Seattle Students, Campus Workers Picket vs. Budget Cuts

SEATTLE, May 3 — At 8:00 AM today, up to 250 campus workers and students conducted mass picket lines throughout the day to protest budget cuts and show our strength in the face of current contract negotiations for graduate students and the upcoming contract expiration for the custodians at our university here. The UAW union leadership unilaterally chose to extend the grad students contract rather than strike, as many rank-and-filers demanded.

Earlier, at 4:30 AM outside clock-in stations for campus workers, we asked them to join our picket lines. Many took our flyer and did join throughout the day, despite intimidation from management who told them joining students could cost them their jobs.

This student strike was organized as a continuation of the nation-wide March 4 events. These angry students and workers want to fight the budget cuts that mean higher tuition, lower pay and layoffs for all campus workers, especially targeting black and Latino and low-income students.

A coalition of workers and students (who see themselves as part of the working class) organized the strike. Many understand the class politics that places the university as a “center of production,” seeing student-worker unity as having the power to stop that production.

The series of picket lines was designed to give students and workers pause on entering the campus and think about what it meant to cross the lines. We marched in the crosswalks and blocked traffic and, despite police threats of ticketing and arrests, many students and workers refused to leave the streets for the sidewalks.

While the turnout was less than the 1,000 workers and students who demonstrated on March 4, there was a qualitative leap forward over March 4. Then that student strike became a march led by the cops and moved off campus, losing its intended focus. Today we picketed
despite the cops’ threats and harassment, not with their “guidance.” Students and workers who joined us united as one, defying the bosses and their henchmen.

The picket lines eventually spontaneously marched onto the campus (not part of our original plan), to win more students to participate. A few did join, although we also lost some workers and students who had planned to meet us at the picket lines. Now we must begin to judge these actions not only by quantity but also by quality.

The quality of our action was a step forward in our struggle, one which more and more workers and students are understanding is long-term. On the picket lines we discussed what a “fair contract” for grad student workers would mean, particularly for other workers. We explained the nature of reforms, where they come from and how the bosses often simply take from one group to throw crumbs to another.

With the upcoming custodians’ contract expiration, we stressed the importance to be there for them as they stood by us. We’re beginning to see these reforms as merely temporary fixes (if that) for systemic problems in the university and in capitalism generally.

This important battle signified the potential power of worker-student unity. Now we must better understand how to use that power and the long struggle ahead, as well as the nature of capitalism and the history of workers’ struggles. We must steel ourselves for a grueling fight, not only on the campus but as part of the larger struggle of the international working class, a fight which means destroying a system that puts these cuts on the backs of workers and working-class students.