As the third week of the strike in the University of California (UC) system comes to conclusion, 48,000 academic workers continued to be locked in a struggle against the Democratic Party-run administration, along with the United Auto Workers bureaucracy, which is abandoning workers’ central demands and rushing to end the strike.

In negotiations this week, UAW bargainers accepted concessions that include dropping the demand for starting base pay from $54,000 to $43,000, the halving of child care support, the dropping of dependent health care, and the removal of all language supporting workers with disabilities. UAW bargainers had previously dropped the demand for cost-of-living protection (COLA).

UAW officials have tried various tactics to, as one rank-and-filer aptly put it, “gaslight us into accepting what the university wants.” These have ranged from blaming the workers for their supposed “weak bargaining position” for allegedly failing to show up on the picket lines in sufficient numbers to claims that the strike is “losing steam.”

Union officials have also claimed that strikers’ demanding COLA and other critical pay issues are isolated and that a “silent majority” is opposed to a prolonged strike and happy to accept a more “modest” contract. At the same time, UAW officials have refused to poll workers and ignored results when the rank and file take the initiative to run polls themselves. UAW bargainers and their apologists even absurdly argue that lowering wage demands are only a “negotiating tactic to get management to come to the table.”

It should be recalled that when the negotiators blatantly defied the will of its membership by dropping cost-of-living adjustment (COLA) provisions last week, they did so with a similar excuse. They claimed it was a tactic to preserve a contract with $54,000 base pay. Now that the base pay has been cut down a further $11,000, this stands exposed as a shameless lie to hide the UAW bureaucracy’s duplicity.

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2022/12/03/zjxr-d03.html