As global temperatures rise, workers are making workplace safety and protections a new focus for labor. Farm workers, garment manufacturers, and delivery drivers have all found climate issues to organize around.

DC civil-rights activist and music legend Reagon passed away this summer, an immense loss to the movement. Maxwell Rott calls for a new appreciation of her historical research on music in the Black Freedom Movement.

This summer, the New Deal Cafe screened a documentary on Israeli propaganda, demonstrating how two Jewish people came to challenge their Zionist upbringing.

Twin Cities DSA is currently collecting user feedback for some of our online platforms. Filling out this form is extremely helpful! You will be directly impacting our work going forward. There’s also opportunities to get involved or reach out for training at the end. There will be a Tech Ops zoom meeting to talk about […]

As corporate-aligned media ramp up opposition to Prop 33 in order to preserve the profits of developers as the driver of housing construction, socialists are challenging the market imperative that makes housing a commodity and creates the crisis of the unhoused.

The Affordable Rent-Controlled Housing (ARCH) Campaign to pass Propositions 33 and 5 on the November 5th ballot will put policies in place to address this crisis.

Liz D, a DSA housing activist in Los Angeles, makes clear the connection between rent control and the “housing market”: 

“Only if you accept that housing must be a commodity in the market, that unless private developers can make a return there will be no housing construction, does attacking rent control have any saliency. In fact, housing should not be subject to the market, so Prop 33 is a good opportunity to challenge this assumption and make the case for publicly funded social housing as an alternative to the profit-based housing market.”

Proposition 33

It's important to remember that the inability to afford “market rate” rent is the primary cause of people losing their housing. The state law known as Costa-Hawkins, which Prop 33 would repeal, prevents cities from enacting controls on rent for vacant and new units. Even under the law passed in 2019 by the California Legislature that sets a maximum annual increase on rents of 10%, rents still double within six to ten years for all types of units. 

Thus, our ability to strengthen local rent control and make housing more affordable depends on repealing Costa-Hawkins, which is why tenant rights organizers have so much at stake in winning Prop 33.

Since newly built apartments rent at market rates (except for the non-profit affordable projects and affordable units set-aside for low-income tenants), without strong rent control new construction per se does not create affordable housing.  

It is also true that high interest rates reduce construction, and those high interest rates are driven by high inflation, which is driven in large part by skyrocketing costs of housing. In this sense rent control can help stabilize not only renters but the entire economy including new construction.

Proposition 5

Prop 5 would lower the threshold for voter approval of publicly financed housing, creating more alternatives to for-profit construction.

California DSA chapters are engaged in a variety of tactics to organize support for Props 5 and 33. San Diego DSA is reaching out to voters in neighborhoods most affected by increasing and high rents. Los Angeles DSA has begun canvasses and is coordinating ARCH campaign work with support for LA’s Rent Stabilization Ordinance. 

In addressing why LA DSA housing activists are especially motivated to participate in the ARCH campaign, Mark G provided some context: “63% of Angelenos are renters, and a majority are rent-burdened. Rents have been rising faster than inflation generally, and even rent-controlled units in the city permit a minimum increase of 3% annually. There is no such parallel guaranteed increase in our wages.”

Mark makes the connection between the individual burdens increasing rents create and the social impacts: “This disparity has contributed to overcrowding, displacement, and the housing crisis more generally. Many workers in the city have had to move farther away from the places where they work and spend more of their time commuting to work. This reduces the time that working people have to engage in self-directed activities and is thus expressive of the dynamics of class conflict generally:  rising housing costs make us less free.”

Profit motive—the root of the problem

At the root of this cycle of individual and social harm is the profit-motive. “The further disparity between the increases of rent-controlled housing and market rate housing create an incentive for landlords to harass and evict longer term tenants in pursuit of ever higher profits,” Mark pointed out. “To remedy this, we need vacancy control, which requires the passage of Prop 33, stronger local rent controls, and an organized working class that can secure higher wages to lessen the negative impacts of housing costs.”

North Central Valley DSA started their canvasses and outreach on September 8th. In San Francisco, DSA activists have formed an organizing committee to coordinate with DSA endorsed candidate campaigns; East Bay DSA is doing the same thing.

Matt M, a leader in the ARCH campaign from SF DSA, reports that “both our endorsed Board of Supervisors candidates have endorsed Prop 33 and we're co-mobilizing for it. We're shooting for a big turnout weekend to go along with the statewide weekend of action on October 5th and trying to tie some education about Costa-Hawkins into our tenant organizing work.”

Be a part of the campaign

DSA members in California can be a part of the ARCH Campaign, by filling out this form. And you can join ARCH campaign meetings on Tuesdays at 6:30 pm by registering here. 

The ARCH campaign state-wide Day of Action is Saturday, October 5th, timed just as state ballots go out! Be sure to sign up on the form so you can help organize an event in your area.

You can also push out messages on social media, and tell your story about high rents, evictions and why you need California to strengthen rent control. Grab some social media images here. And utilize the ARCH Campaign-in-a-Box here. 

In short: Now is the time to organize statewide to win justice for renters!

Like many DSA chapters, our various committees in Sacramento have seen surges and ebbs, depending upon what’s happening in the political life of our community. One initiative that has remained vibrant has been our political education committee. We see political education offering many different contributions and functions in the life of our chapter. 

First, it brings together our membership as a whole to learn, analyze, and discuss various ideas and practices from different aspects of our work as a socialist organization. While DSA can be somewhat splintered along committee lines, including mutual aid, union work and housing, among others, large-scale public events can be helpful to bring comrades together to establish a common understanding and framework for political work overall. These events help to contribute to organizational community-building and a shared social structure.  

Secondly, our political education events are outwardly-facing, and offer good opportunities to bring in members of the public who might not want to join DSA outright, but want an opportunity to attend an event where other members of the public will be present. These events are great opportunities to invite friends, contacts, and acquaintances to a gathering they would feel comfortable attending. 

Thirdly, organizing public events are a great way to build alliances with other movements and to share our common ideas and struggles to build solidarity with like-minded comrades outside the orbit of DSA. 

We have concentrated on two distinct types of events: large public events with speakers, films, performances, book talks and discussions; and our night school, which offers a variety of classes that are more in-depth. 

Night Schools

We typically hold our night schools in classrooms in a community center that used to be a school. The location feels like a school, with typical classroom seating with the swiveling arm rests for notetaking. On average these classes have brought in approximately 40 students each. We typically schedule classes in a one-month period, with a class meeting once every week, say on every Thursday of that month. We encourage people to register in advance, and we often distribute a reading ahead of time for each class. 

We have played with the idea of having some kind of “passport” booklet to stamp for every class, and once someone has enough stamps they earn a “diploma” just to make it fun. Some of our classes have included curriculum on racism, imperialism, electoral strategies, queer activism, Marxism, labor strikes and much more. 

Larger public events

Our public events are often geared towards bringing in a larger audience with a more eclectic program than classes. We have had dinners, speakers, films, music, artwork, and a range of educational and cultural offerings. Our evenings have featured Silvia Federici on feminist theory, Hy Thurman and Kwame Shakur on multiracial unity, Debbie Bookchin on the struggle in Rojava, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz on Native American history, Mat Calahan on the politics of music, Max Elbaum on movement building, Fred Glass on labor history, and Bob Wing on Asian-American activism, among others. 

We try to tie our educational subjects into the work that our committees are doing. For example, we presented labor activist Jane McAlevey (Rest in Power!) with our labor committee at a reading we sponsored at a local bookstore. We worked with our International Committee to co-sponsor a teach-in on Palestine.

During the COVID shutdown we offered online classes such as queer theory, pirate radio, and immigrant rights. Most recently we featured the new film Open Country (produced by two Sacramento DSA members), a radical reinterpretation of North American country music, which opened with a country music performance by DSA members and friends. The money raised from this screening is going toward procuring a grave marker memorial for Aunt Molly Jackson, a singer/songwriter from the Bloody Harlan mine wars who is buried in an unmarked grave in Sacramento.

Community outreach

It’s important to bring in community activists who are not necessarily DSA members, including activists and organizers we feel would benefit our movement as a whole. Billy X Jennings from the “itsabouttime” Black Panther archive spoke about the role of the Black Panther Party and the importance of preserving the people’s archive. We reached out to the broader women’s movement for Silvia Federici’s talk, to strengthen our connections to those working exclusively on sexuality and gender issues. Silvia’s talk drew more than 200 people, which reinforced the importance of reaching out beyond our membership. 

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s talk was co-sponsored by local activists involved in protesting the pipeline projects and also brought in a large, overflow crowd. A new project we have undertaken is to host “international cafes” where we bring activists working in different parts of the world to give updates on current situations in those regions. Our “café” on Central America, for example, highlighted the work of four activists from the region. Almost without exception these events have been standing room only. 

The importance of political education

Historically political education has been a central part of organization building. The Communist Party (CPUSA) had many worker schools throughout the country that emphasized political education among the working class. The Black Panther Party relied heavily upon political education to integrate young recruits into the movement. DSA should place a strong priority on political education to strengthen the three aspects we have highlighted so far: education and integration for our members, bringing in interested possible recruits, and strengthening ties with other movement organizations. 

We would like to see our political education initiatives focus on publishing printed materials for our public outreach and tabling work, which we see as very lacking. We would like to propose a shared initiative around printing and distributing this material, which would benefit all of us in every chapter. This would greatly accelerate our efforts to reach the public with inspirational ideas that will fuel a strong socialist movement. Let our motto be: Each One, Teach One!

Many new DSA members think worker organizing and unions are important, but don’t know much about them and have no experience with them.  Over the last four years, East Bay DSA has created a curriculum, ‘Labor 101 for Socialists’, to introduce new members to the labor movement and the role of socialists in it.  I joined the Labor Education subcommittee in 2022 and facilitated one group. Based on that and on feedback by both participants and facilitators from the previous groups we revised the curriculum, extending it from three sessions to four because important topics got squeezed out when there were only three. I was the facilitator for a group this spring that piloted the new version, and I’m setting up another group for this fall. It has been a great way to bring new members into the Labor Committee and many participants have become active in our labor work.

More a discussion group than a class

Labor 101 for Socialists is more a discussion group than a class.  Participants read some short articles and discuss them based on a series of question prompts; we want them to learn about the labor movement and some fundamental socialist ideas about it, but we also want them to practice talking about those ideas so that they’ll be comfortable talking to co-workers and friends about them and so that they’ll feel more confident about speaking up at Labor Committee or other DSA meetings and educationals. The curriculum was written for new members without labor movement experience, but we’ve also had participants who were in unions but wanted to think about the role of socialists. We welcome friends and contacts who are not DSA members; one participant talked two of her co-workers into attending.

In the first session we talk about what defines the working class, what unions can do, and about why the socialist project depends on organized workers.  The second session focuses on U.S. labor history and includes a brief slideshow about Haymarket and the eight-hour movement, a summary of the 20th century(!) and an article by Eugene Debs about the relationship between socialists and unions.  The unifying text for the first two sessions is a pamphlet written by Fred Glass and published by East Bay DSA, which is also titled Labor 101 for Socialists. The third session looks at class-struggle strategies in unions through two case studies: a chapter from the The Long Deep Grudge by Toni Gilpin about organizing in the South by the left-wing Farm Equipment union in the 30s and 40s, and an article and a video about the history of Teamsters for a Democratic Union.  The last session addresses why socialists play a crucial role in reviving the labor movement and the ways in which participants can get involved in organizing or in union support activities. The week after the last session we plan an informal get-together over beer and pizza at an accessible location.  

Preferred:  the relaxed setting

Group meetings are two hours, with a break in the middle; there are suggested times for each question/topic but we aren’t strict about these; one really good discussion is worth cutting another one a little short. We’ve held the groups both at the EBDSA office and in someone’s living-room; both work, but participants like the more comfortable and relaxed living-room setting. We try to schedule the group for four weeks shortly after our three-session orientation/onboarding group for new chapter members; someone attends the last new-members session to publicize it, along with representatives of other chapter committees and campaigns. 

The group is listed in the chapter calendar. We email previous participants to ask if they know anyone who would be interested, and we announce it at Labor Committee and EBDSA chapter meetings. There is an online form to register for the group; that gives us a phone and email list. Half-page flyers with a QR code to the form are distributed wherever it gets announced.  Some people who sign up never come. Others come but miss one or more sessions. Groups have been as large as twelve and as small as eight. 

The facilitator role

There are two parts to the facilitator role, and they can be done by one person or split between two people.  One part is facilitating the discussion: trying to steer toward the 'key points' noted for each section in the curriculum, inviting people who haven’t spoken to jump in, suggesting that we move on to the next topic.  At the end of each session we go over the reading for the next session, and ask for participants willing to briefly summarize each reading at the start of the next session. 

The other part of facilitating is calling and texting: I try to talk with everyone who signs up before the first session and call or text people who don’t come to the first session to see if they’ll catch up on the reading and come to the second.  If people who came at first miss a session I’ll check in with them  during the week.  With a group of ten these calls require some attention but not a lot of time.  After the last session where we go over ways they can be involved.  I check in with participants to make sure that they are connected to some piece of labor work.

It’s great if one of the facilitators has some union experience but not required.  We have tried to make the curriculum stand on its own. There are readings, discussion questions and timing for each session. Questions the facilitator can’t answer (I’ve been stumped several times) can become a quick research project for the questioner or the facilitator for the next meeting. 

Great results

Building relationships and political capacity through Labor 101 has had great results for us. Several of the non-DSA participants have joined EBDSA. Some of the participants in the first group I facilitated in 2023 have become leaders of the Labor Committee. Three of the participants in the second group became involved in organizing their workplace.  Two have joined a chapter Tech Workers Circle. One is part of an organizing committee that has now submitted a super-majority of cards for union recognition. She says that salting might be her next career goal. Many new DSA members think worker organizing and unions are important—and Labor 101 for Socialists has been a way to move them to activity and organizing.

Our curriculum is available HERE; our last revision was also a chance to make it something that others could use.  If you are interested in trying it in your chapter, please let us know how we can help. If you try it or if you are already doing similar things we’d like to know.

[This article originally appeared on Labor Day in the San Francisco Chronicle, but it’s behind a paywall. Enjoy it for free in California Red.]

It was supposed to be May Day.

The May Day holiday—International Workers Day—is currently celebrated by over one hundred countries across the earth. Only in the United States and Canada is a similar holiday—Labor Day—held in September.

This is ironic, because the events inspiring the birth of May Day occurred here. 

Most people have a vague understanding of the problems faced by the working class in the nineteenth century, before passage of any meaningful laws regulating the workday or limiting the ability of capital to control the lives of workers. But the realities were often far worse than we might imagine today.  

Bloody harvest

Ten, twelve and even fourteen-hour workdays, six or sometimes seven days a week, were the norm in many industries. Factories were filled with machines tended by workers. Moving parts were exposed, and employers considered protections like guardrails too expensive to install. No laws required such measures, and no penalties came with worker casualties. In those regulation-free workplaces, each year brought a bloody harvest of worker injuries and deaths, with most occurring in the final hours of the long workday as workers grew tired and careless.

Which is why, beginning in the 1860s, shortly after the conclusion of the Civil War, arose a movement for a standard eight-hour workday. As the slogan of the time had it, workers wanted “Eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will.”

In California, the second state law in the country (following Illinois) established the eight-hour day in 1867. But without any enforcement mechanisms, it proved meaningless when the newly completed transcontinental railroad carried unemployed workers by the thousands seeking jobs across the country to the Golden State a few years later. The glut of labor reduced wages and lengthened the workday. 

The arrogance felt by employers toward their employees at the time was exemplified by statements like that of George Baer, owner of the Reading Railroad, who promised that “The rights of the laboring man will be protected, and cared for, not by the labor agitator but by the Christian men to whom God has given control of the property interests in this country.”

General strike for the eight hour day

Workers and their unions saw things differently. In 1886 the American Federation of Labor asked its member unions to call a general strike on May first to support the campaign for the eight-hour day. 

A third of a million workers answered the call and walked off the job, hoping to achieve the limit with their action. 

But in the wake of the strike, in Chicago, a demonstration protesting police violence against strikers was disrupted by a bomb in Haymarket Square. Although no one was ever identified as the bomb thrower, a lynch mob atmosphere, whipped up by anti-union employers, put eight immigrant radical worker leaders on trial, and several were hung. The prosecution admitted that no evidence connected these leaders with the bomb, but wanted to make an example of them. The nation’s first Red Scare, predating McCarthyism by some six decades, took hold. Advocacy for workers was equated with anarchism and communism. Eight hours for work had to wait for another day.

In Europe, the Socialist International in 1889, condemning the martyrdom of the eight-hour day leaders in Chicago, proposed commemorating their cause with a workers’ holiday on May 1. 

A few years later, following massive labor-capital battles like the Homestead Steel Strike in 1892, in the midst of the Pullman strike in summer 1894, in which workers were killed by police, the national guard and armed thugs employed by the railroads, President Grover Cleveland thought a little steam might be let out of the pressure cooker of class struggle. He put his pen to a bill proclaiming that henceforth, the first Monday in September would be a holiday celebrating the contributions of workers to America. This bill made no mention of the eight-hour day or the repression of the workers’ movement. Under these circumstances Labor Day was, in effect, an employer-friendly substitute for May Day.

Elsewhere, in country after country, mass worker movements pushed their governments to sign May 1 into law as a paid workers’ holiday, in many cases via the same general strike tactic.

Fifty more years 

It took fifty years before the eight-hour day became the law of the land here, when FDR signed the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938, in the wake of the largest upsurge of worker militancy since the nineteenth century. But May Day never even came close. 

The history of May Day was not taught in our schools. Its public memory was suppressed by selective association with Communist countries that celebrated it, ignoring both its American origins and the democracies that observed it as well. During the Cold War, seeking to drive a final stake through the coffin of May Day memory, Dwight D. Eisenhower proclaimed May 1 to be “Law Day”.

In recent years, May Day—like the labor movement itself—has been making something of a comeback. Here in the Bay Area central labor councils have jointly called May 1 marches and demonstrations—something unthinkable during the long years of the Cold War.

As we celebrate Labor Day, by all means, let’s go get the deals at “big Labor Day savings” sales, and grill hot dogs or meatless substitutes over our backyard BBQs. Take the day off work. We all deserve it. But also take a moment to recall that Labor Day was the original meatless substitute. 

And come May 1 next year, look around for and help organize the nearest demonstration. 

The struggle over the length of the working day is nearly as old as capitalism itself. During the Industrial Revolution, American workers clocked in for brutal 80-100 hour work weeks until socialists, communists, and anarchists began unionizing their workplaces, and organizing worker strikes around the eight hour work day. The police violently cracked down on the strikers, one example being the 1886 Haymarket Massecre, where a bomb blast set off a barrage of police gunfire. Eight anarchist labor activists were arrested without any evidence, and seven of them were hanged. Their efforts eventually culminated in the creation of the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1940.

However, as capitalists have chipped away at unions and New Deal reforms over the decades, we find ourselves inching back towards square one. 52% of adults employed full time in the U.S. report working more than 40 hours per week. The growing gap between productivity and compensation has been well-documented.

American workers are producing more than ever, but earning less than they did 50 years ago, after adjusting for inflation. Many of us are having to pick up multiple jobs just to make ends meet. Workers are even having their overtime pay denied (stolen), costing some households $35,451/year. On top of this, there’s a growing pay gap between the labor aristocracy and the essential workers providing the hard labor that keeps the economy afloat. What can we do?

In March of 2024, Sen. Bernie Sanders announced he will introduce legislation to change our workweek standard from 40 hrs to 32 hrs with no loss in pay. This would be a revolutionary change that would make sure workers benefit from our increased productivity in this country.

This bill would reduce the maximum hours threshold for overtime from 40 to 32 hours. Workers would be paid time and a half for work days longer than 8 hours and double for work days longer than 12. The bill would also ensure that workers’ pay would not be reduced along with the reduction of hours.

What we need is to build support in the Senate and the House by activating voters, and organizing the working class to build strong unions.

“I know when my members look back on their lives, they never say, ‘I wish I would have worked more.’ When people reach the end of their lives, they never say, ‘I wish I made more money.’ What they wish for is they wish they had more time.”

– Shawn Fain, President of UAW

32 HOURS A WEEK WORKS

It’s pretty obvious that working less hours in a week is nice for the workers, but it’s also better for the workplace in general.

A 32 hour work week pilot was done in the UK in 2022. It involved 61 organizations over a period of 6 months. These orgs reported overwhelmingly positive feedback to the pilot. They reported that staff well-being improved, staff turnover reduced, and recruitment rate went up. All of which helped to improve productivity in the workplace. The pilot worked out so well that 54 of those orgs (89%) continued the policy at least a year after the pilot and 31 of them (51%) made the four day work week permanent.

When you think about it, this all makes perfect sense. Right now we are so overworked that we struggle to find time for ourselves outside of work. Taking back an extra day in the week frees up enough time for us to relax, socialize, and it helps with mental and physical health which means when we do go back to work, we feel less miserable. Even though we currently work 40 hours a week, we rarely actually do 40 hours worth of work. Spending less time at the workplace will not actually reduce the amount of work we can get done, so there’s no reason to keep us there for so long.

From the cubicles to the factory floor, service workers, sex workers, and everyone in between. Workers should fight to make this change and take back their time!

The post The Case for a 32 Hour Work Week Has Never Been Stronger appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.