On April 25, 30 or so tents went up in front of Royce Hall on the campus of UCLA, and the university’s eventual response has now led to rolling strikes by unionized academic workers on multiple UC campuses.

United Auto Workers (UAW) Local 4811 represents about 48,000 teaching assistants, tutors, student researchers, academic researchers and postdoctoral scholars employed in the UC system. So far, the union’s so-called “Stand-up Strikes” have been stood up at UC Santa Cruz, UCLA, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara.

The union, which states on its website that it “will not negotiate on behalf of encampment organizers,” has filed multiple complaints against the University of California with the state’s Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) since the beginning of May, when the university called in law enforcement to break down the “Palestine Solidarity Encampment” at UCLA. By then the initial 30 tents had grown into a massive, self-barricaded site that attracted angry counter-protesters in a violent overnight clash.

The union’s complaint listed “workplace demands” that included the “right to opt out of participation in military-funded research,” and the “disclosure and divestment of University funds from Israel’s war effort.” The UAW local also complained that a new discipline policy of an “applicable review process” for employees who are arrested or cited was imposed without “notice or opportunity to bargain.”

Further, the union wants the university to “make whole” any employees who were reported for criminal activity by paying their civil fines, attorney fees, bail and damage expenses.

The UC Office of the President released a statement that called the strikes “a dangerous precedent that would introduce non-labor issues into labor agreements.” UC filed its own complaint with the state labor board, arguing that the walkouts violate the union contract’s “no-strike” clause, but the board turned down the university’s request for an injunction to halt the strikes and ordered the two sides to mediation instead.

According to the UC president’s statement, the University of California has “more than 280,000 students and 227,000 faculty and staff.” UC’s annual budget, at $51.4 billion, is more than the total funding for California State University and California Community Colleges combined.

It sounds a little top-heavy, especially in a tough budget year. Perhaps the university would like to invite the strikers to move on with their careers somewhere else. That’s a better idea than making concessions to narcissistic union leaders who want to run another country while everyone else pays for the damage.

Union propaganda posted by UAW 4811 to Twitter includes the grandiose claim that, “Student and worker protest movements have always pushed the UC to the right side of history. As UC demonstrates in an article on their own website, it is the students and workers who remain the driving force of change in the UC system.”

As can be seen by the current state of the UC system, the “right side of history” is evidently a bloated, costly system stacked with far-left radicals who have a soft spot for terrorists.