The obvious failings of public sector unionism aside, the union representing graduate students and staff at the University of California, a local of the United Auto Workers because the Teamsters were too busy that day, has authorized a strike.

Not for pay. Not for benefits. For “free speech.”

The union, U.A.W. 4811, represents about 48,000 graduate students and other academic workers at 10 University of California system campuses and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. Its members, incensed over the university system’s handling of campus protests, pushed their union to address grievances extending beyond the bread-and-butter issues of collective bargaining to concerns over protesting and speaking out in their workplace.

As a general precept, it’s not unheard of for a union to be concerned about its members’ ability to speak in the workplace. But this strike authorization isn’t about speech, per se, but a very specific subset that neither involves free speech nor a term and condition of employment.

The strike authorization vote, which passed with 79 percent support, comes two weeks after dozens of counterprotesters’ attacked a pro-Palestinian encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles, for several hours without police intervention, and without arrests. Officers in riot gear tore down the encampment the next day and arrested more than 200 people.

Essentially, the union strike authorization relates to the treatment of criminal conduct on campus. The encampments were not free speech. The counterprotesters attack was not free speech. The clearing of the encampments and arrests were not free speech. What this seeks to influence is what constitutes criminal conduct and how it’s addressed. The union wants its say.

The union said it had called the vote because the University of California unilaterally and unlawfully changed policies regarding free speech, discriminated against pro-Palestinian speech and created an unsafe work environment by allowing attacks on protesters, among other grievances.

The vote left it to the executive board of the local to decide whether a strike should be called.

“At the heart of this is our right to free speech and peaceful protest,” Rafael Jaime, the president of U.A.W. 4811, said in a statement after the vote. “If members of the academic community are maced and beaten down for peacefully demonstrating on this issue, our ability to speak up on all issues is threatened.”

Of course, “peacefully” demonstrating is a disingenuous characterization. While it was mostly peaceful, it was also blatantly unlawful, as they not only seized a portion of the campus but denied access to others who had as much right to be there.

Masked activists block Jewish Professor from entering the UC Davis campus where he works.

pic.twitter.com/pdq4CdyXCc

— Oli London (@OliLondonTV) May 15, 2024

The University of California recognizes the problem inherent in the union’s flexing of muscle beyond the scope of normal labor relations issues, where the answer to any issue that concerns the union could be a strike that undermines a university’s mission of providing an education.

A spokeswoman for the University of California president’s office said in a statement that a strike would set “a dangerous precedent that would introduce nonlabor issues into labor agreements.”

“To be clear, the U.C. understands and embraces its role as a forum for free speech, lawful protests and public debate,” said the spokeswoman, Heather Hansen. “However, given that role, these nonlabor-related disputes cannot prevent it from fulfilling its academic mission.”

The plan is to use a strike to reward campuses that capitulate to the protesters’ demand and punish those that don’t.

Mr. Jaime, the U.A.W. 4811 president, said before the vote that the union would use the tactic to “reward campuses that make progress” and possibly call strikes at those that don’t. He added that the union would announce the strikes “only at the last minute, in order to maximize chaos and confusion for the employer.”

The problem, of course, is that this isn’t a business that will lose profits if a strike is called, but a university. The people punished are the students if they are denied an education. Then again, the people punished by the union’s demands are also the students, as well as the faculty, that don’t share their activism.

But now that unions have taken hold on college campuses, they are in a position where they can shut down a school for whatever cause or purpose they support to the detriment of everyone else. While strikes by public sector unions are unlawful in other states, they are not in California. And frankly, the unlawful strikes are “forgiven” as part of the settlement elsewhere, rendering that limitation a functional nullity.

If this ends with the University of California capitulating to its union, as some of its colleges capitulated to its student protesters, it opens the door to a deeply problematic future, where whatever issue enjoys the progressive trend on campus will be the source of the next threatened strike.

Tobias Higbie, a professor of history and labor studies at U.C.L.A., said that while striking for free speech was unusual, it wasn’t unheard-of. The academic workers’ union is also largely made up of young people, who have been far more receptive to organized labor than young people in even the recent past, he said.

“It points to how generational change is not only impacting workplaces, but it’s going to impact unions,” Mr. Higbie said. “Young members are going to make more and more demands like this on their unions as we go forward over the next couple of years, and so I think it’s probably a harbinger of things to come.”

Having realized that the power to strike to wreak havoc on a university can enable a union to push whatever trendy cause strikes its fancy, there is really no limit to what it can demand of the administration at the expense of the students, administration and taxpayers. But that’s the nature of public sector unions, particularly in the hands of children.