Learn how to run your union in a way that’s democratic and engages members in their own contract fights.

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Learn how union contracts secure higher wages, better benefits, and employer accountability.

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Learn about the two paths to union recognition, how to define your bargaining unit, and how to win your union vote.

The post NLRB election and certification: How to win union recognition appeared first on EWOC.

Learn how to prepare co-workers for anti-union boss campaigns, recognize captive audience meetings, and defeat common company lies.

The post Inoculation: How to defeat the anti-union boss campaign appeared first on EWOC.

The following remarks were delivered by ROC DSA Co-Chair Gregory Lebens-Higgins at a vigil for Gregory Kase hosted by the Center for Disability Rights in Rochester, and alongside allies including VOCAL-NY. Gregory Kase was shot and killed by Monroe County Sheriff deputies during a wellness check on August 9. Mr. Kase, who was deaf, was killed after responding to officer commands with “I can’t hear you.”

Gregory Kase should be alive right now. All of us, but particularly the disabled, should be able to depend on our community to provide health and support. A wellness check should not be a death sentence. Police were called to help Mr. Kase, but arrived all too ready to do harm. Officers arrived with guns drawn, and pulled the trigger in just 30 seconds.

We see this happen over, and over. We cannot just metabolize these incidents. A disproportionate amount of those killed by police have a disability. But with insufficient resources and a lack of alternatives, families are forced to make the difficult decision to call 911. They are asking for help, and we are letting them down.

It would help to have police trained in deescalation; who are knowledgeable in interacting with the disabled community. But we need to ask ourselves whether the system of policing – its them vs. us mentality, its militarized approach – can be reformed. This incident is symptomatic of how many people are treated by police, particularly vulnerable communities.

We need to provide resources for the disabled community to have the help and support they need, and for appropriate crisis interventions. Hot-headed cops with guns should never be the go-to intervention.

Gregory Kase should be alive right now, but let’s keep his memory alive, and make his life impactful even in death, by making this the moment we say “No More.” We are proud to partner with the disability rights movement to create the conditions for a better world with dignity for all.

The post I Can’t Hear You: Statement on the Killing of Gregory Kase first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Learn how to plan strategic collective actions at work, escalating from initial assessments to marches on the boss.

The post Workplace campaigns and collective action appeared first on EWOC.

Learn how to have effective one-on-one organizing conversations with co-workers. Master the 80/20 listening rule, the discussion framework, and scripts for handling pushback.

The post Organizing conversations: Talking with your co-workers about a union appeared first on EWOC.

By the TDSA Ecosocialism Association

It is widely assumed that the political struggles people pay the least attention to are the ones that are closest to home. AI data centers are changing this. In both red and blue states, people are crowding normally barren local government meetings to stop the plague of large-scale AI data centers from reaching their doorstep.

On August 24th, the data center fight arrived in Durham, North Carolina. At a Monday evening meeting that ran from 7pm until midnight, county commissioners Mike Lee, Michelle Burton, Wendy Jacobs, Nida Allam, and Stephen Valentine appeared aligned on passing a moratorium on data centers, but divided on how comprehensive a ban should be. Despite an overwhelming majority of public comments urging a moratorium without carveouts, the commissioners voted 4-1 for a moratorium that included major loopholes. Allam was the lone dissenting vote.

The most significant of these was a carveout allowing for the construction of new data centers in Durham County, as long as they are less than 100,000 square feet. County commissioners spun this as a reasonable measure to allow for the construction of so-called “enterprise” data centers, and claimed that 100,000 square feet is well short of what counts as “hyperscale.” Yet this is enough space to build a data center with a power draw of up to 100 megawatts, the equivalent of powering 80,000 households or over 63% of City of Durham households. Such a facility could further consume 530,000 or more gallons of water per day, once both on-site and indirect water consumption is accounted for. 

Even though the public supermajority supporting a loophole-free moratorium was largely ignored by the county commissioners this time, we should not rush into the mistaken conclusion that public hearings are unimportant or without value. The opposite is true. In fact, one of the biggest reasons why we’re seeing local governments across the country pass moratoriums on data centers in the first place is because of local communities organizing themselves to make their data center opposition as vociferous as possible inside the halls of local power. However, in places like Loudoun County, the proliferation of data centers despite this resistance belies a dirty truth about local “democracy” that speaks to the need to organize a powerful working-class movement both within and beyond the county commissioner’s chambers.

One moment of the debate is worth focusing on to understand the power dynamics lurking behind what took place. After hours of deliberation and public comment, Commissioner Jacobs invites someone from the audience whom she refers to as “Mr. Levitan” to come up to the microphone to provide more context on a question she raised about the Research Triangle Park (RTP) zoning process. As Mr. Levitan makes his way to the microphone, someone else from the audience interrupts, claiming that if Mr. Levitan will be receiving an extra opportunity to speak, so should every other member of the public. The person who interrupts the meeting is then admonished by Chair Lee for interrupting. This interaction encapsulates the political fissures that underlie both Monday’s contentious meeting and local politics writ large in this country.

City council and county commissioner meetings create a certain temporal illusion. During the timespan of a public hearing, local government bodies give the impression that every member of the public has an equal opportunity to influence the debate at hand by ostensibly granting every member of the public an equal amount of time to speak. The interaction described above shatters this illusion. Mr. (Scott) Levitan is not county staff, or another county commissioner. He is the CEO & President of RTP Foundation, and one of only two out of sixty speakers at the public hearing who urged the commission to vote for a moratorium with carveouts, which is what they ultimately did.

Were the opinions of the two speakers who asked for the moratorium with loopholes more persuasive than all the other sixty or so speakers? Why was a particular member of the public granted extra speaking time? What would’ve happened if the interaction wasn't interrupted?

While the details of exactly what happened behind closed doors are not known, we do know some things. Mike Lee publicly asked for exemptions that allow large 75-80 megawatt data centers. Since local governments in North Carolina cannot directly regulate energy use, the strategy switched to square footage. Scott Levitan was the only supporter of a 100,000 square foot loophole at an earlier work session on August 3rd. The staff who wrote the ordinance only listened to public directions from Lee and Jacobs, both of whom have never faltered to address their “stakeholders” (businesses in RTP and Treyburn) since the beginning of public meetings on this topic.

The cozy relationship capitalists enjoy with many politicians isn’t breaking news. But what happened at the county commissioners meeting was a prime example of just how this undemocratic process works. Capitalists like the CEO of the RTP foundation get increased access to elected officials, shaping “the public hearing” even before “the public hearing” takes place. Furthermore, the AI-funded Trump administration’s federal budget cuts create an extra layer of economic pressure on the shoulders of Durham’s elected officials to cater to the whims of tech companies and their promises of economic development. How this development will materialize equitably from a technology whose main selling point is replacing workers, or at best paying them less to do more, remains a mystery. This is to say nothing of how the data center boom is driving up water and energy bills, sucking up water in drought-stressed areas, and delaying the energy transition.

None of this is anything new in the Triangle. The history of RTP reveals that it has been a top-down, corporation-centric project from its very beginnings in the 1950s. Originally cooked up by a small group of capitalists, academics, and government officials, the “Research Triangle” development strategy was meant to change the face of North Carolina by attracting tech companies and knowledge workers to a state dominated by a few low-wage materials processing industries; namely textiles, tobacco, and furniture. While some have certainly prospered thanks to RTP, this same development strategy has time and time again reinforced class inequalities, gentrified historically Black neighborhoods, and facilitated unsustainable, unaffordable, car-centric suburbanization. It also has failed to substantially improve the lot of much of North Carolina’s working class both within and beyond the Triangle, which continues to face low wages, poor working conditions, a degraded environment, and aggressive union busting. This is precisely because RTP did not break with earlier patterns of development in North Carolina so much as supercharge them under the guidance of a detached and dictatorial technocracy.

Despite their long-held sway over regional politics, the movement to oppose the data center boom increasingly has something capitalists do not: public support. A Gallup Poll from March found that seven in ten Americans oppose constructing data centers for artificial intelligence in their local area. This discontent has manifested in grassroots coalitions that have emerged throughout the country. Durham’s Stop Data Centers campaign, of which NC Triangle DSA is a co-sponsor, has played an important role in organizing the community to pack local government meetings and was instrumental in obtaining a recent year-long moratorium at the city level.

Although the county commissioners ultimately sided with Mr. Levitan and RTP’s business elites over the people, the fight is not over. Expected growth trends in both RTP and Duke Health arc towards a probable future of ever more consequential AI data center fights. The degree to which Durham and other cities and towns across the country will be able to thwart the whims of the AI capitalist class is dependent on the degree to which they can organize their communities to stop the rise of the Musks and the Altmans and their machines. Because ultimately, the fight over AI data centers is more than just a technocratic fight over emerging technology and its regulations. At its core, it’s a fight for our democracy, our humanity, and the land, water, and air that we all depend on to survive and to thrive.

An interview with Die Linke’s Berlin vice-chair on the party’s growth, expropriating big landlords, and the developing art of German canvassing.

The post The Left Contends for Leadership in Berlin appeared first on Democratic Left.

Released By: Central Massachusetts & Worcester DSA Program Committee

WORCESTER – Massachusetts has some of the most rent-burdened tenants in a country where the crisis is ubiquitous. Every year in Massachusetts, thousands of working-class people are pushed onto the streets, three-quarters of which are families with children, while their landlords continue to raise rents higher and higher. This state of affairs has forced many to leave Massachusetts altogether, but the reality for those most threatened by rent gouging is that leaving their homes, jobs, and lives behind to look elsewhere simply isn’t an option. Even for those of us with a little extra in our paychecks, rent is increasingly eating away at our ability to get by. We should not be surprised that the overwhelming majority of state residents report that the cost of housing is their top concern, and that rent control enjoys considerable support.

History

Rent control has advanced and receded in Massachusetts for over 100 years as fighting tenant movements have ebbed and flowed. The story begins with a housing crisis caused by soldiers returning from the first World War, at a time when the Russian Revolution — which redistributed the great plots of feudal lords amongst those who worked the land — inspired working-class unrest and revolt across Europe and around the world. Although the Massachusetts legislature passed a ban on “unreasonable” rents in 1919, then, as now, landlords and government officials were concerned less with the letter of the law than with capitalists’ ability to maximize profits. The law was never enforced, and was taken off the books several years later.

Rent control made a comeback in Mass as an emergency measure during the Second World War, and, after being deconstructed once again in the 1950s, became the chief demand of a massive tenants’ movement in the late ‘60s. Finally, at the height of this movement, the state legislature caved, passing a law that allowed individual communities to control rent in 1970. By then, organizations like the Cambridge Tenants Organizing Committee had long been directly attacking capitalism and the institution of landlordship itself.

As the rage of tenant struggle cooled and the movement on the streets dissipated, this policy, too, only lasted a handful of years. In Boston and Cambridge, tenants successfully petitioned the state to continue to allow rent regulation on the basis of “home rule”, meaning local options. But as the Cold War ended, the Soviet enemy of American capitalism was finally destroyed, and the neoliberal consensus was cemented at home and exported worldwide more than ever, the home rule deal wouldn’t last. In the late ‘90s, a concerted effort led by landlord organizations Massachusetts Small Property Owners Association and MassLandlords began to push for the total eradication of all rent control. In the cities, they found little traction with tenants who wouldn’t be able to survive the rent spikes landlords drooled after. One landlord described with great frustration the power that tenants — the hard-working people whose paychecks he looted once a month, every month — still have today: “In Cambridge, tenants outnumber landlords by three to one. It was like three wolves and a chicken deciding what’s going to be for dinner.”

Realizing that local campaigns were a losing strategy, opponents of rent control took to a statewide question, gathering enough signatures to relitigate the issue on the ballot in 1994. Margins were incredibly slim, but ultimately, the influence of suburban property values won out. On New Year’s Day, 1995, rent control was ended in every city across the Commonwealth. 

In recent years, certain organizations, particularly a coalition of nonprofit organizations in Homes for All Massachusetts, have attempted to revive lost tenant protections through a protracted, hitherto unsuccessful lobbying campaign. Some politicians have vocalized support for a local option in individual cities, with yearly rental increase caps as high as 10%, while opposing a statewide solution — more a public relations exercise than a genuine attempt to relieve rent-burdened tenants. All of these efforts, ultimately, culminated in the fiasco of this year.

The 2026 Ballot Initiative

Last year, Homes For All Massachusetts (H4A) announced that it had managed to gather enough signatures necessary to get a rent stabilization proposal on the ballot for the November 2026 election. The initiative would have limited annual rent increases for residential units to the Consumer Price Index (CPI) or 5%, whichever lower, with large carveouts and exemptions. This modest proposal was the center of a media storm driven by seething reactions of landlord organizations like Housing For Massachusetts. Politicians like Maura Healey — who publicly brands herself as a champion of affordable housing, yet openly states full-throated opposition to rent control on the basis that it would scare corporate developers — sided with their donors over a crushing supermajority of MA voters who indicated they would “definitely or probably” vote in favor of the measure in one Spring 2026 poll.

Tenants inspired by the ballot initiative, including many DSA members tirelessly committed to working-class struggle, campaigned for it intensely. Many allies understandably expressed betrayal, however, once H4A entered backroom deal-making with property investors to withdraw the question from the ballot. The compromise was a yet weaker proposal for a 10% (or 5% plus CPI, whichever lower) cap that municipalities must opt into, with a limit to the number of apartments the policy could apply to.

The scope of the original initiative’s effect was never certain, and it would have never eliminated tenants’ existing rent burden as wages stagnate and living costs skyrocket. Even so, the compromise represented an enormous step backward, and would have implemented nothing itself. State officials sat quietly on the sidelines, as if to wait for the people in charge — the landlord and business groups H4A was negotiating with — to give them their marching orders.

In the end, the Massachusetts Supreme Court struck down the initiative entirely. Ironically, it was the proposal’s exemptions for religious institutions — one of many carveouts written to blunt resistance from moneyed interests — that provided the courts with the legal basis to kill the initiative.

Central Mass & Worcester DSA’s Alternative

H4A has led with solutions they think are most likely to be accepted by the rich and powerful. This is no accident: progressive nonprofits and non-governmental organizations take up worthwhile goals, but often rely on a web of grant funding from foundations and donors that place constraints on their activity. Push the political horizon of a campaign beyond what funding sources find acceptable, and risk the collapse of the entire organization. This forms the basis of many problems, chief among them: a lack of meaningful democratic accountability to the working-class constituencies these agencies set out to help.

We propose a different approach: we believe that by leading with our most radical and class-partisan demands, the working class can best position itself to build an organized, politically conscious movement to coerce concessions through struggle. We want to build that working-class movement — a democratic one, no less, that does not sideline tenants in backroom dealings with their enemy, but welcomes them to join DSA, determine our organization’s strategy, and challenge the rigged system head-on.

Central Mass & Worcester DSA has proposed a policy question which will appear on the ballot in the sixth Worcester State House district that instructs the district’s representative to support a measure using a tax on vacant properties and wealth and inheritances over $5 million to fund a robust, union-constructed, universal social housing program that “eliminates the role of landlords,” caps rent at 10% of household income, and places housing under tenants’ democratic management.

The State House, which itself is filled with profiteers on the human need for shelter, will not consider this proposal for even a moment. But, if landlords and developers are increasingly confronted with a working-class movement that threatens their profits and their role as the dominant class in society, the reader might find that they will become far more open to the comparatively moderate rent control measures they reject now — in fact, they’ll beg the workers of the Commonwealth to take it.

The Program Committee of Central Massachusetts & Worcester DSA, which organizes the working class across the central region of the Commonwealth, prepared this piece. It has been approved by the chapter’s Steering Committee.

The post OPINION: Where Does MA’s Movement for Affordable Housing Go From Here? appeared first on Working Mass.