Mass Labor Fought Apartheid and Won. We Can Again.
By Richard S
Cambridge, MA – Massachusetts labor activists were some of the first movers to confront South African apartheid and push for US divestment and sanctions. These efforts bore fruit in 1982 legislation divesting Massachusetts pension funds, Boston municipal divestment in 1984, and federal sanctions in 1986. Throughout the late 20th century, labor activists in Boston kept the issue of apartheid firmly on the agenda until the African National Congress (ANC) leadership supplanted apartheid and established a progressive constitutional democracy.
Today, American workers confront another criminal regime. In July 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) found Israel to be practicing “racial segregation and apartheid” in occupied Palestine. In Gaza, Israeli forces have resumed what Human Rights Watch and international institutions around the world call genocide, “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group.” According to a recent YouGov poll, only 15% of Americans support increasing military aid to Israel. Public favorability toward Israel has cratered across all partisan and age demographics over the past three years. Given this bedrock of anti-apartheid sentiment, we can look to the New England struggle against South African apartheid as inspiration to end its Israeli form.
Workplace Roots of Anti-Apartheid Struggle
In 1970, at the Polaroid Corporation in Cambridge, MA, two Black employees – chemist Caroline Hunter and photographer Ken Williams – discovered the South African government was using Polaroid’s cameras to produce passbook photos – the internal passports enforcing racial segregation. Outraged that their labor aided oppression abroad, Hunter and Williams formed the Polaroid Revolutionary Workers Movement (PRWM) and launched the first anti-apartheid boycott of a U.S. corporation. They demanded Polaroid withdraw from South Africa through a pressure campaign that included rallies at Polaroid’s Cambridge headquarters. Pressure worked. By 1977, Polaroid ended all business in South Africa after a failed attempt at “responsible engagement” collapsed under public scrutiny.
In the wake of the 1976 Soweto Uprising, Boston activists formed the Boston Coalition for the Liberation of Southern Africa (BCLSA) alliance fighting white minority rule. Labor organizers coordinated boycotts and educational events. Black American trade unionists in particular took the lead: in 1975, the national Coalition of Black Trade Unionists (CBTU) broke with the conservative AFL-CIO and passed a resolution supporting the exiled South African trade union federation aligned with Nelson Mandela’s ANC. CBTU became the first U.S. labor body to call to boycott apartheid.
New England Labor at the Leading Edge
As South Africa’s repression intensified, New England labor activists championed divestment – pulling financial investments out of companies tied to South Africa. In 1979, State Representative Mel King of Boston and State Senator Jack Backman introduced legislation to divest the state’s public-employee pension fund from banks and corporations doing business in South Africa. At first, their bill lacked enough support. Understanding that broader grassroots backing was needed to overcome political inertia and corporate lobbying, they helped convene a meeting of unions, church groups, and anti-apartheid activists across Massachusetts.
Unionists testified that worker pension dollars should not fund apartheid. They linked factory shutdowns in Massachusetts to companies seeking cheap, non-union labor in South Africa.
These forces merged to form the Massachusetts Coalition for Divestment from South Africa, or Mass Divest. Crucially, labor unions were at the coalition’s heart, including locals of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), and Massachusetts Teachers Association. By uniting labor with religious and student groups, Mass Divest built a broad constituency in favor of cutting Massachusetts’ economic ties to apartheid. As Mass Divest rallied public support through petitions, pamphlets, and public hearings, the campaign gained momentum. Unionists testified that worker pension dollars should not fund apartheid. They linked factory shutdowns in Massachusetts to companies seeking cheap, non-union labor in South Africa.
In 1982, their efforts paid off, as the Massachusetts legislature passed a sweeping pension divestment bill requiring the state to sell off all investments (around $100 million) in companies doing business in South Africa. Conservative governor Edward King vetoed the bill. In a dramatic show of unity, lawmakers overrode his veto – the only override of King’s tenure. The new law, enacted in 1982, made Massachusetts the first U.S. state (alongside Connecticut that same month) to divest its public pension funds from South Africa. Massachusetts’ divestment law – described at the time as the toughest in the nation – passed through a concentrated campaign led by a bedrock of labor unions and activists in Massachusetts. Union activists provided much of the grassroots muscle behind Mass Divest, lobbying legislators and educating rank-and-file workers on why apartheid investments were immoral. The state AFL-CIO and major unions formally endorsed the campaigns in resolutions and lobbying officials.
Inspired by the state’s stance, Boston City Councilor Charles Yancey successfully introduced a Boston city ordinance in 1984 requiring Boston to withdraw its funds from companies tied to apartheid – a measure similar to a proposal by Somerville for Palestine to Somerville City Council in March 2025. “Today’s divestment legislation is one more hammer blow against the chains of apartheid,” declared Yancey in 1984. This made Boston the first major American city to divest municipally, selling $12 million in stocks and leading to policy transfer across the country as cities and states took Boston’s law and codified it into their own books. By 1986, the U.S. Congress, prodded by a broad coalition prominently featuring labor, overrode President Reagan’s veto to enact the federal Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act, imposing economic sanctions on Pretoria.
Labor Building Base, Boycotts, and Networks of Solidarity
New England labor did not just lobby for legislation; their memberships took more direct action to isolate the apartheid regime. Trade unions passed strong anti-apartheid resolutions throughout the 1980s, committing union resources and moral authority to the cause. For example, Massachusetts AFL-CIO under President Arthur Osborn vocally supported sanctions. So did local labor councils; the Greater Boston Labor Council regularly urged its affiliates to boycott firms complicit in apartheid. National unions such as the United Auto Workers (UAW) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT) denounced apartheid’s exploitation of workers. West Coast longshoremen in 1984 boycotted South African cargo ships, inspiring unionized dockworkers and truckers in the Northeast.
Unionized city workers even removed Shell products from municipal garages.
Unions also joined campaigns targeting specific corporations. A notable one was Shell Oil, part of an international boycott to pressure Royal Dutch/Shell to withdraw from South Africa. Boston became a key front in this campaign. In December 1988, Boston’s mayor Raymond Flynn (former labor organizer) issued an order flanked by labor leaders declaring the city government “Shell Free” – no city agency would buy Shell gasoline until the company cut ties with apartheid. Boston’s unions enthusiastically backed Flynn’s order; unionized city workers even removed Shell products from municipal garages.
Finally, Massachusetts activists built relational networks of solidarity with South African liberation movement organizers. Union locals hosted South African trade unionists and anti-apartheid leaders on speaking tours. Labor-affiliated groups raised funds for Black union organizers in South Africa who were jailed or fired by apartheid authorities. For instance, Boston-area unionists sponsored the defense of imprisoned labor leaders such as Oscar Mpetha and funneled material aid to newly independent Black unions in South Africa like the National Union of Mineworkers. In June 1983, Northeast activists formed a Labor Committee Against Apartheid to coordinate letter-writing drives.
When Nelson Mandela was liberated from prison in 1990, he made a point to visit Boston. Speaking to a jubilant crowd of 300,000 on the Charles River Esplanade, Mandela praised “the pioneering and leading role of Massachusetts.” The long-incarcerated leader of the South African freedom struggle cited the early Polaroid protests of 1969–70 as proof that Bostonians “rallied around our cause when we soldiered on by ourselves…You became the conscience of American society.”
Mandela’s praise was not just empty rhetoric. As recounted by scholars like Kathleen Schwartzman, Kristie A. Taylor, and Stephen Zunes, international sanctions and other restrictions on South African capital played a decisive role in apartheid’s collapse.
Today: Labor and the Struggle for Palestine
Labor’s fight against apartheid in South Africa shows us divestment and sanctions can be effective tools to isolate racist regimes. It continues today in the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions) movement against Israel. Just as our unions once opposed apartheid South Africa, unions today, such as the UAW, UE, tenant and teachers’ unions are taking up the baton of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Crucial to the earlier generation’s success was building a broad, popular coalition across religious, labor, and student groups in coordination with allied lawmakers.
For our predecessors, “an injury to one is an injury to all” was not just a moralizing cliché. It was an analytic necessity that grounded the struggle for universal justice in shared class interest, the same class interest that leads workers to oppose Trump’s mass firings, the plunder of the commons, attacks on free speech, science, public health, and social insurance. As the war on Gaza deepens in its cruelty, and as the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza nears its fifty-eighth year, the fight for an arms embargo and broader sanctions will be fought by labor.
Richard S is a member of UE Local 256 and Boston DSA. He is also a doctoral student in political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
How do we organize when union rights are under attack?
Recent attacks on the NLRB are forcing unions to consider their tactics. U.S. labor history may hold some new ideas.
The post How do we organize when union rights are under attack? appeared first on EWOC.
Twin Cities DSA Little Red Letter Round Up – April 2025 Edition
Who’s Afraid of Power?
Maine Mural: Camp Hope, Bangor Maine
This month our Maine Mural podcast brings you interviews with houseless folks from Bangor who are being forced out of their encampment with little guidance as to where they should go.
The post Maine Mural: Camp Hope, Bangor Maine appeared first on Pine & Roses.
Weekly Roundup: April 15, 2025
Upcoming Events
Wednesday, April 16 (6:00 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): 
What Is DSA? (In person at 1916 McAllister)
Wednesday, April 16 (6:45 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (In person at 438 Haight)
Thursday, April 17 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Immigrant Justice Working Group Meeting (Zoom)
Friday, April 18 (12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.): Office Hours (In person at 1916 McAllister)
Saturday, April 19 (11:00 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.): Flyering for May Day Events (Meet at 1916 McAllister)
Saturday, April 19 (12:30 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.): Tenant Organizing Mission Canvass (Meet at Café La Bohème, 3318 24th St)
Sunday, April 20 (5:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Capital Reading Group (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)
Monday, April 21 (5:50 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Electoral Board Meeting + Socialist in Office Hour (Zoom)
Monday, April 21 (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (Zoom)
Monday, April 21 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Board Meeting (Zoom)
Tuesday, April 22 (7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): Maker Tuesday: Red Cards (In person at 1916 McAllister)
Wednesday, April 23 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): DSA SF Tech Reading Group (In person at 1916 McAllister)
Thursday, April 24 (5:00 p.m. – 6:00 p.m.): 
Education Board Open Meeting (Zoom)
Saturday, April 26 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Food Service (In person at Castro & Market)
Sunday, April 27 (1:30 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.): Know Your Rights Canvassing (In person at San Francisco Botanical Garden, 1199 9th Ave)
Monday, April 28 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tenderloin Healing Circle (In person at Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate)
Monday, April 28 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister)
Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.
Events & Actions
Tenant Organizing Mission Canvass
Tenant organizing is hosting a canvass in the Mission! Join us in talking to tenants about their housing conditions and how collective power can help. This action will be great for organizers at any level of experience — if you’d like an orientation, you can meet us a little earlier at 12:30pm for training. Spanish-speakers and multi-lingual comrades are especially needed! We’re meeting April 19th 1:00 p.m. at Cafe La Boheme at 3318 24th St.
Come Join the Tenderloin Healing Circle on April 28
All are welcome to attend the Tenderloin Healing Circle. The healing circle is a great way to connect, reflect, and share food with other DSA members and folks in the Tenderloin community. The Healing Circle will be meeting at the Kelly Cullen Auditorium at 220 Golden Gate Ave on April 28th from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Food is provided, and masks are provided and encouraged.
Capital Reading Group
DSA SF has started a Marx’s Capital reading group! We’ll be meeting every other Sunday from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. at 1916 McAllister St. and also on Zoom. We’ll meet on April 20th to wrap up our discussion of chapter 1 and cover chapter 2 and the afterword to the second German edition. We’re reading the new translation published by Princeton University Press. You can also join the #capital-rdg-group-2025 channel on the DSA SF Slack for additional information and discussion!
Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) is running a Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing course weekly in May (see below for schedule). We’re getting a group to take the course together and benefit from in-person discussions and activities,. If you’re interested, fill out the form here and join the #ewoc-fundamentals-2025 channel in Slack! The goal is to have more people learn organizing skills, both for your own projects and for organizing with EWOC.
Sessions run every week from 6:00-7:30 p.m. on
- Wednesday, May 7
- Tuesday, May 13
- Wednesday, May 21
- Wednesday, May 28
The Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) is a project of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) to build a distributed, grassroots organizing program to support workers organizing at the workplace.
Office Hours
Co-work with your comrades! Come to the DSA SF office and get your DSA work or work-work done, or just hang out. We’ll be at 1916 McAllister from 12:00 p.m to 5:00 p.m. on Fridays.
Behind the Scenes
The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and newsletter, etc. Members can view current CCC rotations.
To help with the day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running, fill out the CCC help form.
Hands Off Our Community: Stop Detentions and Disappearances of Pro-Palestine Students
Statement from the Madison Area DSA Executive Committee on the Detention and Deportation of Pro-Palestinian Students, Faculty, and Staff
As scholars, faculty, staff, students, and members of the University of Wisconsin-Madison community, we members of Madison Area DSA condemn the immoral and unlawful kidnappings of our colleagues and neighbors from universities across the U.S. Our colleagues and peers have been targeted for opposing Israel’s genocide in Palestine in yet another display of the United States’ escalating fascism. These targeted detentions and disappearances are part of efforts to destroy scholarship in the United States, to force alignment with Zionist foreign policy, and to punish those who dare step out of the carceral, white supremacist, Zionist line.
Since March 1, 2025, at least four students have been arrested by ICE in scenes akin to kidnappings or Schutzstaffel-style disappearances: on video, masked ICE officers whisk Rumeysa Ozturk away, as a bystander asks, “Is this a kidnapping?”
On March 8, ICE arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader in the Columbia University student protests against Israel’s genocide in Palestine, from his family’s apartment in Columbia student housing without being charged for any crime. Khalil is being held in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center.
On March 9, ICE searched the home of Yunseo Chung’s parents in an attempt to find her. Chung is a Columbia student and was present in Barnard College sit-ins. Chung has since filed a lawsuit alleging that “the administration is demonstrating a ‘pattern and practice of targeting individuals associated with protests for Palestinian rights for immigration enforcement.’”
On March 17, Badar Khan Suri, a postdoctoral scholar and instructor at Georgetown University, was detained by ICE. Suri was “approached by masked men outside his home.” Like other students targeted by ICE, Suri is accused of supporting Hamas–Suri’s lawyer argues that Suri is “being punished because of the Palestinian heritage of his wife–who is a U.S. citizen–and because the government suspects that he and his wife oppose U.S. foreign policy toward Israel.”
On March 25, plainclothes ICE agents arrested Rümeysa Öztürk, a scholar at Tufts, off the street without providing any identification–the encounter, which was captured on video, looks like a kidnapping. Although Öztürk was granted a petition to be held in Massachusetts, ICE transferred her to Louisiana. A DHS spokesperson accuses Öztürk of “supporting Hamas,” without providing evidence.
These incidents are not isolated. Students continue to be detained by ICE, including one University of Minnesota Twin Cities student on March 27, 2025. By the time this statement is published, it will surely be woefully out of date as our peers, neighbors, and colleagues continue to be targeted and kidnapped. As we wrote this letter, unjust arrests were made on UW-Madison’s campus at a protest against former US Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield. Just days later, UW announced that students and staff in our community are victims of visa termination.
It is clear that this anti-immigrant, white supremacist, Zionist tendency seeks to punish scholars for taking the moral stance. Many targeted academics, including Mahmoud Khalil, are being held in the Central Louisiana ICE Processing Center. This prison is owned by a private corporation, and is known for its unsafe and inhumane conditions. Accusations of mistreatment are many: “In 2016 alone, three immigrants died within six months. Following a fourth death in 2017, the Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties concluded that inadequate medical care contributed to “multiple deaths; sexual assault allegations have “plagued” the facility; prisoners are served unlabeled and expired foods.
As abolitionists, we extend solidarity with targeted scholars held in Jena, Louisiana, and elsewhere: imprisonment and cages are the violent arm of these efforts to silence activists and scholars, punish the poor, and exploit labor from the oppressed.
As scholars, we understand that detentions are an attack not only on individuals, but on the pursuit of knowledge itself. There is no neutral scholarship, and we extend solidarity to our colleagues and neighbors who have been and continue to be targeted for challenging carceral, white supremacist, Zionist structures and motivations.
As socialists, anarchists, communists, and moral human beings, we believe the right of free speech should never be infringed. We believe that no-one should ever be imprisoned for acts of speech and peaceful protest. We believe that anyone who speaks out against genocide and hate should be lifted up, not denigrated as supposed terrorists.
The true cause of terror in American communities right now is this expanding fascist wave we see: this intentionally illegal abduction of citizens and scholars by masked agents must end. We demand: Hands off our colleagues, and hands off our communities!
How federal workers without a union can still act like a union
See and share how federal workers can fight back against Trump's cuts regardless of their status with the FLRA.
The post How federal workers without a union can still act like a union appeared first on EWOC.
Brandeis Staff Organize a New Union on Campus
By Freddy R
WALTHAM, MA – Research associates, academic administrators, department coordinators, and academic advisors started 2025 by voting to unionize under SEIU 888 at Brandeis University. Motivated by pay freezes, increased workloads, and layoffs, workers voted 78-6 in January to protect good jobs and address ongoing issues of low wages and burnout in their ranks.
Tensions between workers and management had been simmering for five years. In response to COVID-19, the university paused all merit pay increases for non-unionized workers. While only a small change in total compensation, many workers expected to receive these changes in pay to cover increases in rent or groceries. Meanwhile, management increased workers’ workloads as the pandemic exacerbated issues around low staffing.
Eventually, workers had enough.
Anger simmers as wage increases flatline
All employees I spoke to expressed understanding of the freezes and workload increase as the pandemic brought a whole host of unforeseen challenges to Brandeis, emphasizing the community-rootedness of their jobs when Brandeis respected them. But as the pandemic came to an end, many workers expected a return to normalcy – including merit pay increases. Management had other plans. Citing financial issues around a lack of postgraduate enrollments, management paused non-unionized staff merit pay increases again until October 1, 2024.
Meanwhile, Brandeis president Ron Liebowitz reportedly failed to meet fundraising expectations, yet eventually won his desired five-year contract with an increased wage, in large part due to a Boston Globe piece centered around a leaked letter. Workers suggested Liebowitz himself provided the letter to counteract the university’s Board of Trustees.
Brandeis University has an endowment of over $1 billion.
The president’s wage increased while others flatlined. Faculty were not sympathetic to the Brandeis president. Despite negotiating for more money with the university’s Board, Liebowitz stepped down from his position on November 1, 2024, after a resounding no-confidence vote from faculty.
A union, a community
Inspired by the long history of unionization at Brandeis and the number of other bargaining units at the University, administrative workers decided to take direct action. Backed by SEIU 888, the workers presented a petition and organized rallies. These actions culminated with workers attempting to deliver the petition to the Brandeis Board of Trustees. Security shoved workers against the wall and forced them from the building during the delivery. Management quietly reinstated the workers’ merit pay raises.
But management wasn’t done. Brandeis cut over sixty administrative staff positions, offering severance packages in exchange for voluntary resignations, shortly after workers submitted their the petition. Workers again stressed that this was a far cry from the Brandeis they had worked for, when Brandeis respected their employees and the community that workers served. These layoffs also exacerbated already present issues of limited staffing and increasing workloads, adding structural factors to simmering anger.
“This is a union; it’s a community.”
Workers began collecting cards for an official union election. They relied heavily on community support, the same whole-worker strategy adopted by teachers in Fitchburg, MA that won their union in the same month as Brandeis workers. Successful organizing required extensive networking and leveraging of social connections in siloed academic workplaces. Much of the organizing at Brandeis was done through hybrid means, with workers describing an intensive effort involving emails, phone calls, and texts to reach colleagues—many of whom they had never met before. Doing so required overcoming fears and challenges associated with digital communication.
Organizers attributed their success not just to the goal of unionizing but to building a sense of community: “This is a union; it’s a community.” The union also benefited from strong support from numerous other unions on campus, which helped push back against anti-union sentiment and fears.
Much of the campaign was also led by women, who coworkers referred to as “badass.”
Management responds with bureaucratic union-busting
Unlike corporations such as Amazon or Starbucks, Brandeis did not launch an aggressive open-air anti-union campaign. The institution instead relied on bureaucratic tools to resist unionization. One tactic involved defining inclusion and exclusion criteria for the bargaining unit. Higher education workers are often the only employees in their respective departments, meaning bargaining unit composition can be contested. For example, museum workers who had signed authorization cards were ultimately excluded for “logistical reasons.”
By late October, 2024, organizers finished collecting signatures. On October 31, they delivered the official election petition to the provost, accompanied by a rally outside the administrative offices. With the petition filed, the focus shifted to boosting voter turnout and maintaining momentum. Again, workers highlighted the crucial support from other unions on campus.
The election took place on December 12, 2024, with 84 workers casting ballots in what turned out to be a landslide victory for the union.
Workers are now faced with, as one worker put it, “the hard part:” bargaining. At the time of interviews in early 2025, workers were currently holding elections for electing a bargaining committee and ensuring that the diverse working conditions of the unit were represented. They will join other unions on campus, like the librarians, whose original contract expired in June 2024.
With this win, Brandeis staff now join a growing wave of unionized higher education workers, showing that when institutions fail to uphold their commitments to staff, collective action can force change. With bargaining on the horizon, workers remain committed to ensuring that the Brandeis they once believed in—a university that values its employees—can be restored.
Freddy Reiber is a PhD student at Boston University researching collective action and technology. He is a member of SEIU 509 and Boston DSA.
Sitting Down with Portland’s Tenant Union
T. Sinclair sat down with Bradley Davis, steering member of the Portland Tenants’ Union, which has recently helped win a case where it was ruled $34,000 in illegal rent violations must be paid back to tenants.
TS: Thanks for making time for us today. To start, there’s been some confusion in the local media as to how the Portland Tenants Union (PTU) was established. Some people have said it comes from former Mayor Ethan Strimling’s efforts with the Trelawny Tenants Union. Others have said that you were the founder. And so can you clarify it, how did the PTU get started?
That’s a good question. PTU started last year following my own personal landlord retaliation experience. There were a lot of things that we learned about how the city handles tenant complaints and who has the authority to allege a complaint for somebody else. And something that we were told by the city multiple times is that an individual cannot allege a violation for another individual. So, hypothetically, if I’m living in a building and the building is unregistered and I’m being charged illegal rent and I have all the proof for it and I go to the city and complain about it, I cannot loop in my upstairs neighbor on that complaint.
They would require that person to stick their neck out and go against their landlord and put themselves at risk to even look into the situation. It’s a very anti-tenant perspective. So, we needed to create an organization that can have the legal standing to represent an entire group, we needed to create a citywide tenants union. At the time, I was working with the Portland Local Campaign Committee, an arm of Maine DSA, and all of these issues with tenants’ rights, rent control, and enforcement from the city were stuff that we were all really passionate about. And so we decided to grow it.
TS: Now that it’s established, how does the union operate internally?
We want there to be elected representatives of tenants. We want decision making to be shared with everybody who is a member. In order to make that happen, we currently have a steering committee. I would say there’s roughly a dozen people that have been administering meetings, a large email list, and social media posts reaching over ten thousand. We’re just trying to grow our membership and let people know that the organization exists and that there are people who are fighting for their rights.
Right now, we have three areas of focus for the tenants union. We have a “complaints & research” group, which has been fielding communications that we get from tenants. An “events and membership” group, which is focusing on growing our membership engagement. And finally, a “communications and education” group. This handles a lot of our social media and extends education about tenants rights in Portland.
Our recent win in getting landlords to pay back $34,000 to tenants in rent violations has really helped showcase what we can do when we come together, and right now we’re just hoping to get more people involved.
TS: City Councilor Wes Pelletier recently lamented that it’s been too incumbent upon tenants to challenge rental offenses, and he wants the city to be more proactive. Why do you think a tenants’ union is necessary right now, and in what ways has the City of Portland not been proactive?
The Portland Tenants Union needs to exist right now because there’s been a severe lack of enforcement of rent control and rental registration from the City of Portland in the past five years that rent control has existed. They only hired a dedicated rent control inspector, I believe, in December 2023, which was years after rent control was actually in place. Up until that point, it was 100% on tenants to have to bring forward any sort of rent control violation, and they were sticking their necks out without a union.
Before then, it is very clear that the city was not actively verifying any data points from landlord registration forms. Not only that, they weren’t even doing the math on the forms to see if rent increases were legal. We’ve seen cases where the numbers in the city’s own data are illegal, but the city doesn’t catch it, because they’re waiting on tenants to call them out for it. So, finally this past year, they have started to audit buildings and look at data proactively. I believe they said as of late they’ve gotten through 18% of units, which is far too low for the fact that we are potentially sitting on four plus years of unverified data.
The tenants union needs to hold the city accountable to enforce the laws that its citizens passed. Whether landlords like it or not, rent control passed, was expanded, and was defended in three separate elections, and it is here to stay, it is the will of the people of Portland. We get the sense that the City is not very happy with the rent control laws, that they think they’re too ambiguous, and it seems like they really don’t want to have to go to court to fine a landlord for breaking rent control laws. But at the end of the day that is the city’s obligation, to enforce the laws that its people have put into place. And so our job and our role as we see it is to push the City to be more proactive in their enforcement of rent control.
TS: What are some more serious issues or loopholes you have seen landlords try to exploit? For context: you folks just won $34,000 in back-owed rent for tenants on St. George Street because the landlords were charging illegal fees.
So, additional fees on top of rent are something that we have seen historically over the past few years. And the city has set the record straight on the legality of those fees, but still landlords think they can charge them to get around rent control. They’ll say, “Okay, fine. Your rent is going up the allowable amount, but your parking fee just got raised $300 or now your pet fee is $400 a month.” To some extent there isn’t a lot of clear language on some of those fees.
Pet fees in particular are one thing that we are very interested in. And, we have people reaching out to us even this past week saying that their building just got bought by new owners who are saying to get the units up to market rate they’re gonna be increasing the fees for storage and the driveway and pet fees. And if you opt out of the driveway and storage, then they’re just gonna hike the pet fee anyway, to get to market rates. So it is clear what they’re trying to do.
They are trying to get more profit from their tenants than is allowable by rent control, but at that point it’s on the city to bring down the hammer and say, no, you can’t take advantage of tenants like that.
There’s also hundreds of units in the city with $0 registered rents. Another loophole that we see a lot is the claiming of owner occupied status in order to get exempt from rent control. For example, some will claim a building is owner occupied if a family member lives in the building, which is not considered legally owner-occupied, it has to actually be the owner’s primary residence.
TS: Since the tenant movement has taken off in Portland, we’ve seen tenant movements start to pick up in other places. For example, in Brunswick there’s the Brunswick Renters Organization (BRO), and just recently in Saco there’s been a group starting to organize tenants. For these new burgeoning movements, what advice would you give?
Yeah. I mean, to be fair, I don’t know how qualified we are to give advice since I know BRO is technically older than we are. What I will say in terms of tenant organizing as someone who is not experienced in organizing prior to being thrust into it, unwillingly, I think that it’s important to get people on board with fighting back against the isolation and individualism that living in this capitalist housing system has forced upon us.
The system is designed to keep landlords in charge, to keep tenants alone and having to fight for themselves and thinking that they are in the minority and have no power. And what we and other tenant organizers historically have realized is once we get together and say, “hey, we live here, we are this community, we want our needs to be met,” there is power in that and there is democracy to be had in that. And the more people that you can get on board and the larger coalition you can build, the more power that you get.
Other cities across the country have shown that they are more willing to fight for tenants than the City of Portland. There was a story out of Las Vegas, someone was operating an unregistered AirBnB for multiple years, got multiple violations, and the city council went to court to try and fine him almost a hundred thousand dollars. And because of how the court proceedings went, that fine went through. That is the city council of Las Vegas that went to bat for tenants across the city and put a hundred thousand dollar fine on just one guy operating an unregistered unit.
There’s also talk in New York City right now of utilizing their structures in place to repossess buildings that are not up to code and put them in the hands of the city and tenants. They are willing to go to bat against landlords that are violating the law, And I would love to see Portland, Maine fight for its community members in even half of that capacity.
TS: Thank you for your time, Bradley, feel free to say whatever you want here to wrap it up and let folks know where to find you.
Folks can follow us on Instagram, @portlandtenantsunion. Come join us for a meeting. We have general meetings on the first Wednesday of every month. People can go to our website, portlandtenantsunion.org, to learn more about their rights as well as sign up to become members of the union. And we are just trying to bring as many people in as we can, to fight for everything that we’ve been talking about.
I think to close it off, and I don’t know if this is gonna be a very good closing statement, but another thing that I’ve been thinking about after reading Abolish Rent, I think that the only path forward for true tenant emancipation is to decouple profitability from housing ownership. For as long as it is profitable to just own a building, tenants will always lose. The only way that tenants win is if housing returns to what it was initially meant to be, a place to live for you and your family to live in community. And as long as the profit motive exists for owning a building, tenants will lose at the end of the day. And we’ve talked about plenty of ways to fight back against that, whether that’s in enforcing rent control, whether that is looking into social housing, which the City of Portland is now starting to do, finding ways to return housing to just a place where people live and not an infinite money glitch because you got lucky in being born with the wealth that you have. That is the end goal.
The post Sitting Down with Portland’s Tenant Union appeared first on Pine & Roses.