Huffington Post: UC's Student Workers Union Fumbles Anti-Israel Initiative

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stuart-w-davidson/opinion-ucs-student-worke_b_6350492.html

Stuart W. Davidson
Union attorney, labor activist, educator, and Chair of the American Friends of the Yitzhak Rabin Center

Last week a milestone occurred affecting U.S. Labor and Israelis alike: a vote took place by the University of California's "student-workers" union, UAW Local 2865, to approve the "Boycott, Divest from and Sanction Israel (BDS)" movement. While Local 2865 is just a local player in the large union space, a vote like this will likely encourage anti-Israel and anti-Semitic sentiments across labor and academia.

Local 2865, comprised of 13,000 teaching assistants, tutors and student workers in the UC system, is the first significant U.S. labor union to hold a membership vote on Israel and BDS. The measures approved call on the University of California and UAW International to divest from companies involved in Israel and demand that the U.S. government end military aid to Israel. With strong encouragement from the union's leadership, 1,136 members also pledged to personally adhere to an academic boycott of Israel.

The resolutions unfairly and unjustly single out Israel while marginalizing and alienating Jewish, Israeli and pro-Israel graduate students. In addition, these resolutions are fundamentally contrary to the core principles of both academic freedom and trade union solidarity.

What is especially shocking is that this well publicized and polarizing fight over a non-collective bargaining issue generated participation by fewer than 20% of the union membership. Among the local's 13,000 members, fewer than 2,500 actually voted and of them, only 1,411 supported the resolutions - which were ultimately pushed and financed from the top down by the union's leadership. The selection of these issues to divide a union membership and drain a union's resources is especially confounding.

FULL story at link. This is a labor story.