The Auto Workers Who Stand With Gaza
More than half of organized labor in the US is part of a union that has called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza. One worker explains why.
When asked why workers in the United States care about people in Gaza, Marcie Pedraza immediately brought up the animating principle of labor organizing: solidarity. The 48-year-old autoworker told me, âWorkers are always being attacked by companies or being exploited,â and the only antidote is banding together. This, she said, was reinforced during the United Auto Workersâ (UAW) strike, when she and her colleagues at Fordâs Chicago Assembly Plant joined thousands of workers who walked out in rolling, surprise strikes against the Big Three automakers. Why, she asked, wouldnât this same concept apply to people being targeted in a lethal military campaign in another part of the world, who are suffering unimaginable levels of persecution and loss?
âWhenever someone is being oppressed, we should stand with them.â
Workers like Pedraza are, increasingly, the face of a US labor movement that is publicly disagreeing with President Joe Bidenâs unwavering political support and arming of Israelâs military operations against the coastal enclave of 2 million. Four months in, the Palestinian death toll in Gaza is now over 29,000, including more than 12,000 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. And Israelâs siege has caused famine and medical collapse and displaced more than 80 percent of Gazaâs population. Israel is killing Palestinians at a rate unparallelled in modern conflicts, and the International Court of Justice determined in January that it is âplausibleâ that Israel is committing acts of genocide.
The majority of unionized workers in the United Statesâat this point, at least 9 millionâare now members of unions that have directly called for a permanent cease-fire in Gaza, and major national and international unions, like the UAW and the National Education Association, have joined the new National Labor Network for Ceasefire. Roughly 12.5 million workers, many of whom overlap with the 9 million, are in unions affiliated with the AFL-CIO, which has also called for a cease-fire. The longer Israelâs campaign grinds on, the more mainstream this demand grows.
The leadership of the US labor movement has frequently hewed close to the foreign policy positions of the US State Department, with notable exceptions and some consistent outliers (including, at times, within the UAW). So the divergence on Gaza is remarkable, with growing numbers arguing as union plumber Paul Stauffer did in In These Times: âThe War on Gaza Is a Labor Issue.â And as labor historian Jeff Schuhrke recently noted in Jewish Currents, networks of workers organizing in solidarity with Gaza are pushing their unions to escalate their actions beyond cease-fire statements. They want unions to directly pressure lawmakers, cut economic ties to Israel, disrupt the flow of weapons and intelligence to Israel, and make any endorsement of Biden contingent on the presidentâs support for a permanent cease-fire.
Pedraza pushed for a cease-fire resolution in her UAW Local 551 relatively early, coming off of a difficult and high-profile strike. Yet, when we discussed this feat at a community center in Chicagoâs north side, she came across as humble and unfazed. A mother to a 13-year-old daughter, she has shoulder-length brown hair with a smattering of pencil-thin streaks of gray, and wears glasses that fade from blue to green to beige. I was struck by her willingness to dive into any topic I brought up in a manner that was both friendly and forceful. It is easy to imagine her being disarming and convincing in conversations on the shop floor or in the union hallâand it seems thatâs exactly what she had to do.
After the UAW international executive board called for a cease-fire on December 1, 2023, Pedraza said, âI was like, Iâm going to see if we can do something at our local. If you put them all together, it can be a trickle effect. Eventually someone will have to listen to us.â
At a general membership meeting on January 21, she came prepared with a statement she had pieced together by combining themes from resolutions passed by other locals, and by referencing an October 16, 2023, call to action from Palestinian trade unions, which urges global unions to refuse to supply weapons to Israel and âpressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel,â alongside other demands. âRight before the union meeting,â she explained, âwe had committee meetings. I table-hopped, went to the skilled-trades meeting, went to the organizing committee table, and said Iâm going to make this resolution. They said, âYeah, OK.ââ
When it came time to present her proposal formally at the meeting, she was nervous, she said. âI started talking about how I want to put it in terms workers can relate to. Our tax dollars are paying for this genocide. The government says we have no money for public education, for fixing our roads, for infrastructure, for the unhoused, no money for universal healthcare. But we have billions to spend on military aid for Israel. Thatâs something people can relate to.â Her proposal got a second, followed by brief discussion and âa little hesitation,â she said. âOne guy tried to table it until the next meeting.â
But the resolution passed overwhelmingly, and when she circulated it publicly a few days later, it was praised in some corners of the Palestine solidarity movement for its strength: The text referred to Israelâs campaign as a âgenocide,â directly referenced Palestinian trade unionists, and called for refusal to build and transport weapons to Israel.
Laborâs calls for a cease-fire are in line with public opinion in the United States: Polling shows that a majority of Americans, and more than 70 percent of Democrats, want a cease-fire. Yet the voices of people like Pedraza are often excluded from public debate about the issueâor outright denied. In an article published on February 2 in New York magazine, the prominent liberal pundit Jonathan Chait criticized UAW members who opposed their unionâs endorsement of Biden while the president was backing the onslaught against Gaza. Chait framed these union membersâ concerns as a fringe position adopted by graduate students (roughly 25 percent of UAW members are academic workers). Chait took issue with the idea that the labor movement, at its most âvisionary,â should consider foreign policy a union issue. âIt may not be surprising,â he wrote, âthat the graduate-student wing of the UAW has a more visionary understanding of its mission than do the people who work in car factories.â (Chait, itâs worth noting, has been a longtime critic of teachersâ unions and has had to disclose, on a number of occasions, that his wife works for a charter-school advocacy group.)
Pedraza said that, for the purposes of this article, she didnât want to get into the issue of UAWâs Biden endorsement. But she did want to make two things clear: It is âcondescendingâ to say autoworkers are incapable of visionary, complex thought that grapples with the global nature of workersâ struggles. âThey just assume weâre all uninformed,â she said, âthat we are not knowledgeable about world events and all weâre here to do is just clock in and clock out.â And she said itâs wrong to drive a wedge between graduate students and other sectors of the working class; graduate students are highly exploited wage earners and are no less legitimate than any other worker.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe âAs a blue-collar autoworker, Pedraza had been doing visionary organizing long before her localâs cease-fire statement. She has been a UAW auto worker since 2013, and a worker at the Chicago Assembly Plant, in the far south of Chicago near the Indiana border, since 2016. Trained as an electrician, she currently does preventive maintenance planning for the paint department, which involves generating work orders to keep the equipment and plant in good condition. âIf they find something wrong, like a leaky pump, I make the work ticket and make sure it gets to whoever it needs to,â she explained. (She wanted to make sure itâs clear that she does not give people work and is not a supervisor.) She likes her role because it allows her to spend weekends with her daughter, in contrast to the years she spent on call for any trouble on the assembly line, when she had to work 12-hour shifts, both days and nights.
She grew up in the working-class neighborhood of South Chicago, where her grandparents came from Mexico to work in the railroads and the steel mills. Her dad, who had also worked in nearby steel mills, died when she was 9, leaving her mom to take care of five kids, a flock that would eventually expand to six, while working as an administrative assistant at the American Bar Association. Her family wasnât particularly political growing up, she recalled, âbut I saw Chicano Power buttons in my house, and I remember going to events with Harold Washington,â a progressive Chicago mayor in the 1980s.
Her high school ecology club got her interested in activism, but her first foray into organizing happened at University of Southern California, which she attended for two years, where she threw herself into a grape boycott campaign in solidarity with the United Farm Workers. She moved back to Chicago, and got jobs as a union electrician, and in construction, before becoming an autoworker, work that went hand-in-hand with union activism. âMy daughter has been to protests with me since sheâs been a baby,â she said. âHer first big demo was the Chicago Teachers Union strike in 2012. I remember marching with other friends pushing strollers.â
Pedraza is active in campaigns against environmental racism as the board president of the Southeast Environmental Task Force, serves on the Local School Council, and is part of Unite All Workers for Democracy, the grassroots UAW rank-and-file reform movement that got Shawn Fain elected to the presidency as a reform challenger in March 2023. The only elected position she has ever served in her union was on the election committee; currently, she serves on several other committeesâwomenâs skilled trades and organizing. She is also involved in UAW Labor for Palestine, which has a large and active group chat that she has a hard time keeping up with. Asked about her political affiliations, Pedraza said she is a âleftist.â Her lifeâs work and her penchant for weaving together complex political arguments for international solidarity is a refutation of Chaitâs claim that visionary thinking does not happen on the factory floor.
Pedraza said she is eager for the labor movement to take robust action to make the growing cease-fire calls a reality, as the situation for people in Gaza grows increasingly desperate. Reports are emerging of Gaza residents forced to resort to eating animal feed and of disease spreading as Israel turns hospitals into attack zones. Civilians face escalating lethal attacks, reporting that there is nowhere safe to flee. Despite rising global calls for a cease-fire, including from major humanitarian organizations, Bidenâs material support for Israel has not faltered. In the months following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack that killed around 1,200 people, mostly Israelis, Biden has been pressing Congress to send $14 billion in military aid to Israel, and has repeatedly circumvented Congress to send more weapons. On February 20, the Biden administration for the third time vetoed a draft resolution for an immediate humanitarian cease-fire at the United Nations Security Council, instead calling for a temporary cease-fire conditioned on the release of 134 Israeli and foreign-worker hostages who remain in Gaza.
Pedraza does not wish to equate the suffering of Palestinians in Gaza with the hardships US workers face. âOur schools donât have working heat or air conditioners, but at least my kid has a school structure,â she said. âThese kids in Gaza donât even have a house.â But she does think that workersâ experiences of being exploited and mistreated can open a door to increased global solidarity. This doesnât always come easily, she said. Just like anyone else, workers âcan be only concerned about whatâs going on in their own families or their own communities.â
But she noted, âPeople at work are always trying to survive. Things cost so much more. Everyone has side hustles. People are always trying to sell something at work. This is one of the reasons our strike was so successful.â
âThereâs no money to do anything about the problems we have here,â she added, âbut there is always money for war.â
Thank you for reading The Nation!
We hope you enjoyed the story you just read, just one of the many incisive, deeply-reported articles we publish daily. Now more than ever, we need fearless journalism that shifts the needle on important issues, uncovers malfeasance and corruption, and uplifts voices and perspectives that often go unheard in mainstream media.
Throughout this critical election year and a time of media austerity and renewed campus activism and rising labor organizing, independent journalism that gets to the heart of the matter is more critical than ever before. Donate right now and help us hold the powerful accountable, shine a light on issues that would otherwise be swept under the rug, and build a more just and equitable future.
For nearly 160 years, The Nation has stood for truth, justice, and moral clarity. As a reader-supported publication, we are not beholden to the whims of advertisers or a corporate owner. But it does take financial resources to report on stories that may take weeks or months to properly investigate, thoroughly edit and fact-check articles, and get our stories into the hands of readers.
Donate today and stand with us for a better future. Thank you for being a supporter of independent journalism.
Thank you for your generosity.
More from The Nation
Campus Protesters Were Right to Spurn Peggy Noonan, Emblem of Media Obtuseness Campus Protesters Were Right to Spurn Peggy Noonan, Emblem of Media Obtuseness
Our narcissistic media elite doesnât understand why their lies have made young people wary.
The Flag Is Mourning. You May Kill My Body, but You Will Never Silence My Soul. The Flag Is Mourning. You May Kill My Body, but You Will Never Silence My Soul.
Graduation gown worn by the artist at Commencement Day 2019, John Jay College.
The Fiction of the âOutside Agitatorâ The Fiction of the âOutside Agitatorâ
With the âoutside agitatorâ narrative, the media and politicians are puking up the worst of this countryâs past.
Arresting Students for Opposing American Militarism Is a Moral Travesty Arresting Students for Opposing American Militarism Is a Moral Travesty
Protesters against US involvement in Israel's war on Gaza may not always get the details right, but they're on the right side of history.
Eric Adams Is the Lying Face of the Campus Crackdown Eric Adams Is the Lying Face of the Campus Crackdown
New Yorkâs mayor is the right man for the job of standing up for the indefensible.