Cambridge, MA – Boston DSA congratulates our friends and neighbors in the Cambridge Public Library Staff Association on their hard-fought contract victory. After over a year of struggling for their rights, the CPLSA won a contract that achieved all of their primary goals. 97% of CPLSA members have voted to approve the new contract, which includes a functional wage increase of nearly 5%, new health and safety protections with worker input, democratization of workplace standards, and fairer staffing practices.

Boston DSA was proud to stand with the CPLSA in their struggles for a fair and democratic workplace. DSA members joined CPLSA stand outs, bringing snacks, coffee, and energy to show our library staff their community was behind them. Working Mass, a DSA publication, chronicled CPLSA’s ongoing efforts last fall. We are glad to see city leadership finally show some recognition of what has been clear since this fight began—our library staff, and all workers, deserve fair wages and democratically-determined safe work conditions.

CPLSA’s victory is yet another reminder of the power of an organized and militant working class. By standing unified in their demands and holding regular demonstrations against their employer’s practices, they were able to achieve meaningful wins against an intransigent city government with an unelected City Manager controlling the purse strings. Boston DSA members will continue these struggles in our own unions and stand ready to support our neighbors who, like CPLSA, are ready to demand a better, more democratic workplace.

### To join Boston DSA, visit bdsa.us/join. To participate in our work in Cambridge, visit  bdsa.us/Cambridge.  ###

[[{“value”:”DSA members and other community supporters attend hearing at Worcester City Hall on Dec. 17.

By Ivy Elliot

The Department of Justice Report

WORCESTER – On December 9, 2024, the Department of Justice released a report describing horrific, systemic civil rights violations committed by the Worcester Police Department. The investigation, during which the DOJ reviewed evidence and conducted interviews from prosecutors and victims of police abuse, had been opened in November of 2022. Many in the Worcester area were outraged – but not surprised – to learn that the WPD routinely uses their state-granted power to assault Black and Hispanic communities, resort to excessive force on a regular basis, and sexually abuse sex workers in the city.

On December 17, members of the community attended a meeting at Worcester City Hall to demand reforms and assistance that would alleviate the hardships experienced by unhoused and sexually exploited women in Worcester. These demands include public apologies for the crimes committed by WPD officers, allocation of funds towards a women’s shelter and harm reduction programs, and, from some, calls for the criminalization of sex buyers and pimps “while decriminalizing and rehabilitating abused women.”

Sex work is fully criminalized in Massachusetts and many other states across the U.S. Police all over the country will often perform undercover operations in an attempt to find and arrest those participating in the buying or selling of sex. It’s no secret that the officers frequently and systematically abuse their positions of power to engage in sexual contact with sex workers, and often assault them in the process. Many officers routinely offer not to arrest them in exchange for sexual favors.1 The DOJ report found the same problems exist in the WPD, which has led to this new push for the criminalization of sex buyers.

While the DOJ report condemns the sex abuse, it also specifically notes that police officers are allowed to enforce the law in regards to the buying and selling of sex. The report does not admit that it is the act of officers “enforcing the law” on sex work which leads to the systemic abuse of sex workers. Many women involved in sex work are the most vulnerable people in the community: people who are unhoused, disabled, racialized, queer, undocumented, and who use drugs; those who may have no other option for work than to sell sex. Even if the officers involved in these undercover operations were not violating the law themselves, their job is, in itself, the targeting and arresting of anyone found to be engaged in sex work, which only serves to put sex workers under further hardship. It’s worth noting that the report includes the fact that “the Worcester County District Attorney’s Office has not prosecuted those arrested for selling sex since 2018, instead referring arrestees to a diversion program for survivors of sexual exploitation.” This treatment falls short of decriminalizing the sale of sex – which would mean the police are not technically allowed to arrest sex workers themselves – but these are the conditions under which the DOJ’s reported abuses have occurred. The County DA already operates under something akin to a model of partial decriminalization, and the results of this DOJ report suggest that it hasn’t curtailed the abuses of the WPD.
The suggested remediations at the end of the DOJ report offer little in regards to the safety of the Worcester community from the police. Their suggestions of increased supervision, training, and use of body cameras are little more than a band-aid which can easily be torn off when convenient, and do nothing to prevent the continued abuse of marginalized people at the hands of the WPD. As the community focuses on the abuse of sex workers in light of the DOJ report, we should examine what can be done to improve their conditions.

The Nordic Model

The Nordic model, which decriminalizes the seller but criminalizes the buyer of sex, has been proposed by some who see this as a way to eventually end sex work without further harming those who sell sex. In their view, this would only harm men who exploit women’s bodies, causing the market to eventually dry up. However, there is ample evidence from countries which follow this model that it is not an effective method to remove women from the sex industry or make the conditions of their work safer. Maine became the first U.S. state to adopt the model just last year, and we will likely see similar failures arise there. In reality, sex workers need to sell sex more than clients need to buy it, which puts workers at a disadvantage when their clients are criminalized. The dynamics of partial decriminalization does not increase the leverage sellers have over the exchange, especially when such “leverage” is inherently created by a systemically violent, sexually abusive, discriminatory police force continuing to track and harass the sellers themselves.

Many sex workers are in a position in which they cannot find another means of income. By criminalizing the buyer, the demand for sex work is lower, meaning sex workers are less likely to find clients, and are paid less by clients for their labor. Any law which makes workers poorer reduces their power as workers. When they make less money, they become more desperate, less likely to set boundaries with their clients, and more likely to take on riskier clients that they otherwise wouldn’t take.

Criminalization of the buyer forces sex workers to cater to their clients’ needs for safety. Clients will refuse to provide identifying information which workers could use to confirm if others have had violent experiences with them in the past. This opens more opportunities for clients to rob or assault sex workers without being traced. 

Sex workers can also still be followed by police who are looking to arrest their clients. When police are present, sex workers – especially those of marginalized backgrounds – are still at risk of discrimination, and subject to arrest for things unrelated to their work, such as immigration status or drug use. It was also found in the DOJ report that the WPD systemically targets Black and Hispanic people more frequently, and even performs arrests without probable cause. Since partial decriminalization does not reduce sex workers’ chances of police interaction, it continues to place sex workers – and especially racialized ones – in a position to be abused by the police.

The Nordic model also fails to address other ways that the police can use the law to unfairly punish sex workers. When buyers and managers are criminalized, sex workers themselves can be lumped into these categories. In Ireland, which implemented the Nordic model in 2017, sex workers sharing an apartment together can be penalized for brothel-keeping. In another damning report published by Amnesty International, Swedish police developed a strategy called “Operation Homeless”, in which they called the landlords of properties that housed known sex workers, informing them that they can either evict those tenants or face the legal consequences of “promoting prostitution.” The landlords, of course, overwhelmingly chose eviction.

Full Decriminalization

Another solution, full decriminalization, offers the ability for sex workers to continue to sell sex without the same level of fear from police nor from their clients and managers. While it does not completely erase the potential for police violence – or violence as a part of working conditions generally – it does prevent the police from involving themselves in sex workers’ lives as part of sting operations to arrest them (or their clients) for their work. When sex work is decriminalized, sex workers are given the same labor rights as other workers. The nature of work under capitalism remains exploitative, but increasing the rights of workers is better than decreasing them. They have a better ability to screen clients, set explicit boundaries, and openly organize. 

Other models generally fail to regard sex workers as workers. The discrimination and abuse faced by the most marginalized of sex workers under these systems reduces their power to defend their rights. When clients are scarce and demand is low, as perpetuated by the Nordic model, sex workers have less power to make demands of their clients. When the sex industry is regulated by laws which determine who is allowed to sell sex, business owners have greater power with which to control the industry and exploit hired sex workers. And when sex work is fully criminalized, sex workers are pushed into an underclass in which society barely sees them as human and paths out of poverty become more difficult.

The New Zealand Prostitutes Collective (NZPC) began organizing in the late 1980s to address the discrimination faced by sex workers and advocate for their rights in the country. Over the next decade, the NZPC lobbied for a reform act to decriminalize prostitution. The Prostitution Reform Act eventually passed in 2003 because of the organization and hard work of these sex workers. The collective now works to defend this law from being overturned, and provides resources to sex workers to keep them safe from abusive clients and managers, negotiate for fair wages, provide sexual health services, and defend migrant sex workers who are still criminalized in New Zealand.

Socialists and labor activists need to stand in solidarity with sex workers, fight for  decriminalization, and support them in organizing for their needs in a system which continuously disregards their humanity.

Full decriminalization does not intrinsically solve the issues of capitalism which force people into sex work. This is true of any work under capitalism, in which workers are forced into jobs which exploit their labor. Decriminalization, however, raises sex workers up to the same level as other workers in society and allows them to participate in class struggle on better terms. We should also not neglect the fact that many sex workers are in the industry because they cannot find other work. Sex workers, collectively, are the ones who are most impacted by their conditions, and have a strong understanding of their own needs; they can better advocate and fight for themselves when sex work is fully decriminalized. Many advocates of carceral solutions will say that criminalization is only effective when paired with reforms and services which help people out of the sex industry, but this leaves out an analysis of exploitation inherent to all types of work – reforms cannot address the myriad of underlying, structural issues which may lead people into sex work. 

The existence of programs that offer free shelter, universal basic income, drug rehabilitation, and helping migrants gain legal citizenship are all helpful in leading people away from selling sex if that is the outcome they want or need, but many of these programs come with their own flaws which cannot address every person harmed by the system. We cannot reform our way out of capitalism, and therefore we cannot rely on these programs to entirely eliminate sex workers’ need to sell sex. When these programs are coupled with any form of criminalization, there will always be people inevitably excluded from benefiting from them. Therefore, full decriminalization is the only way to give power to the workers.

Socialists and labor activists need to stand in solidarity with sex workers, fight for  decriminalization, and support them in organizing for their needs in a system which continuously disregards their humanity. Only through the end of capitalism can we fully end the exploitation of all workers and enter into a world in which no one is forced to perform labor which degrades and abuses them. Economic freedom and the freedom to choose our work is the only true solution to all symptoms of capitalist exploitation.

Ivy Elliot is a member of the Worcester DSA Steering Committee.
Photo Credit: Rory Cronin, member of Worcester DSA.

Works Cited:

Smith, Molly, and Mac, Juno. Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights. Verso, 2020.

Smith and Mac, 125 ︎“}]] 

[[{“value”:”

By the Editorial Board

Trump’s Threat To Labor

Donald Trump’s comeback election is an unprecedented threat to the labor and socialist movements. 

In his first term and on January 6, Trump flirted with right wing authoritarian tendencies. But now he is preparing a far more thorough and systematic break with the liberal democratic order. We must be clear that the threat from Trump this term is quite different than from previous Republican administrations.

His attacks on working people will certainly include the typical Republican approach of making it harder for workers to unionize, and passing legislation which economically helps the billionaires and hurts working people. Project 2025 lays out an ambitious plan in this regard, which would cut across protections for marginalized workers, defund pro-worker aspects of the regulatory state, expand misclassification, legalize company unionism, and allow states to exempt themselves from federal minimum standards. A new Republican-majority NLRB is also likely to curtail the rights of graduate workers to secure access to the National Labor Relations Act.

However, this time the typical weakening of workers rights will be paired with a more comprehensive assault on the most radical sections of our movement, as well as a co-optation of the more establishment-adjacent sectors of labor. Repression will be focused on those sections of labor willing to stand up to imperialism, mainly the pro-Palestinian movement within labor, and will be paired with wider assault by way of defunding and mass layoffs of those who seek to use their union power to support pro-social public services, especially teachers unions as well as unions in the civil service. At the same time, Trump will likely seek to bring a section of the labor movement close to him by way of handouts, especially those in the military-industrial complex and those unions with a disproportionately reactionary base, as we have already seen with the Teamsters union.

Divide and Conquer

Trump seeks to divide and conquer the labor movement. If Trump is successful, the result will be a labor movement too divided to launch a serious fightback. But to do so, he needs to win the reactionary wing of US labor, in order to keep the movement as a whole divided.

Trump’s choice of Congresswoman Lori Chavez-Deremer for Secretary of Labor is indicative of this strategy. Chavez-Deremer was one of only three Republicans to back the PRO Act, the main legislative push for labor under Biden which failed to pass. Now she has received this key appointment in the Trump administration with the endorsement of Sean O’Brien, the president of the Teamsters.

In reality, Chavez-Deremer is no champion of workers. She has received just a 10 percent voting approval rating from the AFL-CIO, which by our accounting is an F. Indeed, one of Chavez-Deremer’s biggest supporters is Nike, the shoe company long accused of relying on sweatshops in East Asia, and she has also received over $100,000 from AIPAC. Nonetheless, her appointment gives the labor-right a justification for making nice with the Trump administration.

Chavez-Deremer’s appointment follows O’Brien’s speech at the Republican National Convention which, while short of a direct endorsement for Trump, nonetheless enhanced Trump’s pro-worker credentials.

The speech was also useful for O’Brien, helping him resonate with his right leaning members after some 59 percent of respondents in an internal union poll backed Trump. These numbers are not unique, but represent the march of MAGA from the police and border-patrol unions, through the building trades, and into the mainstream of the labor movement.

Trump’s economic-nationalist agenda which favors a revitalization of domestic manufacturing helps to facilitate his courting of labor. Trump’s critique of neoliberal globalist free trade has been a through-line in his politics since 2016, while his push to increase defense spending is a boon for certain unionized industries. Union leaders in these industries face the classic pressure of labor imperialism — more missiles, more airframes, more tanks means more jobs, and more jobs means more dues. Keeping the labor movement divided is an important task for Trump. If Trump can neutralize just a few major national unions, he can use them to disrupt the potential for unified action by the entire AFL-CIO.

Labor and Mass Resistance

Trump can court some sections of labor, but his program is anathema to the majority of the American labor movement and especially to unions in the public sector. Although the routing of the Harris/Walz campaign has left the liberal, labor, and left oppositions to Trump disoriented, it is all but inevitable that mass fightbacks will emerge during Trump’s second term, even if they do not emerge immediately.

Labor must not confine its energies to the fields of new organizing and contract fights, or even to basic defensive fights to hold onto organizing rights and conditions. Rather, the responsibility of the unions is to support popular mass resistance to Trump’s policies, providing symbolic and organizational support to attempts to block Trump’s policy roll outs, and using labor’s direct power to disrupt economic normalcy to materially reinforce the symbolic power of mass resistance. Only this level of resistance can be a threat to the Trump regime itself.

Although the way in which mass resistance develops cannot be pre-figured in advance, it is most likely that mass resistance will develop as a result of either sweeping layoffs in the civil service, attempts by Trump to roll out mass deportations, or an escalation of the US’s involvement in the current war.

During Trump’s first term, we saw the power of taxi drivers and flight attendants to disrupt Trump’s agenda through industrial action and the threat of a general strike. We also saw the largest protest movement in US history with the George Floyd Uprising, and the hope of a positive alternative in Bernie’s 2020 campaign. If such energies can be revived, threaded together, and directed strategically, with labor as a backbone, mass resistance can block Trump’s policies and even bring down his entire administration.

The Role Of Socialists In Labor

Just because mass resistance to Trump’s second regime is in the interests of the labor movement and the wider working class does not mean that it is in the interests of labor leaders. The majority of labor leaders are overwhelmingly bureaucratic in methods, uninspired in political outlook, and risk-averse and self-serving in orientation.

Some labor leaders may take a leading role in resistance on their own initiative, either because such resistance is in the interests of their members, their personal career, or their beliefs. But the majority of labor leaders will only act if pushed in one direction or another, preferring symbolic statements and risk-avoidance to bold material action. We will also quickly find out how large a proportion of the labor movement will be bought off into silence or active support by Trump.

While the spectrum in labor between those more sympathetic towards mass resistance, those caught in the middle, and those more open to accommodation with Trumpism is an objective fact determined by the structural position of the various industries within the capitalist-imperialist system and the balance of power within the unions, that does not mean that the role which the various sections of labor play is determined in advance.

Rather, the extent to which the radical sectors take effective and militant action, the middle layer are more or less brought along, and the reactionary layers remain latent (or vice-versa), is determined by the quality and quantity of our active intervention in the labor movement. If we intervene in the labor movement with a strategy for resistance which seizes on issues with majority support, puts forward effective tactics for their pursuit, and avoids minoritarian isolation, we can alter the degree to which the various sections of labor enter the field of class struggle. This requires socialists to lead and provide examples in the most militant unions, organize within the middling unions to push them towards supporting mass resistance, and block the worst expressions from within the reactionary unions.

Moreover, while DSA lacks unity on exactly how, when, and to what degree we should pursue politics independent from the Democratic Party, it is essential that within labor DSA members push in this direction, championing the idea of the need for a party for working people, and uniting the anti-Trump resistance with the fight for an alternative politics for working people.

“}]] 

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