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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.

Union Square Barnes & Noble Workers Win Vote To Unionize

June 10, 2023 Elizabeth Schwe, The Gothamist. , , ,
Workers at the Barnes & Noble flagship store in Union Square voted overwhelmingly to unionize in a 76-2 vote this week. This comes after the Barnes & Noble Education store on Rutgers University’s campus in New Jersey unanimously voted to unionize last month and two weeks after workers at the Barnes & Noble store in Park Slope submitted a petition with the National Labor Relations Board to unionize. The Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union will represent over 100 workers at the four-story Union Square store, which includes booksellers, baristas and other non-supervisory employees.

As New York Skies Darken, Delivery Workers Help Each Other

June 9, 2023 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
Wildfire smoke muddled the New York City skyline on Tuesday. Many people experienced the eerie threat mainly by scrolling through social media. But others experienced it in their bodies. “My eyes were burning,” said UPS package driver Matt Leichenger, who was making deliveries in Brooklyn. “My throat was scratchy. By lunchtime, I was feeling dizzy and nauseous.” Eventually, he got himself a surgical mask, he said, pausing momentarily to cough while we spoke on the phone. “It got a little bit better, but I was still blowing snot.” News stories showed a veil of smoke stretching from Wisconsin to Alabama—but UPS didn’t say anything to its workers.

Gathering For Indigenous Water Justice And Global Collaboration

June 7, 2023 Wakíŋyaŋ LaPointe, Last Real Indians. , , ,
On August 15-17, MKW Co-conveners and partners will convene the Mni Ki Wakan (Water is Sacred) Summit, themed, “Indigenous Water Justice, Global Collaboration, & Dismantling Water Colonialism,” occurring in Rapid City, South Dakota, United States (mnikiwakan.org). The MKW Summit will bring together Indigenous Peoples, youth, and Indigenous-led environmental water organizations. The MKW Summit is a pillar of the Indigenous Water Decade that was first announced in 2016 at the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII). Since then, the MKW team has engaged in local/transnational partnerships, and initiatives, providing Indigenous water interventions at the UNPFII and the UN Expert Mechanism on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Geneva, Switzerland.

Early-Career NIH Researchers Forming Union For First Time

June 5, 2023 Max Kozlov, Portside. , , ,
Bethesda, Maryland - Thousands of early-career researchers at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) have kick-started the process of forming a union. They are calling on the agency — the world’s largest biomedical funder — to raise pay and improve benefits, as well as to bolster its policies and procedures on harassment and excessive workloads. About 150 of these researchers rallied on the NIH’s campus in Bethesda, Maryland, on 1 June to celebrate filing their union petition with the US Federal Labor Relations Authority (FLRA) in nearby Washington DC. The filing kicks off a months-long process that they hope will end in the union being officially recognized by the US government and the NIH.

June 10-11: International Summit For Peace In Ukraine

June 2, 2023 International Peace Bureau, Popular Resistance. , , ,
'The aim of the International Peace Summit is to publish an urgent global appeal, the Vienna Declaration for Peace, calling on political actors to work for a ceasefire and negotiations in Ukraine. Prominent international speakers will point to the danger around the growing escalation of the war in Ukraine and call for a reversal towards a peace process. Speakers include: Former Colonel and Diplomat Ann Wright, USA; Prof. Anuradha Chenoy, India; Advisor to the President of Mexico Father Alejandro Solalinde, Mexico Member of the European Parliament Clare Daly, Ireland; Vice President David Choquehuanca, Bolivia; Prof. Jeffrey Sachs, USA...

You Can’t Organize Alone

June 1, 2023 Keisa Reynolds, In These Times. , ,
I spent a number of weekend mornings in small rooms attending workshops across downtown Chicago in my early 20s, around 2015. In one, abolitionist Mariame Kaba taught some two dozen participants about the legacy of the women in Marcus Garvey’s Black Nationalist movement, connecting their organizing in the 1920s with the framework Black feminist abolitionists were creating a century later. Learning that history was valuable in itself. Equally important was Kaba’s assurance that we didn’t have to reinvent the wheel — there was no analysis or strategy we were considering that hadn’t been used in the past. That might sound like reason for despair, but for me it was immediately empowering; white supremacy doesn’t want abolitionist organizers to know how close we’ve gotten to a common goal.

DHL Violates Neutrality, Freight Workers Join Teamsters Anyway

June 1, 2023 Peter Lucas, Labor Notes. , , ,
At the DHL Express superhub at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, 1,100 workers who load and unload freight on aircraft voted to join Teamsters Local 100 in April in one of the biggest private-sector union wins this year. Package giant DHL, a competitor of UPS and FedEx, is one of the world’s largest and most profitable logistics companies, and the Cincinnati-area hub is the company’s largest. The tug and ramp workers organized because of low pay, safety concerns, and poor treatment from management. “The company mantra that they sell to customers—‘connecting people, improving lives’—doesn’t exist for their own workers,” said ramp lead Garrett Schwing.

From Bayanihan To Talkoot

May 30, 2023 Jeffrey Andreoni, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
For all of human history, societies have depended on communal work to sustain themselves into the (often unpredictable) future. However, at a certain point, that all changed. Market forces took over, and communal projects ceased to have the same significance. The individual took precedence over the community, and large public works became the purview of burgeoning states. The classic North American example of such communal work projects is the Amish tradition of barn-raising, wherein the community gathers to help a neighbor erect their barn without remuneration or any expectation of reciprocity because, as we’ll see, these acts of generosity benefited everyone, not just the barn owner.

Britain’s Broken Food System

May 27, 2023 Red Pepper. , , ,
Multimillionaire food-writer Jamie Oliver has some advice for the one in five households, including 9.3 million adults and 4 million children currently experiencing food insecurity in the UK: check out his £1 Wonder website for ‘thrifty tips, helpful hacks and delicious recipes that won’t blow the budget’. Mind you, the energy costs are not included, access to white goods like a freezer is assumed, and you will need to put aside 2 hours and 40 minutes to cook your spag-bol. Even the BBC are at it with a page on their website dedicated to £1 meals. Like many other personalised responses to the spiraling cost-of-living crisis focused entirely on money-saving frugality, Oliver and the BBC miss the bigger picture behind food inequality across the country.

Protests As Trainings Are Growing This Fossil Fuel Divestment Campaign

May 26, 2023 Ray Bailey, Waging Nonviolence. , , ,
On a cool, clear April morning just past 8 a.m., the sprawling corporate campus of the world’s second largest asset manager was suddenly roused from its suburban Philadelphia calm. While about 20 activists broke into song, unfurled banners, stepped into the road and began blockading Vanguard’s entrances, around 80 more stood by in support. The ensuing commotion snarled traffic around the borough of Malvern, eventually slowing the flow of rush hour on Route 202 as drivers craned their necks toward a fleet of beaming police cars. Before most Vanguard employees had fired off their first email of the day, 16 people — aged 22 to 84 — were zip-tied at the wrists and hauled off to Chester County Prison.

Organizing Despite The Churn

May 23, 2023 Jenny Brown, Labor Notes. , , ,
When the Amazon Labor Union first submitted union authorization cards, “we had to withdraw and file again,” recalled organizing committee member Justine Medina, “because Amazon challenged over 1,000 of our signatures saying they no longer worked there.” The sky-high turnover at the 8,000-worker fulfillment center on New York's Staten Island, made collecting cards “a race against Amazon firing everyone,” she said. Amazon has annual turnover of 150 percent. “They design the productivity quota, the rates system, to be a constant speedup situation, and that makes it hard to keep the job,” said Medina, who still works at the warehouse. Several ALU leaders have been fired.

Labor’s Uptick Isn’t Just Hype

May 22, 2023 Eric Blanc, Labor Politics. , , ,
Is the current labor uptick just more hype than reality? Numerous articles have recently made this case, pointing to the continued decline in union density in 2022. This skepticism also appears to be the prevailing view among most national union leaders. Though rarely stated publicly, labor’s continued routinism suggests that few people up top see our moment as particularly novel or urgent. But contrary to these skeptics, there is compelling data indicating that things really are changing — and, therefore, that unions should immediately make a major turn to new organizing.

People’s Health Assemblies Towards A More Caring World

May 21, 2023 David Legge, People's Dispatch. , , ,
A carnival of many colors, many backgrounds, many different political perspectives; sharing experiences, discussing how people’s health is shaped, exploring how health care can be transformed: this is the People’s Health Assembly (PHA). The PHA is the top direction-setting forum for the People’s Health Movement (PHM). But it is much more than that. Plenary presentations; sub-plenaries for further exploration and discussion; workshops, music, dancing, marching, and breaking bread. Many participants at previous PHAs have found the experience deeply inspiring: finding comrades you didn’t know existed; learning what is different and finding what is common; hearing stories which are new but which are also familiar; throwing new light on pathways forward.

To Resist Push For ‘Parents’ Rights,’ Focus On Youth Liberation

May 21, 2023 Maya Schenwar, Truthout. , , ,
In this season of parent-celebrating days, many of the parents making top headlines are those pushing violent agendas under the mantle of “parents’ rights.” Deep-pocketed groups like Moms for Liberty and Parents Defending Education are asserting the rights of parents as a justification for their right-wing, anti-trans, anti-Black, anti-immigrant, ableist onslaught. The Republican “Parents Bill of Rights Act” that passed the House this spring combines an attack on students’ right to gender self-expression with measures targeting curricula and libraries. As Amy Nagopaleen wrote for Truthout, the bill (which, thankfully, is unlikely to advance in the Senate) had “nothing to do with empowering parents, and everything to do with bringing the mounting Republican moral panic over schools to the national stage.”

Berkeley Urban Ore Workers Win IWW Union Election

May 19, 2023 Industrial Workers of the World, It's Going Down. , , ,
The Urban Ore workers of Berkeley, California won their union election with a two-thirds majority of workers’ votes on April 7, 2023. The union received confirmation of their certification from the NLRB as a bargaining unit on Thursday, April 20. The campaign went public on February 1. While one of the employers had told local media he objected to some of the ballots, he did not file any objection before the deadline with the regional National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) office. Urban Ore is a 3-acre for-profit salvage operation in Berkeley, California, founded in 1980 with its goal “to end the age of waste.” Workers describe it as an essential part of the Berkeley community.
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