Boston

Boston March October 7 To Demand: Indigenous Peoples Day Now!

September 24, 2023 Boston Branch, Workers World. Organize! Boston, Faneuil Hall, Indigenous Peoples Day, State Legislatures

United American Indians of New England (UAINE), the North American Indian Center of Boston (NAICOB) and other organizations have called for a march and rally on Oct. 7 to demand that the Massachusetts legislature forever replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day. This decades-long struggle of Indigenous peoples in Massachusetts, where the Pilgrims carried out “first encounter” land thefts and genocide, aims to overturn centuries of entrenched racist mythology wrapped up in the triumphalist federal holiday known as Columbus Day. The 2017 murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, Virginia, at the hands of fascists, and the police lynching of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, sparked a national wave of actions targeting racist icons, including Christopher Columbus.

Disability Justice And Neurodivergent Community Rally To ‘Stop The Shock’

September 22, 2023 Brian Shea and Edward Yudelovich, Workers' World. Resist! Boston, Disability Rights, Massachusetts, mental health

Stop the Shock – a coalition of more than 30 organizations in the Disability Justice and Neurodivergent community – organized a rally and press briefing at the Boston Common on Sept 9. The rally succeeded in garnering greater publicity and support for passing House H180 in the Massachusetts state legislature to outlaw the use of aversion therapy. Aversion therapy includes skin shocks, pinching, ammonia face spraying, contingent food programs (using food deprivation as punishment), long-term restraints, sensory deprivation and white noise helmets used primarily against children with disabilities. All of these methods are used at the Judge Rotenberg Center (JRC) in Canton, Massachusetts.

Project Provides Housing And Tech Training For Young Women Of Color

September 10, 2023 Punnya Kalapurakkel, Next City. Create! Boston, Employment, Technology, Women

The quaint, Victorian-style house where social entrepreneur Bridgette Wallace chose to bring her vision to life looks like any other home in Boston’s historic Garrison Trotter neighborhood. Built in 1900 and nestled in the heart of Roxbury, this unassuming property on Boston’s Hutchings Street houses an innovative co-living and co-learning model to curb the effects of tech industry-driven gentrification. Welcome to G{Code} House, a place where women and nonbinary people of color ages 18-24 can reside as they complete a two year coding course that prepares them to enter the workforce.

Dorchester Food Co-Op Is Here To Shake Up Boston’s Food Ecosystem

September 4, 2023 Punnya Kalapurakkel, Next City. Create! Boston, Cooperative, Food and Agriculture, food justice, Worker Cooperatives

Stroll down the intersection of Bowdown and Topliff Streets in Boston and you’ll see the shiny automated doors of the brand new Dorchester Food Co-op, where a few friendly faces are adding some finishing touches to the space before it opens to the public in the coming weeks. The worker- and community-owned grocery store, which aims to increase access to nutritious and culturally relevant food, is a project over a decade in the making. As Next City reported during last year’s groundbreaking ceremony, the co-op is the result of more than 10 years of organizing around investors and gathering the funds to make a dream come true.

Community Organizations Take Ownership Of Local Food Systems

September 1, 2023 Punnya Kalapurakkel, Next City. Create! Boston, Composting, Food and Agriculture, food justice, Gardens, Local Economy

What if there was a way for communities to create a food system, from land ownership to composting, that could sustain itself? Community organizations’ efforts to create a sustainable food ecosystem in Boston’s lower-income neighborhoods offer a window into resident-led food security initiatives in disinvested communities around the country. Dorchester, Roxbury and other majority-minority neighborhoods in the city are home to a grassroots, informal network of community organizations that manage food-related processes ranging from harvest to gardening to composting.

How We Turned Our Backs On An Abusive UPS Manager

August 13, 2023 John Capodanno, Labor Notes. Resist! Boston, Protests, UPS, Worker Rights and Jobs

I’m a 34-year Teamster and package car driver for UPS, and I’ve been a steward for the past seven years. Since I’ve been with UPS for so long, I am very used to the constant harassment and intimidation this company has thrived on. I had the honor to be put on the national negotiating team for the UPS contract by my local union—one of the strongest in the country, Local 25 in Boston. After UPS walked away from the negotiating table in early July, I was at barns helping to run practice picket lines. The UPS center in Westwood, a suburb of Boston, has a new center manager from New Orleans named Brian Newman.

Chinese-American Worker And Activist Arrested For Advocating For Peace

June 23, 2023 Natalia Marques, People's Dispatch. Resist! Boston, China, Criminal Justice and Prisons, New Cold War, Retaliation, Unions

Labor leaders and organizers are banding together to demand justice for Chinese-American unionized worker and activist Li Tang “Henry” Liang. Liang was indicted and then arrested in early May in Boston in retaliation for exercising his free speech rights. “The federal government has targeted Liang for advocating peaceful relations between the US and China,” say labor activists in the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance of the AFL-CIO, the largest trade union in the US. As a hotel worker, Liang was an active member in his union, UNITE HERE Local 26. He is also an activist in the Chinese-American community, rallying against the US’s propaganda war against China.

Colonial Universities Grab Land For Profit, War, And Medical Apartheid

June 19, 2023 Map Liberation. Educate! Boston, Higher Education, Land grabs, Massachusetts

Universities on Turtle Island, as la paperson writes, “are land-grabbing, land-transmogrifying, land-capitalizing machines.” Indigenous land theft, and profits from slavery, enabled these universities to be built in the first place – and they still collect profits from stolen lands.[1] With this accumulated capital, major US universities have become colonial real estate agents. Harvard University, notably, owns land all over the world – from vineyards in Washington state to farmlands in Brazil, South Africa, New Zealand, and Romania.[2] Harvard’s land-grabbing machine has harmed Indigenous communities, poisoning their water and crops in Brazil, and denying access to burial sites and pasture land in South Africa.

Solidarity Propelled Union Drive At The Country’s Richest University

June 13, 2023 Dusty Christensen, In These Times. Organize! Boston, Harvard, Higher Education, Unions, Worker Rights and Jobs

Boston, Massachusetts - In February, after five years of organizing under the radar, members of the nascent Harvard Academic Workers officially went public with their intent to unionize. The road to going public wasn’t always straightaway. In January, as the group of non-tenure-track teaching and research employees moved closer to announcing their drive, union member Kara Fulton and her fellow organizers were having as many feelings of discouragement as they were elation. “It felt like we were kind of working on our own,” she said. But then, later in January, other workers from across the Harvard campus and other Boston-area unions put fuel to their fire at a quickly organized roundtable event.

Food Forests Are Bringing Shade And Sustenance To US Cities

May 18, 2023 Karen A. Spiller and Prakash Kashwan, Next City. Create! Boston, Chicago, climate crisis, Food and Agriculture, Food Forest, Food Security

More than half of all people on Earth live in cities, and that share could reach 70% by 2050. But except for public parks, there aren’t many models for nature conservation that focus on caring for nature in urban areas. One new idea that’s gaining attention is the concept of food forests – essentially, edible parks. These projects, often sited on vacant lots, grow large and small trees, vines, shrubs and plants that produce fruits, nuts and other edible products. Unlike community gardens or urban farms, food forests are designed to mimic ecosystems found in nature, with many vertical layers. They shade and cool the land, protecting soil from erosion and providing habitat for insects, animals, birds and bees.

Setting Our Sights On The Equality Of Women

March 5, 2023 Patricia Hynes, Portside. Educate! Boston, Gender equality, Massachusetts, Women's Rights

Boston, Massachusetts - A month ago, I heard on the news that Boston public schools would be closed on February 3 because of the severe Arctic cold and wind chill forecast for that day and the next. My first thought was: what if the students’ mothers are working single mothers, what if they cannot take off or cannot afford to lose the pay – given inflation of food, energy and rents and the impoverishing impact of Covid? Boston is a severely unequal city with an extremely segregated public school system: 80 percent of children in public school are low income; 90 percent are students of color, mainly Latino and Black; higher income families with children leave for suburbs when their children become of school age, according to the Dorchester Reporter.

Six Arrested Protesting At An East Boston Electrical Substation Site

January 18, 2023 Miriam Wasser, WBUR. Resist! Boston, climate crisis, Direct Action, Environment

Boston, Massachusetts - Six environmental activists were arrested early Tuesday morning while protesting the construction of a controversial electrical substation in East Boston. Jule Manitz of Extinction Rebellion, the group that organized the demonstration, said the group got to the site around 6:45 a.m., and within a few minutes, several Boston police officers arrived. “We were attempting to unfurl two banners and were barely able to do that [before] a lot of cops showed up,” she said. “People were arrested right away.” Manitz lives in Chelsea, about a mile away from the substation site, and has taken part in several protests over the years. She said she was surprised to see people arrested on the sidewalk and in a nearby parking lot — two areas where people have protested peacefully in the past.

Boston University Historic Union Win For Graduate Workers

December 26, 2022 Steve Gillis, Workers World. Strategize! Boston, Education, Massachusetts, Unions, Victory, Worker Rights and Jobs

Boston, Massachusetts - Over 3,000 new members of the Boston University Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU), Service Employees (SEIU) Local 509, celebrated a 98.1% NLRB election victory Dec. 7, which was months in the organizing. To punctuate that 2022 has been a wildly successful year of rank-and-file union organizing in the U.S., some labor researchers have characterized the 1,414 to 28 vote as “the most lopsided NLRB election win ever by a bargaining unit [of] more than 1,000 people.” (@dskamper, @gradworkersofBU, Twitter) Speaking at a Dec. 9 Boston rally marking the one-year anniversary of the first victory for Starbucks Workers United, rank-and-file BUGWU organizer Wu Nairan credited “the inspiration and solidarity of [this summer’s 64-day] strike of Boston Starbucks Workers United on the BU campus” with propelling BUGWU’s win.

We Can’t Allow The Far-Right To Take The Initiative Or Hold Public Space

March 31, 2022 It's Going Down. Strategize! Anti-fascism, Boston, Massachusetts, Neo-Nazis

Boston, Massachusetts - Last weekend in South Boston, around 50 people mobilized to counter a possible appearance by the neo-Nazi group the Nationalist Social Club-131 (a nod to both the ‘National Socialism’ of the Nazi Party and ‘Anti-Communist Action’), after public outcry grew following the group’s appearance at the yearly St. Patrick’s Day parade. At the parade, around a dozen neo-Nazis, all wearing masks and flying a flag with a white nationalist symbol, held a banner reading, “Keep Boston Irish,” and handed out flyers promoting the group and attacking non-whites.

Malden Residents Can’t Get Through To Housing Management, Form Coalition

March 26, 2022 Sophia Paffenroth, The Scope Boston. Resist! Boston, Housing, Landlords, Tenant organizing

Rhina Sorto, who has been filing complaints to Carabetta Management for months about mold, flooding and rodent infestation, was joined in a protest yesterday by other Malden Towers residents, as well as tenant advocates showing solidarity. Gathered in the parking lot of Malden Towers apartment complex at 99 Florence St., those present witnessed three Malden tenant associations come together. The event, which started at noon, was organized by the City Life/Vida Urbana (CLVU) housing nonprofit. The nonprofit brought together the Malden Towers Tenant Association, the United Properties Tenant Association and the Maplewood Square Tenant Association into a coalition with one mission: dignified housing.

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