Organize!

Whether 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.

No Half Measures, We Need Biden To Cancel All Student Loan Debt

May 12, 2022 Frederick Bell Jr., In These Times. Organize! Education, Joe Biden, Student Debt, Student Loans

On September 1, 2021, Hurricane Ida hit Southeast Louisiana, temporarily displacing thousands of New Orleans residents, including myself and most of my family. Residents who had the means evacuated early, leaving others to fight for limited resources while simultaneously seeking refuge in neighboring cities. On top of their pre-existing bills, evacuees were forced to front the costs of hotels, food, gas and repairs or even replacement of their own homes. Natural disasters produce an overwhelming amount of stress and anxiety — you simply don’t know if you will have a house to live in until you are able to return home. I don’t know how my family would have made ends meet if I was forced to cover my monthly student loan payments while struggling to meet these other, unanticipated expenses.

Defending The First Amendment

May 9, 2022 Paul Ortiz, Portside. Organize! Education, First Amendment, Higher Education, Unions

Speaking as a historian, I believe that the work of UFF-UF officers, delegates, volunteers, and allies during the global pandemic will be remembered as among the finest moments of unionism this nation has ever witnessed. Under duress and constantly bullying by forces outside of our campus, we continued to grow as a union. We also continued to support a plethora of causes that the membership believes are essential to sustaining a democratic society. I believe that UFF’s consistent and public support of academic freedom was a factor in the federal court’s preliminary injunction against UF’s repressive speech policies in January. Our struggles are far from finished. Members of the Florida State Legislature continued their assault on the First Amendment by passing House Bill 7, the so-called “Stop Woke Act.”

KC Tenants Announces Launch Of Citywide Tenant’s Union

May 8, 2022 Aarón Torres, Kansas City Star. Organize! Evictions, Housing, Kansas City, Tenant Union

Kansas City, Kansas - Pat Lucas received the notification last August: She would have to vacate the Armour Flats building in the 3400 block of Holmes Street in Kansas City — her home for more than 17 years — by November. The management company was going to renovate the property, causing her rent to shoot up, from a little over $500 a month to more than $1,000. She was priced out and had to move. Lucas shared her story Saturday as KC Tenants, a local organization advocating for housing rights, held a rally to announce it was creating a citywide tenant’s union. The organization will work with every local neighborhood association with a goal of getting 10,000 union members.

International Seminar For Peace Kicks Off In Cuba

May 5, 2022 Ileana Ferrer Fonte, Prensa Latina. Organize! Anti-War, Cuba, International Relations, Latin America

Leaders of the World Peace Council (WPC) and its member organizations, as well as prominent figures, academics, anti-war activists and friends in solidarity with Cuba, are present in the event, to be held until Thursday, May 5. According to the program, WPC President Maria do Socorro Gomes, that organization’s Executive secretary Iraklis Tsavdaridis and Venezuela’s Deputy Foreign Minister Carlos Ron Martinez are also attending the Seminar. According to the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), the meeting will demand the cessation of the arms race being developed by the United States along with its allies of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Participants will also support the Proclamation of Latin America and the Caribbean as a Peace Zone, endorsed by the heads of State and Government of the region in January 2014.

Grinnell College Becomes First Fully Unionized Undergraduate School

May 4, 2022 Lexi McMenamin, Teen Vogue. Organize! Education, Iowa, Student Activism, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Grinnell, Iowa - On April 26, student workers at Iowa’s Grinnell College elected to create the first wall-to-wall undergraduate student union in the country, expanding their Union of Grinnell Student Dining Workers (UGSDW) to include all hourly student workers. On March 4, UGSDW and Grinnell College signed “a first-of-its-kind neutrality and election agreement,” which, members of the union explained in Labor Notes, “legally binds the College to respect the results of an election.” On the night of the 26th — delayed from April 21, the original ballot-count date, after a toxic gas leak at the local National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) offices — the UGSDW voted to expand, with 327 voting for the expansion and 6 voting against.

Will Amazon Workers’ Win Infect Walmart Next?

May 3, 2022 Coco McPherson, LA Progressive. Organize! Amazon, Labor Movement, Unions, Walmart, Worker Rights and Jobs

The improbable April 1 victory of Amazon workers in Staten Island, who fought for over two years to establish the very first union at the retail behemoth, is inspiring other Amazon employees around the country and highlighting a new path forward for the labor movement. It may also reignite labor organizing at Walmart, where workers seeking to form unions have been thwarted for decades. More than two years after Amazon employee Christian Smalls led a small walkout at JFK8, the company’s sprawling distribution center on Staten Island, to protest its lack of COVID-19 health safety guidelines — soon after which he was fired — he returned in triumph. Earlier this month, at a joyful press conference on a grassy lot near the facility, Smalls and fellow organizers celebrated the historic Amazon Labor Union (ALU) win.

Enduring Lessons From The Pittsburgh And Flint Water Crises

May 3, 2022 Daniella Zessoules, Demos. Organize! Contamination, Flint Water Crisis, Pittsburgh, Water

Eight years ago, the water crisis in Flint, Michigan began, the effects of which linger today. The nation was shocked to see a city fail so spectacularly to meet its most basic responsibility to provide safe water to its citizens. Unfortunately, Flint is not alone. According to a 2020 Natural Resources Defense Council analysis of Environmental Protection Agency data, nearly 30 million people in the U.S. drink from unsafe water systems. The rate is significantly elevated in communities of color. The Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania water system was one of them. As in Flint and other cities, structural racism, chronic disinvestment, and economic austerity meant that Pittsburgh’s communities of color were most impacted by the failing water systems. Entering the 2000s, Pittsburgh’s water infrastructure was in dire need of repair and modernization.

How Border Deployment Led To Union Organizing In Texas

May 2, 2022 Steve Early And Suzanne Gordon, Convergence. Organize! National Guard, Texas, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

When a group of Texas workers started discussing job problems and what to do about them a few months ago, their list of complaints would have been familiar to Starbucks baristas, Amazon warehouse staff, or restive young journalists at new and old media outlets. With little notice, their employer changed work schedules and transferred employees to a new job location. Some of those adversely affected applied for hardship waivers, based on family life disruption, but many requests were denied. Meanwhile, access to a major job benefit—tuition assistance—was sharply curtailed. Even paychecks were no longer arriving promptly or at the right address. When a few brave souls called attention to these problems, management labelled them “union agitators” who were trying to “mislead” their co-workers.

The Jackson-Kush Plan And The Struggle For Land

May 1, 2022 Max Rameau, Hood Communist. Organize! Affordable Housing, Gentrification, Land, Malcolm X

While the land relationships that dominate this society have implications for every relation in society, the recent crisis of gentrification and forced removal in low income Black communities, along with the volatile boom-bust real estate cycles, has made the struggle for adequate housing the most pronounced battleground in an increasingly intense war over the vision for the future of how we relate, prioritize and manage access to land. The current regime of land relationships renders housing and community development fatally flawed in at least two respects: first, houses serve dual social functions in this society, but those functions are contradictory and at odds with each other. And second, decisions about land use is fundamentally undemocratic, rendering people unable to make basic decisions about how to improve their own communities.

Learn It, Do It, Teach It

April 28, 2022 Stephanie Basile, Brittany Carloni, and Andrew Pantazi, Labor Notes. Organize! CWA, Labor Movement, Organizing, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Over the last five years, in big pro-union cities and small Southern towns, more than 7,000 workers in 145 shops have organized with the NewsGuild, a sector of the Communications Workers (CWA). After years of layoffs, buyouts, and pay cuts, workers across an entire industry seemed ready to organize. There was no way our union could hire enough staff organizers to keep up. So we built a member-led movement that could grow fast. Rank-and-file members, many of them fresh off their own organizing campaigns, answer emails and calls from workers at non-union shops, train new organizing committees, track assessments of support, win certification elections, and prepare workers for brutal first-contract campaigns.

Union Wins Two Elections Among Clinical Staff At McLean Hospital

April 28, 2022 Mark Herz, Portside. Organize! Healthcare workers, Massachusetts, Unions

Belmont, Massachusetts - Local union organizers have scored another victory at McLean Hospital in Belmont, after winning two votes on Friday to unionize all hourly clinical staff like nurses and mental health specialists who assist with patient care. In September, research assistants at the nationally prominent Harvard-affiliated psychiatric treatment and research institution formed a union — the first, the organizers say, in the hospital’s long history. All hourly clinical staff, excluding those with advanced degrees, will be part of the union if Friday's votes are confirmed. Through the effort, union organizers from AFSCME Council 93, which represents some 45,000 mostly state and municipal workers in New England, said about one-third of McLean’s approximately 2,400 employees may soon be unionized.

Round Two For The ALU: The Fight To Organize Amazon Continues

April 27, 2022 James Dennis Hoff, Left Voice. Organize! Amazon, Labor Movement, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

The Amazon Labor Union (ALU) victory on Staten Island has transformed the terrain of the U.S. labor movement and has inspired millions of workers. On Monday, a second unionization vote will begin at another Amazon warehouse of 1,600 workers just across the street, and the stakes couldn’t be higher. If successful, this second victory at warehouse LDJ5 would further consolidate the power of the ALU and prove that their first win was not a fluke. A second successful unionization vote would also confirm the importance of the ALU’s grassroots organizing model and hasten what seems like an already inevitable wave of organizing efforts at other Amazon warehouses across the country. In response, Amazon is taking every opportunity it can to lie, cheat, and intimidate workers in order to undermine the unionization effort and to overturn the first vote.

Winning Against The Odds: The 32BJ SEIU Organizing Model

April 26, 2022 Rob Hill and Stuart Eimer, New Labor Forum. Organize! Organizing, Transportation, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Over twenty-five years have passed since the AFL-CIO New Voice movement urged unions to dedicate 20-30 percent of their budgets to organizing. Despite recent high-profile victories by the Writers Guild in digital media, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) in home health care and at Starbucks, and the Transit Workers at JetBlue, most unions have not heeded the call to organize, and the labor movement has continued to shrink.[1] Facing this decline, unions have turned much of their attention to labor law reform, hoping to address notable weaknesses in U.S. labor law that impede organizing success.[2] Winning the Protect the Right to Organize (PRO) Act would be a game changer in this regard but the PRO Act will not pass without organized pressure and militancy from non-union workers demanding unions.

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