The following speech was delivered at the Labor Notes Higher Education Workers meetup. In it, a CUNY graduate student and PSC member speaks about the Fired Four campaign and the joint picket with Starbucks workers as an example of labor solidarity in action. The CUNY Fired Four are four adjunct faculty members who were fired last summer in retaliation for their Palestine solidarity activism. Three have since won reinstatement through collective organizing and sustained pressure, but the fight continues until the fourth is reinstated and all retaliation against pro-Palestine activists is defeated.

Thanks so much to Labor Notes. It’s an honor to share the stage with these panelists.

My name is Tatiana, I’m a grad student at CUNY, a member of the PSC, and a member of the reinstate the CUNY fired four organizing committee. I’m also a member of Left Voice

The CUNY fired four are four CUNY adjuncts who were fired last summer, over the heads of the recommendations of their departments. What unites these 4 adjunct professors is their tireless organizing for the liberation of Palestine, union activism, and activism alongside students. Their precarious status as adjuncts made them easy targets for the administration.

The campaign for the reinstatement of the cuny fired four, which you can follow on instagram, Reinstate the CUNY Fired Four, has included multiple tactics, from the grievance process to activism. We protested, we made t-shirts, and we held dance party fundraisers. But I want to share a bit about one action in particular.

In the winter of last year, Starbucks Workers United went on strike across the country, protesting the continued lack of a contract. The Fired Four immediately saw the connections: many CUNY students are starbucks workers and starbucks workers have been on the front lines of the struggle for Palestine. But most importantly we know that the working class is connected — that if one of us wins, all of us win.

So, in the dead of winter, during finals week, as the campaign for the fired four seemed to have stagnated, we proposed a joint picket with Starbucks workers.  It was co-sponsored by two chapters of our union and other groups including the student union.  It was a really successful end of the year action, which brought dozens of students and PSC members — including our union leadership — as well as dozens of Starbucks workers to raise awareness of both struggles. It was part of an attempt to make the Fired Four campaign not only a CUNY issue, but an issue for the labor movement as a whole — and to show that the issues affecting Starbucks workers are connected to our struggle at CUNY.

It was an expression of deep working class solidarity — and of building that muscle. It’s the kind of solidarity that has an enormous amount of power, which on a much larger scale, the heroic anti-ICE struggle in Minneapolis showed.

Really the lesson from this action is to connect. To connect with students, connect with staff, with workers outside of the university, to connect issues and struggles that seem disconnected. Because in this context of imperialist war, capitalist crisis and attacks by Trump if you scratch the surface it’s easy to see that it is all connected, and we need each other to win.

As of now, three of the Fired Four have been reinstated. And this is a huge victory of this struggle that has been led by the CUNY PSC and has helped build and strengthen our union.

But one has yet to be reinstated. The Fired Four campaign is now a campaign for the Fired Fourth. She has been banned from working on all CUNY campuses. This isn’t an isolated example of repression and we must continue the fight against repression of all those who have organized against the genocide in Palestine. Right now I’m thinking of the Swarthmore Nine, students who are facing felony charges, I’m thinking of the Michigan Eight, who were arrested by the FBI — and I’m talking about attacks on leftists like Tom Alter in Texas.

We are in a political context where we are experiencing large scale attacks: on immigrants, the Palestine movement, on workers, continued genocide in Palestine and imperialist intervention around the world, on the teaching of history, Black struggle, queer studies, and on universities as a whole. These are attacks by the Trump administration, but also supported and often enacted by Democrats and liberal university administrators. We need each other, we need to show up united, as the working class to fight back. As the Minneapolis teacher said yesterday, no one is coming to save us. But we can save each other and re-imagine universities not as repressive businesses, but as public, free, and run by and for working-class and oppressed people.

The post An Injury to One Is an Injury to All: Solidarity and the Fired Four Campaign appeared first on Left Voice.

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