In between UE conventions, the elected General Executive Board and national officers issue statements applying UE policy to specific issues of the day. UE policy is set by rank-and-file delegates to our biennial national convention. Also posted here are statements issued by UE regions, conference boards, locals, or groups of locals.
Twelve UE locals, representing over 30,000 graduate workers at both private and public universities, have released a statement urging colleges and universities to form a “Mutual Academic Defense Compact” to respond to the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on higher education.
Federal agents are currently on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, NY attempting to detain UE Local 300-Cornell Graduate Students United member Momodou Taal. Taal is an international graduate worker and visa holder who was terminated from his employment and threatened with deportation by Cornell administrators last September without just cause.
The UE officers have released a statement denouncing the arrest, detainment and threatened deportation of Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident of the U.S., in retaliation for his peacefully speaking out on political issues. The officers condemned this abduction, as well as other threats by the Trump administration against universities, as “serious attacks on our civil liberties” which “will impact all working people if they are not vigorously resisted.”
The statement further points out that “History has shown that a government that feels like it can get away with detaining or deporting legal residents for political speech will also be willing to arrest or deport union leaders who speak out about bad working conditions and low wages.”
As a union representing tens of thousands of academic workers, we are in a struggle against a decades-long effort to undermine the education and research mission of higher education. Administrators are abandoning the stated core values of their universities and instead joining with their investors to transform robust academic institutions into profit-making enterprises. This model rests on the labor of overworked and underpaid graduate workers who provide undergraduate instruction and bring in billions of dollars in research funding.
Since Donald Trump assumed the Presidency on January 20, he has issued a flurry of executive orders which will both directly cut living standards for working people and make it harder for us to organize and fight to improve our working and living conditions.
The recent announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza is an initial, but tenuous, step towards a just and lasting peace in Palestine. Far more is needed, and it is imperative to keep pressure on the U.S. government to ensure that the ceasefire is made permanent, that reconstruction of Gaza is adequately funded, and that the Israeli government end its occupation of the West Bank and its threats and military aggression against other countries in the region.
Statement of the UE officers on the election
For over half of a century, working people in the U.S. have seen stagnating wages, worsening working conditions, the loss of good jobs, and constant increases in the cost of living. This is the result of corporations’ never-ending thirst to squeeze as many profits out of workers as possible. Throughout this time, both major parties have been complicit in this corporate assault. They have maintained their power, and a corrupt two-party system, by dividing the working class along lines of race, gender, and education. Frustration with the Democrats and their unwillingness to confront corporate power or offer real solutions to working people’s economic concerns led many working people to vote for Donald Trump on Tuesday, giving him the margin of victory.
Israel’s recent strikes on Lebanon, which have killed hundreds of people including women, children, and paramedics, are exactly the type of regional escalation of hostilities that we predicted would happen without a ceasefire in Gaza. Right-wing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose government has faced massive protests including a general strike, is attempting to stay in power by expanding the war and killing additional innocent people.
Meeting in Pittsburgh this week, UE’s General Executive Board discussed the 2024 elections and adopted a statement declaring, “Working people desperately need an independent political organization, based on a political program that can unite us, which can fight for that platform in the electoral arena — in short, a labor party.”
Statement of the UE officers.
In the face of rising working-class militancy, anti-union forces have launched various legal attacks on the labor movement, using the false claim that union involvement in protests demanding a ceasefire in Gaza is somehow “anti-Semitic.” Most prominently, the federal monitor charged with rooting out corruption in the United Auto Workers has engaged in wildly inappropriate behavior, in a clear attempt to use his immense legal power over the union to shut down their criticism of Israel. The National Right to Work Committee and union-busting law firms like Jones Day have also launched a series of legal cases, including some against UE locals, aimed at undermining union shop and exclusive representation.