Organizing associational power: A strikers’ inquiry into the 2022 UAW strike against the University of California

In November 2022, 48,000 workers across the University of California initiated the largest strike in the history of United States higher education. But although the strike ended 6 weeks later with the ratification of a new contract, support for this new contract diverged sharply across campuses: what accounts for these varying assessments of the strike? Drawing on ethnographic participation, documents, and interviews with strikers, organizers, and union staff across Berkeley and Santa Cruz, two campuses exemplary of this divergence, we develop a strikers’ inquiry into how differing strategies and organizing tactics produced opposed understandings of the strike’s possibilities and limits. Engaging the power resources approach, we describe and contrast Berkeley’s “broad, visible, and complete” strategy with Santa Cruz’s “long haul” strategy. Whereas the former envisioned a brief, but absolute, labor withholding that would overwhelm the university, the latter anticipated a more attritional and dynamic struggle structured by various leverage points. These strategies articulated contrasting ideas about the strike’s collective power, revealing how associational power must be actively organized. The strategic questions raised in 2022 remain central to future academic labor struggles and the exercise of collective power.