Rabbit Hole v.002
By: Jade DeSloover
Rabbit Hole v.002 was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
On The Value of Research
Red Catholic: A Life of Contradictions
COMING TO THE STAGE: A COMPELLING STORY ABOUT DETROIT WORKERS
By: David Elsila
Labor theater returns to Detroit this Fall with a revival of the show ‘Forgotten: The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant.’
Open auditions: Anyone who likes to sing or act can come to auditions for “Forgotten” July 11–12 at St. Matthew’s-St. Joseph’s Church on Woodward at Holbrook. Nine leads and nine chorus members will be cast, and all positions are paid. Contact davidelsila@gmail.com for more information.
One night in November 1937, Lewis Bradford was found seriously injured in an isolated section of the Ford Rouge plant in Dearborn. A few days later he died.
Bradford’s voice was well known in Detroit. He hosted a radio show on WXYZ called “The Forgotten Man’s Hour” where he interviewed jobless and homeless workers. It was a counterpoint, he felt, to the right-wing antisemitic priest Father Charles Coughlin, whose “Hour of Power” radio show on WJR was beamed nationwide.
Now nearly 90 years later, the story of Bradford’s mysterious death and the struggle of workers to organize unions during the Depression will be told on stage in the play “Forgotten: The Murder at the Ford Rouge Plant.” It will run for three days at Marygrove Theatre in Detroit October 10–12. DSA members are involved on the production team or are helping raise funds to mount the show, which features 22 songs in a jazz/bluesy genre performed by a cast of more than 20 actors, singers, and musicians.
Bradford was also an assistant pastor at Detroit’s Central Methodist Church. He had taken a job at the Rouge to pay for medical care for his young daughter, Ella, who was seriously ill. There was no health insurance in those days, and a pastor’s salary alone couldn’t pay the bills. While at the Rouge, Bradford tried to interest Henry Ford in developing better relationships between workers and management. Ford rejected his overtures; indeed, earlier that year Ford security guards had attacked UAW organizers at the Battle of the Overpass.
For years, Steve Jones, Bradford’s great-nephew, had listened to family stories of his great-uncle’s life and mysterious death. In 1991, he traveled from his home in Maryland to Detroit to find out more. Weeks of research led to the discovery of Bradford’s 1937 autopsy report. Jones took it to the Wayne County Medical Examiner, who said Bradford’s death should likely have been classified as a homicide — not an accident.
That became the genesis for “Forgotten.” Jones, an accomplished composer and a member of the American Federation of Musicians union, wrote 22 songs for “Forgotten” that tell the stories of the Ford Hunger March, the Battle of the Overpass, the Flint sit-down strike, and the struggles of workers like Bradford to organize.
In 2004, the Michigan Labor History Society sponsored the premiere of the show and revived it in 2005 and 2010 to sold-out audiences. This fall will bring another opportunity for Detroit-area audiences to see it.
Tickets for “Forgotten” are $35 and available through EventBrite. Read more about “Forgotten” at MichiganLaborHistorySociety.com and get tickets here.
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David Elsila, a long-time Metro Detroit DSA member, is a producer of “Forgotten.”
COMING TO THE STAGE: A COMPELLING STORY ABOUT DETROIT WORKERS was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Maine Mural: Looking Forward to the DSA National Convention
With DSA’s National Convention right around the corner, our host Dylan C. talks with three delegates from Maine DSA to discuss their preparation and hopes for the upcoming event.
The post Maine Mural: Looking Forward to the DSA National Convention appeared first on Pine & Roses.
July Chapter Meeting & Picnic Potluck
For our July Chapter Meeting, we’re having a Picnic Potluck! The Chapter will be providing hot dogs and beverages. We are asking folks to bring a side or dessert. (And camping chair if you have one.)
We’ve secured a backup location in case of bad weather. We’ll make that decision on Saturday. Please RSVP below to receive email updates.
We’re meeting in the evening of Saturday, July 12, at Riverside Park (near the Guild St entrance). Arrive at 3pm, the meeting will start around 4pm. After the meeting, we’ll keep hanging in the park. Feel free to bring a frisbee, hacky sack, or other park activities.
We encourage you to also attend Unionizing: Escalation & Recognition, a part of our Worker’s Power Teach-in series earlier in the day, 12-2pm. The teach-in will be at Fountain Street Church, Room 109.
NOTE: Because we’ll be meeting in the park, we will not be offering a hybrid option. This will be an in-person only meeting. If you cannot attend but want to share your opinions on the agenda items please email info@grdsa.org or post to the GRDSA slack.
The post July Chapter Meeting & Picnic Potluck appeared first on Grand Rapids Democratic Socialists of America.
Optimizing Versus Organizing: An Inventory of the Bosses’ Weapons
By: Frederick Reiber
BOSTON, MA – While the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that only 11.1 percent of the workforce is covered by a union, nonetheless, support for unions remains at a 70-year high. Over half of American workers indicate they would vote to unionize their workplace if given the opportunity. Public opinion is similarly strong: labor’s approval rating polls in the high 60s to low 70s.
Half of American workers may vote to unionize if given the opportunity – but since unionizing is a result of organizing with one’s coworkers, what stops workers? What tools lie in the master’s house that ensure support for labor remains trapped in a poll instead of expressed through collective action?
One force is technology. Organizing in 2025 requires not only confronting the boss; it means contending with a growing arsenal of digital tools designed to disorganize and disempower, optimizing bosses’ own class struggle against workers. Now more than ever, workers are inundated with digital technologies, many of which can—and often have been—weaponized against labor organizers. Workers must understand the digital systems shaping our workplaces to leverage that knowledge to craft new, creative strategies to organize around—and against—them.
Management and Predictive Data
“Smart” technology has changed the corporation from the top down – starting with changes in management styles. Today’s workers operate in environments saturated with digital surveillance. In many large companies, employees are monitored not only through traditional managerial oversight but through automated systems: sentiment surveys, productivity dashboards, keystroke monitors, and algorithmic risk assessments. In Boston, Blank Street Coffee has 70 workers with only three managers in the entire metro area. The digital systems that enable this create asymmetries that allow employers to know more about workers than workers know about each other or their own managers, making marching with demands more challenging, while also giving bosses information to predict and prevent collective action.
Amazon has made immense progress in anti-worker tools to this effect – finding ways to stop organizing in advance. Leaked internal documents reveal the company’s development of a “heat map” tool to anticipate which Whole Foods locations were most at risk of unionizing by analyzing area income, recent raises, and proximity to active unions. These insights allow Amazon to proactively intervene to disrupt organizing efforts. Instead of letting the conditions for organizing to ripen, employers have numerous tools to subvert labor law like subtly reassigning ringleaders, offering last-minute benefits to diffuse momentum, or illegally firing organizers with little consequence. For instance, in the lead up to the election in Bessemer, Alabama, Amazon reduced its enforcement of its famously brutal quotas and provided employees with temporary, marginal benefits. Amazon has also used technology to make moves like raising the workload of key workers, creating a firing pretense for “failing to perform.”
Amazon went so far as to change traffic lights preventing organizers from reaching workers.
There are corporations whose entire business is predictive anti-worker action. As journalist Sarah Kessler has reported, numerous other corporations like Perceptyx and WorkTango now advertise the ability to detect early signs of organizing. Combining data from internal work surveys and demographic studies, employers can now estimate the likelihood of certain shops unionizing, or create surveys to assess how likely employees are to favor unionization. Union-busting firms like Littler Mendelson and Jackson Lewis, central to massive corporate control, have also started discussions and advertising the usage of similar tools.
Fragmented Workplace, Privatized Public Forum
The modern workforce is far more geographically dispersed than in the heyday of labor. During the Thirties, organizing efforts were nestled in communities: steel towns, mining villages, industrial corridors. Unions were embedded in the social and civic life of workers. While successful organizing campaigns today still often activate their communities, from 2025 Fitchburg educators to the famous cases of Jane McAlevey’s whole-worker organizing in Stamford and Las Vegas, remote work and digital-first employment models fragment social networks.
Gig-work’s invasion into several markets also has created fractured work environments for large swathes of the most precarious workers, which has led to a pivot to digital organizing. In a recent paper, we found that digital organizing in these fragmented environment struggles to replicate the relational density of place-based movements. No shared space makes solidarity harder to build. Most unions don’t host or facilitate vast sports leagues and union halls that anchor their community and the labor organizing projects that benefit from shared space, compared to previous militancies. Both workers in remote environments and in fragmented in-person ones often find themselves first developing a social layer at their workplace before being able to think about collective demands.
Both workers in remote environments and in fragmented in-person ones often find themselves first developing a social layer at their workplace before being able to think about collective demands.
Digital communication tools deepen this problem. In many tech workplaces, platforms like Slack have become the primary channel for internal communication. But discussing unionization over Slack—owned and monitored by the employer—is risky. Admins can often view supposedly private conversations, and some companies actively scan for keywords related to organizing. In other cases, companies, like Apple, restrict access to certain communication tools altogether to limit organizing. And as workers who have been through organizing campaigns with companies on Slack before know intimately, bosses are one click away from removing access to Slack. This requires developing a medium communication platform that suits the needs of workers, which may be more difficult the more diverse the membership of the union. After all – social media and messaging apps have also fragmented in recent years. Signal, Whatsapp, listserv, Messenger, Discord, text, WeChat – these and more are all possible answers. And all of them are subject to the whim and whimsy of corporate and digital surveillance, as well.
Worse still, employers increasingly use these same digital communication tools to push active anti-union messaging. During the New York Times Tech Workers Guild campaign, workers were bombarded with directives to vote no. At Amazon, the company’s internal app, “A to Z,” sent anti-union notifications directly to workers’ phones, framing the union as a threat rather than a tool for empowerment.
The Digital Panopticon
Technology enables a deeper, more ambient form of control: fear. We recently found that many workers are deeply anxious about employer surveillance, especially in moments where it wasn’t clear whether they were being watched, which informs what workers do. Participants mentioned co-workers being worried that their employer might hack their personal phone or that their private emails were being monitored.
Fear is a broader condition. Under contemporary workplace surveillance regimes, workers can no longer take privacy for granted.
In Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault highlights the panopticon — a theoretical prison used to illustrate how control has shifted in modern societies. No longer are we controlled by force and police. Instead, we internalize our own policing, a requirement due to the consistent but obfuscated threat of surveillance and its associated fallout. This constant fear of retaliation, a reality of surveillance and union-busting, along with the immaterial fears of employers hacking personal phones, is a symptom of this dynamic.
The Digital Scab
Finally, even when workers succeed in unionizing, digital tools limit workers’ power to disrupt. One way they do this is through the automation of workers. This is not new – the Typographers Guild, one of the strongest American unions in the 20th century, was essentially decimated by advances in computers. Dockworkers held a multi-month battle over the introduction of automation. Here in Boston, Fenway Park concessions workers with UNITE HERE Local 26 were galvanized to authorize a strike in June 2025 for the first time in their 113-year history partly in response to the automation of their jobs. Most grimly, in 2023, National Eating Disorders Association workers were replaced by a chatbot two weeks after voting to unionize.
Many of the digital tools used to automate labor rely on data and insights generated by workers themselves. As scholar Trystan S. Goetze argues, these systems often constitute a form of unethical labor theft, extracting and repurposing human labor to destroy it.
Even strikes are affected by digital scabbing. In education, college deans have suggested using AI to substitute striking grad workers. In logistics and manufacturing, bosses reroute orders to other warehouses. All of this makes it increasingly difficult to materially impact an employer’s bottom line—a critical ingredient for winning strong contracts.
Resistance, Sabotage, and Winning
Historically, workers amidst labor struggles against workplace technology have engaged in sabotage. Maybe the most famous example is the Luddites—workers in the English textile industry—who systematically destroyed and sabotaged specific machines which threatened to deskill and disempower them. In the United States, the Industrial Workers of the World engaged in a similar fight. During the early 20th century, labor disputes over Taylorism and scientific management—modes of labor often compared to contemporary algorithmic and computation tools—resulted in workers sabotaging production by engaging in slowdowns. To quote an anonymous Boston DSA member who has engaged in sabotage for collective action:
Sabotage is just any kind of direct action to decrease production in the workplace, a lot of the time. If the boss can’t prove something, any action can bring workers together. That includes everything from traditional destruction to destruction of the data the boss uses.
A number of tech activists, scholars and authors have also suggested numerous ways of combating these abusive tech regimes on multiple fronts – for example, as workers operating on the side of consumption. In Nicholas Vincent et. all’s article Data Leverage: A Framework for Empowering the Public in its Relationship with Technology Companies. The authors encourage everyday users to understand the leverage or power they have against large tech companies, arguing that while it may be more difficult to see the connections, users of tech do have power to reduce or stop the oppressive usage of their data. To do so, we need to shift our practices not just as workers, but as users, recognizing and developing an understanding of how our practices outside of the workplace affect the practices inside.
Today, the systems of control might not look like managers with stopwatches or spinning jennies, but the logics are similar. The goal is still worker suppression, even if the interface is now dashboards, wearables, and algorithmic management. Fighting back requires more than just nostalgia – it requires understanding and clarity. Workers and users alike must learn to recognize how power is embedded in technological systems and organize accordingly.
That may look like workers refusing to train their replacement by resisting the introduction of “pilot” AI tools; it might mean collectively slowing down work that’s being tracked; it might mean building alternative systems that prioritize worker autonomy. Sabotage today won’t always look like smashing a loom—it might look like transparency, refusal, or subversion.
The first step is the same as it was two centuries ago: recognize that the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as intended. Organize to break it.
Frederick Reiber is a PhD student at Boston University researching collective action and technology. He is a member of SEIU 509 and Boston DSA.
The post Optimizing Versus Organizing: An Inventory of the Bosses’ Weapons appeared first on Working Mass.