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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.

Jailed For A Crime She Didn’t Commit, Dreama Caldwell Takes On The System

April 25, 2022 Jaisal Noor, The Real News Network. , ,
Alamance County, North Carolina, is probably best known for its defense of Confederate monuments and backing Republicans in every presidential campaign since Jimmy Carter. But an important grassroots fight for racial and economic justice is currently unfolding there. One of the leaders of that fight is Dreama Caldwell, a Black working mother who, in 2015, faced a $40,000 bail for a crime she didn’t commit—now she is working to organize across racial and class lines to build grassroots power in rural areas that have been abandoned by the major political parties. In the latest installment of his investigative series “Defending Democracy in the 2022 Midterm Elections,” supported by the Solutions Journalism Network, TRNN’s Jaisal Noor speaks with Caldwell about her story and her organizing work with Down Home North Carolina.

June 11, 2022: Call To Support Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners

April 23, 2022 It's Going Down. , , ,
As time moves on and the seasons change, we approach once again the June 11 International Day of Solidarity with Marius Mason and All Long-Term Anarchist Prisoners. Another year has passed, and many of our dear comrades remain captives of the state, subject to its daily subjugation, isolation, and brutality. June 11 is a time to stop the ever-quickening rush of our lives and remember. Remember our imprisoned comrades. Remember our own histories of revolt. Remember the flame – sometimes flickering, sometimes blazing – of anarchism. With June 11, we desire to deepen a critique of prison that challenges the distinction between prisoner and supporter. For us, these differences are conditional: we, as anarchists, see ourselves as potential prisoners. Some of us have been, some of us will be.

A New Effort In San Francisco Aims To Debate Rent At The Bargaining Table

April 21, 2022 Jack Ross, Capital & Main. , , , ,
San Francisco, California - On April 11, tenant representatives from the Veritas Tenants Association gathered at the mailbox at 150 Larkin St. across the lawn from San Francisco City Hall. They dropped 15 letters to their landlord, Veritas Investments, the largest landlord in San Francisco and the subject of lawsuits alleging tenant harassment, into the mailbox. “We will show what it means to unionize the biggest private landlord in S.F.,” tenant Madelyn McMillian said. “We will be bargaining on a full range of issues affecting our lives.” The letters presented majority approval of tenant associations in 15 Veritas buildings and asked that Veritas formally acknowledge the unions under a new San Francisco “Right to Organize” ordinance, which went into effect April 11.

Apple Retail Workers At The Grand Central Store Are Trying To Unionize

April 21, 2022 Amanda Silberling, Portside. , , , ,
New York City, New York - From Activision to Amazon, historic union elections are changing the way that Americans think about work. Now, Apple is the next tech giant to reckon with an employee-driven labor movement. Calling themselves the Fruit Stand Workers United (FSWU), employees at Apple’s Grand Central Terminal retail location launched a website designed to educate their fellow workers about why they want to unionize their store. “Year over year, the cost of living in New York City has not kept pace with our wages,” the FSWU’s mission statement reads. “Meanwhile, Apple has grown to be the most valuable company in the world. Why should its retail workers live precariously?” The collective will be affiliated with Workers United, the same group that has helped over 20 Starbucks locations form unions since December.

Health Concerns Are At The Heart Of New Amazon And Starbucks Unions

April 20, 2022 Alexa Spencer, The Observer. , , , ,
When news broke on Friday, April 1, 2022 that Amazon workers in Staten Island, N.Y. had managed to organize the first union in the notoriously anti-union company’s 27-year history, a common refrain across social media went something like this: This is not an April Fool’s Day joke. The news was so noteworthy that the name of Christian Smalls, a 33-year-old Black former Amazon employee and the interim president of the Amazon Labor Union (ALU) who led the walk-out, even trended on Twitter. Did Smalls and the other employees want better pay and benefits? Absolutely. But what many people may not realize is that the drive to unionize at Amazon and elsewhere is being driven by employee concerns about health and safety at work.

Virginia Caucus Of Rank-And-File Educators Votes To Unionize

April 19, 2022 Left Voice. , , , ,
Richmond, Virginia - On Saturday, members of the Virginia Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (VCORE) voted to unionize schools in Richmond, the state’s capital. The vote took place over two days, with 99 percent of educators in favor. The Richmond Educators Association (REA), of which VCORE is a part, will serve as official bargaining representative. This is a major victory for public-sector unions in the South, and it comes amid a wave of unionization across the United States and labor militancy among educators. A December vote to grant Richmond public school employees collective-bargaining rights paved the way for yesterday’s victory. That month, the city’s school board voted 8-1 in favor, making it Virginia’s first school district to reinstate collective-bargaining rights.

A Hotline Garment Workers Can Call When They Face Harassment On The Job

April 19, 2022 Ryan Lenora Brown, In These Times. , , ,
Maseru, Lesotho - When Nthabiseng Moshoeshoe’s supervisor told her he loved her, they were alone in a room where they both worked at a blue jeans factory in Maseru, the capital of Lesotho, she says. It was early 2021. She was emptying the garbage. He said she was beautiful, that he wanted to be with her, says Moshoeshoe, who is going by a pseudonym to protect her safety and job security. “Let’s keep this professional,” she remembers telling him back. “I pushed him away gently.” But he didn’t receive the news kindly, she says. From then on, she reports that he made repeated complaints about her performance. She grew worried she would lose her job, and with it the paycheck of $150 a month she relied on as her family’s breadwinner.

Move To Unionize Tour Could Rewrite How Theater Industry Operates

April 17, 2022 Ezra Brain, Left Voice. , , ,
On April 12, the New York Times broke the story that the theater actors union Actors’ Equity Association is, for the first time in over 20 years, attempting to unionize a workplace. Inspired by recent wins at Amazon and Starbucks, actors and stage managers on the non-union national tour of the musical Waitress are moving to unionize after being contacted by Equity, as the union is known in the theater industry. This attempt represents one of the biggest developments in labor organizing within the theater industry in years and has the potential to largely rewrite the way that the theater industry operates.  This development represents a major change in strategy for Equity. For years, it operated less as a union of workers, and more as a league of professionals.

The Triumph Of A Pedagogy Of The Oppressed In Progress

April 15, 2022 Charo Mina Rojas, Black Agenda Report. , , ,
It is very interesting and important how Francia has learned to be respectful and coherent in echoing the voices of the people, instead of the phony politicking to which we are used to. The enormous growth in her political narrative is not only due to her beautiful and natural intelligence, (not in vain blessed by [the Orisha] Orunmila). It’s also fundamentally due thanks to her life experience as a Being who has suffered all the forms of oppression, against which she rosed up in rebellion, allowing her a capacity for listening and transcending words in action and deeds, resonating in those of us who come from the same place. These are capabilities and attitudes only typical of those who always dare to know that, with nothing more to lose in a white-male supremacist, arrogant, violent predatory world like this one, at the end of the day we have everything to gain by facing risk. Risks that are existential because either we are, or we are not.

Amazon Lashes Back In Staten Island Warehouses

April 15, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. , , ,
The company has billed itself as the everything store. Now Amazon is the throw-everything-at-them union-buster—trying every trick in the playbook to throttle worker organizing at its Staten Island warehouses in New York City. The union vote at a second warehouse, a neighboring sorting center known as LDJ5, is set to start April 25, so the company has turned its focus there. “All those union-busters that were there to union-bust 8,000 workers at JFK8 have walked across the street and are in our little building of 1,600 people,” a visibly shaken Madeline Wesley, who works at LDJ5, told reporters at a press conference last week. “They’re really fighting us, and they’re playing really dirty.”

Fordham Graduate Students Vote 94% For A Union

April 9, 2022 Steve Wishnia, Labor Press. , , ,
New York, New York - Graduate student workers at Fordham University in the Bronx have voted overwhelmingly to join the Fordham Graduate Student Workers union. “We did it!” one called out from a balcony in the student center’s atrium after the results were announced April 7, as a few dozen supporters gathered below. The vote was 229-15. The bargaining unit, part of Communications Workers of America Local 1104, will include about 360 graduate student workers at both the University’s Rose Hill campus in the Bronx and its Lincoln Center campus in Manhattan. “It’s a very clear message: We want a union. We got it,” Nick McIntosh, a third-year Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, told LaborPress.

MIT Graduate Students Vote To Form Union

April 7, 2022 Max Larkin, Portside. , , ,
Graduate students at MIT have voted to form a union by a 2-to-1 margin. Organizers said the result was a response to the growing challenges facing students — who teach, conduct research and provide academic support on the Cambridge campus — and in keeping with the institute’s experimental spirit. Fifth-year doctoral student Lilly Chin leapt back into organizing to help with the get-out-the-vote campaign in the computer science department, one of MIT’s largest. “My phone was buzzing for five minutes straight: ‘Make sure so-and-so can get to the polls,’ ” Chin said. The count Wednesday happened quickly, but it was still “a little nerve-racking,” said Ki-Jana Carter, an organizer and fifth-year doctoral student in material science and engineering.

Higher Ed Labor Unites For Equity For All: Faculty, Staff And Students

April 5, 2022 Aimee Loiselle, Convergence. , , ,
Students swell the picket lines of dining service workers. Staff fight for cancellation of exorbitant graduate student workers’ fees. Undergraduate student workers learn about the precarity and low pay behind the title “adjunct” and demand their university administrations do better. Tenured faculty insist that part-time instructors receive benefits.  Across higher education, workers are realizing that they depend on each other to get work done, from faculty, academic staff, graduate and undergraduate student workers, to janitors and clerical and technical workers—and the landscape of organizing is changing. Higher education labor unions have generally been stratified, but now universities with multiple unions representing various types of employees are seeing increased cooperation and collaboration.

TANC Organizing Committee On San Francisco’s ‘Right To Organize’

April 4, 2022 It's Going Down. , , ,
In February, San Francisco officials amended administrative code to “require residential landlords to allow tenant organizing activities to occur in common areas of the building; require certain residential landlords to recognize duly-established tenant associations, confer in good faith with said associations, and attend some of their meetings upon request; and provide that a landlord’s failure to allow organizing activities or comply with their obligations as to tenant associations may support a petition for a rent reduction.” They call it the “right to organize.” While the media and some tenant organizations hailed the legislation as an unprecedented expansion of tenant rights, in key ways the legislation limits its nominal goal and solidifies conditions that undermine mass tenant power.

Sufficiency And Interdependence In The Wake Of A Degrowth Future

April 4, 2022 Jere Kuzmanić, Grassroots Economic Organizing. , , ,
Even if one didn’t have an immediate experience of disaster at the doorstep — like flood, storm or wildfire, which are happening globally on a weekly basis affecting many millions of people — we all share an experience of global surge of mutual aid during the COVID-19 pandemic. In many places, it implied a different relation to material reality such as provision of food, medics and, in peculiar cases, toilet paper. In non middle-and-up-class contexts, the pandemic increased risk of losing the roof over head or being stuck below dignifying conditions in at home. This intense period became a sharp reminder of local sufficiency, the scale of our community, and the importance of understanding a home as space that goes beyond our rented or owned four walls.
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