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.

Why Workers Need A Voice On The Job Now More Than Ever

July 15, 2020 By Sharon Block and Benjamin Sachs, On Labor. Organize! COVID-19, Recession, Unions, Workers Rights and Jobs

The COVID-19 pandemic has spurred multiple crises in our country including a public health crisis and an economic one. The need to protect the health of Americans and the need to protect their livelihoods might seem to require disparate approaches. But, as unlikely as it may seem, we believe that rewriting the rules of how workers can act collectively is a key solution to both. Why? COVID-19 poses particular and grave challenges to working people, and, in the context of the pandemic, threats to workers’ health are a threat to public health. As has become painfully obvious, moreover, the costs of the pandemic are being borne disproportionately by low-wage workers, a population made up primarily of workers of color. As they work to keep the economy moving, these workers are being asked to put their lives on the line in ways that are both unacceptable and unnecessary, especially as the country faces the many facets of our nation’s structural racism.

Today’s Revolution Includes Kale, Medical Care And Help With Rent

July 8, 2020 Rinku Sen, ZocaloPublicSquare.org. Organize! COVID-19, Mutual Aid, Pandemic, Recession

In recent months, members of progressive direct-action organizations have developed new systems for checking on their neighbors, dropping off food and medicine, providing protective personal equipment to incarcerated family members, and giving cash to those suddenly unemployed to meet immediate rent, food, and medical needs. At the same time, they’re continuing to press for workers’ rights and proper health care during the pandemic, as well as ensure access to federal stimulus money for individuals and small minority-owned businesses. In so doing, these organizations are harkening back to their roots: people creating social ties by helping each other out, and those ties fueling collective fights for new systems and policies.

FCA Toledo Jeep Workers Support Call For Rank-And-File Safety Committees

July 4, 2020 Marcus Day, WSWS. Organize! COVID-19, PPE, Strike, Worker Rights

Anger is reaching a boiling point as workers continue to fall ill and management and the United Auto Workers union refuse to release information about the extent of COVID-19 cases. “It is ridiculous,” Johnny, a worker at Fiat Chrysler’s Toledo North Assembly Plant, said. “Threats and intimidation. People popping up positive left and right. I’ve been hearing we’ve had about 11 positive this week alone. All the different parts of the plants. Plus, there are several other potential cases.” Another worker at the FCA Toledo plant said that workers needed a rank-and-file safety committee at their factory, adding that they had read and shared the statement by the committee at Jefferson North. “Management and the union are two peas in a pod down in Toledo. Management has threatened the workers about any line stoppage. The union is still in hiding.

Manitos Children’s Fund To Support Venezuelan Children Despite Sanctions

July 1, 2020 Manitos Children's Fund. Organize! Children, Food and Agriculture, Sanctions, Venezuela

Manitos Children’s Fund grows out of the decades old Latin America solidarity movement which has worked to change US policies toward Latin America for over 60 years. Because of our history we are most focused on the effects of sanctions on the children of Latin America, with Venezuela being the most targeted by illegal sanctions currently. Democratic and Republican administrations have both issued sanctions against the democratically-elected government of Venezuela, but since taking office in 2017, President Trump has ratcheted up the pain factor with an aggressive attack on the Venezuelan economy. In August 2019, President Trump issued an Executive Order imposing a full economic blockade on Venezuela. It is not government officials who suffer when the US imposes illegal sanctions! It is children.

As COVID19 Spikes, Blackfeet Leaders Close Entrances To Glacier Park

July 1, 2020 Chris Aadland, Montana Free Press. Organize! COVID-19, health, Indigenous Rights, National Park

Blackfeet Nation leaders, citing the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, have decided to keep the eastern entrances to Glacier National Park closed for the rest of the tourism season. The Blackfeet Reservation borders the east side of the park. The tribe’s Business Council passed an ordinance on Thursday closing the entrances, saying the move was necessary to protect residents of the reservation — where tribal citizens suffer from higher rates of existing health conditions that put them at higher risk of serious complications of COVID-19 — as case numbers continue their recent rise statewide. The closure affects entrances along Two Medicine, Chief Mountain, St. Mary’s, Cut Bank Creek and Many Glacier roads, according to the tribe.

How Palestine Advocates Can Support Black Struggle

June 29, 2020 By Kristian Davis Bailey, The Electronic Intifada. Organize! Black America, Colonialism, Palestine, Police violence

Black people are one of the first and largest victims of Western colonialism and racial capitalism. We have never received justice for 500 years of racist violence and exploitation. The US and most Western countries built their empires through profits from the Atlantic slave trade. As an illegitimate settler colony that was built on the ethnic cleansing of the indigenous population and enslavement of Africans, the US requires the continuous subjugation of Black and Indigenous people to maintain its imperial domination abroad. Accordingly, the greatest internal threat to the US empire is that of a Black revolution. This is why the last real moment of Black revolution was so viciously attacked and destroyed between the late 1960s and early 1980s.

LGBTQ Pride At 50

June 27, 2020 Jeff McMillan, AP News. Organize! COVID-19, LGBTQ, Pride, Racism, Transgender

Scranton, PA - LGBTQ Pride is turning 50 this year a little short on its signature fanfare, after the coronavirus pandemic drove it to the internet and after calls for racial equality sparked by the killing of George Floyd further overtook it. Activists and organizers are using the intersection of holiday and history in the making — including the Supreme Court’s decision giving LGBT people workplace protections — to uplift the people of color already among them and by making Black Lives Matter the centerpiece of Global Pride events Saturday. “Pride was born of protest,” said Cathy Renna, communications director of the National LGBTQ Task Force, seeing analogies in the pandemic and in common threads of the Black and LGBTQ rights movements.

Black New Orleans Waste Workers Build Power Against A Crisis

June 21, 2020 Mindy Isser, Scalawag Magazine. Organize! New Orleans, Recession, Strike, Worker Rights and Jobs

Sanitation workers in New Orleans have been out on strike for over a month now. On May 5, a group of sanitation workers, also known as “hoppers” (because they hop on and off the trucks to empty trash cans), walked off the job after frustrations around low pay and lack of safety equipment boiled over. They have held firm to their demands and to their brothers on the strike lines for over a month now. "All we’re trying to do is to get what we’re asking for, and then get back to work. We just want fair treatment," Jonathan Edward, who’s been a hopper for over a decade, said. They are not alone—workers around the country have taken bold action in response to the COVID-19 crisis, winning hazard pay, personal protective equipment, and even unions—all in the face of an unprecedented economic crisis.

When Workers At Barnes & Noble Got Sick, We Organized And Won

June 21, 2020 Elsa Rodriguez Flores, Waging Nonviolence. Organize! COVID-19, Essential worker, health, Worker Rights and Jobs

I have been working the night shift at a Barnes & Noble warehouse in Monroe, New Jersey for the past 16 years. For decades I have witnessed abuses at my workplace, but the COVID-19 crisis spurred me into collective action for the first time. Every evening, I come into work on a shop floor with hundreds of other immigrant workers, all packaging deliveries in close quarters. As news of the pandemic spread, I began to worry about the conditions in my warehouse. My managers were not providing us with any protective equipment, and we were expected to maintain the same rate of productivity, working dangerously close to one another. I told my boss that I was concerned for my safety, and that of my co-workers. I told him that I was worried if things carried on in the same way we would all get sick, and that I wanted to use my personal days to stay home.

The Black New Yorker Who Led The Charge Against Police Violence In The 1830s

June 19, 2020 By Jonathan Daniel Wells, TIME. Organize! New York (NY), Police abuse, Racism, Slavery

At the apex of the kidnapping club were two members of the New York police force, Tobias Boudinot and Daniel D. Nash. Both had grown up in or near Manhattan and they shared a deep disdain for Black people. Like all members of the police force, Boudinot and Nash were poorly paid, inadequately trained, and largely uneducated. Boudinot in particular was constantly in debt, sued by creditors and desperate for the extra money he could make by capturing runaway enslaved people who had managed, against tremendous odds, to escape southern bondage and forge new lives in New York. The nation’s founding document, the Constitution, required free states to return runaways to southern masters, and Boudinot and Nash were all too willing to comply. The police with the explicit approval of Wall Street financiers and merchants dependent on slave-grown cotton, terrorized the 15,000 or so Black residents who called New York City home in the decades before the Civil War. Seizing Black men, women and children off the streets and arresting them as fugitive slaves who needed to be returned to southern masters.

July 1: Call To Action To Confront Israeli Annexation, Free Palestine

June 16, 2020 Samidoun. Organize! Annexation, Israel, Occupation, Palestine

We know that many Palestinians in exile and supporters of Palestine are, like Samidoun’s members, engaged in the uprisings and mass mobilizations taking to the streets to confront anti-Black racism and demand the defunding and dismantling of police and other structures of oppression. Confronting Israel’s annexation plans – fully backed by U.S. imperialism and inspired by Zionist racism – also comes as part of the global fightback against racism, colonialism and imperialism. Israel’s crimes are backed by $3.8 billion in military aid from the U.S. each year as well as unlimited diplomatic, political and “security” support from Canada, the European Union, Britain, Australia and other imperialist powers.

From George Floyd To COVID-19, Two Pandemics Target Black Workers

June 9, 2020 Southern Workers Assembly. Organize! COVID-19, Essential worker, Rebellion2020, Worker Rights and Jobs

Compounding the devastation of coronavirus, Black people in the US continue to face threats, brutality, and death for going to and from work. For being out jogging. For being poor. For sleeping in their own bed. For watching birds in a park. For being Black. The murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade highlight this grim reality. Now millions of people all across the country are protesting. After experiencing two months of grief from COVID-19, there is now a righteous feeling of collective anger. According to the statement from UE national officers, “It is not surprising that protests over Floyd’s and Taylor’s killings have erupted into rage.

Contemporary White Antiracism

June 4, 2020 Cross Cultural Solidarity. Organize! Anti-Racism, Racism, White People

The easiest way to find local White antiracist groups is to look at SURJ’s list – which includes SURJ chapters as well as other White antiracist groups – organized by state and city. SURJ (Showing Up for Racial Justice) is a nationwide network of White antiracist groups, with chapters in roughly 100 cities. For building White working-class antiracism, see SURJ’s commitment to such organizing, as well as the more explicitly radical, self-defense oriented group, Redneck Revolt. White antiracist groups, historically and in the present, tend to be predominantly female. White women and LGBT people are far more likely join antiracist groups than men, and especially straight men. STAND is one example of an organization working to bring White men into antiracist work.

Health Care Workers Call On Labor Movement To Take Action

May 30, 2020 Left Voice. Organize! Healthcare workers, Labor Unions, Police abuse, Systemic Racism

As health care workers, we condemn the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers as an act of racist violence. We condemn the murder of Breonna Taylor by Louisville police officers as an act of racist violence. We condemn the murder of Tony McDade by Tallahassee police officers as an act of racist violence. Their killings are just a handful of countless examples of police brutality responsible for the early deaths of many Black people in the United States. Black people are three times more likely than white people to die by police violence. As health care workers, we witness first-hand how widespread racist police brutality harms Black and brown people. We understand the anti-Black, racist origins of the institution of policing, initially created to patrol and entrap people who had escaped enslavement.

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