The Trump administration has leveled an attack against the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funding, and we represent about five thousand NIH workers. In higher education, we represent about a hundred thousand workers, and tens of thousands of those are researchers working on lifesaving research. Not only have we mobilized at different universities, we’ve also made it clear to our members in other industries, especially in auto, that this affects them too, because this is a direct attack on the progress we could make to find cures for diabetes, cancer, Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and so many diseases that disproportionately affect working-class people, who have worse medical care or can’t afford medical care in this country.

So this is a health care justice fight. It’s a workers’ justice fight. It’s a fight against union-busting and a fight against privatizing and slashing federal funding. The fact that the UAW has a diversity of sectors means that we can take on these kinds of fights.

Different sectors have different fights, and the work that the union at a regional or national level has to take on is fighting that fight while garnering solidarity across sectors that might not be directly impacted; to show how the fight in one specific sector is absolutely connected to your existence and your life as a worker in any other sector.

That’s a huge challenge. It takes a lot of political work, a lot of educational work. But it’s what we have to do in order to build a labor movement that is in solidarity with one another. I would love to live in a country in which nurses and teachers and autoworkers would instinctively hit the streets for our federal workers. In many ways, we are seeing that. We are seeing some of the largest labor-led protests and demonstrations against these actions. But the challenge for the labor movement is to build the kind of solidarity that automatically makes everyone understand that they are part of the same struggle.

Workers everywhere are facing the same fight: corporate greed and abusive employers, no retirement security, no hope. Workers across the country, no matter where they work, can feel that. Maybe there’s different jargon in one sector or in one company than there is in another, but once you peel back that jargon, people are going to understand. And they’ll say, “Yes, I’m in solidarity with that fight.”

I come from a family of union members. My grandpa joined a union when he came to this country from Guatemala in the 1980s, when he worked at a packaging company. My dad is an SEIU (Service Employees International Union) member. He’s a handyman in a high-rise building in Manhattan. I got involved myself because I organized my coworkers in 2017 and 2018 at Harvard, where I was a grad worker. I’ve always been committed to workers’ rights and justice, and I benefited greatly from having union health care. My parents were able to do a little better for themselves and for my family because of a union.

As a student, I was deeply invested in internationalist politics. I always understood that if working people in one country had the support of working people in all countries, we’d be a better world for it. That’s how I came across Palestine organizing. I saw folks like you, Sumaya, who were organizing Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters. I grew up in a pretty evangelical household and an evangelical church in which support for Israel was kind of assumed. I always thought that was very confusing, because I would look at the news, especially around Israel’s 2014 bombing of Gaza, and it didn’t really square up with how I understood the world. Around my sophomore year of college, I linked up with SJP on campus and began organizing around Palestine.

Signing on to a cease-fire and also an arms embargo is not something that faced huge opposition within the union. In fact, most people understood it, because they saw what was happening in the news and were horrified. Most working-class people do not want their money going to foreign wars. They don’t want to be complicit in something as horrific as the genocide in Gaza. They want to stand on the right side. That’s not a universal position, but I think most people have an instinct to be antiwar and anti-atrocity. I have faith in people on that level.

Most people that I’ve met at UAW conferences and different UAW events have said that endorsing a cease-fire was the right decision. I’m proud of my union for taking a bold stance in keeping with the social justice and internationalist commitment of the union, from the days of opposing apartheid South Africa and supporting the civil rights movement. UAW members are really proud of that history.

We need to keep getting better at translating something that seems foreign. For example, with what’s happening in Gaza, we need to make the connection to our domestic situation quite clear: it’s our taxpayer dollars and our weapons that are being used in our name to commit Israel’s atrocities in Gaza. Not only do we not support the genocide, but we also know that its coming at the expense of working-class people here, preventing them from getting a better shot in life. We need to be able to take care of people in our country and be able to actually point out that the most waste, fraud, and abuse that exists in this country is actually in the corporate greed of defense contractors.

Shortly after a lot of the major unions signed on to the cease-fire demand, they created the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, which brought together large unions for the first time specifically to talk about a cease-fire and the situation in Palestine broadly beyond the war. It was a huge step forward, because an officially dedicated space like this had not been launched by the labor movement ever. Folks like Mark Dimondstein, the president of the Postal Workers, led the way in saying that in order to actually call for a cease-fire, you need to put some backbone behind it. We have to be honest that there won’t be a cease-fire as long as we’re supplying arms to Israel unconditionally.

All the talk of Joe Biden being frustrated with Benjamin Netanyahu over the past year was leading to nothing, because in order to secure a cease-fire, you actually have to put some leverage behind it. That’s what the arms embargo call was about. It was to be clear about what it would take to secure a permanent cease-fire. It’s not just a moral position; it’s a material one related to investment in the state of Israel. We should all be very clear about the fact that the Trump administration’s, similar to Biden’s, foreign policy decisions are completely disconnected from democratic oversight.

The question of Palestine has been concretely felt at workplaces and especially at universities. Campuses are facing a direct attack on free speech and the rights to protest and to academic freedom in an unprecedented way. We’ve definitely seen crackdowns on speech in the past, but right now, whether it’s the detention of Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts or Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia, there’s a very specific targeting on speech grounds. All of our unions on campuses are seeing how that’s explicitly being tied to an attack on their own right to speak out and protest in solidarity.

We recognized right away that the Trump administration is trying to use federal funding as a way to get universities to do its dirty business, whether it’s cooperation with the White House’s immigration policies, its anti-diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, or its suppression of free speech and the end of academic freedom as we know it. Just like with any other authoritarian movement, universities are one of the first institutions to get attacked.

The suppression of free speech and attacks on the NIH and federal funding are connected. They’re part of the same fight. This is not just a “student issue” or a “faculty issue.” It’s a union issue.

It’s important right now that unions are fighting at universities like they’ve never fought before. Grant Miner got expelled, which means he was effectively fired, because as a student worker, he has a job as a condition of being at the university. He was the president of his local. He was fired a day before bargaining was going to begin with Columbia University between the student worker union and Columbia. That’s set the tone for bargaining. Now the union has the duty to not just fight for a new contract and important wage increases but also fight back against the campus climate that Columbia has created.

The best way anyone can support a union is by joining a union. Forming a union is one of the hardest things to do, because the labor law is stacked against you. But it’s one of the most fulfilling and important things you could do in your life, especially as a working person. Most people aren’t in a union. Maybe they don’t think that an attack on a union means anything to them. An attack on a union, whether it’s the federal workers or a teachers’ union or a higher-ed union, ends up being an attack on anyone’s right to organize and unionize.