Chapter Statement Jan 9, 2024

In response to an attack article in CNYcentral from a right-wing propaganda group.

Syracuse DSA proudly endorsed several candidates in 2021, recognizing their tireless advocacy for the needs of all children in Syracuse. We stand firm in our support of our endorsees. The ‘report’ by Parents Defending Education – a group akin to Moms for Liberty and known for spreading disinformation and fear-mongering – creates a false equivalence between those working to fund and build up our public education system and those ideologically committed to dismantling it.

These far-right groups whitewash history, erase cultural diversity and identities, and seek the wholesale destruction of the public education system. Syracuse DSA supports policies to strengthen our public education system – including the principles of community care instead of juvenile policing (Care, not Cops). In contrast to the right-wing agenda of indoctrination, we embrace students’ varying cultural backgrounds and reject a learning environment that forces assimilation and ideological conformity.

We reject the unfounded allegations made by right-wing educational groups as well as their  support for the school-to-prison pipeline. It is no surprise to us that these groups have no objections to funding genocide in other contexts. Syracuse DSA welcomes those standing for and with public schools and invites them to seek our endorsement next election.

The post Defending Public Education appeared first on Syracuse DSA.

FedEx workers had enough of impossible workloads and understaffing — so they organized.

The post All It Takes Is One: How an Injury on the Job Spurred Organizing Efforts at FedEx appeared first on EWOC.

The Road to Convention | Register, Read Proposals, Attend Events!

We are now on the road to the 2024 NNJ DSA Convention! All submitted resolutions, priority campaigns, EC Candidate Questionnaires are now live! Amendments to these proposals are due a week from tonight, Sunday, January 14th. We’ve also announced a few more events to support Convention, facilitate more political discussion, learn how the rules of Convention go, and even party it up with a social the night before!

View Proposals here

Submit Amendments here.

RSVP for Roberts Rules Training

RSVP for Run for EC Leadership Forum

Jan 27th Our Political Moment in NJ Forum & Social – LOCATION TBA

RSVP for 2024 Convention

Check (and even save to your Calendar) the chapter Calendar to register for events and see in-person locations for some supplemental events. The Convention itself is totally on Zoom.

If you’re not a Member in good standing, go ahead and pay dues to get access to view proposals. If you want to make sure you are up to date on when all things in the chapter are happening, and to be involved in the discussions about future projects and organizing, Join our Chapter Slack by attending our new member orientation Sat. January 20th at 11AM.

The post The Road to Convention | Register, Read Proposals, Attend Events! first appeared on North NJ DSA.

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

The following comments are from a rally and community speak out calling for justice and accountability for the killing of Todd Novick. On Christmas Eve, Todd Novick was shot multiple times in the back by an RPD officer following an eight-second foot chase.

I am the Secretary of the Rochester Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America, and a public defender.

I applaud the call of DSA-endorsed Councilmembers Stanley Martin, Kim Smith, and Mary Lupien, for an independent and transparent investigation into the killing of Todd Novick, and a review of RPD policies regarding foot pursuits.

In 2022, Chicago Police adopted a policy restricting foot chases for minor offenses after 13-year-old Adam Toledo was shot and killed by police while his hands were raised. The policy restricts police from conducting a foot pursuit based solely on a person’s response to the presence of police, acknowledging that people may avoid contact with police for reasons other than involvement in criminal activity. Police are instructed to engage in foot pursuits only if there is a valid law enforcement need to detain the person, including the commission of a felony, class A misdemeanor, or physical threat.

Given the overcriminalization of human behavior, however, and noting that “retail theft” is an example where foot chases remain permitted, I am pessimistic about the real impact of such a policy.

De-escalation techniques among RPD officers are also sorely lacking. Prior to killing Todd Novick, the as-yet unnamed officer’s interaction took a condescending tone, and he shot Todd in the back before he had time to respond to the officer’s command to “drop the gun.”

It is also important that the Rochester Police Accountability Board be fully empowered to investigate, so that our community members can provide oversight, rather than a coverup by the Attorney General and RPD.

Ultimately, as activists and organizers, we must not focus our energy on mere police reform. We cannot reform a system premised on the violent protection of private property and maintenance of class hierarchy. To quote Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing,

“The basic nature of the law and the police, since its earliest origins, is to be a tool for managing inequality and maintaining the status quo. Police reforms that fail to directly address this reality are doomed to reproduce it.”

Real public safety includes providing reliable housing, accessible healthcare, and robust education. We must disinvest from state violence and reinvest in these forms of protection.

WE KEEP US SAFE, by organizing and building community. We fight against the alienation of capitalism by respecting one another’s humanity, learning from one another, and working together. If you are not yet a member of an abolitionist organization, join one.

To echo comrade Stanley Martin, “The killing of any member of our community, especially by law enforcement, is a failure of our city and public safety systems.”

We can do better. We must do better. Together, a better world is possible.

The post Justice for Todd Novick: Rally and Community Speak Out, Rochester City Hall (January 6, 2024) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) buses can be miserable to use. Buses are infrequent, arrive late, and skip stops. Bus stops can be hard to get to, sometimes with nowhere to sit or shelter while waiting. Trips that ought to take 30 minutes can take hours depending on the day. Overall, riding the bus is so inconvenient that most Charlotteans don’t even consider taking the bus. Therefore, only those who truly rely on the bus system tend to experience its failures. This fact is often shrugged off by Democrats – after all, most people have cars – and justified by Republicans as a punishment for poverty. As socialists, we see this is a tragedy needing an urgent solution.

Mass public transit is a crucial service for the city. It’s a substantially cheaper, safer, and even more dignified form of transportation than our current car-centered system. Mass transit relieves us of the need to purchase, maintain, and pay debt on a car. Mass transit takes vehicles off the road, resulting in quieter streets and less polluted air. Mass transit recognizes that the ability to get to work, run errands, and explore our city should be shared equally, connecting rather than separating us.

This year the Charlotte Metro DSA is launching the Charlotte for CATS campaign. We demand that CATS become the mass public transit system that Charlotte needs. Since the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in 2020, CATS has fallen into disrepair. Mired in scandals, CATS is under-performing and under pressure to change. Rather than give in to this situation and let the bus system leave behind those who depend on it, we can turn the situation around. CATS can operate for the benefit of all.

Join us today and let the city know: CATS service levels must be improved!

Solidarity Forever,

Charlotte Metro Democratic Socialists of America Steering Committee

by Chris Mills Rodrigo

Taking a glance at how the spike in union activity over the last few years has been described in traditional media — a wave, a surge, a boom — one could be forgiven for thinking that the process is natural. Anyone who has organized their workplace will tell you the opposite. Organizing is hard work, from covertly building support amongst colleagues to weathering management retaliation to navigating the byzantine process of formal elections. Desire to unionize can only go so far without organizers willing to put in the work to make it happen.

Few places experienced that disconnect between interest in unionization and successful campaigns as acutely as the Bay Area in the early years of the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite exciting organizing activity across the nation — particularly at chains like Starbucks and Trader Joe’s — and a rich local history of organized labor, new unions in the area were still few and far in between.

Fearing that the Bay Area was at risk of missing out on a special opportunity to build durable labor power, the East Bay chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) started asking itself what it could do to help. 

“There was this huge wave of new organizing happening across the country, and to some extent in the Bay Area, but not quite as much as we were expecting,” Zach Weinstein, one of the co-chairs of the organization’s Labor Committee, explained. “We were having a conversation: what do we do in terms of engaging with this wave of organizing that’s happening? How do we do labor work that isn’t just sitting around waiting for workers or a union to ask us for help?”

Taking a look at what was working elsewhere in the country to motivate unionization, members of the labor committee were taken by the successes of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. 

At the height of the pandemic, when the contempt of many employers for their workers became harder to ignore, the DSA and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America teamed up to create a one-stop-shop for workers with the desire to organize that lack the know-how to make it happen.

Since its inception in March 2020, EWOC has helped over 70 organizing drives win demands and aided almost 100 successful unionization campaigns by providing resources, training and individual help to workers. 

In the spring of 2022, the East Bay DSA members began discussing whether forming a local equivalent would be a good way to help turn the rise of pro-labor sentiment in the area into concrete organizing wins. By September of that year, a resolution establishing the East Bay Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee was approved. 

A little over a year in, based on the raw numbers alone, the project has been a success. The group has played a part in seven successful unionization campaigns, aiding workers in successful efforts to win union elections at three Peet’s Coffee locations, a Starbucks, a Trader Joe’s, Berkeley’s Ecology Center, and Urban Ore. 

After becoming the first local EWOC in the Bay Area – and the second nationally after New York City’s – the organization has helped the San Francisco and Santa Cruz DSA chapters launch their own local affiliates.  

Those behind the campaign say the next goal for East Bay EWOC is to bring some of the workers they have helped organize into the DSA to help the group better represent the region’s working class. 

East Bay EWOC provides a variety of services to workers fighting to improve their workplaces. The group utilizes the national organization’s online support form, which workers can fill out to get help from trained organizers. Requests for help from the region are forwarded to the local EWOC, which then has volunteers contact workers directly. 

The group’s volunteers have helped give workers interested in organizing direction, turning get-togethers that would often devolve into aimless complaining and gossip into more structured discussions with clear targets in mind, according to workers who spoke with Majority for this article.

“They gave us tools and resources to structure our meetings to make them productive and to envision the arc of the campaign, to have goals to be constantly working towards,” one worker, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retribution, said. 

The organization has also hosted a series of workplace organizing trainings, three of which were adapted from Labor Notes’s Secrets of a Successful Organizer and a fourth which focused on contract negotiations. The training not only helped upwards of 30 workers develop the skills necessary to organize their workplaces, but it also helped spread awareness about the assistance that East Bay EWOC offers.

Another worker at a not yet public unionization drive, heard about one of these trainings through a friend, showed up, and then was connected to a local organizer who helped get their campaign to the next step.

“There’s been a lot of different things over the years that have had people talking about the benefits of unionizing,” they told Majority. “But previously in those conversations, it was a small group of people and when we looked into what it would take to actually unionize it felt really overwhelming.”

The local organizer assigned to the campaign was able to provide strategies for how to reach new colleagues, answer questions about eligibility and give tips on how to keep shop lists organized. 

As East Bay EWOC heads into its second year, there is still a lot more to achieve.

For one, none of the union campaigns that the group has aided have secured their first contracts yet. Helping get those challenging negotiations over the finish line is a priority.

Once those contracts do start getting ratified, East Bay EWOC organizers hope they can convince some of the workers involved in the process to join the local DSA chapter and contribute to the fight to grow worker power nationwide.

“I think EWOC has the power to make an organization like DSA actually feel and look like the working class,” Taylor Henry said. “When you have something like EWOC that focuses on supporting and growing the power of the working class, that will have a big impact on our membership.”

If you want support to organize your workplace, fill out this form to be connected to a local organizer through EWOC. To volunteer with EBEWOC, email labor@eastbaydsa.org.

So far, over 1200 DSA members are making sure that our organization has a durable funding source for organizing by switching to Solidarity Dues and asking comrades to do the same. RSVP here to reach out to your comrades this winter!

The post Solidarity Dues in the New Year appeared first on Democratic Left.