Every Human is Essential

On May 1, 2020, Metro Atlanta DSA joined with a massive coalition of Atlanta-area unions and activist organizations to put on a car parade and protest against the unacceptable handling of COVID-19 by the Georgia state government.

Protesters’ demands included:

• State-funded paid sick leave for all essential workers
• State-funded hazard pay for all essential workers
• Expanded unemployment benefits
• Expanded medicaid coverage
• Expanded food stamp subsidies
• Moratorium on rent
• Decarceration of jails and ICE detention facilities

The showing was incredible! Upwards of 100 vehicles participated in the caravan.

DSA members erected a mock guillotine along the parade route and in front of the state capitol building. Their signs read, “WE ARE NOT PAWNS FOR YOUR PROFITS.”

“Cars in the caravan all drove by blasting their horns with their fists raised, as did quite a few people who were not demonstrating,” said DSA member Rachel K, who worked closely with other organizers to make the mock guillotine stunt a reality.

More photos from the car parade and protest:

Atlanta’s 2020 May Day demonstration was organized and sponsored by:

• Concerned Members Of ATU Local 732
• United Campus Workers Of Georgia
• Shift Change Atlanta
• Southern Workers Assembly
• National Nurses United
• Black Alliance For Just Immigration
• Community Movement Builders
• Atlanta Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW)
• Metro Atlanta Democratic Socialists Of America
• Science For The People – Atlanta Chapter
• Georgia Detention Watch
• Black Workers For Justice
• Workers World Party
• Georgia Peace And Justice Coalition
• Georgia Workers Alliance
• Housing Justice League
• New Orleans Hospitality Workers Alliance

Get involved with Metro Atlanta DSA

Never forget — the wealthy elites need us more than we need them. Without our labor, they would have nothing. When we stand together, we are unstoppable.

JOIN METRO ATLANTA DSA — SUPPORT OUR WORK

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM

The CVDSA Covid-19 Response Working Group interviewed Scarlett Moore, a barista at Starbucks in downtown Burlington, about how the store is responding to the pandemic and what workers are doing.

In a recent letter to “partners”, Starbucks says it is committed to “ensuring your safety and well-being, supporting our public health and government officials and being in service to our communities.”  How has Starbucks lived up it commitments?

When the pandemic broke out in China, Starbucks closed stores and they didn’t have an option not to.  When the pandemic came to the United States I think that Starbucks response was so delayed that workers had to take action on their own to demand the types of environments we think are safe to work in. So when Starbucks originally promised store closures and catastrophe pay for 30 days, that was the result of workers organizing, mostly online across many stores, thousands of workers demanding that stores shut down.  Starbucks had to respond to that. We certainly benefited from that in Burlington. Starbucks did provide pay (called “catastrophe pay”) when stores closed. There were problems with the way it was calculated, but it has been really helpful to a lot of people. 

What about working conditions in your store?

Because of its location in a mall, my store in Burlington closed right away. Other stores like the one in Essex Junction, Vermont with drive-throughs stayed open longer. They did not however provide PPE to workers who were working at the windows within 6 feet of customers, where you still could contract the virus. So, what I heard is that when the rest of the Starbucks closed down, the customer load increased so much that it was impossible to complete recommended measures like washing hands and sanitizing between each transaction because of the level of production workers were being asked to maintain by managers. Eventually, that came to a head, and there weren’t enough people willing to work in those conditions.  People won’t work when our lives are lives are on the line for $11/hour.

Workers at your store wrote a letter to management. What were they asking for?

On April 16, when we read the letter from Rossan Williams, the Exec. Vice President of Starbucks U.S., it was like getting whiplash. The letter to us read that we were being pushed back to work in unsafe conditions on threat of losing our jobs, whether or not it was cloaked in compassionate language. So we read that and were immediately concerned that the company was prioritizing its profits over our lives. We knew we had the ability to do something about that, and so we should. We wrote a letter to our manager and to our district manager, which essentially said that we would not be returning to work until the Vermont stay at home order had been lifted. We asked them to extend our catastrophe pay until that point. One of our main concerns is that baristas are not essential workers. Serving coffee is not essential work. There is no socially useful reason we should be asked to return to work. It’s all about restoring the profitability of the store, and that’s just not acceptable. Our lives are worth more than that.

So we wrote a short and sweet letter to management saying that we had made the decision on our own that our store was staying closed, regardless of the priorities of the company.

How did Starbucks respond?

We gave the letter to our manager during a Zoom meeting with our store’s staff. We discussed our concerns about our safety in being asked to return to work.  Another concern on the call was that our location was on Church Street, an area of non-essential services largely for upper middle class people, and that by opening the store we were actually encouraging people to step out of their homes during a stay at home order and come to a shopping district. We felt that was not only unsafe for us, but also creating unsafe conditions for the rest of our community as well.

Although the manager said he was proud of us, the letter and our concerns were to the best of our knowledge passed up to the district manager and to upper management. This was something that we were ready for.  We did not hear back for another 48 hours. And then a @StarbucksHelp account responded to one of my tweets saying that the store had never intended to open before the stay at home order was lifted. This message was given in individual calls to all the baristas at our location by the district manager and store manager the following morning. A few days after that we had a meeting where management didn’t mention our letter at all, but reiterated that the store was never going to open until the 16th.  They told us that because Starbucks serves food, it is an essential service, and that it was their choice to have been closed this whole time.

I would say this type of response is an attempt to gaslight workers and distract us from what we won. Getting an extra 12 paid days off is a real victory that comes out of solidarity and comes out of community.  And I think the response we’ve gotten is to convince us that we didn’t win anything by our coming together, and that our action was superfluous and didn’t have a concrete benefit for all of our lives. We know that’s not true.  But it is true that my store is staying closed until the stay at home order is lifted, while every other store in the district to the best of my knowledge will be opening up May 6.

What are lessons that you learned?

Everything that happened took place in a very short period of time, about 24 to 36 hours.

It is inspiring to see how store workers could come together in such a short time. We’ve seen an enormous political shift in the last few years, and many of the people I work with are looking at a job market that is really terrifying. The economy seems to be crashing down all around us, and we are having to respond in the best ways that we can. That is always going to be through solidarity in our workplace. This is a feeling that has been building for a long time. Problems always exist in our workplaces. We are asked to work for wages that are lower than what we deserve. Never mind the pandemic, we are put in situations that are unsafe at work. We face sexism, and LGBTQ+ discrimination and racism in the workplace all the time, and we don’t have a company that stands up for us. We learn over time that we have to stand up for each other.

In this episode of the RS podcast, Heart in a Heartless World,, our guest is Colleen Shaddox, a devout Roman Catholic, a committed socialist, and a veteran healthcare journalist. Shaddox’s articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR, and many other outlets. Along with her co-author Joanne Goldblum, Shaddox just completed a book on the everyday lives of persons living in poverty and the broken policies that cause their suffering. Shaddox is interviewed in this episode by the Religion and Socialism Working Group member Fran Quigley. They discuss the connection between Catholicism and socialism, what socialism has to say about the COVID-19 pandemic and access to healthcare, what progressive Christians should be doing in response to reactionary Christianity, and Colleen’s interesting paths to Roman Catholicism, socialism, and writing about healthcare. “It’s Matthew 25, right?” Shaddox says. “You're supposed to feed the hungry and care for the sick, and we don't do that under capitalism.” Some of Colleen Shaddox’s healthcare journalism can be found here, and her book can be pre-ordered here. Look on our website for more about DSA’s Religion and Socialism Working Group.

Chancellor Jeb Spaulding thought he could get away with closing three of Vermont’s six state colleges. His proposal would have had a devastating impact on working class people; it would have slashed hundreds of jobs from the state colleges, destroyed the economies of whole sections of the state, especially the Northeast Kingdom, and foreclosed opportunities for young people to get education for skilled high paying jobs like nursing.

But professors, staff, and the communities that depend on the colleges rose up and stopped Spaulding in his tracks. Over 37,000 people signed a petition demanding that the proposal be withdrawn, thousands called their state legislators, and hundreds of cars turned out to a massive parade that shut down Montpelier in a concert of honking horns. Faced with this outpouring of anger, the proposed vote was delayed and then withdrawn in a humiliating setback for Spaulding.

The working class of Vermont has scored an initial victory against a tidal wave of austerity measures that Governor Phil Scott is threatening. But no one should be under any illusions that the state colleges are safe; the Governor made clear that he wants the legislature to pass a budget with devastating cuts to our public institutions.

The movement spearheaded by unions, students, and communities must prepare for the next phase of the struggle. We should demand that the state fully fund public education at all levels, using money from the federal bailout, cuts in corporate welfare, and taxes on the rich.

We must reject the entire case that Spaulding and the Governor are making that they have no alternative but to cut education spending given the budgetary constraints imposed on them by the coronavirus and recession. In reality, this is a manufactured crisis, and one that can be easily solved.

It is the product of several decades of neoliberal cuts to public funding of education. The Democrats and Republicans have level-funded state appropriations for higher education for decades, dropping Vermont from 3rd in per capita spending in the country in 1989 to 49th today. Both parties are responsible for setting the state colleges up to fail amidst this crisis.

While we have stopped the closures for now, it is clear that the Governor is still determined to force through cuts, and we must be prepared to mobilize again to stop him. In these efforts, we must not fall for any of the Governor’s tricks. One that he floated is pitting state colleges against K through 12 education, saying that if we cannot pay for both, we have to cut one.

We know that he’s been angling to slash funding for primary and secondary education as part of his plan for school consolidation. We must reject Scott’s divide and rule tactic; working class people should have the right to high quality education with well-paid union teachers and staff from pre-kindergarten through college.

There is plenty of money to pay for all of this. It is merely a question of priorities. If the federal government can bailout the big corporations and banks with trillions of dollars, it and the state can find the money to meet Vermont workers’ need for education.

We should demand that the Governor and legislature generate the money in the following ways. First, they should take $25 million from $1.25 billion from Washington to cover the immediate shortfall in funding for the state colleges. Second, they should raise taxes on the rich, which they have cut for decades, to bankroll education for the future.

And, third, if they have to cut anything, they should cut corporate welfare schemes like the Remote Worker Program, Vermont Training Program, and the Vermont Employment Growth Incentive. However rhetorically innocuous in name, these programs are frankly just giveaways to the bosses and rich.

It will take a fight to win these demands, because they challenge the neoliberal logic accepted by most of the political class in Montpelier and Washington. Save for a few exceptions like Progressive Lieutenant Governor David Zuckerman and Progressive Senator Anthony Pollina, and members of the Vermont Worker’s Caucus, most of the politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, were slow to respond and only agreed to delay and then withdraw the proposed cuts, when the petitions, calls, and car protest forced them to.

But if we stay united, if we reject Governors divide and conquer strategy, if we maintain pressure on our elected officials through a diversity of tactics, we can win. We must build on our initial victory of stopping the closures and intensify our organizing, mobilizing, and protesting until we have secured education at every level as fully funded public right for all working class people.

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM.

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM.

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM.

You’re listening to Revolution Per Minute on listener sponsored WBAI in NYC broadcasting at 99.5 FM and streaming on your favorite podcast app. To connect with us after the show you can email us at revolutionsnyc@gmail.com. You can find us on our website revolutionsperminute.simplecast.com or on twitter @nycRPM.

We are very thankful and impressed by this community’s response to the current pandemic we are facing. As closures and social distancing set in, we are seeing the most vulnerable in our community be deeply affected by the loss of income and access to resources.

For this reason, we request that not only the governor’s executive order N-28-20 be respected, but that there be an additional suspension of rent given how many renters in this city are hourly service workers who no longer have a safe source of income while performing social distancing. We request as well that empty hotel/motel rooms be immediately offered to houseless community members who cannot self-quarantine without a space to do it in. It is vital emergency shelters be provided immediately.

As per the latest executive orders, we further recommend the city guarantee continued publicly-provided water and trash service regardless of payment.

We request that you do not fail your earlier promise to provide free tests to all who qualify and furthermore that these tests are provided regardless of doctor’s note—putting such a roadblock on students and those without insurance or local doctors will keep us from having the knowledge we need to keep our county safe.

Lastly, we ask that as per executive order N-26-20, you ensure state funds are allocated and properly used within our school systems. Parents deserve daytime childcare and school lunches need to continue to be provided.

We also ask the state for paid sick leave for those workers who have no source of income while following health directives. Flattening the curve necessitates avoiding public interactions for longer than those 14 days; disability and unemployment are not an adequate response.

In solidarity,
The Steering Committee of DSA SLO