Palestinian workers are asking for solidarity from British trade unionists. Following the onslaught of the Israeli genocide in Gaza, the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) issued a global call for solidarity from workers across the world. They wrote:

Palestinian trade unions call on our counterparts internationally and all people of conscience to end all forms of complicity with Israel’s crimes - most urgently halting the arms trade with Israel, as well as all funding and military research. The time for action is now - Palestinian lives hang in the balance.

They also named several specific actions which workers should prioritise:

We are calling on trade unions in relevant industries:

1. To refuse to build weapons destined for Israel.
2. To refuse to transport weapons to Israel.
3. To pass motions in their trade union to this effect.
4. To 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 US, funding to it.

This call for solidarity builds on the global call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) of Israel first issued by Palestinian civil society in 2004.

In advance of 1st May, International Workers Day, and 15th May, Nakba Day, the PGFTU also issued a further call for a range of solidarity actions, asking workers everywhere to:

1. Refuse to handle goods coming from or destined to Israel.
2. Organise a work stoppage or slowdown.
3. Hold educational meetings within your trade union branch to discuss the Palestinian struggle.
4. Distribute informational flyers, pamphlets, or newsletters in your workplace to educate colleagues and provide resources for action.
5. Circulate a workplace petition among coworkers calling for specific actions or policy changes, such as divesting pension funds from companies complicit in the occupation or implementing boycott measures against complicit companies.

Since these statements were issued, a large number of trade unionists and activists have sought to implement these calls to action. In the UK, perhaps the most notable actions were taken by Workers for a Free Palestine (WFFP). Their activists have organised several mass pickets outside UK arms factories since October 2023. On 1st May, they also organised a successful blockade of the UK Department of Business and Trade in solidarity with civil service workers inside who had been struggling alongside their union, the PCS, to refuse to take part in the granting of arms export licences to Israel. This blockade was so large that it succeeded in closing the building for the morning.

These were inspiring and important actions, but they also had limits. Firstly, they were mostly community-led, i.e. organised by workers and activists beyond the workplaces targeted for action. This limited their capacity for sustained leverage inside the workplace. Second, and relatedly, they were of necessity time-limited, since organising mass community pickets is resource and labour intensive. And finally, these blockades have steadily become targets for greater police repression, since they are unauthorised pickets without the legal protections unions usually seek for such actions.

As has been noted by the organisation Workers in Palestine (WiP), such solidarity actions are generally much more effective if they can garner the support of workers inside the workplaces they target, since this opens the door to more widespread and sustained work stoppages, such as has happened at several US ports hosting Israeli ships. For this reason, the recent mass pickets of factories and government departments have also involved sustained efforts at worker engagement, attempting to build bridges with those inside the workplace as the basis for future organising.

Nonetheless, this raises a further challenge: how could workers in the UK actually strike for Palestine, especially given the extremely restrictive environment created by British labour law? Wildcat, unauthorised strike action is always a possibility, and has been used to powerful effect in recent industrial relations in the UK. There have also been impressive boycotts organised by gig economy workers in support of Palestine. However, without the protection of official industrial action, it is unarguably much harder to build the necessary confidence and strength among workers to carry off such actions.

Nevertheless, there are some avenues for trade unionists to explore in seeking to implement lawful and official industrial action in support of Palestine. Recent examples in different sectors point to various ways forward. I have tended to concentrate the argument below on the university sector, which is where I work and whose complicity with the genocide has been widely documented. But I also discuss several other sectors, such as the arms trade, civil service, and cultural workers where there are also clear opportunities. Before suggesting what these strategies might be, it’s first necessary to briefly outline the relevant legal landscape around industrial action in the UK, which is where I’ll begin. I’ll then look at the possibility of UK strikes for Palestine oriented around freedom of speech; a just transition; and complicity in genocide.

It’s also necessary to add a disclaimer here: the guide below has been written from a lay perspective, and doesn’t claim to be an authoritative legal analysis. I’m not a lawyer or legal academic. Nevertheless, ordinary workers can have an important role in pushing the boundaries of the legal landscape and legal knowledge production, and can thereby create new opportunities. It’s in this spirit that this article was written.

UK labour law

Despite its rich history of trade unionism, the UK has some of the most anti-trade union restrictions on industrial action anywhere in the developed world. Successive legal frameworks have curtailed the ability of unions to take strike action, to the extent that it is now notoriously difficult to organise strikes. Most of the commentary on these restrictions has focussed on recent Tory legislation, such as ballot thresholds or minimum service levels, or the legacy of Thatcher’s attack on workers. But in fact some of the biggest legal obstacles to striking for Palestine are baked right into the heart of British trade union law, including some of its most celebrated features.

The most important of these is the so-called “golden formula”, originally enacted in the 1906 Trade Disputes Act, which was the first law to positively protect strike action from employer retaliation. This Act states that all lawful strike action must be taken “in contemplation or furtherance of a trade dispute”, which is narrowly defined. According to current law (a direct descendant of the 1906 Act), a trade dispute has to “wholly or mostly” concern one or more of the following:

1. Terms and conditions of employment.
2. Physical working conditions.
3. Engagement or non-engagement of workers.
4. Suspension.
5. Termination of employment.
6. Allocation of work.
7. Disciplinary matters.
8. Membership or non-membership of a trade union.
9. Facilities for union officials.
10. Machinery for negotiation or consultation, or other procedures, relating to the above (including union recognition and union representation rights).

You will notice, of course, that “free Palestine” or “stopping the global war machine” do not feature here, and on the face of things, it would be hard to construe this list to include them. This is intentional. British labour law has been designed to prevent the occurrence of “political strikes” which collectivise the power of workers to apply leverage over a political issue facing the whole of society.

Another way in which UK labour law achieves this objective is by defining between whom a trade dispute can exist. Such disputes must always concern a matter between an employee and an employer. In the past, it was possible for this to include employees of one workplace taking strike action in support of workers employed by a different employer (otherwise known as secondary action). However, this was firmly outlawed by legislation introduced by the Thatcher government. In 2014, the RMT unsuccessfully challenged this at the European Court of Human Rights. On the face of it, this would appear to make it unlawful, for example, for a schoolteacher or train driver to take strike action at their workplace in order to apply pressure on arms companies. Nor could they take strike action over a general political matter over which their employer has no control or influence.

Faced with these significant challenges, it is no wonder that some trade unions might view the idea of a strike for Palestine in the UK as impossible. However, if we begin to think creatively, potential doors to striking for Palestine are opened.

Freedom of speech and “matters of discipline”

An inspiring recent example of a strike for Palestine was undertaken by graduate student workers in the University of California (UC) system. The UC is a statewide group of publicly-run universities. The United Auto Workers Union (UAW) represents almost 50,000 academic workers in the UC, many of them graduate students, who carry out a large proportion of the teaching, grading, and research. In May, in response to the Palestinian call, graduate student workers at UC Santa Cruz went out on strike. What began as a wildcat walkout in solidarity with Palestine on 1st May was followed by a formal strike authorisation to protest “unfair labour practices” on the part of their employer. The official strike at UCSC began on 20th May, with workers at other universities joining them after the first week. It should be noted that the UCSC chapter is the most militant in the UC system, having previously taken wildcat action and a series of indefinite strikes over the cost of living for graduate student workers.

The reference to “unfair labour practices” derives from the equivalent US legal framework governing industrial action, the National Labour Relations Act (1935). This permits strikes for two reasons: first, economic reasons (essentially, striking for pay and conditions); and second, “unfair labour practices”. The genius of the UAW was to identify that repressive university actions over Palestine could easily be construed as an unfair labour practice. As has been widely reported, following the recent wave of student encampments at universities across the US, a number of universities subjected their students to draconian repression and disciplinary action, including inviting police onto campus to clear encampments and arrest students. At UC Los Angeles, a student encampment was even attacked by far-right agitators and a number of students were injured, all on the university’s watch. The UAW argued successfully that all this repression constituted an unfair labour practice precisely because many of the graduate students who were repressed and disciplined were also workers.

The UC took out several lawsuits to prevent the strikes, but was twice unsuccessful in winning injunctions. Unfortunately the employer continued venue-shopping until it eventually found a sympathetic judge in Orange County who granted a temporary restraining order to prevent the UAW from striking. Nevertheless, although the employer’s legal strategy eventually paid off, this was not enough to keep the genie in the bottle: an official strike for Palestine across the UC system had already lasted for three weeks by this point.

What lessons could this offer workers in the UK? Well, “unfair labour practices” has a potential analogue in the UK definition of a trade dispute: “matters of discipline”. This gives trade unions the right to call industrial action in relation to employer decisions to discipline workers. It is, therefore, at least conceivable that a UK employer who chose to discipline workers for expressing support for Palestine in the workplace, such as by speaking out, joining a protest or other disruptive action, could become embroiled in a trade dispute with a trade union. Insofar as any disciplinary sanction amounted to suspension or even dismissal, it would also touch on other relevant aspects of the definition of a trade dispute. It is also conceivable that if an employer were to attack trade union facilities which displayed material in solidarity with Palestine, as happened recently at Queen Mary University of London, workers would be within their rights to lodge a trade dispute and take action in response. Although balloting restrictions could make it difficult to quickly mount an officially-sanctioned worker response, such disputes could go beyond reactive firefighting if unions actively seek changes to disciplinary policies or recognition agreements which enshrine guarantees for freedom of speech on Palestine.

Scenarios like this could theoretically play out in any sector, not just higher education. But such disputes could have particular importance in universities because of the role academic labour and knowledge production have played in shaping critical discourses about Palestine. Key concepts in the study of Palestine, such as settler colonialism, apartheid, and most recently genocide, have been elaborated and substantiated through critical scholarship in dialogue and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. The fact that these concepts have growing purchase in UN reports and significant legal cases at the ICJ and ICC is in no small part due to the space created for such scholarship in universities worldwide, including in the UK, space that it is strategically crucial for academic workers to defend collectively. The strategic importance of struggles to defend freedom of speech is also evident in the creative sector and the arts, which have played a important role in platforming and raising awareness of Palestinian culture and struggle. Using industrial leverage to defend freedom of speech in these workplaces could, therefore, make an important difference to the kind of academic and cultural labour which is possible in them.

Of course, some of the above scenarios for strikes for Palestine over the disciplining of speech do pre-suppose a degree of risk. They involve a situation in which workers have exposed themselves to employer reprisals. However, unfortunately, this attack on freedom of speech is not hypothetical but real, and the risk of doing nothing may be even greater. As the UC example shows very well, repression can and does arise where there is already a high level of community and worker agitation around Palestine happening in the workplace. Many of the students who participated in the encampments in the UK will also have been graduate workers. Moreover, before the encampments, universities in the UK had already been widely criticised for having targeted academics for disciplinary action over their views on Palestine, usually on spurious charges of antisemitism. Like academics and students, cultural workers and artists expressing solidarity have also come under attack. Insofar as any of these workers have faced unjust disciplinary repression from their employer, a strike to support them remains a possibility we can seize.

A just transition

One of the major challenges of organising workers in sectors with high degrees of complicity with Israeli apartheid and genocide is the anxiety generated by the possible job losses that could ensue if companies broke ties and divested. Both employers and governments regularly talk up the role that the arms industry plays in the UK economy, even though, in reality, it is a heavily subsidised and volatile sector. As activists have pointed out, this is why it is essential that alongside calling out complicity, trade unions and campaigners also need to discuss the practicalities of a just transition away from arms production and into more sustainable industries such as green energy.

One of the most celebrated examples of this approach in Britain was the Lucas Plan, through which plant workers lobbied Lucas Aerospace to respond to competitive pressures in the arms sector by diversifying into other areas of demonstrable social need (such as medical supplies or energy conservation). With the onset of the energy transition away from carbon, these ideas are witnessing a revival, with arguments being put forward that weapons manufacturing systems would be better and more sustainably put to use producing things such as wind turbines or tidal generators (see here, here, here, and here for examples and further discussion). This would lead to better and more secure jobs without complicity in the Israeli war machine or genocide.

Nonetheless, there are still challenges in turning this approach from theory into industrial action that could be taken in support of Palestine. As Ben Crawford and David Whyte argue in a recent pamphlet on green bargaining, there are several barriers to taking strike action for climate justice. These include the fact that it remains difficult to attribute responsibility for overall climate injustice to one’s own employer or that the future job security and cost of living risks of climate change lack the perceived immediacy implied by the statutory language of “contemplating” a trade dispute. As they argue, creative strategies are needed to build green bargaining approaches which link job security and conditions with the need to transition. They give recent examples where this is being attempted with modest success by the UCU in Green New Deal bargaining in universities and by Unite in chemicals manufacturing.

The genocide in Gaza may be an area where the role of demilitarisation makes the question of a just transition far more urgent and easier to connect to the activities of individual employers. Researchers have identified the links between British arms manufacturers and the Israeli military very clearly. These links also extend deep into the R&D activities of British universities. A recent report by the student Palestine Society at LSE also made the link between the university’s complicity in apartheid and investment in fossil fuels explicit. These sectors are ripe for unions to submit green bargaining claims in solidarity with Palestine.

This idea of a just transition is another area where the recent UC strike was extremely innovative in showing a possible way forward. Based on intensive organising conversations with graduate researchers across the UC system, UAW identified a need to incentivise those workers with financial support if they were to feel able to make the decision to break ties with military research supporting genocide. That is why, alongside demands to lift disciplinary sanctions on student workers, the UAW also articulated in its strike platform a demand for transitional research funding for graduate researchers.

Given the rampant casualisation among researchers in the university sector in the UK, the time is ripe for UCU to articulate a parallel demand in its national bargaining platform over pay and conditions. There can be no argument that doctoral and post-doctoral workers in the UK need better financial support in their early careers, where their professional choices are often constrained by a university funding landscape dominated by the private sector, including military R&D. In recent years, despite multiple setbacks in national pay bargaining, UCU’s claim has continually grown to include a call for more support for Postgraduate Researchers. While employers are yet to agree to any of these terms, they have been forced to accept a widening of the bargaining agenda to include these issues. It is time for the national claim to include an explicit demand for financial support for researchers that could facilitate a just transition away from complicity with the Israeli war machine, and towards greener research, so that a national UCU strike for Palestine might become a possibility in future years.

Protecting workers from complicity in genocide

A final area where a strike for Palestine might become possible relates to the recent efforts by the PCS union to support its members in the Department of Business and Trade. As discussed above, this was the focus of the WFFP solidarity action on 1st May. As was widely reported, the PCS had written to the government protesting that civil servants processing export licences for weapons to Israel were being exposed to the risk that they could be charged with complicity in genocide or war crimes. This protest was undoubtedly given further credibility by the ICJ’s repeated rulings that Israel’s actions in Gaza plausibly amount to genocide, as well as from the attempted ICC prosecution of Israeli leaders. The PCS is also reportedly considering taking legal action on this basis.

But what about industrial action? The most promising avenue here is the possibility of a trade dispute about “terms and conditions of employment”. It would theoretically be possible for the PCS, or indeed other unions in different sectors, to put forward a demand that contracts should be changed to allow workers to conscientiously object from complicity with genocide or the arms trade with Israel. This argument is not without legal precedent. It is notable and fitting that one of the most relevant cases to this issue in British industrial relations law, Hearn v BBC, concerns an attempted workplace action against Apartheid South Africa. In 1977, the Association of Broadcasting Staff sought to allow its technician members to take strike action to refuse to broadcast the FA Cup Final to South Africa. This was consistent with the strongly anti-apartheid policy of the union. Such an action was reminiscent of the recent action taken by Belgian broadcast workers, who interrupted their broadcast of the Eurovision semi-final during the Israeli performance in support of a cultural boycott.

Back in 1977, the BBC responded to the worker threat by seeking an injunction against the union. Amazingly, the High Court initially refused the BBC’s application because of an innovative argument made by the union that they were effectively seeking a new term in their contract which would exempt the workers from having to broadcast the match. Unfortunately, the Court of Appeal then granted the injunction, holding (perhaps accurately) that the contractual argument was simply a retrofitted ruse to allow a political strike. Nonetheless, the judgement in the case left an intriguing loophole. In his decision, Lord Denning offered the following hypothetical:

To become a trade dispute, there would have to be something of the kind which was discussed in the course of argument before us: ‘We would like you to consider putting a clause in the contract by which our members are not bound to take part in any broadcast which may be viewed in South Africa because we feel that it is obnoxious to their views and to the views of a great multitude of people. We would like that clause to be put in, or a condition of that kind to be understood.’ If the BBC refused to put in such a condition, or refused to negotiate about it, that might be a trade dispute…

In other words, all that was required to make the argument succeed was a bit more forward planning to structure the claim properly. This creates the possibility that unions in relevant sectors could formulate similar claims to seek contractual exemptions from having to work where it would breach workers’ consciences or in cases of gross human rights violations. The PCS is clearly in a position to put forward such a demand, but so would unionised workers in many other sectors. If employers refuse, a strike for Palestine would be a legitimate response.

Conclusions

As the above thought experiments suggest, the labour law landscape in the UK is not as hostile to strikes for Palestine as might first be imagined. By eschewing conservative interpretations of the law, trade unionists would have a variety of possible means to use their collective power to put pressure on employers and the state to break ties with Israeli genocide and stand in solidarity with Palestine.

However, while I have emphasised the possible legal routes to strike action in this article, we should also remember that legalism has its pitfalls. As was shown in the UC experience, employers will also have their own legal responses to such actions. We should not expect the judicial system to be a reliable friend of trade unions in such circumstances, especially when it comes to strikes for Palestine. This is why it is important to remember that official strike action does not exhaust the possibilities for trade unions, and that it needs to be supported by other actions to be effective. This certainly includes campaigning, education, and solidarity fundraising, but it could also entail forms of unofficial action to supplement or open up routes to formal action.

In fact, the major barriers to the approaches described above are not primarily legal, but political. Without strong organisation and broad support, legal protections alone will not suffice. As any good organiser knows, effective industrial action requires building strong support and relations of trust among workers. It requires giving them a voice and control over the direction of the action. Crucially, and particularly where Palestine is concerned, it also requires strong community mobilisations to complement and enrich worker actions, and help them seize opportunities and overcome legal limits. This political work is never easy, but it is essential.

The most important actions we can all take in this context are to build the organising networks in our communities and workplaces, and expand and generalise the inspiring solidarity work that is already taking place. If our movements and unions are strong, legal limits are surmountable. With determination, we can all find new ways to heed the Palestinian call for solidarity in our workplaces.