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Organize!

organize-iconWhether we are engaging in acts of resistance or creating new, alternative institutions, we need to create sustainable, democratic organizations that empower their members while also protecting against disruption. This section provides articles about effective organizing, creating democratic decision-making structures, building coalitions with other groups, and more. Visit the Resources Page for tools to assist your organizing efforts.

The AFL-CIO Can Be Reformed, Locally And From The Bottom-Up!

February 15, 2024 Steve Early, Popular Resistance. , , ,
Changing the leadership, structure, or functioning of any U.S. labor organization is no easy task. Activists and experts have long argued about whether dysfunctional unions are best reformed from the top-down, bottom-up, or some mix of the two approaches.  For the past 65 years, the main locus of union democracy and reform struggles in the U.S. has been local unions, which hold leadership elections every three years and are closest to the membership. Thousands of rank-and-file workers have campaigned for more militant unionism by running for and winning local office.  Some have had the backing of national networks of like-minded dissidents, including Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) and Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a TDU-inspired reform caucus within the United Auto Workers.

Contract Faculty Wrest Neutrality From New York University

February 14, 2024 Jeff Schuhrke, Labor Notes. , , ,
Contingent professors scored a victory January 3 when they got New York University to agree to a union election this semester, and to remain neutral during the process. The election is scheduled for February 27 and 28. If they vote yes, Contract Faculty United (CFU)-UAW Local 7902 will become the largest union in the country of full-time, non-tenure-track faculty at a private university, with 950 members. Nationwide, two-thirds of faculty positions are contingent—meaning they lack the possibility of tenure. Many are adjunct instructors, who are hired on a course-by-course, semester-by-semester basis and typically make low wages and lack benefits. But there is another, lesser-known category of contingent faculty: those who work full-time on long-term contracts. The number of such full-time, non-tenure-track faculty in the US has almost tripled since 1987.

It’s Known As ‘Death By Incarceration’; People Want To End It

February 12, 2024 Victoria Law, Portside. , , , ,
“My life is either going to be a testimony or a warning,” said Derek Lee. Lee was speaking on a video chat from behind the walls of SCI Smithfield in central Pennsylvania. Now 35 years old, Lee has been imprisoned since he was 29. If nothing changes, he will grow old and die in prison. In 2016, a Pennsylvania court sentenced Lee to life without parole for a burglary two years earlier that ended with his accomplice fatally shooting the homeowner. Lee was not involved in the killing, but he was convicted of second-degree or felony murder—an unintentional death that happens when the defendant is committing a felony. In Pennsylvania, that means an automatic sentence of life without parole (LWOP).

Campus Divestment Activists Eye Fossil Fuel Profits On Stolen Land

February 10, 2024 Anita Hofschneider, Scheer Post. , , , ,
Samantha Gonsalves-Wetherell, a senior at the University of Arizona, has spent years urging university officials to take climate change seriously. As a leader of UArizona Divest, she and her classmates have been pushing the university toward three goals: to divest from fossil fuels by 2029; commit to no further investments in fossil fuels; and to implement socially responsible investing goals.  “It’s hard to both combat the climate crisis and also fund it,” said Gonsalves-Wetherell. She has met with university officials to ask them what stocks the university has invested in and how much revenue oil and gas investments bring in. 

Amid Union-Busting, Starbucks Workers Just Keep Organizing

February 6, 2024 The Stand. , , , ,
If Starbucks executives thought the company’s aggressive and illegal anti-union efforts would eventually wear down employees and that enthusiasm would wane for joining together in a union, they were wrong. On Monday, employees at yet another local Starbucks store in Renton Village demanded a union election, saying “business has repeatedly been prioritized over partners’ physical and mental health.” Amid management’s union-busting campaign, Starbucks workers just keep organizing. There are now 483 Starbucks stores in 46 states that have filed to unionize. Of those, 385 Starbucks stores in 43 states have won union elections, a nearly 80 percent win rate.

FightBackBetter.com: Hyper Focused News For NJ’s Pro-Palestine Movement

February 5, 2024 Bob Witanek, Fight Back Better. , , , , ,
“NJ area news hyper-focused on the topic of the efforts in solidarity with the people of Palestine” is how editor of the new site Bob Witanek describes his newly rebranded http://FightBackBetter.com. The news is certainly of the advocacy bend – unlike most standard journalism that attempts to maintain a semblance of impartiality. According to Bob Witanek, “The assumption is that our readers are on this site to find out what they can do to take effective action against the US-supported genocide targeting the Palestinian people in Gaza. ”The site is structured to present the dozens of activities and organizational efforts occurring around NJ each and every week with the details and the contact information, to show what the editor believes is repression against some sectors of opposition to the what he considers “genocide’.

Hyundai Workers Roll The Union On In Alabama

February 4, 2024 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , , ,
Auto workers at Hyundai in Montgomery, Alabama, have signed up more than 30 percent of their nearly 4,000 co-workers in an ambitious drive to unionize. The Auto Workers (UAW) announced the organizing breakthrough with a new video, “Montgomery Can’t Wait,” where workers link the labor and civil rights movements: “Montgomery, the city where Rosa Parks sat down, and where thousands of Hyundai workers are ready to Stand Up.” “There’s something about our fight to unionize being homegrown that makes it just that much sweeter,” said Quichelle Liggins, a 12-year quality inspector at Hyundai.

Tech Workers Deserve A Union

February 2, 2024 Peter Olney, The Stansbury Forum. , , ,
Many of us have tried to follow the recent kerfuffle involving Sam Altman’s leadership of the company he founded, OpenAI. In mid-November 2023 he was abruptly fired, then returned to power just five days later. The business press highlighted the implications of this power struggle for the rapid deployment of artificial intelligence and the future influence of investors like Microsoft. It appears, however, that the pivotal moment in the power struggle came when 738 out of OpenAI’s estimated 770 workers said they would resign if Altman remained ousted. Even if it only resulted in putting a CEO back in power (and to a company that represents a real threat to the labor movement), the revolt by OpenAI workers was nevertheless “one of the most successful collective actions taken to date in the tech industry,” writes Ethan Marcotte, and a reminder to tech workers of the power they have at work.

The Landless Workers’ Movement At 40

January 29, 2024 Liam Crisan, Counter Punch. , , , , ,
This month marks the 40th anniversary of the largest social movement in the Americas: Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, or MST (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra in Portuguese). What began as a group of displaced farmers has evolved over decades into a mass movement — with as many as two million members and a presence in 24 of Brazil’s 26 states. Today, the movement is the largest producer of organic food in Brazil and the largest producer of organic rice in all Latin America. While Brazil remains one of the world’s most unequal nations, the MST has made incredible progress during their 40 years of existence

International Assembly In NYC Salutes Palestinian Resistance

January 28, 2024 Sara Flounders, Workers World. , , ,
The International Assembly Against Imperialism in Solidarity with Palestinian Resistance was held at the historic Malcolm X & Dr. Betty Shabazz Memorial & Educational Center in New York City on Jan. 21. Workers World Party, the organizer of the event, had chosen the date to honor the centennial of Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, who died that day in 1924. The unique assembly challenged U.S. imperialist efforts to isolate and demonize the Palestinian resistance and its allies. Organizers surrounded reports by Palestinian Resistance groups with statements from well-known national and international organizations that have decades of authority in the world movement for resisting U.S. imperialist blockades and sanctions, and by workers’ parties and solidarity organizations from around the world.

Urgent Call To Defend The Uhuru Movement Against Imprisonment

January 26, 2024 the Hands Off Uhuru Fightback Coalition, Popular Resistance. , , , , ,
On July 29th of 2022, the FBI militarily raided seven homes and offices of the Uhuru (“Freedom”) Movement including the home of its founder and leader, Omali Yeshitela, Chairman of the African People’s Socialist Party. This video shows footage from the violent, unjustified raids.  The U.S. government has fabricated the bogus charge that Chairman Omali and the Uhuru Movement are “Russian agents” to justify putting the 82-year-old Yeshitela in prison for the rest of his life and to silence him and his lifelong fight for the liberation of Africa and African people worldwide. Chairman Omali Yeshitela’s official statement can be read here.  

The Unionization Wave Is Hitting Costco

January 23, 2024 Luis Feliz Leon , Jacobin. , ,
Costco’s executives are eyeballing the number 18,238 and plastering letters of contrition in break rooms after workers at the wholesale retail chain’s Norfolk, Virginia, store voted to join Teamsters Local 822 in late December. “We’re not disappointed in our employees; we’re disappointed in ourselves as managers and leaders,” wrote outgoing CEO Craig Jelinek and then president and now CEO Ron Vachris in a memo on December 29. “The fact that a majority of Norfolk employees felt that they wanted or needed a union constitutes a failure on our part.” This pattern — contrition, apology, vows to do better — is nothing new in the union-busting playbook.

We Threw Out The Old Playbook: The New Union Drive At Mercedes

January 20, 2024 Jeremy Kimbrell, Labor Notes. , , ,
Auto workers have had several organizing campaigns at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Alabama. They all follow a similar pattern: Frustrated workers decide there’s enough energy for change in the plant and start talking about organizing. We reach out to a union, the Auto Workers (UAW), and meet with a staff organizer. They lead us through the steps they’ve all been taught for decades—a playbook that hasn’t worked for us at Mercedes. Over the years we got frustrated—not only with the company, but also with the ways that past organizers told us union campaigns had to operate. We would often say to UAW reps, “We don’t know how to win, but we know how to lose, and you do too.”

At MLK Conference, Unionists Strategize On Organizing The South

January 18, 2024 Mark Gruenberg, Portside. , , ,
Unionists at the AFL-CIO’s annual Martin Luther King conference, held January 12-14 in Montgomery, Ala., tackled what one panelist called a decades-long problem for the labor movement: Organizing the South. And that means both for more union victories, and members, and politically, too. The conference, in a birthplace of the modern civil rights movement, preceded the first actual voting of the 2024 presidential campaign: The January 15 Iowa Republican caucuses, pitted former GOP Oval Office occupant Donald Trump—a self-professed authoritarian who’d rip up the U.S. Constitution—against the rest of the field.

Inside The Fight To Save Philly’s Chinatown From A New Arena

January 17, 2024 Justin A. Davis, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
Since the summer of 2022, the city of Philadelphia has seen a fierce battle over the home of their professional basketball team, the 76ers. Currently located at Wells Fargo Center on Philly’s south side, economic power players have been shopping around a proposal for a new 18,000 seat arena called 76 Place, which would move NBA games to the city’s bustling downtown core (known as Center City). With a billion-dollar price tag, 76 Place represents a partnership between team owners Josh Harris and David Blitzer and real estate mogul David Adelman, who have argued that the arena would create new jobs, raise tax revenue and revitalize a part of downtown that many see as full of untapped potential.
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