Seven Unions Demand An End to US Military Aid to Israel

Mel Buer: Welcome back everyone, to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams and struggles of the working class today brought to you in partnership with In These Times magazine and The Real News Network, produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network.

Today we’re bringing the focus back to the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the role that organized labor is playing to try and stop it. In July, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s scorching address to Congress in which he vowed ​“total victory” in Palestine and called American protesters standing in opposition to the genocide ​“useful idiots” earned him a standing ovation for many US representatives and underscored, yet again, the deep involvement of the US in this ongoing carnage.

Maximillian Alvarez: Over the last year, both Mel and I have sat down with many workers and organizers who have been agitating within their unions to pressure leadership to take a public stance against the genocide in Palestine and to draw attention to the US involvement in Israel’s brutal campaign. Since October 7, the United States government has sent more than $12 billion — that’s billion with a B — to Israel, with billions more earmarked for the next four years. The death toll in Gaza continues to climb with conservative estimates putting the numbers of dead near 40,000, but a recent report in the British medical journal The Lancet estimates the death toll could be far greater than that, over 186,000 people or more. That’s roughly 8% of Gaza’s population. And with each passing day, the humanitarian crisis unfolding in Gaza gets orders of magnitude worse.

Seeing the dire situation in Palestine, seven major US labor unions have collectively drafted, signed and sent a letter to President Biden demanding that US military aid to Israel stop immediately. The letter reads in part: ​“Recent reports only underscore the urgency of our demands. Large numbers of Palestinian civilians, many of them children, continue to be killed, reportedly often with US manufactured bombs. Rising tensions in the region threatened to ensnare even more innocent civilians in a wider war, and the humanitarian crisis deepens by the day with famine, mass displacement and destruction of basic infrastructure, including schools and hospitals. We have spoken directly to leaders of Palestinian trade unions who told us heart wrenching stories of the conditions faced by working people in Gaza.”

Mel Buer: The seven unions collectively represent about 6 million American workers. As Alex Press reported in Jacobin, this letter to Biden is a product of relationships built through the National Labor Network for Ceasefire, a coalition of unions that formed around a statement initially sponsored by UE and UFCW International Union Local 3000. That statement called on Biden and Congress to ​“push for an immediate ceasefire and end to the siege of Gaza.” This new letter represents a significant escalation and pressure from the US labor movement in an effort to address this ongoing humanitarian catastrophe. With us today to discuss this important escalation in the campaign to pressure the US to end its involvement in Israel are Brandon Mancilla and George Waksmunski.

Maximillian Alvarez: I was wondering if we could start with George going back there and talk a little bit for our listeners about the Labor Network for Ceasefire, and the UE’s role in pushing this call for a ceasefire, and now an end to military aid to Israel within the US labor movement.

And then Brandon, I’d love for you to hop in and talk about UAW as well, your president, Shawn Fain, being one of the earliest and most vocal union leaders to call for a ceasefire earlier this year.

George Waksmunski: For many decades, [UE has] had a policy about the situation in Palestine and Gaza, and as it relates to Israel… In 2015, we passed a resolution called Justice and Peace for the People of Palestine and Israel, and that called for an end to military aid to Israel. It also endorsed BDS, Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions, because we believe that Israel is acting similar to an apartheid state, and that’s how apartheid was dismantled — at least one part of it.

So [during] this last convention in 2023… we passed that resolution calling for an end to all military aid to Israel, and that was about two weeks before the horrific attack of the citizens of Israel that occurred… And after several weeks of seeing how this was playing out, we were already in a position long held to be able to take the lead on it. And that’s what we did. As you mentioned, we initiated, along with the UFCW 3000, a petition to get all labor unions signed on to call for a ceasefire. Since then, our members have been out in the streets, rallying, protesting on college campuses, at congressmen and senators’ offices, doors, wherever we can catch those folks to give them hell.

We got a lot of false hope given to us about a potential ceasefire, but it never happened… And the United States just backs Israel no matter what, even if it means that we’re going to be involved in genocide, supporting it with our bombs that we make. We put together our coalition to now put forward this letter to President Biden, going more than just calling for a ceasefire, but an end to all military aid to Israel.

There’s a change going on, not only in our membership, but at the leadership levels as well, to understand that the injury to one is an injury to all. Because there was a time in our history, back during the Red Scare, when McCarthyism, part of that was to silence unions from being active on political affairs, international affairs. And for a long time, that worked. 

Brandon Mancilla: Unions like UE… really paved the way… I think they also realized that it wasn’t going to be enough to just rally the same unions that have had an internationalist stance or a solid progressive stance on this issue. It needed to be an opening to the rest of the labor movement.

A lot of our members took to the streets and… demanded a ceasefire from October 8. And I think with those members going into the streets, they were demanding that their union realign their own politics around this issue. Eventually, 6 and 9A explicitly as political councils came out in support of a ceasefire, and signed on to the letter that UE mobilized and that gave myself and director Mike Miller the leverage to be able to take that to the International Executive Board… And at the International Executive Board meeting at the end of November, we decided to sign on… I think our leadership on this when we did come out, did allow an even further opening of the door for other unions to come out.

And now, I think the discussion is… what’s next, right? And I think that’s what this escalation is with a letter to call for a halt of arms. The key thing to remember through this process is that it is a process of political education for our own unions. It’s not fast enough, but it’s also historic… And at the end of the day, this is not going to end until peace is secured and there’s a true path to justice for the Palestinian people. 

Buer: We’ve talked about why calls for a permanent ceasefire were really the start. And now we’re seeing through months of negotiations… or broken promises that the Biden administration has spent a lot of time saying ​‘we’re close’…’ At some point it seems like almost a cynical ploy for votes in November, right? Israel is receiving at least every year until 2028, $3.8 billion in military funding from the United States. I think it’s something like 15% of the Israeli defense budget is made up of money that comes from the United States.

Why do you think this is the appropriate sort of pressure on Israel to hone in on the US pulling back its military aid in a way, to pressure them to actually accept the terms of a permanent ceasefire in this conflict?

Mancilla: The amount of political backing, arms, resources we supply to the State of Israel is astronomical. I think it’s not an exaggeration to say that President Biden could make a phone call and end this war today. How the State of Israel reacts to that is a separate question. But they cannot carry out the scale of violence without our support, as the United States… We are consistently one of few allies that the State of Israel has to give what it’s doing right now legitimacy or cover-up.

And I think that’s really important for us, as leaders within the labor movement, to say, we know we are complicit and responsible in ways in which we are not over the actions of a group like Hamas. And disproportionately in this conflict over so many others, right? It’s not because people want to talk about Israel more than other countries. It’s because we are directly involved and complicit.

Second, the fact that this opens up the door to talk about our defense budget. We spend so much on on defense, on military spending, in lieu of actually trying to solve deep social crises in this country, of inequality of healthcare, of food access, of education, of so many social goods that working people need, union and non union alike, to be able to survive and make stable, good lives in this country.

Ultimately, many workers do make the arms that end up getting sent, the bombs, the arms, tanks… And I think that means that we have a responsibility to say we have to have an economy that is able to run in a different way under humane principles.

Alvarez: I want to ask both of you what response you’ve gotten from the Biden administration, if any at all, and also from your own members.

And we can’t go into the whole history there about why unions have kind of taken less and less of a strong political stance… And yet, you have more independent unions… who played a critical role in striking against apartheid in South Africa. If you could say a little more about how unions got so complacent when it came to taking strong political stances like this, and how you see that changing now.

Maksmunski: Well, we’ve always been a union that believes in independent political action… We’ve long believed that both parties are corrupt and do not serve our best interests, especially since McCarthyism and the Red Scare, when the unions were divided and they just busted up the militancy of the labor movement to the degree that unions were running scared…

That period of McCarthyism, it just really destroyed the labor movement, because there were factions that were very militant, and those factions were one by one, annihilated. And we are one of the only ones surviving… We’ve been through some tough struggles in our history, and we’ve learned some hard lessons, some good lessons, lessons we always knew. But sometimes you just stand up for your principles, and even if it costs you.

On the response from the Biden administration — to my knowledge, we’ve not gotten any.

Buer: Has there been communication just from the rank and file in general about the direction that the UAW and this coalition are moving towards in terms of their call for ending military aid?

Mancilla: As you can imagine, when we did not endorse Biden last year, and also had our stand up strike, the Biden administration took note of that. October 7 and the war on Gaza came right around this time, towards the end of our strike. So when we passed our ceasefire resolution, and since then… Shawn has been very clear to [Biden], especially after the uncommitted vote in Michigan, that you’re going to lose this election in places like Michigan because there’s no change in direction. And unfortunately, we haven’t seen a dramatic change in course, some rhetorical changes — I think a commitment to find a framework and negotiate towards a ceasefire, but no real actual leverage from the government to actually make it happen.

And we also have sent that letter demanding an end to arms shipments… But what we saw from Kamala Harris in that press conference she gave after she met with Netanyahu, I think that is in part because of the continual pressure, because of pressure from the labor unions and generally the US public is at a place where they just don’t want to see this happening anymore.

Buer: What can rank and file union members or organizers, workers, individuals who care do to join this anti genocide movement? And how can we continue to keep this pressure up? What are the things that you think of?

Mancilla: Well, I think just to start from the UAW side — UAW 4811, the 48,000 academic workers of the University of California going on strike against the… university… when they repressed protest and silenced speech on campus during the encampment period. So I think the fact that we had our first ever authorized strike for Palestine — I think that’s a historic breakthrough.

To me, it’s the biggest advancement of this movement beyond statements and letters, which are all important, but to actually go out on the line defending your coworkers for the simple right to speak out against injustices is crucial. Because that’s what the labor movement should be about, aside from also fighting for our benefits and our wages and so many other protections we need on the job.

So I think workers and folks should know that number one, the strongest protection you’re going to have is a union in all of this… But second, we need to take those risks. We need to step up and stand up and speak out on all of these issues, because if we don’t do it, no one’s going to do it. And I think the solidarity movement for Palestine in this country has constantly spoken about how labor entering the fight has really changed the dynamic…. Now it’s got another added muscle to it, which is the labor movement. So don’t get discouraged.

Waksmunski: First, we’ve got to have discussions. We have to be talking to each other, worker to worker… Because, again, an injury to one is an injury to all. These are workers who are being murdered and injured and starved in Palestine — in Gaza and the West Bank. And so it is a workers’ issue.

We’ve got to educate people. We’ve got to mobilize people… We’ve got to get people out of their comfort zone because… we’ve got to get them out of this decades-old way of thinking that what has happened over there don’t affect me, because it does affect us. We’re paying the taxes. We’re building the bombs, we’re selling the bombs, we’re sending the bombs, and the bombs are dropping on innocent children and women and men, citizens, indiscriminately. And that has to end.