Resolutions passed by the membership in a General Membership Meeting
GSU-UAW Local 2322 Member Resolution Calling for a Ceasefire in Gaza and an End to the Israeli Occupation of Palestine (April 23, 2025)
We, the undersigned rank-and-file members of the University of Vermont’s Graduate Students United – United Auto Workers Local 2322 — a certified union of graduate students employed as graduate teaching assistants, graduate research assistants, graduate assistants, pre-doctoral fellows and trainees, and all other graduate workers doing academic work at the University of Vermont — respond to the Palestinian trade unions’ urgent call to their international counterparts to pass motions in support of Palestine. We will not cross picket lines; we will join them.
We endorse the October 16, 2023, call issued by a coalition of Palestinian trade unions asking their international counterparts to:
1. Refuse to build weapons destined for Israel.
2. Refuse to transport weapons to Israel.
3. Pass motions in their trade union to this effect.
4. Take action against complicit companies involved in implementing Israel’s brutal and illegal siege, especially if they have contracts with your institution.
5. Pressure governments to stop all military trade with Israel, and in the case of the U.S., funding it.
Hearing our union siblings’ call, we resolve that:
We stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people and their struggle for national liberation.
We demand an immediate end to the bombing and siege of Gaza, all Israeli hostilities and military actions, and all forms of apartheid, settler colonialism, and violence being perpetrated against the Palestinian people.
We acknowledge that our struggle in the labor movement is an intersectional and international struggle for the freedom, justice, and dignity of all workers. As graduate student workers, we refuse to allow our labor to be complicit in warfare and genocide. We refuse the false choice presented to us as workers: between good union jobs and our moral consciousness. We stand in solidarity with our fellow Palestinian graduate student workers.
We reject UVM’s ties to genocide through its business and financial relationships with the Apartheid Israeli State, weapons manufacturers, defense contractors, and the US Department of Defense. We affirm our responsibility and obligation as unionists towards building a just transition to a peacetime economy for all working people. An injury to one is an injury to all.
We call for a permanent ceasefire to end the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide in Gaza, and now we call on other labor unions to do the same.
We are responsible to act. There are no more universities left standing in Gaza. Without the direct financial and political support of the United States government and all complicit US institutions, what we see in Gaza would not be possible. Our labor, our tax dollars, funds this genocide. It is our responsibility to act, to say, “Not in our name.”