workers, teachers, and community members in Berkeley on October 24, 2009, was for a Strike! and Day of Action. Though the Day of Action was larger than I think many thought imaginable, only one strike, where all labor came to a complete stop at a certain workplace, occurred on March 4, at the University of California at Santa Cruz. There are many reasons why this is true, some more debatable than others, but before we look at that, let us first provide a brief overview of what the process of building a strike looked like, so that there is a firm basis to compare ours to other experiences.
the prehistory
To start with, it must be pointed out that UCSC had a relatively high level of mobilization coming out of the fall. Though we never had the thousands who mobilized in Berkeley on September 24 and November 18-20th, the campus was by no means silent through the fall. The Sept. 24 rally and picket saw hundreds of students ready to fight back from the very first day of classes. Later that day there was an occupation of the Graduate Student Commons that brought a lot of excitement (and dancing) to the movement. Nov. 18-20th saw a protest and march escalate to a shut down of the main entrance to campus for a few hours, to an open occupation of Kresge Town Hall, to a open and then closed occupation of the main administration building on campus, Kerr Hall. Thus the strike committee was called for at an open General Assembly with over a hundred participants, many of them full of excitement over the recent weeks’ actions. Though only 8 folks came out for the first meeting of the strike committee, they met in the midst of power, certainly different conditions than might exist on many other campuses.
However, to argue that Santa Cruz is just full of radicals who are down and represents an exceptional case is a clear simplification. Certainly Santa Cruz has made a name for itself as somewhat of a center for left organizing in recent years, and has attracted many radicals. But the end of the 2008-09 school year had left the campus extremely demobilized. A compromise contract between the U.C. and AFSCME 3299 after two years of organizing left the student-worker movement without clear direction, and many with a sour taste in the mouths towards labor organizing early in the year. The budget cuts fightback at the end of 08-09 was fairly weak and divided; though the popular community studies program was shredded, a clearly political campaign of pink slips for left faculty and lecturers became clear, student of color resource centers budgets were threatened, along with the women’s and queer centers, and student fees rose an unprecedented 10 percent, all in the midst of massive almost-monthly bailouts for the very rich, no successful fightback coalesced. Tension over demands and tactics, often between predominantly white organizing bodies and student of color organizations, was a roadblock the movement was unable to cross. A series of protests and rallies took place, and the Student of Color Collective staged a multi-day hunger strike, all of which failed to win significant demands, or maintain a particularly strong united front.
In this context, the actions of fall 2009 were a blessing and a curse. Though the represented the real anger of students over the situation and their refusal to sit back and do nothing, many of the fall actions were characterized by reaction to the previous year. Fed up with long, tense and unproductive meetings, many organizers of the fall actions tended to fetishize “direct action” over the political strength that can only come with mass movement building. Though the actions excited many students, they oftentimes failed to provide open and democratic decision making spaces, with much of the power coming from informal networks of friends, which tended to alienate those unfamiliar with the left. Furthermore, many criticized the appeared fetishism of illegal actions, and noted that “radical” actions that often attracted police presence could be less accessible to folks with less privilege. Lastly, the fall actions failed on the whole to involve workers and faculty in anything more than supporting roles, they remained isolated to the student anti-cuts and anti-hikes sentiment.
Thus those eight folks who sat down at that first strike committee meeting had their work cut out for them. They were opposed on one side by the bulk of the movement’s “radicals” who scoffed at the idea of “only a one-day strike”, and were clearly bored by the idea of talking about March way back in January, when there was so much more interesting things to be doing in the meantime. On the other hand, the course of fall’s actions had burned some bridges to the rest of the campus community, bridges that would have to be rebuilt in order to create the level of mass participation necessary for an actual strike.
the organizing strengths
Though there was a lot of work to come, those few students had already come further than students on many other campuses would come, because they had an organizing body dedicated to building a strike. This was an incalculably essential development. If the organizing effort had stayed in coalition spaces or open general assemblies, the strike would not have become what it was. The meetings of the strike committee were open and democratic, however we did not waste a whole lot of time with anything that wouldn’t build for the strike on march 4th. Though the original call for the day had been for a Strike and Day of Action, it was the strike committee’s firm orientation towards building a strike and nothing else that made the Santa Cruz action what it was. We were constantly presented with opportunities to lose that focus, from faculty telling us that going to Sacramento was the only non-elitist action, to students arguing for ending the strike line to march downtown for a community rally. The phrase, “That sounds awesome, but this space is for building a strike on march 4th,” came up again and again, illustrating neatly the importance of having that space. In the Santa Cruz context, it was essential that we eliminate the “and day of action” clause from our organizing space, and focus only on the building of the most powerful strike we could build.
The strike committee made an early commitment to focus in a clear manner (and at times exclusively) on outreach. We spent hours and hours at different points around campus getting students to sign a “strike pledge”, which served more as a tool to stop students and others and actually have a real conversation than it was an attempt at getting binding commitments to strike. It also built our email and phone number database. We covered the campus with fliers. We coordinated announcements in classrooms and at events. We maintained a consistent presence at labor meetings, engaging with labor leaders and rank and file workers about the potential for stopping all work on campus without a bureaucracy-sanctioned strike. We used various tools to attempt to open up lines of communication with student of color organizations, from attendance at events and meetings, to sending out a letter to all the organizations explaining our thoughts and questions, to holding a solidarity forum as an open space for discussion on race and privilege in the budget cuts movement. This focus on outreach gave a real and material dynamic to the otherwise empty phrase, “open and democratic meeting,” and was crucial to the success of the strike. Early participation from rank and file workers from bus drivers and custodians to lecturers to faculty to unionized grad student t.a.’s gave the meetings a multi-tendency dynamic, without coalition-style tensions, and made sure the meetings were never crippled by a lack of information as to what one or another group was doing.
The strike committee soon superseded the earlier general assemblies as the central organizing body of the campus. An important factor in this process was that the strike committee established a clearer and more democratic structure for its meeting. Majority rules, but after yes and no votes were counted, we asked for “blocks” and a block vote from 10% or more could return an item to debate, making sure no significant dissent was ignored. The General Assembly was unable to decide on a clear decision making process, and decided to just remain as a, “meeting space for the whole movement.” The fact that the meetings had no power to get things done soon meant that not a lot of “the whole movement” had any reason to come out to the general assemblies, and the strike committee was the more decisive organizing body.
By far the most important innovation of the strike committee was to focus from the beginning more on a “direct action” definition of a strike then on bureaucratic support for the strike. Instead of trying to get AFSCME 3299 or UAW Local 2865 to officially endorse a strike for March 4th, organizers worked directly with workers to set up a system for non-violently yet forcefully blocking any entrance to work. Worker’s told us, “All we need is to be able to truthfully tell our bosses that we could not physically get to work, and we’re good. It has to be true, because they’ll be watching us, but that’s all we need.” And we organized to make it happen. The UAW local leadership could never have endorsed a strike in the time we had to build March 4th, regardless of whether they would have if they had the time. But by building from the ground up, we were able to get to a place where the UAW local leadership called up the Santa Cruz organizer and said, “What can we do for you? Because in Santa Cruz you guys are really making something powerful happen, and we want to help however we can.” Not only that, but we were able to build a strike where not only did next to no labor occur on campus, but all the workers got paid for the day regardless of the fact that many of them came out to the picket line after they were told they could go home.
You might say, as a janitor shouted to a crowd of a thousand at the noon rally, “You all, every one of you, are the bosses, not the fuckers up there.” But I think the situation was best represented by a conversation I had with an air conditioning contractor who was pissed at us stopping work for the day in the wee hours of the morning on March 4th. ”How dare you!” he said, “you don’t have the right.” ”You’re right,” I said, “We don’t have the right. We have the power.”
the weaknesses
Though the strike committee made huge strides forward in bridging an extremely split campus, more work certainly remains on this front. It is absolutely essential that the entire budget cuts movement remains clear on the fact that those most affected by the cuts are already marginalized working class students and students of color. For this reason, any successful fight back against the cuts will be led by working class students and students of color. However, this fact cannot be conflated with a tailist position towards the often liberal and/or reactionary student of color organizations. Building a successful budget cuts fightback requires reaching out to building the bridges with student of color organizations, but it cannot mean taking leadership from reactionary influences, which can often be affected by close connections between student government, dominant student of color organizations, and the university administration.
The racist attacks on Black students at UCLA and UCSB in the last weeks of February prompted widespread reaction on the parts of black students and allies. At UCSC, a group of predominantly Black students using the slogan “Real Pain, Real Action” planned a rally in the Quarry Plaza on Wednesday February 24th. Many organizers of the strike committee came out in solidarity, which was an important step in building the connections between larger budget cuts movement and the specific “state of emergency” of Black students facing white attacks from other students combined with the further segregation of education due to budget cuts. However, on March 1st, an action called “Assembly followed by MASS ACTION”, which included predominantly white students, focused centrally on the racist attacks and the black state of emergency. Many of the participants of the March 1st action did not make it out to the Feb. 24th action, and the March 1st action had no planning from the Black Student Association on campus or the ‘Real Pain, Real Action’ group. Though the action was not a particularly well-devised way of showing solidarity on its own, it was worsened by a rumor spread an administrator that the group had shouted “real pain, real action”.Neither the truth of whether this group did or did not shout real pain real action, nor the exact nature of how the administrator spread the rumor have been verified by the author at the time of writing. The day exacerbated an already tense relationship between many student of color organizers and the larger budget cuts movement.
The example at Berkeley provided by the Third World Assembly seems to be an important one, and one that many students should look to. What we needed at Santa Cruz was an independent space for organizing centered and lead by students of color, that could have made a link between the larger budget cuts movement and the oft-reactionary student of color organizations. A space of this sort would have made the strike movement at UCSC even stronger. Although March 4 was the largest and most multiracial protest event I’ve seen in my four years at UCSC, the work has just begun.
Another weakness of the March 4th came directly from one of our greatest strengths. It was essential that we focused on outreach in the way we did, but it left the details of the actual day of March 4th a little less well-planned then they should have been.
the day of
“That seems like something that should get decided by the ‘day of’ committee.” The amount of times that phrase was uttered in the strike committee meetings was incredible. The ‘day of’ committee was a subgroup of the strike committee that took on planning the enormous details of transportation, food, communication between entrances, picket captains, two rallies, and a general assembly at the main entrance to finish the day. The massive amount of logistics necessary to make the day of come off as well as it did proves the level of commitment of everyone who came to a ‘day of’ committee.
By 5:00 in the morning on March 4th, both entrances to campus had already been blocked by at least 200 folks (predominantly undergrads and grad students, with a few faculty). Before daybreak, the nerves of everyone on both lines had been well-tested, with a DPR contractor trying to speed past the picket line behind a fire truck, only to be stopped by brave souls putting their bodies on the line on the main entrance, and a prius driver who drove straight at picketers on the west entrance. Numerous other small walking paths and dirt roads were also blocked by strikers. By the time of the first rally (with pancakes!) at 9:00am a much larger crowd had gathered at the main entrance, and the worst of the day’s maniacs had been successfully turned around. A van full of workers managed to drive up a dirt road almost to their worksite before being stopped Tiananmen square style, by a lone grad student on a speedy scooter who got the word in time, allowing the workers to have the excuse they needed to join us on the picket line. At one point a manager must have called the police after his van full of workers (who confirmed in spanish that they had no interest in working as long as they’d get paid) were blocked from entering. The police came by, but they just stood there as the student-strikers let a few managers walk onto campus.
However, the ruling class’s perception of events can never be bounded by reality. Campus Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor Dave Klieger sent out the following email to students in the mid morning.
“Earlier this morning, protest activity at both campus entrances rendered our main campus inaccessible to vehicle traffic. Reports of protesters carrying clubs and knives, smashing a car windshield with a metal pipe, denying a resident of faculty/student housing the right to exit the campus, and keeping a campus health care worker from getting to work, escalated this morning’s protest into behavior that is disruptive, intimidating and destructive. Behavior that degrades into violence, personal intimidation, and disrespect for the rights of others is reprehensible, and does nothing to aid efforts to restore funding to the university. These actions should cease. University police, Student Affairs staff, and others are doing their best to manage this situation. In the meantime, we commend members of our community for their patience.”
The absolute falsity of this statement can be attested to by faculty and National Lawyer’s Guild observers who watched both picket lines throughout the course of the day. A very creative mass email response from the strike committee awarded Klieger an award for creative fiction. Luckily, the administrations lies didn’t stop the growth of the picket line’s strength. At 12:00 a hastily re-arranged rally and speakers came off with barely a hitch, with a crowd of at least a thousand present. The rally called out Klieger’s lies, which were nothing more than ridiculous when read out to a crowd of college students bereft of clubs and knives, in the midst of a day “In defense of public education”. It wasn’t until 5:00 that the we reached the limits of the ‘day of’ committees seemingly inexhaustible supply of well-planned execution of a complex mass movement/ direct action.
There was a bit of confusion over who was to facilitate the General Assembly, planned for 5:00 to finish the day off, and provide a space to move forward, hook in new organizers, and plan for the future, leading to new facilitators to take on the task only an hour before 1200 folks sat down in the middle of the intersection at the main entrance and thought about how to move forward. Not a great situation. At least not for the goal of mass movement building. An occupation organizer who had rarely been seen at the strike committee managed to get on the megaphone and declare that, “This assembly is not to plan for the future, it is to decide what we do now!” and other contradictory comments before being asked to sit down. Without a strong plan for organizing the Assembly, the excitement over the power of the day took sway. A confused decision making process led to folks marching down into town and then starting a dance party in the main intersection downtown, with the majority of folks drifting away in the process without getting hooked in to building for the future. Though the change from the plan was fairly harmless, it wasn’t as powerful as it could have been, and should show us that a little more attention to the details of the day’s plan might have been called for.
the lessons
- Though a Day of Action can happen on the same day as a strike, building for a strike requires focusing solely on a strike.
- There are many creative ways we can think about the strike weapon, beyond the legalized one day unfair labor practice strikes we’ve seen on UC campuses.
- Though support from bureaucracy and movement leaders can be extremely helpful to the movement (they’ve got the $), they shouldn’t be seen as the arbiters of struggle. If we’d asked UAW to go on strike at UCSC after our first meeting, they’d have said no.
- The way to avoid police repression is in real mass numbers.
- The U.C. administration, far from being the allies they should be, can often be our greatest enemies.
- Centering an analysis of race and privilege in the anti-cuts movement will prove invaluable to our strength and unity.
- Student-worker solidarity is absolutely essential, but it only becomes meaningful when there are direct lines of community with rank and file workers.
I put these thoughts down in hope that people will use them to think about their own strategies for how to move forward in their own struggle in their own communities. This is by no means a definitive, or even collective account, but I hope it will prompt a larger and more collective discussion and debate over the lessons and experience of the march 4 example in Santa Cruz.
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