Higher ed labor strategy in response to the call for solidarity from the Palestinian trade union movement
In addition to the statements, petitions, and resolutions we have seen appear, workers in the higher ed labor movement are seeking concrete and material ways to act in solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
The Department of Defense (DoD) funds billions of dollars of research in U.S. universities. In return, research conducted in DoD-sponsored labs strengthens the U.S. military, which has historically and ongoingly sent armaments, munitions, technologies, and research to support Israeli military assaults on Palestine.
Workers in labs receiving DoD funds are uniquely placed to answer the call by Palestinian trade unions for “halting the arms trade with Israel, as well as all funding and military research.”
This is a step-by-step guide to organizing with these workers. The priority is to stage lab-level meetings of workers to strategize a response to the call for solidarity. We cannot know in advance what will be possible among specific sets of workers, or likely even what the best tactics and strategies may be, until we meet collectively with the relevant workers, and learn the labor process in their lab.
We are trying to build something new in response to an emergency, in the hope that examples of worker action can be amplified and replicated. This is a strategy open to rank and file workers at any university that receives DoD funding, whether unionized or not.
Contents
Step 1: Find links to the U.S. Department of Defense at your institution 2
Step 2: Identify specific labs 4
Step 3: Do power mapping for DoD-funded labs at your institution 4
Step 4: The Initial Outreach 5
Step 5: The Meeting (Templates—More Soon) 6
Steward Outreach
It is often the case that workers already know which labs in their department receive this funding. If you have stewards or other contacts through previous labor organizing, reach out for a discussion. For tips on how to have these discussions, see below.
General links to your institution
Your institution may generate annual research funding reports (especially public universities) that break down the total research funds that the university receives from state and federal agencies. This will likely include a section on DoD funding streams. For example, the University of California’s Appropriations Priorities report for the 2024 fiscal year states that the UC supports research for over $23 billion of DoD funds. The report does not fully specify the breakdown of those funds by campus or lab, but it does offer keywords for further investigation (see “Search keywords” section below).
The National Science Foundation’s Higher Education Research Development (HERD) survey contains a (probably incomplete) list of U.S. universities that receive DoD funding, ranked by funding amount. See Table 60 at this link. Note that this database currently reflects funding allocations for 2021, and will be updated sometime in November 2023 to reflect the 2022 cycle.
The web site usaspending.gov offers an advanced searchable database that makes it relatively easy to trace what grants are connected to Principal Investigators (faculty). Here’s an example from Boston University. To utilize this search tool, you will need to input your institution’s UEI code, which is available here. Reviewing self-published faculty CVs in heavily military-funded departments, as the author of this study did, can yield additional details on PI grants at your university.
Major research universities house centralized research offices that maintain detailed information about all externally-funded projects on their campus, some of which is publicly accessible. For example, the UC Santa Cruz Office of Sponsored Projects, housed in the UCSC Office of Research, publishes monthly bulletins online highlighting STEM research awards greater than $150,000, many of which are military-funded projects. UC Berkeley's Sponsored Projects Office features a searchable online database of external research funding on campus that includes specific military agencies as filters.
General internet searches
Many direct funding links between the DoD and university research labs can be found with simple searches on Google or other platforms. You want to look out for announcements of funding or grant recipients from DoD (or subsidiary) reports, or announcements by your university. The DoD and its subsidiaries often release lists of funding awardees for specific annual grants. Less frequently, funding awards from the DoD will be announced on lab websites or on news releases published by your institution, but these are harder to find right away.
Search keywords
If starting from scratch, you can often make progress by simply searching “department of defense” + “[your institution].” An important tip is to spell out your institution’s name in full when you search, even if it is better known by an acronym or other short-form spelling. DoD award lists typically spell out university names in full.
Even more importantly, the DoD is not a monolith body, and has many subsidiaries. Even individual DoD subsidiaries may have distinct names for certain funding programs or research grant awards. This means that there may be multiple labs at your institution that receive DoD funding even though the DoD is not directly named as a funding source.
You may be able to narrow your search by swapping out “department of defense” in your searches with the names of some of the subsidiaries listed below. If you can find research funding reports released by your institution, these may give you more specific search terms to refine your investigation or reveal labs that you might have missed with a more general DoD search.
Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of DoD subsidiaries and grant funding programs to search for. Links are also provided where available for recent funding recipient lists or research award databases.
Using the search tips above, the information you find will probably help you identify which specific labs at your institution receive DoD research funding. These labs will often be housed in engineering, physical science or biological science departments, but you may find DoD awards in the social sciences as well. The best specifying information to help you identify labs are:
Once you have this, try to find the lab’s website. Labs or PIs usually publish their websites online for recruitment purposes, and are often easy to find. The PI name is usually a much better route to finding the lab than the title of a specific project, since labs frequently encompass multiple concurrent or consecutive research projects through multiple funding sources.
If you wish to confirm DoD (or subsidiary) funding for a given PI or research project, you can also look up recent publications where the PI is a named author or co-author. The author info or acknowledgment section on published articles will sometimes directly point to DoD funding sources for the research.
For most unionists in U.S. universities, the PI of the identified labs will not be your primary target. There will always be many workers in a given lab, from postdocs to lab techs and other staff to graduate and undergraduate student researchers. Most of the workers in the lab will be named in some section of the lab’s website.
The first step in power mapping is to give yourself a full picture of the workers in the lab. Create a spreadsheet for each identified lab where you list the names of every worker in the lab, along with their job title and contact information.
Then, use your existing resources and prior organizing experiences to prioritize your plan of outreach. If you are a graduate student, you will likely want to prioritize graduate student researchers in the lab, who will have common experiences with you and will be more likely to engage in conversations about the Palestinian trade union call and their lab’s ties to the DoD. We suggest starting where you expect to have the most receptive audience — it will be easier to reach further once we have concrete examples to point towards.
If you have access to official union resources, contact lists, or membership data, use a variety of indicators to assess if workers in your union are more likely to be receptive to a conversation. Which workers in the lab are union members? Which workers in the lab voted in your union’s most recent Strike Authorization Vote? Did they sign in at recent pickets? These and similar questions will help you start your outreach in a non-random way.
General Notes
Guide to the conversation:
Text template (if no answer):
Hi ____! This is ____, a fellow grad worker in the ____ department at [University]. I’m working on an organizing campaign right now specific to researchers in STEM fields. Do you have 10-15 minutes to talk on the phone sometime this week?
Here are some template materials you can use or share with workers in labs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRWXjX_nD1J5kuGE3N-Woc5WNl0Pltbx0H2YZ5LxMVxzC7vwWvoHwrPdDXRu1vVd0BJlu_DEk46AmXG/pub