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.

Sufficiency And Interdependence In The Wake Of A Degrowth Future

April 4, 2022 Jere Kuzmanić, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Organize! climate crisis, Climate Justice, Economic Justice, Finance and the Economy

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.

Italian Students Are Rising Up Against Exploitation

April 3, 2022 Andreas Petrossiants And Giulia Sbaffi, ROAR Magazine. Organize! Italy, Structural Violence, Student organizing, Students

On January 21, 18-year-old Italian high school student Lorenzo Parelli died after being hit by a heavy metal beam while working at a factory in Lauzacco, a small town in northern Italy. The accident happened on the last day of Lorenzo’s alternanza scuola-lavoro (“school-work alternation”) internship as part of a mandatory work-placement program for high school students. In an attempt to individualize the responsibility for this tragedy, investigators are now wasting time and resources to determine who is to blame for Lorenzo’s death. Meanwhile, they are letting the neoliberal capitalist death machine that legitimized a program that forces young students into dangerous factory work off the hook. However, for the students who have been organizing throughout the country since his death, the real culprit of this tragedy is clear: “Lorenzo did not die. He was killed by the state through the alternanza scuola-lavoro,” as Niccolò De Luca, a member of the recently formed student movement La Lupa (“The Wolf”) put it.

Staten Island Amazon Workers Pull Into The Lead

April 1, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Organize! Alabama, Amazon, New York (NY), Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

In initial vote tallies today, Amazon warehouse workers in New York are ahead by hundreds of votes in favor of forming a union, while in Alabama the election is too close to call, pending a court hearing. The vote at Amazon’s mammoth warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, was a rerun of the election last April that the union lost by more than 2 to 1. The results of that election were thrown out after the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that Amazon had illegally interfered with the vote. This time, out of 2,375 valid ballots, 993 workers at the fulfillment center voted against joining the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, while 875 workers voted in favor. There are 416 ballots being contested by either the company or the union, and 59 voided ballots.

Our Organizing Must Match The Structure Of Our Target

April 1, 2022 Sam Nelson, The Forge. Organize! Amazon, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

In September 2017, Amazon announced its intention to build a second headquarters, dubbed HQ2. Over 200 municipalities in the US, Canada, and Mexico submitted proposals to host the site, with offers for everything from tax breaks to infrastructure improvements to promises of partnerships with high schools and universities in order to train a whole workforce for Amazon. Some even offered to rename their town Amazon. In the end, Amazon selected three locations: New York City, Arlington, and Nashville. Labor and community organizations in each location quickly coalesced to oppose the developments and the use of public money to incentivize them. In New York, the coalition organized demonstrations; allied with key elected officials, like Senator Michael Gianaris; and trained community members in Queens — Amazon’s would-be neighbors — to act as spokespeople.

How To Build Fierce And Worker-Centered Unions

March 31, 2022 Paige Oamek, In These Times. Organize! Organizing, Unions, UNITE, Worker Rights

In the early 2000s, UNITE was a small, scrappy union that put an immense amount of resources into new organizing. They had small teams of organizers who flew around the country and lived in hotels and motels and spent their life organizing. I think it’s really important for unions to be oriented in that way, to have just about every arm focused around new organizing and building the labor movement and having militant sites. At the same time, we have to really think critically about the role of organizers. Organizing can be such a science: We assess things, map workplaces, determine our tactics. Our tactics add up to be our strategy. It’s all very methodical and stripped of emotion. I write about standing up in front of the group and telling the story of the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, which is something organizers in UNITE get trained to tell.

Staten Island Amazon Workers Vote On A Union

March 31, 2022 Luis Feliz Leon, Labor Notes. Organize! Amazon, New York City (NYC), staten Island, Unions

New York City (Staten Island), New York - As the country cheers on Starbucks workers organizing, the votes will be counted this week in two big union drives at Amazon warehouses—one in Alabama and one in New York. Voting concluded March 25 in Bessemer, Alabama, after mail-in ballots were sent in early February to more than 6,100 workers who are deciding whether to join the Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store Union. This is a re-vote after Amazon’s interference tainted the first election, a landslide defeat last April. Meanwhile in an in-person election at the sprawling Amazon warehouse known as JFK8 on Staten Island in New York City, more than 8,000 warehouse workers will decide whether to unionize with the Amazon Labor Union, an independent union formed there last year.

Cuba Prepares For Disaster

March 26, 2022 Don Fitz, Popular Resistance. Organize! climate crisis, Cuba, Democracy, Energy, Neoliberalism

The September 2021 Scientific American included a description by the editors of the deplorable state of disaster relief in the US. They traced the root cause of problems with relief programs as their “focus on restoring private property,” which results in little attention to those “with the least capacity to deal with disasters.” The book Disaster Preparedness and Climate Change in Cuba: Adaptation and Management (2021) came out the next month. It traced the highly successful source of the island nation’s efforts to the way it put human welfare above property. This collection of 14 essays by Emily J. Kirk, Isabel Story, and Anna Clayfield is an extraordinary assemblage of articles, each addressing specific issues. Writers are well aware that Cuban approaches are adapted to the unique geography and history of the island.

Sustaining The Organizing Surge

March 25, 2022 Ellen David Friedman, Labor Notes. Organize! Starbucks, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

It seems that union organizing has become both necessary and cool. Can this surge be sustained—and what will it take? Desperately exhausted, overworked, and underpaid workers—like Starbucks baristas, nurses, Amazon warehouse workers, and graduate students—are lining up for the fight of their lives (and for their lives). A certain collective excitement has lent an allure to standing up together, in a way that was last true 70 years ago. Pulsing through workers nationally is a pull towards something new, edgy, and possibly powerful—built on the compelling truth that a risk becomes less risky when you are part of a group. Seeing hundreds of people take action—people who are “just like you”—takes it from the barely imaginable to the manageable.

Fossil Free Research

March 23, 2022 Fossil Free Research. Organize! climate crisis, Environment, Fossil Fuels, University Research

Fossil Free Research is a new campaign to end the toxic influence of fossil fuel money on climate change-related research in universities. It is coordinated by international student divestment and climate justice activists with the support of a wide range of academics, climate experts, and university members, as reflected by the letter here.

The Challenge Of Integrating New Members

March 20, 2022 Laird Schaub, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Organize! Community, Intentional Community, Membership

Sometimes the older folks forget what it was like to be a newbie—even though everyone was one once. For most new folks, joining an intentional community is an adventure unlike anything they've done before. So much so that it's unreasonable to expect them to even know what questions to ask. This task is further complicated by the richness of community culture. While it's one thing to create and disseminate to new arrivals a book of agreements (it's a good idea for everyone to have a copy BTW), that's just the tip of the iceberg. The vast majority of norms or customs will not be delineated in a handbook—which means that someone has to be available to offer community in translation, or you are essentially deciding that it's OK for the new folks to figure it out by trial and error. (Hint: this is a poor choice.)

A Black-Women-Led And Life-Based Project For A New Colombia

March 19, 2022 Jaime Alves, Black Agenda Report. Organize! Afro-Colombians, Black Women, Colombia, Electoral Politics

Francia Márquez Mina, a 40-year-old Black female activist from the predominantly Black and forgotten region of the Colombian Pacific coast, is shifting the terms of political debate in the second 'Blackest' nation in South America. Francia, the first Black woman to run for the Colombian presidency, is leading a collective effort by women, LGBTQ+ communities, Black youth, peasants, and the poor in general to transform Colombia's insidious patterns of violence and socio-racial inequalities. According to Infobae , as many as 54.2% of Colombia’s population face food insecurity, 42% are under the poverty line, and 10.8% of children are under chronic malnutrition. The country has one of the largest internally-displaced populations and the longest armed conflict in the hemisphere.

How Hawaii Activists Helped Force The Military’s Hand On Red Hill

March 15, 2022 Christina Jedra, Portside. Organize! Environment, Hawaii, US military, Victory, Water Pollution

In late November, military families were sickened by fuel ingestion, including babies with rashes, after the tap water source for some 93,000 people in the Pearl Harbor area was contaminated. The military initially denied any problems, then confirmed that recent leaks at the Navy’s underground Red Hill fuel storage facility were to blame and promised to clean up the mess. It suspended operations at the World War II-era tank farm but spent months fighting efforts to close the facility altogether, fending off criticism during public hearings and arguing the state lacked the power to enforce an order to drain the fuel. Then last week, the Department of Defense reversed itself and agreed to shut it all down.

Venezuela: Eyewitness Report Day Three Of The PSUV Fifth Congress

March 14, 2022 Tom Burke, Fight Back News. Organize! Political Parties, Revolution, Socialism, Venezuela

Caracas, Venezuela - Day three of the PSUV 5th Congress began on March 8, with thousands filling the large auditorium again as Afro-Venezuelan dancers took to the stage and Caribbean coast music filled the air. The Chavista delegates smiled and swayed to the steady rhythm of folkloric songs about the Bolivarian Revolution. PSUV militants came prepared to listen to speeches and consider the changing conditions and forces in motion, explanations of errors, questions about how to achieve new goals, and implementation of the Three R’s: Resistance, Rebirth, and Revolution. Luis Brito Garcia, a professor, spoke on ethics, responding to the arrest of a mayor and others in a drug smuggling scandal.

Abolitionist Efforts To Trangress The Prison Walls

March 13, 2022 Jaden Janak, Hood Communist. Organize! Criminal Justice and Prisons, Prison abolition

Incarcerated radical intellectuals elucidate the nature of political struggle and its various arenas. Alongside these writers are solidarity groups that propagate their writings and intellectual products. Through a close reading of Black Communist trans prisoner Alyssa V. Hope’s legal efforts and writings, this article unearths how a pen-pal relationship transformed into a comprehensive abolitionist community. This case study provides an example of how abolitionists are grappling with the need to support the material needs of marginalized communities while still building otherwise possible worlds separate from a failing welfare state. Mutual aid projects, like the one formed by Hope’s supporters, showcase that otherwise possible worlds are not only possible, but they are being created right now before us.

Union Organising Is Brewing In Starbucks: 100 Stores And Counting

March 11, 2022 John McGrath, Counterfire. Organize! Starbucks, union busting, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

More union organizing is brewing at Starbucks. In December 2021, staff at a Starbucks in Buffalo, NY became the first US branch to successfully vote to form a union. Since then, 103 Starbucks branches have decided to join them by filing petitions with the National Labor Relations Board. There are roughly 9,000 Starbucks locations in the US, and the workers in Buffalo overcame an intimidation campaign by the corporation which spent a lot of resources to squash the union drive. The company was right to worry, however, as the Buffalo example has encouraged other workers of the global coffee chain to form unions in 26 states across the country. The fast-spreading unionization drive is being organized by Starbucks Workers United, an affiliation of Services Employees International Union (SEIU).

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