Workers Strike stands in solidarity with University of Michigan Students
Photo by Taylor Bowie
Workers Strike Back supports the anti-genocide student activists targeted by the University of Michigan administration.
We demand:
Drop all Office of Student Conflict Resolution disciplinary charges against students for protesting the ongoing genocide in Palestine
Reinstate student workers and staff members fired for protesting genocide and reverse campus bans of student and community activists
Remove all university regents and administration involved in the use of chemical weapons against students
Remove all university regents and administration involved in the the ongoing persecution of student protesters
End contracts with private security targeting student activists
End the genocide in Gaza, all U.S. military aid to Israel, and the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank
We call on all campus unions and organizations to pass resolutions of support for the targeted protesters, and to back those resolutions up with workplace actions, with strikes, and with shutting down the University of Michigan campus until our demands are met.
The regents’ first attempt to crush the right to protest on campus failed when Michigan State Attorney General Dana Nessel dismissed all criminal charges on May 5, 2025. Scandalously, regents who donated to State Attorney General Dana Nessel’s political campaign urged her to pursue these criminal charges against students simply for protesting against the genocide.
Nessel dropped the charges under pressure from our movement, because the massive community support for the protesters turned the courtroom into, in her words, a “circus”.
Following the state’s dismissal of criminal charges, the University has now launched new disciplinary charges against students for actions that allegedly took place 10-14 months ago. For standing up against the horrors taking place in Gaza, these anti-genocide activists now face penalties that can include suspension, expulsion, revocation of degrees, and a campus hiring ban.
This latest attempt to criminalize protest against an ongoing genocide not only aids the mass murder taking place in Palestine, but threatens to criminalize any and all campus protest.
We urge all students, university workers, and anyone affiliated with the University or living in Ann Arbor to join this defense campaign.
Mass strikes, mass protests, and campus shut downs are our most effective tools to fight back against these vicious attacks on basic democratic rights, to end the US government’s arming and funding of the genocide in Palestine, and to end the Trump administraton’s attacks on immigrants and intensifying right-wing, authoritarian actions.
We call on students nationally to organize for a re-launching of mass anti-genocide campus protests this fall, tied to mass strikes by campus and non-campus unions, and mass protests of the wider antiwar movement nationally and internationally. The slaughter in Gaza must end, and we need to go on the offensive against both warmongering parties of the billionaires which have been aiding and abetting this holocaust of the 21st century.
In solidarity,
Workers Strike Back
