By: Freddy Oswald

From Viral Attention to Volunteer Action

Perhaps the most distinct feature of Zohran Mamdani’s primary campaign was his ‘man on the street’ videos.

Talking directly to the camera, often while walking, Zohran captivates audiences on social media with his humor and energy. And every video seemed to end with just about the same appeal: “get signed up to join a canvass in your area.”

To win June’s Democratic primary, Mamdani’s campaign mobilized an army of volunteers. More than 50,000 people signed up to volunteer and upwards of 30,000 or more actually attended a canvass, led by over 400 field leads and augmented by around 40 paid canvassers with fluency in key languages: together they knocked 1.6 million doors, holding more than a quarter of a million conversations with voters.

Earlier tonight, our campaign passed 1.5 million doors knocked across the five boroughs.

Here are some of the volunteers who made it happen. pic.twitter.com/lSUs4BDRsI

— Zohran Kwame Mamdani (@ZohranKMamdani) June 24, 2025

Behind those numbers sat not just good vibes or a popular working class election platform, but a piece of infrastructure that translated viral attention into material turnout: Solidarity Tech, a CRM designed by organizers for organizers and rooted in the organizing methods of the labor movement.

Mamdani’s campaign excelled at social media, producing attention-grabbing content that cut through timelines and inspired action. But crucially, that attention didn’t dead-end on Instagram, X, or TikTok. Instead, it linked to a volunteer sign-up page where supporters could commit to canvass shifts in their neighborhoods, which fed into the campaign’s Solidarity Tech database, 

Once signed up, the CRM handled the unglamorous but decisive follow-up: automatic confirmation emails, text reminders, and calendar invites. These nudges dramatically boosted attendance, reducing the rate of no-shows. Unburdened from manually sending texts or doing constant event-reminder phonebanks, campaign field leads could focus on leading in-person canvasses and driving the face-to-face interactions with new volunteers and voters alike which are so crucial to deepening engagement with any campaign.

The combined system turned Mamdani’s charisma into an attention-to-action pipeline: from virality, to sign-ups, to turnout, to door-knocks, to earning the trust of hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers. 

Technology Built By Organizers, For Organizers

In some sense, Solidarity Tech is like every other Contact Relationship Management (CRM) software. Just like Action Network or Salesforce, the system is a contact database, helping its users collect, store, and sort information about the people they engage.

But Solidarity Tech is different for two main reasons: it is independent from the Democrats, and it was designed with worker organizing in mind.

Unlike the dominant CRMs in U.S. electoral politics (NGP VAN, NationBuilder, or Action Network) Solidarity Tech was not born inside the Democratic Party ecosystem. This is crucial because the Democratic establishment has a history of weaponizing its control over this infrastructure to undermine progressive, anti-establishment campaigns. For example, in 2015 the DNC shut off the Sanders campaign’s access to NGP VAN. Others, like Justice Democrats challenging incumbents, have in the past been denied access to NGP VAN’s VoteBuilder software entirely in some states. 

And the Democratic establishment doesn’t even try to hide it. “We talk about growing the Democratic Party, so how do you grow the Democratic Party if you go after incumbents?” Steve Brown, a spokesperson for the Illinois Democrats, told Wired in 2017. In the same article, another then little-known Justice Democrat, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was able to purchase VoteBuilder for $6,000 only to find a  stripped-down voter file. “It was all gone,” Ocasio-Cortez told Wired, referring to the information about vote preferences and past support which is collected by VoteBuilder and usually made available to candidates. It should be no surprise that the establishment Democrats have no interest in facilitating their own undoing. 

But Solidarity Tech didn’t come from inside the Democratic Party. Instead, it was designed by a worker-organizer and software engineer, Ivan Pardo.

After working briefly in big tech, Ivan left to build Buycott, a website to facilitate consumer boycotts, with a Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) effort as its second largest campaign. Then Ivan got involved as a volunteer organizing in Rideshare Drivers United (RDU), the Uber/Lyft driver association based out of Los Angeles. To help his team organize, he started building a CRM that eventually turned into Solidarity Tech.

Ivan’s model took many lessons from the traditional worker-organizing framework developed by labor unions. But the problems of organizing Uber and Lyft drivers, with hundreds of thousands in California alone, many part time, were vastly different from running a campaign to unionize 100 grocery store workers or 1000 machinists at a manufacturing plant.

And there was another problem: no money. Unlike traditional organizing campaigns where well-resoured unions bet big on viable campaigns in the hopes of recouping costs later, RDU has never able to raise more than enough to fund one or two staffers. 

To meet these twin challenges, organizers adapted classic labor frameworks, including assessments, the organizer bullseye, and leadership ladders, into an organizing workflow that could operate at mass scale. Assessments became the first line of contact: short conversations or digital surveys that gauged support, identified leaders, and sorted drivers into tiers. The organizer bullseye framework was adapted for distributed conditions: core leaders in the center training volunteers, with volunteers engaging wider layers of supporters over the phone. Every RDU member was asked to become an organizer, with the core team distributing lists to get drivers phonebanking fellow drivers, onboarding peers, and reporting assessments back into the CRM. 

And this work often happened in drivers’ own native languages, allowing a diverse handful of driver organizers to reach hundreds and thousands of drivers in Spanish, Chinese, Tagalog, Arabic, Korean, and more. Out of the necessity of organizing a multi-lingual, largely immigrant workforce, and enabled by a technology which easily tracked language preference and assigned calls by language, Solidarity Tech approximated the logic of workplace mapping and the union strategy of building representative leadership committees.

The journey began by answering the question of how to find drivers in the first place. The most direct way was the meet drivers at the airport, signing them up one by one, and following up with them later to recruit new volunteers. But other ways were possible too. At the time, protests against Uber and Lyft received outsized attention – so this ‘earned media’ could be used to capture drivers attention. And a small budget for Facebook ads was able to turn a constant stream 

All of this was coordinated by Rideshare Drivers United through Solidarity Tech, relying on just one paid organizer and a handful of lead volunteers. 

The software was built to solve problems of scale and independence: how to mobilize tens of thousands without substantial centralized resources, and how to retain ownership of organizing data rather than depend on institutions that might restrict access.

And with this work, by drivers organizing drivers, they were able to win Assembly Bill 5 in 2019, which kicked off a massive multi-year battle with Uber and Lyft. 

When one of us wins, we all win. More importantly, when one of us wins, we all celebrate@ZohranKMamdani joined us for our volunteer appreciation party, giving a rousing call to join NYC-DSA and breaking the 10k member mark in the process. pic.twitter.com/pOaxT6Bc6b

— NYC-DSA (@nycDSA) July 16, 2025

The Real Secret: NYC-DSA

In theory, Solidarity Tech excels at relational organizing and volunteer development: tracking who knows whom, mapping social and workplace ties, pairing volunteers with lists by language or region, and identifying and tapping organic leaders. In practice, Mamdani’s campaign didn’t make use of all of these features.

This wasn’t because these aspects weren’t necessary, but because NYC-DSA provided much of the relational infrastructure already. As Mamdani field director Tascha Van Auken, former campaign manager for Julia Salazar, outlined in her interview with City & State New York, the campaign began in December 2024 with many of the initial canvassers being DSA members with experience leading canvasses. Van Auken outlines how this effort expanded over time, as volunteers were trained into leads, scripts were sharpened, and the operation was scaled up. And core campaign staff, like Van Auken herself, had cut their teeth on earlier DSA campaigns.

It would be totally silly to argue that the Mamdani campaign was won because of Solidarity Tech, rather than the real secret sauce which was NYC-DSA’s political machine, built up over a decade. But Solidarity Tech played a role in super-charging the growth of this machine, constantly feeding it with new volunteer sign ups and driving increased turnout at a scale which likely would have been impossible to keep up with if done manually.

DSA as the backbone of the campaign also explains why the campaign didn’t need to rely on the relational tools within Solidarity Tech. With dozens or hundreds of experienced field leads integrated into a pre-existing semi-mass city party, the chapter could staff canvass launches, orient new volunteers, and maintain neighborhood continuity without depending on the CRM for leader development. 

Instead, the campaign treated ST primarily as a volunteer funnel and reminder system, serving as a bridge between grabbing a supporters attention and leading them on a canvass in person. And even though relational features weren’t maximized in the software, they still mattered in practice. Every volunteer who showed up was greeted by a local organizer—a neighborhood lead who had likely run the same canvass sites multiple times. That consistency created trust and continuity, allowing volunteers to feel rooted in their own community rather than in an abstract campaign machine.

Similarly, DSA had the internal capacity to tap the full capacity of new volunteers who wanted to do more than knock doors. That meant the campaign didn’t need to rely on ST’s follow-up and leadership-development workflows, because the campaign didn’t need to manage those tasks at all; instead, those functions were handled through the chapter’s own committees, working groups, and recruitment pipelines.

In this way, Mamdani’s field operation blurred the line between high-tech automation and low-tech relational organizing. Social media and the CRM got volunteers to the door; DSA organizers kept them coming back.

Moving Forward For DSA

Although the Mamdani campaign was able to forgo some of these features and workflows focused on ‘deep organizing’ in Solidarity Tech, they remain highly valuable for any DSA chapter which seeks to follow in NYC’s lead.

Campaigns outside of New York will have far less infrastructure than what the Mamdani campaign began with, and building up this infrastructure – i.e. recruiting and training volunteer organizers and campaign leads – will require months of work. Even a DSA chapter which has not yet launched a campaign can begin deploying this toolkit, in order to prime their existing list while they decide which campaigns to put forward. The work of organizing a core crew, recruiting volunteers to phonebank, and deploying these volunteers to call through the list remains the same. 

This work of priming the list is crucial to activate as many “paper members” as possible ahead of election time, funneling them into trainings or working groups, so that come election day there is a larger pool of potential volunteers, and a trained team ready to scale up outreach operations.

Organizing At Scale

Mamdani’s campaign demonstrated a truth often lost in the consultant-driven world of politics: organizing at scale is not just about quantity, but about structure.

The Mamdani campaign shows how insurgent campaigns can combine mass attention with deep organizing. Social media grabbed attention. Solidarity Tech captured and converted that attention. And DSA provided the relational glue that turned volunteers into repeat actors.

The lesson isn’t just about one candidate or one election. It’s about how the left can own its own infrastructure, adapt worker-organizing models for electoral scale, and prevent its capacity from evaporating once a campaign ends.

For a generation of activists, Solidarity Tech represents a bridge: from the deep organizing traditions of the labor movement, to the scale of modern internet-driven campaigns. The challenge now is to use that bridge not just for one race, but for the long road of building movements that last.

The tools of the labor movement—assessments, leadership ladders, the organizer bullseye—emerged from shop-floor campaigns which were 10x, 100x, or 1000x smaller than the Mamdani campaign. Today, they can be scaled for tens of thousands of volunteers, if the right infrastructure is in place.

With the right tools we can translate deep organizing into the digital age.

Freddy Oswald is a member of Boston DSA and a contributor to Working Mass.

The post Deep Organizing at Scale: How Solidarity Tech Helped Power Zohran Mamdani’s Volunteer Wave appeared first on Working Mass.

by Reese A

This piece was written 08/15/25

Last week, I had the honor of representing the Liberal Arts and Science Academy chapter of the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA), at YDSA’s 2025 annual national convention. It was a true honor to be their co-chair, and to serve them once more as their delegate.

Ultimately, however, I came away from the convention concerned for our political future as a movement: We were decisively against organizing students. We failed to pass crucial resolutions that would strengthen the student movement, including R23: Building Campus Consciousness, Democracy, and Militancy through Student Unions and R10: Building an International Student Movement. R23 would have provided crucial support to mass student organizing in the form of student unions, a formation that can mobilize large numbers of students in solidarity in a way that YDSA cannot. The success of the student union formation is outlined below with Students United by LASA YDSA, and I think that failing to bet on mass student organizing via student unions will remain one of the biggest lost opportunities of the convention. Additionally, R10 centered our internationalism around building relationships with student organizations as YDSA, something that must be centered in order to build an international coalition to win student demands and ultimately socialism.

Instead, we focused on gatekeeping durable socialist organizing to only people with “real” ties to the class struggle (current laborers) and building value-pure socialist groups to recruit students into. We passed resolutions like R12: For a Campaigning Internationalism and R18: Recommitting to Running Strategic Campaigns as Unapologetic Socialists, which aren’t obviously bad, but show a clear focus away from larger mass movement organizing of students towards socialist groups. This tendency fundamentally doesn’t believe that students have a claim to power, but rather we must take a backseat to the “real” working class and focus on political education, supporting their cause, and running smaller campaigns as socialists to pressure the campus. It doesn’t believe in the mass student movement or their own claim to power and representation.

This is a mistake. If we want to win material change, at our schools and in the world, we have to be comfortable organizing the people around us, having conversations, and building power. As students, we represent some of the most diverse, progressive and willing bodies of people in America, and our organizations should strive to organize and mobilize as many students as possible to win. Some might argue that students don’t have the correct “class character,” and I must disagree. We are forgetting what the root of working class is – people who are not owners, people who do not control capital. Just as unemployed people are part of the working class, so are students. Additionally, others argue that students inherently aren’t worth organizing because they’re a transient group. The student movement has built some of the strongest organizations and movements in American history, from Vietnam and Students for a Democratic Society, to divestment from South Africa and winning the collapse of apartheid, to fighting for a free Palestine today. Turnover is not a valid reason to avoid organizing – if that were true, we wouldn’t be organizing Starbucks and Amazon. Yet regardless of the excuses people give for abandoning students, none of them give a valid reason to leave them unorganized and retreat to our comfort zone of like-minded socialists. They’re progressive, willing to fight, and have organized throughout history. It would be a shame for YDSA to give up on student mass organizing, let alone for the wider socialist movement to do so, yet increasingly that seems to be the trend.

It’s important that we organize the entirety of the working class by building durable organizations to fight for change, not because that we think only the working class can win socialism, but because we truly believe in each and every one of our neighbors as people. In this time of rising fascism, believing in people is more important now than ever if we want to defeat it. Yet the socialist movement seems to be retreating into hiding, requiring that people come to our doorstep instead of organizing our neighbors en masse for change, because we no longer find hope in them. We vote down student organizing, we vote down protest organizing, we stop committing to the rank-and-file strategy and make connections with the union leaders instead. This is what fascism wants of us: to feel hopeless and that your neighbor is untrustworthy, to build division in order to cement the ruling class. Instead, we must meet neighbors where they are, with organizations that can represent them both to their schools and to the wider world, and build committed comrades out of this bond.

At LASA YDSA, we organized a student union, Students United, to serve as a durable student bargaining representative to fight for fairer learning conditions and mental health support. We currently have over 8% of the student body supporting our bid to unionize by signing Union Authorization Cards. This union attracted a wide range of people because it was rooted in a collective movement, representation, and demands for change – a movement from which we were able to build committed socialist organizers out of. While YDSA could never legitimately claim to be a representative of students and demand bargaining rights, a union could, because a union’s legitimacy comes exclusively from its status as a representative of the students instead of ideology or self-interest. YDSA can lead the movement, YDSA can build organizers from the movement, but YDSA must commit to empowering the working class to seize power for themselves. This is an important distinction because it’s both an optical, political and communal one – it’s the difference between one-party rule and a worker’s state for the people. Democratic socialists should commit to people power and democracy first and foremost, not try to make a utopian socialist society concocted out of thin air and imposed on the people.

We will not win by building a cadre vanguard that people do not feel a connection to. We will not win by treating our neighbors as peasants to be strung along. We will win through class struggle and a mass movement of each and every one of us, that, through solidarity, can be built in any community and especially within students. We must not give up on student and wider working class solidarity. We must not give up on our own communities. We must commit more, organize for power, and organize to win socialism.

The post In Defense of the Student Movement first appeared on Red Fault.

On August 22nd, 2025 United Auto Worker (UAW) local 647, representing over 600 GE aerospace workers in Evendale Ohio and Erlanger Kentucky, voted by 84% to go on strike if they had not received a counter offer from GE by the time their contract expired at midnight on August 27th. That time came and true to their word the workers went on strike.

It’s important to remember that between 2022 to 2024, GE Aerospace has reaped record revenue surpassing $100 billion for over $16 billion in shareholder distributions. CEO Larry Culp earned $89 million in 2024 alone - over 1,200 times more than the median worker’s annual income. With this kind of profit GE could absolutely be reasonable with these moderate increases that the workers are asking for but are choosing not to.

Metro Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky Democratic Socialists of America stand in solidarity with these workers not just with words but with direct action. DSA Cincy members have been out on the picket line since day one with these workers and are currently out there as of this writing! We proudly support GE workers and will continue to do so until their demands are met.

The National Guard is coming to Chicago. Never mind the fact that Governor J.B. Pritzker doesn’t want them here and hasn’t ordered them. Never mind the fact that a federal judge recently struck down Trump’s siccing of the Guard on Los Angeles, where they were tasked primarily with intimidating protesters and milling about aimlessly.  Never mind the fact that the presence of troops and federal agents in Washington, D.C was so enraging that a salmon-shirt-and-khaki-shorts-wearing Generic White Guy threw a sandwich at a federal agent – and dodged felony charges after a grand jury refused to indict him. 

Trump has chosen to illegally deploy  National Guard troops and more ICE agents to our city because Chicago is purportedly a violence ridden “killing field” requiring immediate federal intervention. The actual, obvious reason is that Trump is still mad that a group of protesters chased him out of the city in 2016, and that workers here have successfully organized against ICE terrorism. He also resents that Chicago is a thriving, multiracial, multi-ethnic city with local and state leadership uninterested in complying with his whims or bowing to threats of force.

At the same time, the allegations of violence and crime haven’t stopped well meaning people sharing photos of the best of Chicago – its street festivals, beaches, and museums – while mocking how “scary” this world-class city is. I understand the urge to troll and to tell people who have never visited our city to kick rocks. But we cannot neglect the real people behind every statistic, every talking point, and every headline about the number of shootings and assaults in Chicago. Those people deserve more than Trump’s false promises of “law and order,” a “gotcha” headline about crime, or erasure of what happened to them. 

Over the Labor Day weekend in Chicago, 58 people were shot. Eight of those people died. Eight people’s parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters are grieving the loss of loved ones while having to navigate the grim logistics of death: visits to the morgue and the funeral home, obtaining a tall stack of death certificates, contacting Social Security, phone and email providers, banks and credit card companies, health insurance companies, utility providers, and landlords in order to close accounts and attempt to eliminate any debts.

The 50 people who were “only” injured, not killed, are recovering in the hospital. They are fighting with insurance companies who want them discharged before they have gotten used to using a colostomy bag, or before their excruciating pain has dulled to become a manageable (but likely permanent) part of life. Their parents, partners or children are trying to figure out how they are supposed to accommodate a wheelchair or walker in their rickety walkup or two flat, or how they’re supposed to pick up their prescriptions when the only pharmacy in the neighborhood closed three months ago, or who they can talk to about their loved ones’ psychological trauma as the city grapples with a critical shortage of trained mental health professionals.

Meanwhile, nurses have to deliver bad news to parents, aid injured patients, fight with insurance companies, while somehow finding time for a bathroom break. Social workers and case managers have to call through a database of agencies that hasn’t been updated in five years to figure out which patchwork of nonprofit service providers are still open and can offer assistance. Many will try to find time to collectively grieve the clients they lost. Community Violence Intervention (CVI) workers will go to funerals and answer phone calls and text messages at all hours from angry friends and family, trying to persuade them that revenge isn’t worth it, all while making minimum wage and facing layoffs if the CVI grant isn’t renewed. To that last point: Chicago’s CVI landscape is even more fragmented and precariously funded in the aftermath of the collapse of Heartland Alliance, which ran the READI Chicago program.

If a survivor decides to take their chances with the criminal legal system, they’ll deal with an indifferent, unresponsive, or downright hostile police detective. If, rarer still, that detective actually clears a case (meaning a suspect is identified and arrested), the survivor then gets to deal with indifferent, unresponsive, or downright hostile assistant states attorneys, along with the stress of having to relive their trauma while testifying in court, being rigorously cross-examined, and having to see the alleged perpetrator and their family in court. 

If a survivor rationally decides that they want to focus on recovery and don’t want to subject themselves and their loved ones to violent retaliation, the police will openly blame them for the next shooting.

The cycle repeats, leaving more families and workers hurt, desperate for some kind of closure, and struggling with no support. The people screaming about crime in Chicago will continue to ignore the suffering of working-class Chicagoans and remain completely disinterested in offering any real solution to the complex problem of urban crime. The National Guard will either pack up or shift duties to mulching trees.

This is the current state of violence in Chicago. Our city is  this way because the ruling class wants it to be this way. The basic reason why violence is such an intractable issue, no matter how many millions we shovel into the police budget, is because the officers and leadership of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) believe that working-class Chicagoans deserve violence as punishment for having non-MAGA politics and for daring to exist in Chicago while not being white.

I am a police and prison abolitionist because I see “criminal justice reform” as being structurally impossible – not because there aren’t effective reforms, but because police have made it abundantly clear that they will not carry out any reforms that would make the police department better at its stated purpose of preventing crime, swiftly intervening when crime happens, supporting victims and witnesses, and detaining suspects without murdering them or violating their constitutional rights.

In recent years, police have successfully lobbied to make reforms ineffective. The “landmark” Empowering Communities for Public Safety Ordinance (ECPS) is a sprawling meetings-industrial complex that has not delivered on its promises of a police force accountable to civilian oversight. The Anjanette Young Ordinance removed the ban on no-knock raids so it could pass with the votes of alderpeople who think what happened to Anjanette Young and Breonna Taylor was good and should happen more often. They and the Chicago Police Department believe police officers should not be punished for terrorizing and murdering innocent people. 

This extends beyond shootings. This year, women in Logan Square were targeted by a serial rapist. Police detectives refused to act until the women got the attention of local news and publicly organized demands for justice to force the department’s hand. A group of detectives paid six figure salaries had to be bullied into doing their jobs and catching the perpetrator. At least one victim attempted to report what happened and received no response.

The ineptitude and indifference of CPD directly caused an increase in sexual assaults. The reason is pretty obvious if you spend any time trawling anonymous CPD Twitter accounts: the average cop considers women in Logan Square (or Avondale, or Edgewater, or Bridgeport, or Pilsen, or Lakeview, or Hyde Park, and so on) to be insufferably woke and feminist, and thus deserving of rape and sexual assault.

It is our role as socialists to name this specific state failure while uplifting the victims and the many workers left to pick up the pieces of these failures. We should not talk about “killing fields” or point to the richest parts of Chicago to claim that everything is fine. We should also avoid waving off violence as only an issue on the South and West Sides, because violence is both heavily concentrated and scattered across the city. I live on a charming block on the Far North Side that feels like it could have come straight from Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Town. There is a block not too far from me where shootings are commonplace.

Right now, Chicago DSA and many other community groups are bracing for an invasion from National Guard troops and federal agents. It is unclear how long this will last. But once the troops leave, or they are relegated to trash pickup, we need to make a serious effort to uplift the human toll of police letting thousands of people die for no reason, and be a regular presence at community vigils and peace marches. The 58 people shot this past weekend deserved more than a false choice between violence and fascism. We all do.

The post Neither Paradise Nor Killing Field: A Socialist Perspective on “Crime in Chicago” appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

By Jesse D. and Laura W.

Back in May of this year, DSA member and elected Beaverton School Board Director Dr. Tammy Carpenter was accused by the Board of antisemitism for her social media posts condemning Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The community rose up in defense of free speech and a free Palestine, and in August the board voted unanimously that she had not violated any board policy – demonstrating that these kinds of disingenuous smears are no match for the power of a revitalized anti-war movement.

The crisis started on May 29 when the Beaverton School Board held a special session for the sole purpose of disciplining Dr. Carpenter, who was not informed before the session began. The general public had no window into this proceeding as the live stream was blank for well over an hour, until the board appeared. Board meetings are typically held in person.

The accusation happened quickly and with no explanation: School Board Chair Dr. Karen Pérez-Da Silva entertained a motion to refer charges against Dr. Carpenter to a third party investigator. Director Susan Greenberg made the motion and it was seconded by Director Justice Rajee. The motion carried with five in favor and two opposed, and the meeting was immediately adjourned. Because the Board had met for the previous hour in a closed-door session, little information was available as to why Dr. Carpenter was under investigation. What were these charges? Why was Dr. Carpenter being targeted by a majority of the board? 

When Portland DSA members learned about the investigation, we instantly understood it as not just an attack on Dr. Carpenter personally, but also as part of a broader strategy by local Zionist agitators to suppress pro-Palestinian sentiment by punishing public officials who dare to challenge the pro-Israel hegemony. We sprang into action to mobilize Dr. Carpenter’s many supporters, uniting our Washington County Branch, Labor Working Group, Electoral Working Group, Palestine Solidarity Working Group, and our network of educators.

We submitted public records requests to BSD in order to see for ourselves what complaints had been made against Dr. Carpenter. What we discovered was an astroturfed campaign led by the Jewish Federation of Portland to retaliate against Dr. Carpenter for using her personal platform to highlight the injustice and horror of the genocide in Gaza. One Instagram story – which recognized the 77th anniversary of the Nakba – was cited repeatedly in the 13 complaints submitted to the Board.

As a physician, Dr. Carpenter has been deeply affected by Israel’s targeted bombing of hospitals in Gaza. Her first social media post about the genocide was on October 17, 2023, when Israel bombed the first of many hospitals. This was the first of dozens of posts she has made on the subject since October 7, 2023, many of which also talked about the destruction of the schools and universities; a subject relevant to a school board member.

The next regular School Board meeting was scheduled for June 2, just four days after the investigation was voted on. Portland DSA members quickly planned a solidarity protest for that day. Over the course of the next 90 hours, we held planning meetings, arranged for speakers, promoted the protest on social media, talked to our coworkers and allies in the Beaverton School District, and contacted local elected officials. On the day of the Board meeting, 150 people turned out to rally and occupy the School Board headquarters, demonstrating the overwhelming local support for Dr. Carpenter and the struggle for Palestinian liberation. Attendees heard from Portland Jewish Voice for Peace organizer Julia Ford; State Representative Farrah Chaichi; and Hailey DeMarre, a DSA member, Beaverton Education Association activist and Beaverton High School teacher who had a pro-Palestinian mural in her classroom painted over. Beaverton City Councilor Nadia Hasan, the first Muslim person to serve on the Council, also spoke in solidarity during the School Board meeting public comment period. They all made it clear that the retaliation against Dr. Carpenter was just one example out of many in which the interests of Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students were utterly disrespected.

Following the rally, most supporters filed into the meeting room which quickly reached capacity – many supporters were turned away for fire safety reasons. The pro-Zionists were outnumbered 15:1. Those 20 or so counter-protesters carried signs saying “Tammy Sucks” and signs that equated solidarity with Palestine as a call for Jewish extermination. The vast majority of the room was taken up by anti-Zionist advocates and Dr. Carpenter’s supporters, holding signs saying “Stop Arming Israel” and “Free Speech on Palestine.”

The meeting was tense even before public comment began, as the audience seating was overflowing with people holding signs. At one point, a group of high schoolers were awarded honors by the district, and we overheard one student insist on staying to watch the anticipated drama of the meeting, saying, “No, Mom, I want to see how this goes!”

Following the awards, a heated public comment period began wherein both sides shared alternative perspectives on the situation the Board had caused by capitulating to the complaints engineered by the Jewish Federation of Portland. (To hear the speeches, you can watch this YouTube livestream.) Some speakers complained that their federal tax dollars are being used to fund the genocide, and their local tax dollars shouldn’t go to investigating board members with a pro-Palestine position. Although the Board chairperson interrupted several times to tell attendees to quiet their reactions, the event was entirely peaceful. The crowd dispersed with the feeling of a job well done. Following the meeting, public statements poured into the School Board expressing support for Dr. Carpenter and condemnation of the School Board’s actions.

On August 9, the results of the investigation were finalized and published: the third-party investigator determined the charges against Dr. Carpenter were unfounded. We were confident from the start that this would be the result, but Portland DSA was committed to making it clear – to the Beaverton School Board and any other power-players considering following the lead of the Zionist lobby – that the public is in opposition to both the genocide and the erosion of free speech rights.

We see these charges in the same light we have seen charges of anti-semitism made against other socialist figures who have championed Palestinian liberation, like Zohran Mamdani in NYC or Rep. Rashida Tlaib in Congress. The Zionist lobby has long relied on slander to defend military funding for Israel, but it’s clear this trick doesn’t work anymore. Opposition to the imperialist war machine and solidarity with Palestine is not a liability – it is our strength.

We encourage all sympathizers to join Portland DSA and be a part of the movement to end war and genocide and instead create a world where all people can live in peace. From Beaverton to Palestine, all children should have safe, well-resourced schools that facilitate free inquiry. This will not be the last time our public figures are attacked for championing that vision, but no matter what comes next, we’re ready to keep fighting.

The post That Trick Doesn’t Work Anymore: How DSA and Allies Defeated a Smear Campaign and Protected Free Speech on Palestine appeared first on Portland DSA .

By: Andrew S

LAWRENCE, MA– Unionists and socialists gathered together at the Heritage State Park for the 41st Annual Bread and Roses Heritage Festival on September 1 – Labor Day. And as organizers from unions and mass organizations across the Merrimack Valley push in a renewed surge of organizing amidst a backdrop of labor repression, the specters of the Bread and Roses Strike watch on.

The Strike in the Trial of a New Society

First organized in 1985, the Bread and Roses Heritage Festival celebrates one of the most important events in American labor history – the Lawrence Mill Strike of 1912, colloquially known as the Bread and Roses Strike. At that time, Lawrence was inundated with textile mills that heavily employed and exploited immigrant and women workers. At the turn of the year in January 1912, the state of Massachusetts passed legislation to reduce maximum working hours for women and children from fifty-six to fifty-four hours. After a failed attempt to desperately fire half of their workforce of women with men, mill owners summarily reduced their wages instead. As socialist leader and militant railway worker “Big Bill” Haywood would later describe, Lawrence mill owners “[were] putting their thieving fingers into the envelopes of thirty thousand and from each and every envelope extracted 30 cents from every worker.” Thousands of women workers organized a successful walkout. They went on strike for three whole months in the ruthless conditions of a Merrimack Valley winter.

Strike efforts were largely led by workers with the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), or “Wobblies,” who brought in heavy hitters for strike solidarity. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a tour de force organizing mine workers from the Midwest to the Pacific Northwest, accompanied the aforementioned “Big Bill” Haywood – a legendary labor activist who cut his teeth during the Colorado Labor Wars and emerged as an icon of labor and socialist organizing from Massachusetts to the American West. Flynn and Haywood joined IWW organizers “Smiling Joe” Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti on the road to Lawrence.

The strikers and organizers of the Bread and Roses Strike paid considerable costs. After a cop killed striker Anna LoPizzo on the picket line, Ettor and Giovannitti were arrested and later endured a two-month trial which author Justus Ebert would coin “The Trial of a New Society”, going beyond a conflict of capital and labor and placing thrusting old societal values into question. Ettor and Giovannitti were ultimately acquitted, but not without another strike on September 30 in which 15,000 workers would picket during their indictment hearing, along with worker boycotts from Sweden, France, and the Italian motherland from which so many Lawrence workers on strike had recently migrated.

History and textbooks have attempted to win a counternarrative or bury it altogether. One counterprotest organized for “God and Country” on October 12, in which counterprotestors espoused jingoistic and patriotic values in dissent of the thousands of workers who bravely struck that year. Their pathetic actions are memorialized by an even more pitiful flag mast toward the center of Heritage State Park. The Zinn Education Project also noted that ten out of twelve textbooks either have not written about the Lawrence Mill Strike of 1912 or have misrepresented its fight for workers.

However, for those who picketed and lost blood, sweat, tears, and more in those three months in 1912, the world changed. Those workers experienced an immense victory. The mills lost over $30,000 throughout the strike period, equal to almost a million dollars today when accounted for inflation. Material gains were enormous: wages of workers rose by fifteen percent, double pay for overtime was set, and a pledge for non-retaliation against striking workers was secured. Haywood declared that the Bread and Roses Strike was “a wonderful strike, the most significant strike, the greatest strike that has ever been carried on in this country or any other country,” crediting the victory most especially to the democracy the workers had organized and their success in bringing multiple nationalities together in the name of labor. 

The Bread and Roses Heritage Festival celebrates one the greatest moments in American history and the radical potential the working class holds in the country’s darkest hours.

The Festival in the Now

In 2025, over a century after the Bread and Roses Strike, workers and their supporters gather in balmy weather under partial clouds. This isn’t the first time the people have gathered in Lawrence; this is the forty-first year of the Bread and Roses Festival. Organizers set up tables representing various organizations, from teachers unions, socialist parties, Palestine groups, anarchist organizations, and local businesses. Six local musical artists performed with various events speaking on labor and other left-wing organizational efforts happening across the Merrimack Valley and Massachusetts.

While the effort of the festival was to celebrate worker militancy, the current state of government affairs hovered in the clouds above. Merrimack Valley DSA, tabling and petitioning signatures for their Safe Communities Act campaign, rallied and held organizing conversations with workers and supporters who gathered around to discuss ICE attacks and their rampant rackets in kidnapping and detaining working-class immigrants throughout the state.

Local officials and candidates attended the festival to celebrate the festival’s history.

Marcos Candido, running for the District 8 seat of Lowell City Council and endorsed by Boston DSA, reiterated the need to celebrate victorious moments in labor history like the Bread and Roses Strike, especially given the fact that the strike was primarily organized by immigrant and women workers. However, today’s struggles are always at the front of Marcos’ mind.

Reflecting on the connection between 1912’s Merrimack Valley and today, Candido said: 

Time is a flat circle in capitalist society. The only thing that really changes is the technology that carries out anti-union efforts and the cops who come at us looking like US soldiers fighting in the Iraq war. I think things have shifted a little, but people are working sixty- to seventy-hour work weeks today like they were back then. It is weird that in the year 2025, the eight-hour workday is still in demand because even though the forty-hour work week is the standard, in any city it is not enough to survive. People have to work two, three jobs and still don’t have enough to pay their bills. Unfortunately, a lot of the demands of then are the demands of now. The capitalists have the power and use their power to regress.

While the labor movement today has yet to organize a strike as historically pronounced as the Bread and Roses Strike of 1912, labor unions and mass organizations like DSA look to build the power required and beat fascism with socialism. The Bread and Roses Heritage Festival gives the working class another space, deep in the Merrimack Valley on the hollowed grounds of labor history, to take the lessons of this action and move forward.

If Candido wins his seat in Lowell, he intends to fortify his dedication to serving working-class immigrants. “The Safe Communities Act that DSA is pushing for is really important, and even if it doesn’t pass at the state-level or in Boston, making sure that something like that is passed at the local level is extremely important,” said Candido. “Just like Lawrence, Lowell is a large immigrant community. Everything that is happening at the national level is worsening. Immigrants are getting attacked more and more, as well as union leaders and workers.”

“From Lawrence to Lowell, It’s incredibly important that city councils make sure every working family is protected and gets to live a good life,” Marcos Candido said.

Andrew S is an organizer with Boston DSA and contributor to Working Mass.

Workers Over Billionaires: Boston’s Historic First Labor Day Parade

By: Maxine Bouvier

BOSTON, MA– Local labor unions and their allies gathered on Monday, September 1 for a historic celebration of workers rights: Boston’s first ever Labor Day Parade. Organized by the Greater Boston Labor Council, a statewide affiliate of labor’s largest federation working to organize across different unions in the Boston area, the event featured speakers and contingents rooted in a variety of labor struggles.

Those present included teachers, healthcare workers, postal workers, municipal employees, app drivers, actors, transportation workers, tradespeople, and more. In addition, union members were joined by ally organizations including Boston Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), Massachusetts Peace Action, MassCare, and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). 

The event’s central slogan was “Workers Over Billionaires” and began with speeches from union organizers and political leaders to the crowd gathered on Boston Common, highlighting the power of working people and the urgent need for continued organizing. Thousands stood together, with each union represented with its own assembly. Present were teachers, healthcare workers, postal workers, municipal employees, gig workers, actors, transport workers, and tradespeople. Ally organizations like Massachusetts Peace Action, MassCare, and ACLU brought their contingents, as well. Boston DSA was represented by over fifty members wearing red shirts marching in solidarity with signs that read “Socialism Beats Fascism.”

Chrissy Lynch, president of the Massachusetts state federation of the AFL-CIO that bottomlined the parade, said to roaring cheers:

It is the working class that is the backbone of America, not the billionaire class. The rights we celebrate on Labor Day are being ripped up. Working class people are anxious about our jobs, about paying our bills, and if our neighbors are going to be ripped off our streets.

This sentiment was reflected in the signs of protestors present – many called for the inclusion and protection of undocumented immigrants currently targeted by the Trump administration’s increasingly aggressive deportation program. The parade marched from Beacon Street through downtown to City Hall Plaza. Along the route, attendees chanted and sang, calling for solidarity and a continued fight for workers’ rights. People laughed, cheered, and roared chants.

“Money for jobs and education, not for war and deportation,” called members of the Boston Teachers Union. Tracy Romain, a member of the Boston Teachers Union (BTU), shared what felt most important to her about organizing with her colleagues: “[It’s about] bringing everyone together, bringing our wages up, getting what we deserve. Fighting for our rights, and for democracy.” BTU Local 66 emphasized the need to stand up for public education as funding cuts are threatened.

At City Hall Plaza, more organizers spoke about their ongoing fights for better working conditions. A representative of concession workers at Fenway Park, organizing under UNITE HERE Local 26, spoke about their current efforts and a recent two-day strike:

These machines that are replacing us don’t have a family, a neighborhood, or a Boston accent. When we strike again, we will not have an end date. We will not surrender to your low wages and increases in automation.

Many union members shared similar grievances. A speaker from Mass General Brigham’s Primary Care Physicians Union shared that MGB has refused to recognize their right to bargain. Similarly, a representative of the newly formed App Drivers Union spoke about the difficulty of fighting for recognition from corporate leadership:

Today, for the first time ever, ride share drivers are standing with their fellow workers on Labor Day, on the verge of winning the first ever app drivers union in the United States… when working for these companies can feel like living under dictatorship.

While acknowledging the realities of these shared difficulties, the Labor Day Parade and rally were uplifting in tone – a reminder of the power of the working class, what dedicated organizers and unions have already won, and the work that still needs to be done. 

Maxine Bouvier is an organizer with Boston DSA and contributor to Working Mass.

The post Labor Day 2025: From Lawrence’s Bread and Roses Festival to Boston’s Historic First Labor Day Parade appeared first on Working Mass.

By: Rob Switzer

This article was originally published in the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC)’s blog.

If you’re considering joining a union or starting one in your workplace, you may ask yourself, “Are union dues expensive?” This question may have occurred to you spontaneously, or it may have been planted in your head by anti-union rhetoric, perhaps by your bosses in response to a unionization movement in your workplace. In either case, it’s a question worth exploring.

How are union dues calculated?

The union may determine dues based on a straight percentage of your paychecks. For example, if you’re a member of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), you may pay 1.5% of your overall salary in dues, capped at $90 a month. Let’s say you earn $1,000 every week for a yearly salary of $52,000: You would pay $15 from each weekly paycheck, totaling $60 a month or $720 a year.

Other unions calculate dues as a flat rate. For example, I am a United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) member, and at my workplace, I pay $10.65 each week, or $42.60 every month. And yes, your boss is right: If my union membership ended tomorrow, that’s an extra $42.60 that would be going into my pocket. And a hypothetical SEIU worker would have an extra $60 every month going into their pocket.

Is it worth paying union dues?

The important question is what would you lose? What does that $60 get you? Do the benefits of your union membership offset that expense? The data shows overwhelmingly that the answer is yes. To begin with, according to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics in 2024, unionized workers in the United States, thanks to the wages they bargained for in their contracts, make on average 17.5% more than their non-unionized counterparts.

That number alone shows that union membership is worth the cost. If you make $1,000 in a week, 17.5% of that is $175. So on average, if a non-union worker is making $1,000 in a week, their union shop counterpart makes $1,175. Over the course of a year, while you’re paying $720 every year in union dues, you can expect to pocket on average $2,100 in extra cash in exchange. That’s a $1,380 return on investment. But there is much more to the equation than a simple dollar-for-dollar comparison.

Are union dues a benefit?

Forming a union and obtaining a collective bargaining agreement almost always locks in a series of benefits, some that have monetary value and some that are invaluable, in my opinion.

For one example, you could look at the contract where I work: Cattleman’s Meat and Produce, a neighborhood meat market and grocery store. Our union, UFCW, is often criticized as being one of the weaker large unions (and sometimes for good reason), yet our contract provides for a number of guaranteed benefits that workers in many other grocery retail environments simply don’t enjoy.

My favorite among these is paid vacation. At Cattleman’s, we receive a week of paid vacation after one year, and eventually three weeks if you stick around long enough. Having worked many jobs in my life without paid vacation, I don’t know how I ever lived without it. This is one of the benefits that I would classify as “invaluable.” Having a week off here and there to travel or just recharge your batteries and still get your bills paid can be a life-changer.

Can union dues protect my job?

Another benefit is simply job security: unions protect your ability to stay employed. Almost every state in this country is an “at-will” state, meaning you can be fired at any time for any reason (as long as it’s not an illegal reason, like racial discrimination). But virtually any union contract includes a “just cause” provision, meaning you can only be fired for a good reason.

If you are fired and you decide to fight it, this could mean a lengthy and expensive battle for the employer, and sometimes they will simply take someone back rather than having to deal with a fight.

Do union dues mean lower wages?

Paying union dues means you and your co-workers earn higher wages and wage increases over time. At Cattleman’s, most employees are promised a 50-cent raise every six months. This is something we need to stay on top of to make sure it’s enforced (the boss will conveniently “forget”), but it’s a contractually agreed-upon promise that we all benefit from.

Most union contracts will contain wage increases like this, and this obviously contributes to why union workers typically make more money.

What are the benefits of paying union dues?

There are many more benefits! We receive a full day’s pay for certain holidays, whether we work or not. We have dependable schedules. We have guaranteed hours every week, ensuring that we can pay our bills even during slow seasons. We get sick days and paid “personal days.” And like every union member in the United States, we have “Weingarten rights,” meaning we can demand the presence of a union representative or steward before any disciplinary actions are taken.

I am a meat cutter at my job but I am also our shop steward, and when I am asked, “What does the union do for us?”, this is how I answer: I tell them about all of the above-described benefits. (I even wrote up a handout that explains them all!) When someone complains about the union to me and floats the idea of leaving it, I will listen and often sympathize with them. But I ultimately always make the point, “Do you like your paid vacation? How about your job security? Do you really want to give those things up to keep an extra $10 in your pocket every week?”

Is it worth it to pay union dues?

Sometimes critics of unions have a point. Many unions (such as the UFCW) are not as democratic as they should be. Sometimes it seems like they don’t pay attention or care about us. We are often largely excluded from the negotiation process, and many workers feel they are pressured into accepting bad contract offers. Sometimes union executives make extremely high salaries that seem extravagant. (The current UFCW International president makes over $300,000, and many local presidents make around a quarter-million every year as well.)

But even if the union isn’t perfect (and ours certainly is not), the answer is not to leave it. The answer is stay, reap the benefits, and become an active member and improve the union from within. And if you are wondering whether it is worth it to start or join one, the answer is yes! So, are union dues expensive? Simply put, it is much more expensive to not pay dues to a union. And at the end of the day, union dues aren’t a cost — they’re an investment. And the return is your dignity, your security, and your voice.

Rob Switzer is a UFCW butcher and shop steward in Detroit, Michigan. He is a member of Metro Detroit’s chapter of Democratic Socialists of America and co-editor of their publication “The Detroit Socialist.”

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Are Union Dues Expensive? was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

As part of a city-wide crackdown on our homeless neighbors, the City of Madison is unfairly targeting the Social Justice Center, demanding that the SJC removes its food pantry, public health vending machine, benches, and public art, in an attempt to drive away unhoused people who rely on the SJC and the organizations it houses for shelter, safety, healthcare, and support.

Madison Area Democratic Socialists of America recognizes the effort the Social Justice Center puts into addressing the housing crisis that this city ignores, and we stand with the SJC and all who rely on it.

There is no denying it: there is a crisis in Madison. Rents get higher and access to affordable housing gets more limited by the day, forcing more and more people from their homes. Public restrooms are not open early or late enough. Overcoming addiction is nearly impossible when one’s basic needs for survival are not met. Each of these problems is a rung in the ladder of capitalist oppression, which forces the working class into worse and worse conditions until they have nowhere left to go.

The city’s approach to this crisis is unjust and unhelpful. We cannot disappear the unhoused population. We must house them. We must give them safety, security, and support. They are our neighbors, community members, and constituents of the politicians who claim to represent us. Any one of us could be a layoff or medical emergency away from joining them. This crisis is a reminder to the rest of the working class that the ruling class will turn its back on anyone who isn’t making them profits.

The Beacon, Madison’s primary day shelter, is beyond capacity, so people look for shelter in other parts of the city. The city’s proposed new men’s shelter won’t be ready until next year, and will only have 250 beds – not nearly enough to meet the well-documented need.

But instead of fully funding and expanding the sorely needed homeless services and meaningfully addressing the housing crisis that makes them necessary, the city is cracking down on neighbors helping neighbors – by increasing police presence at and making punitive demands of the Social Justice Center, by threatening to close down the Dairy Drive campground with winter just around the corner, and by sweeping the encampment at the Wisconsin Veterans’ Museum.

“Solving” homelessness with incarceration is more expensive per person than harm reduction centers and housing first policies, and only perpetuates the cycle.

As community members, it is our responsibility to provide what the city will not, and the Social Justice Center aims to do exactly that. We also have to fight for a just future in which everyone has what they need. MADSA stands in solidarity with the Social Justice Center, and calls upon the Madison Common Council, Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, and the Dane County Board to do right by our neighbors:

1. Stop targeting the SJC for stepping up where the city has failed.

2. Continue to fund the Dairy Drive campsite, a crucial transition program.

3. Support the Dane County Homeless Justice Initiative’s demands to fully fund homeless support services.

4. Cure the root cause of the homelessness crisis by building affordable, desirable, and dignified public housing where our neighbors can thrive, not just survive!

This is an excerpt from the Independent Organizing Network's Post-NLRB research report on the current legal labor landscape and the threats on the horizon.

The post Labor organizing after the NLRB appeared first on EWOC.

by Dan Fitch

Let’s delve into local coverage of the jail communication contract and mail scanning, Alec K style. If you need background, get lost in the sauce with a deep dive from last month. The summary: The sheriff’s office is arguing that we need to scan mail to save lives from overdoses caused by contraband coming via the mail. The evidence for this? Nonexistent.

First, let’s look at what got published in the media. Then, we have to dive into the sheriff’s two attempts to convince the citizens that mail scanning is about safety. [Spoiler: it’s mostly by saying “safety” a lot.]

A quick tl;dr summary of this whole analysis: there is very little proof that mail scanning reduces overdoses or improves safety, and quite a lot of proof that it does not. Mostly, mail scanning is a “Trojan horse” [as Smart Communications have said themselves] for getting tablets into prisoners’ hands and selling them music and movies and everything else at exorbitant prices. If the sheriff gets more surveillance power along the way, more the better. Plus, the current contract as written doesn’t even restrict usage of the data until after the contract’s term, despite the sheriff’s office claiming the county controls the data.

This contract is bad for all kinds of reasons; pick your poison. Mail scanning with zero proof of safety improvements? Check. Badly written contract that lets maximum extraction happen, up to the point that mail and messages could get used to train AI, or sent to other corporations or government entities without Dane County’s say so? Check. Corrupt corporation that has bribed carceral agencies in the past, and has filed for bankruptcy? Check.

Oh yeah, just pound that point in: this corporation applied for bankruptcy back in December 2024. Shouldn’t that be… something we want to avoid? The county procedures that picked this contract out of the two available are opaque, at best. And while I don’t understand corporate economics in our current hellscape, it doesn’t seem exactly great that we are signing up with a sketchy company trying and failing to file for Chapter 11, right?

(As far as exploitation, how much do you think it costs to stream an hour of music on the jail’s current GTL-run tablets? By my math, it’s $3.00. Would you pay for a streaming service where you had to pay $3 every time you wanted to listen to an hour of music? Although the initial planned price is only $1.80 for an hour in this new contract, there are no upper limits, and the county has zero oversight on pricing outside of calls and texts. If you’re thinking “people in jail don’t deserve to listen to music, who cares if it’s expensive”, you’re forgetting: half the people in there are innocent until proven guilty. They’re almost all poor. And your ass is showing.)

Local coverage

Cap Times reporter Sarah Eichstadt wrote an early piece in June, quite clear on the state of things. The community was upset, Smart Communications was [is] a shady company, the sheriff was pushing mail scanning with weak justifications, and the flimsy evidence around all this is directly addressed in the article. Overall, it captures the tone in the room, where both people from the public and on the committee were disturbed by some of the media coverage of Smart Communications’ very public flaws.

One thing Eichstadt’s piece doesn’t mention is how the Public Protection & Judiciary (PPJ) committee members had just received the proposed contract merely a few business days before the June 17 meeting. [Notice that the proposed contract is not OCR’d, so you can’t easily search for words in it. And why can’t our newspapers link into Legistar for folks to easily dig into meeting details?]

Three days after that first Cap Times article was published, PPJ talked about the contract a bit at a joint meeting with Health and Human Needs on June 30. Then Scott Gordon and I published one of our patented “ow, it’s too long” deep dives on July 14 in Tone Madison. A single point I want to call out from that: the Dane County Sheriff’s Office (DCSO) has been saying conflicting things about contraband in the mail for years. They claim to have a big problem with drugs getting into the jail in the mail, but they don’t have records they can release. From that article:

Asked point-blank whether this is an acknowledgement that DCSO’s records are incomplete or unreliable, Schaffer responds: “I wouldn’t put it that way. We’ve been clear that we have not historically tracked the specific data you are requesting (incidents of drugs entering the jail through the mail).”

Other local coverage has been weak, at best. WKOW’s initial piece talks only to the sheriff, and only mentions “potential concerns” without detailing any, and then they reprinted DCSO’s talking points from a recent press release, but even attempted to strengthen the argument, claiming: “In 2024, there were four incidents of drugs entering the jail through mail, contributing to three in-custody drug-related deaths, according to officials.” That little word “contributing” connects the incidents of drugs in the mail with the in-custody deaths in our minds, creating causation where it wasn’t. If you read DCSO’s press release, it very carefully does not say the incidents of drugs in the mail contributed in any way. It says there were four incidents of drugs in the mail, and then “While this may seem like a relatively small number, it’s important to note that there were three in-custody deaths that same year, all involving drugs.” See how there is no causation proven, just that it’s “important to note” the two facts?

WMTV’s coverage doesn’t make that incorrect connection, and at least adds a throwaway “Opponents of the plan cite privacy concerns”… but quickly follows that with “but Sheriff Barrett says safety is his top priority.” Of course he says that. He says it a lot. But opponents are citing more than privacy concerns, we are citing that this will not stop contraband, it will slow mail access, and it will further isolate people in our jail.

The first missive

The Sheriff’s first letter hit just before the July 22 PPJ meeting, where the committee voted 4-3 to recommend for denial. (Hooray?) So this timing may have been an attempt to convince supervisors that mail scanning was a no-brainer… except for the fact that some of them were unaware of it at the July 22 meeting. Could have been just a PR fail, where it didn’t reach its intended targets. Or, possibly, the letter was intended to target the wider Dane County community, because the sheriff had guessed PPJ was not going to rubber-stamp it.

So, what’s the meat of this letter?

He opens with the fentanyl overdose crisis, which is, to be clear, a real thing and a huge public health concern.

Then he pivots: “Within the jail community…” Now, if I threw people in my basement and locked them up, it would be pretty weird if I called them my “basement community”. He goes on to say contraband comes in through “seemingly innocent letters”. “Seemingly innocent” is a fun phrase, you can put it in front of anything and make it sound spooky. Our “seemingly innocent” sheriff sure is penning a lot of letters to newspapers!

Notice throughout that we have plenty of appeals to emotion, which is fine; and plenty of appeals to reason, but still no numbers, no frequency, no evidence. But in the last line of his opener he lays out the key idea: “Implementing advanced mail scanning in the Dane County Jail is a critical step to saving lives.”

This is going to be his main argument, but the problem is, there’s just no proof. We’ll dive deeper into that below.

Inexplicably, he writes that “scanning technologies, like X-ray and chemical detection systems” can identify threats. But uh, that’s not what’s on the menu. This contract is not for X-ray or chemical detection systems. We don’t know how it compares to what DSCO is currently doing to check mail. This contract is for paying a corrupt Florida company to hire schlubs who open envelopes and scan mail on normal document scanners or cameras or whatever, to be shredded later. This whole section is very confusing, and I don’t understand what it’s doing here. Maybe it snuck in from some other argument for surveillance technology. But it’s not an accident, because [spoiler alert] it pops back up in the second op-ed.

Next, Barrett claims “…scanning mail supports rehabilitation by reducing access to substances that derail recovery.” And we are once again grinding in the teeth of the question: is there any evidence that scanned mail provably reduces access to contraband substances? I have been able to find no research which supports this claim, not even biased research paid for by carceral technology companies. There’s just people like our sheriff saying it loudly, hoping that it’s true.

I did find one paper, Utilizing Electronic Mail to Prevent Drug Trafficking in Prisons (Warshaw 2020) which argues for mail scanning on flimsy grounds. On p. 77 you can find Warshaw laying out Pennsylvania’s plan [in 2018] to prevent contraband: moving to scanned mail through a company called Smart Communications. Hmm, sounds familiar. She writes that “Since the implementation of the new system, Pennsylvania has had positive results,” and quotes a punishment bureaucrat saying it has cut down on the quantity of synthetic cannibinoids in their system.

The only problem with this narrative is that, unfortunately, “After a slight decline in the immediate aftermath of the policy change, the number of positive drug tests rebounded quickly and is now higher than it was before.” [Emphasis mine.]

Mail scanning is not a magical panacea that stops contraband, because mail is not the primary way that contraband gets into carceral institutions. Ask yourself: why is the primary way it gets in not mentioned by the sheriff, ever? Why is it only hinted at in Eichstadt’s article? Might it be because we all know that contraband enters our jail via the workers there, who have dangerous incentives to sell access to contraband?

There’s no evidence that mail scanning stops contraband. There is, however, evidence that increased contact via mail, phone calls, and visits with friends and family has many positives, including reducing recidivism, in-prison misconduct, and depression.

Finally, the sheriff claims that “Investing in mail scanning is a proactive, humane solution” and that “Lives depend on it.” If we’re talking about proactive, humane solutions that save lives, there is one major reform the sheriff should be fighting for: abolishing cash bail and keeping more people out of jail pre-trial, as Illinois has. Guess what? No crime waves happened there. None of the predicted “Purge”-style chaos. There were overall savings for the taxpayers, and less lives got wrecked by carceral punishment. [We also need to address Wisconsin’s backwards approach to crimeless revocation, compared to our neighbors, but that’s a whole other ball of wax.]

“Ensuring safer facilities and stronger communities,” if Barret is actually interested in this, should involve actively reducing our jail population, and rethinking our reliance on punishment as a path to try to cruelty our way to stronger communities. We’ve tried cruelty. We’ve tried cruelty with a neoliberal smile on top. Why would we try cruelty with maximum capitalism smeared on that smile? Let’s try some smarter options.

The second missive

After the PPJ 4-3 denial, Personnel and Finance voted 5-2 to recommend denial on August 11. After that second failure is when we get the second shot from the sheriff, this time in a longer op-ed.

Barret fires off out of the gate with “The evidence is clear: Jail mail scanning saves lives by addressing the growing threat of smuggled drugs, weapons and other illicit materials that fuel violence, overdoses and instability within our jails.” But he adds none of this “clear” evidence to the conversation, still. And wait, what is “weapons” doing in that sentence? Is this another slip, or are mail-in weapons a problem we can’t figure out how to solve?

After that, he points to the opioid crisis, with good reason. He names the sad fact that 3 people died from overdoses in his supervision in 2024. But notice that he does not provide any evidence to link those overdoses to the mail. Plus, he fails to address the fact that people died in Wisconsin prisons in 2024 from overdoses… but we’ve been scanning that mail since late 2021, when the Department of Corrections claimed it was a necessary step to stop K2 overdoses.

Okay. Now. I’m gonna need you to take a deep breath, because there are two extremely strange sentences to delve into coming up.

Chemical detection

“Mail scanning technology, which uses advanced imaging and chemical detection, can identify these threats [substances] before they reach jail residents, preventing overdoses and saving lives.”

Remember above? What is this chemical detection stuff? We are talking about mail scanning with scanners like your grandma uses to scrapbook. Smart Communications is not doing any chemical detection, they’re just… scanning. Digitizing. And then sending the results over the internet. Then shredding the original mail, eventually. Nowhere in this plan do we need any “advanced imaging and chemical detection” for substances. You can look at the steps in the contract yourself under “XIII. MAIL SCANNING – OFF PREMISE MAIL SCANNING” on page 34 of the contract [page 38 of the PDF.]

… followed by a bunch of boring surveillance and review things that happen with the [again, digital] images. I simply do not understand what the “chemical detection” argument is doing in these letters from the sheriff.

Weapons, escape plans, or gang communications

I’m just going to put the entire next two paragraphs here:

Beyond drugs, mail can conceal weapons, escape plans or gang communications that jeopardize the safety of everyone in the facility. Traditional hand-inspection methods are labor-intensive and prone to human error, allowing dangerous items to slip through.

Modern scanning systems, however, provide a non-invasive, efficient and highly accurate means of detecting contraband. They can identify hidden compartments, chemical residues or suspicious materials without compromising the privacy of legitimate correspondence. By ensuring that all mail is thoroughly screened, we reduce the risk of violence, gang activity and escapes, creating a safer environment for jail residents and staff alike.

After the first paragraph, I’m thinking, sure, scanning is a way to guarantee no weapons, but at no point so far has the claim been that weapons in the mail have been a problem. But by “identify hidden compartments, chemical residues or suspicious materials” I’m once again completely baffled. Does Barret mean “stop” instead of “identify” here?

Let me lay a scenario out.

In the dark near-future of this contract with Smart Communications, Alice gets arrested. She can’t make bail, and sits in jail. Her husband Bob wants to send her a birthday card, but somehow sneak in a hidden compartment with a key in it, like in the old movies.

It doesn’t matter what Bob tries to do, because he mails it care of Smart Communications. Whatever clever mechanism he employed goes to Florida, gets scanned in, and a random office drone gets to have a bit of a laugh at someone trying to mail a key through their foolproof system.

The original mail never goes to Dane County Jail.

A picture of it goes over the internet, and Alice can look at a crappy version of it on her tablet. Maybe she can pay money to have a crappy printout of it, too. But a small team of office workers with a scanner and a shredder is what I think this contract is for, not for some fancy centralized CSI lab with shiny equipment that can “identify… chemical residues”.

And then, after all that, he adds “without compromising the privacy of legitimate correspondence.” Huh? Jail mail has been read and checked and not-at-all-private since the beginning of when people first sent mail to gaols. Now there’s an extra layer of office workers in the loop, as well as the AI that initially scans it, plus the usual sheriff’s deputies who manually check, and whoever else from the county, state, or other jurisdiction has access to the scans. [Legal correspondence in this plan will go through a scanner that’s actually at Dane County Jail, for delivery to tablet… or to be reprinted.]

Why do I smell toast?

Back to the plot

Copaganda sometimes directly intends to confuse us, I think.

Let’s get back to the sheriff’s hard evidence for why mail scanning will save lives. I’m sure it’s in here. Oh, here we go, he’s gonna drop some knowledge bombs:

In facilities where mail scanning has been implemented, such as those in Ohio and Pennsylvania, overdoses have dropped significantly, and staff report feeling safer. These outcomes demonstrate that scanning is not just a theoretical solution but a proven strategy.

Hmm. Don’t think we should be looking to Ohio, recently sued over their mail scanning program, as an example.

And the other problem with this narrative is, uhh, remember Pennsylvania? “After a slight decline in the immediate aftermath of the policy change, the number of positive drug tests rebounded quickly and is now higher than it was before.“

Déjà vu, anyone? Prisons and jails all over the country have moved to scanned mail in recent years, and they have not gotten safer. If the evidence for safety held up, these companies trying to push the mail scanning programs would be trumpeting it from the rooftops, instead of making vague claims and bribing departments.

One last bit of phrasing to stare at here: the “staff report feeling safer.” Feeling safer. I feel like most of our problem in the punishment sphere comes down to doing counterproductive and cruel things because people “feel safer.” We arrest non-white people at racist, biased rates because it makes people “feel safer”. We fund prisons and police instead of trying to deal with root causes, because that makes people “feel safer”.

So what?

So the problem with the sheriff’s claims about safety is that these mail scanning systems are already in place in jurisdictions [including the State of Wisconsin Department of Corrections] where they have not shown a proven reduction in drug use and overdoses. It’s obvious why these mail scanning systems are spreading: they give punishment bureaucrats more surveillance powers, allowing them to claim they care about safety, while enriching some jackasses who think making money off of helpless poor people is the American Way.

It shouldn’t surprise us that the sheriff would desire more surveillance power, and attempt to ignore the most common way contraband gets into jails and prisons: through workers.

After those two evidence-free bowls of word salad from the Sheriff, If the sheriff writes a letter and an op-ed pushing for increased surveillance based on platitudes and outdated, incorrect evidence, does our local media not think that’s… interesting?

What next

Now the county board will discuss this as a full body on September 4, after two committees have voted to deny this contract.

Grandstanding politicians are going to say a lot of stuff about our county values, but they’re still likely to push this contract through with the mail scanning even though Jan Tetzlaff, the DSCO representative, said at that first June 17 meeting: “[Mail scanning] is provided free by the vendor, and if we don’t want to start it, we don’t have to start it.”

All that doesn’t even touch on a possible solution: the county self-hosting communication services, or paying all costs for an extant service entirely, so that communication in the jail is free. Some places have done this with jails, and there’s a trend around the nation in prisons.

The community doesn’t want to start mail scanning, for good reason. The sheriff really, really does want it. And we need to start being less naive about what our punishment bureaucrats argue for. Body cameras, mail scanning, automated license plate readers, and more technologies and tools only give our broken, biased carceral institutions more power to coerce poor people into unfair plea bargains… and possibly worse.

We don’t need all that. Mass incarceration is a failed experiment that continues to prove it is super harmful to our community.

We need to stop billionaires and wage theft. We need to build so much more housing and real non-coercive addiction care. We need to do all this while the climate is hurtling off a cliff, and our “trusted” institutions are failing us.

We’ve got a lot of work to do as a society, and it would be great if we could all spend less time fighting punishment bullshit like this, and more time building actual solutions. We have to build better systems in the dying husks of the old hierarchies. They have proven to be failures. How much more evidence are you going to wait for?

If we don’t do that work, we’re just going to end up in full on white nationalist fascism with a lot of people still thinking “If we only invest in more technology, surely the authoritarians will stop feeding us all into the Torment Nexus!”

If you want to help stop this particular bullshit, check out this community reference doc.