UAW 2865, Santa Cruz Passes Resolution in Solidarity with Wisconsin and all Public Workers

The UC Santa Cruz unit of UAW 2865, the union representing teaching assistants, readers, tutors, and graduate student instructors at the University of California, Santa Cruz passed the following resolution in solidarity with your struggle in Wisconsin. Please let us know how we can support you in the coming weeks and days.

In Solidarity,

Sara Smith
Graduate Student Instructor in History at UC Santa Cruz, UAW 2865 Member
(310) 500-7093
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At the UAW 2865 monthly membership meeting at UC Santa Cruz on Monday, February 28th, 2011 we passed the following resolution unanimously.

Resolution in Solidarity with the Public Workers of Wisconsin:

WHEREAS, Working people in the state of Wisconsin are standing up to Governor Scott Walker’s recent attempts to strip public employee unions of collective bargaining rights; and

WHEREAS, Governor Walker has moved to cut taxes for the richest citizens and largest corporations of Wisconsin while cutting funding for the services all Wisconsites depend on – including but not limited to services such as public education and public safety – a plan estimated to remove hundreds of millions dollars from the state’s budget, further deepening Wisconsin’s fiscal crisis without providing a fair solution for all citizens of the state; and

WHEREAS, Governor Walker has admitted that the proposal to eliminate collective bargaining rights for public workers is not a budget issue at all, but is instead simply the initial step in a much broader attack on unions and workers’ rights that threatens to spread; and

WHEREAS, The dire situation faced by working people of the state of Wisconsin –unionized or not – is part of a general assault in the United States and throughout the world against public education, against the public sector more generally, and particularly against working people; and
WHEREAS, if the bill in Wisconsin attacking the right of public workers to collectively bargain passes, this portends a much broader attack on the union rights of public workers in other states. In Ohio, a bill has already been introduced to limit the rights of public workers to collectively bargain and in California lawmakers have introduced a bill that would do away with collective bargaining of the state’s pension benefits; and

WHEREAS, public sector employees are disproportionately women and people of color; and

WHEREAS, Governor Walker’s attacks on organized labor will disproportionately negatively impact poor and working people; and

WHEREAS, We are proud to be Union Workers, and Proud of our Sisters and Brothers standing up to this attack in Wisconsin; and

WHEREAS, We are strongest when we stand and fight together,

WHEREAS, the people of Wisconsin have a long history of bravely standing up for their rights as workers, a courage exemplified today by the Wisconsin Federation of Teachers, the Teaching Assistant Association, the Service Workers’ International Union, and AFCSME, to name but a few; and

WHEREAS, Wisconsin has always been a paragon of working-class, labor, and union values;

Be it RESOLVED: The United Auto Workers Union Local 2865, Santa Cruz, representing Academic Student Employees of the University of California, Santa Cruz do hereby support and call on its members, and workers throughout the United States, to heed the call for a GENERAL STRIKE called for by our Sisters and Brothers in Wisconsin’s South Central Federation of Labor if Governor Walker of Wisconsin succeeds in his efforts to roll back over 50 years of progress fought for and won by organized labor in the United States of America.

Be it further RESOLVED that we encourage other units in our local to pass similar resolutions.

Solidarity Forever.