It’s incredible that the AFSCME workers are going on strike, and it’s one of the most important strikes that will happen on this campus of all the workers who are currently under contract negotiations. These workers are the most essential stewards of the university, and they are also the most marginalized workers of the UC, facing hazardous working conditions, insulting cuts to pay and healthcare benefits, and the additional repression of living as people of color and immigrants in this racist, xenophobic society that UC promotes by welcoming neo-nazis to campus and sicking the police on workers. Amidst a national atmosphere of wildcat strikes from teachers unions, which form a growing RedForEd movement to fund public education, the AFSCME workers are only one of many unions at the university who will go on strike, alongside the lecturers and librarians, the technical workers in the labs, and the student teachers. The UC Administration has bargained ruthlessly with AFSCME, proposing a one time wage increase of 2 percent, and “offering” to shrink the healthcare coverage and pensions alongside no protections from outsourcing. At the doorstep of the biggest union busting law in a decade (Janus), the administration has made it clear they are using the opportunity to try to destroy the most militant union on all the campuses. It is critical that we unite these struggles in every way possible, so that this is not the first killing blow for us the workers, but the first victory we make in taking back the university.
 
As socialists, we have an understanding that the struggle of the working class is not an ideological one, to understand the rightness of communism, but is a material one. It is a struggle for insourcing jobs, for living wages, for a pension, for healthcare, and not to these ends, but as a means of raising the fighting capacity and collective organization of our class. Our task as socialists is to involve ourselves in the class struggle wherever it is happening, and to connect struggles to a permanent solution, which is the permanent mobilization of our class to take power. This is not a lofty goal, but the most essential one.
 
We must and we will be at the pickets. We will bring everyone we can, we will have leaflets on the struggles of the AFSCME workers and we will talk to everyone who crosses the pickets about why the AFSCME workers are on strike, about why this is a struggle for just working conditions and for public education. We will bring needed supplies, banners, security, we will blast it on social media, and we will talk with the workers about why they are there and why we are there with them.