Boycotts to protect DEI and workplace diversity are strengthened by lessons from the Black civil rights movement

Speaking to a renewed age of public-sector austerity, a history of US postal worker organizing

Metro DC has elected a range of political tendencies to represent the chapter at the 2025 convention; a brief analysis.

An empathetic understanding of a recent DSA social-media discourse and questions about caucuses and representation

Hear from union leaders, DSA campaign organizers, and socialists in office who are continuing the fight for a better future. Given the hostile federal terrain we now face, local pressure campaigns in our communities and bargaining for the common good in our union contracts are the most viable pathways for winning a socialist Green New Deal this decade.

Speakers

• Thea Riofrancos (author, A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal)
• Ashik Siddique (DSA National Political Committee, Co-Chair)
• Sarahana Shrestha (Mid-Hudson Valley DSA, Assembly District 103)
• Kelsea Bond (Atlanta DSA, council candidate)
• Alex Brower (Milwaukee DSA, Common Council District 3 representative elect)
• Michael B (Louisville DSA)
• Sam Z (DSA Los Angeles)

The post Mass Call: The Fight for a Socialist Green New Deal appeared first on Building for Power.

Note: posts by individual GMDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.

Below is a speech made by Green Mountain DSA labor chair, Andy Blanchet, on June 10th, 2025 at the Burlington, VT ICE OUT protest. The protest brought together people across the Vermont community - from union & migrant workers to retirees and community organizers - to stand in solidarity with the community of Los Angeles, CA in their resistance to government repression. 

GMDSA’s Labor Committee recently worked with rank and file union members in putting on a Union Power organizing training in April 2024, and was a key organization in coordinating and organizing the May Day 2025 March in Williston, VT where 2,500 people came out to celebrate international workers’ day and stand in solidarity with Vermont migrant farm workers in their Milk with Dignity picket line at Hannaford Supermarket. 

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Repeat after me:  An Injury to One, is an Injury to all! (x3)

Hello! My name is Andy Blanchet and I am a full-time worker at Howard Center, and speak today as president of our labor union, AFSCME Local 1674, and as chair of the Green Mountain Democratic Socialists of America Chapter’s Labor Committee. I come with an urgent message for fellow working class people and our role in combating Trump’s Authoritarian cruelty as witnessed in LA and beyond. I first want to state clearly: AFSCME Local 1674 stands in solidarity with all who have been kidnapped by ICE and DHS and we demand the immediate release of those currently detained. We stand in solidarity with every Union member on the streets exercising our right to freedom of speech in calling for an end to the cruel ICE raids. These unacceptable state sponsored acts of kidnapping are both horrific and unsurprising from this administration. Unsurprising, considering capitalism’s fundamentally authoritarian nature. 

We currently live in a world where bosses who run corporations have full authority over workers. This is an ugly dictatorship of capital - where those who make profits from the blood, sweat, and tears of workers can decide exactly what kind of lives we are allowed to live by exploiting our time and energy for the sake of profit. Not only that, but the capitalist landlords, who pay for their new pools and 2nd homes with our meager wages we break our backs for, decide exactly how much to extort from us in exchange for shelter. Workers have historically worked to combat this dictatorship of the bosses by forming our own labor and tenant unions.

And with that collective organizing, working class people have tried to exercise our natural rights to free speech, organizing, freedom of association, and collective bargaining to win both better wages and working conditions, as well as political change. However, every step of the way, the rich have fought us tooth and nail for even the most meager of wins. They hire union busting lawyers from an industry that reaps profits by convincing employers to keep them on retainer in order to fight their own workers simply pursuing dignity and respect in the workplace. They call the police on striking workers, like they did to Starbucks Workers’ United members during their sit-down strike earlier this year. The rich have even gone so far as to OUTLAW the ability to strike, to withhold our labor, in different industries. That didn’t stop unions like the Newton Teachers’ Association of Newton Massachusetts from organizing a successful, and illegal, strike to win their demands. 

But now, it seems, the rich bosses want more. They criminalize working people from speaking out in support of Palestine through the critique of our own country’s complicity in the ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people. ICE beat & detained the President of SEIU California, David Huerta, while he exercised his freedom of speech. The rich are willing to target unions, union workers & leaders, and immigrant workers to maintain their full control over our economic, political, and social lives. And it is essential that every union, be they local or international, answer the question: Which side are you on?

The time for fence-sitting apolitical unionism must come to an end. There are numerous examples of unions trying to play-nice with overtly hostile political administrations, thinking this would save them, and it never has. All this does is allow those in power to exercise their will over organized labor and know they can get away with it. Worse than that, the do-nothing Democratic party has used the plight of working class people as their political platform for decades. Workers are not pawns to be used in rhetoric and then discarded when it’s time to make good on policy promises - working people are who have built and sustained society and we deserve money for healthcare, prenatal & child care, education, housing, and food, not money for bombs and deportation! It is well past time for unions, big and small, to recognize these trends and organize to win the future we all deserve.

We can win these demands, and more, if we recognize and internalize that when we are divided, and alone, we are at risk. But when we practice safety through solidarity, we are unstoppable! Look at what organized labor did to energize the working class of South Korea in 2024. By organizing workers in huge companies into strike-ready unions and collaborating with farm workers, Korean workers were able to mobilize and fight back against President Yoon Suk Yeol’s declaration of martial law in a fight for democracy. We, the workers and organized labor, must find the political will to commit to this version of organizing for the common good in order to have a lasting impact. We deserve lives of dignity, honor, love, and justice!

The workers, united, will never be defeated! (x3)

Thank you! Solidarity Forever!

As part of our 2025 Migrant Rights Campaign, DSA San Diego is pressuring Grossmont Union High School District to defend students against ICE raids. Read more. [...]

Read More... from Migrant Rights Priority Campaign: Summer 2025 Update

The post Migrant Rights Priority Campaign: Summer 2025 Update appeared first on Democratic Socialists of America | San Diego Chapter.

I was on the street outside the Minneapolis VA Hospital, a truly giant facility that tends to the health of tens of thousands of military veterans each year.  The occasion was a demonstration sponsored by the two American Federation of Government Employees locals that represent thousands of workers at the hospital. The motivator for the […]

Michael P. is an organizer with NYC-DSA.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

GNDCC: What is the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA)? How did it happen?

Michael P: New York State has some of the most aggressive climate laws in the country—mandating a rapid transition to renewable energy, directing benefits of the transition to disadvantaged communities, people who have suffered from the adverse effects of the fossil fuel system. That is a great goal to have, but from the beginning it was clear that the State was not going to take the aggressive action that was needed to meet those goals. So when we were developing ideas for a campaign, we saw that clearly there needs to be some mechanism to force the State to deliver on this promise.

It happens that New York State has a sort of secret weapon for the energy transition, which is the New York Power Authority (NYPA). That’s the largest state-level public utility in the country. It has a very storied history, founded by Franklin Roosevelt and very much a model for a lot of the public power and electrification work that happened during the New Deal. But that legacy had kind of tailed off; over the last decades it’s been more in a holding pattern. Some of our strategy team saw it as an opportunity. The State has this amazing resource; rather than rely on private developers to build renewables, which was quite simply not happening at a rapid pace, we could get the State itself to step up and build the renewable energy we need. 

That push for renewable energy was always tied in our minds with a more comprehensive vision of a just transition that really benefits everyone and realigns politics around energy transition as a public good. So we went about this as a plan to create a huge amount of green jobs; to shut down fossil fuel plants that are continuing to pollute, especially in lower-income places with predominantly Black and brown people living there; and also work on lowering utility bills, which is really affecting everyone.

With that as the context, BPRA is basically a law to give NYPA both the power and the mandate to build a ton of publicly owned renewable energy and create all these benefits in the process.

How did you guys win? What was the campaign like?

This campaign was not waged by hardened politicos or 20-year veterans of legislative work; we really had to figure it out as we went along. Of course we have people with all kinds of skills, but it essentially took us becoming experts and taking that expertise and mixing it with what DSA does really well, which is build power and frighten people in power through organizing. So it was really a multi-year process where, on the one hand, we developed and sharpened our analysis of what the bill should do, and then, on the other hand, gradually built more and more of a base and deployed more and more aggressive tactics to first get the bill on the map—it’s hard to even have something be noticed—then make it one of the main things people were talking about in Albany for climate action, and then ultimately to a place where they had to pass it because there was so much pressure and it was really just a question of how strong we could make the final bill.

That took really every single tool in the toolbox: canvassing people and knocking on doors, tabling and talking to people on the streets, very sophisticated comms targeting a mass audience, knowing how to get our story into the press, knowing how to build relationships in the legislature and how bills really get passed and what’s the realpolitik of that. It also took significant electoral power, in the end, to show that this is a force to be reckoned with, this cannot be ignored anymore.

So it was a massive effort. It’s great to think that thousands of people contributed to passing this law. The ground is breaking for the first project in mid-July. This is something that was a massive collective achievement, and that gives me hope for replicating this and building on it at a much larger scale.

Can you say more about the electoral power and having DSA elected officials and how that helped?

There are a couple of pieces with electoral power. You mentioned the socialists in office that we had elected. That was a really important precondition, because that meant we had people who were on the inside of the legislature. They are there in conference when they are talking about what bills they’re going to debate and prioritize. They are there building relationships across the political spectrum. But they are also very much public agitators for socialist politics and policy, so they were crucial in getting our story out there into the press and in front of the public. That was the product of years of winning campaigns for State Assembly and State Senate.

But the intensification was in 2022 actually running a slate of candidates that had a shared focus on climate, and in particular BPRA, including the candidate I worked for, Sarahana Shrestha. Actually, her campaign grew out of BPRA organizing in the Hudson Valley. She was confronting a 20+ year incumbent who was functionally blocking the bill from moving. This is something we learned over time. The way things work is not, Okay, X number of legislators support this, and then it gets to a vote. It’s really gatekeepers in positions of very specific power, are they motivated to to move the bill? So we found that there’s a lot of things these people can put off and ignore, but they cannot ignore a credible electoral challenge. Obviously, we won some of these races. But even in ones where we didn’t, that had a significant impact on the bill moving through committee and to a vote.

What was the role of working with labor in this and getting it passed?

From the start, the entire concept of the law and the campaign to pass it was structured around the absolutely crucial role of labor in the transition. Both in terms of the political power labor has, but also that it’s workers who are going to build the wind turbines, solar fields, geothermal, all that stuff. They’re going to physically be the ones driving the transition. And of course, it’s also just a part of a broader socialist strategy that labor has to be central.

So from the beginning we wanted to make sure the law would have the strongest possible protections for workers. This is a notorious problem in the private sector renewable development field—a lot of abuse of workers, a lot of non-union labor. So we saw this as an opportunity to show the climate movement really does stand with workers, and that goes beyond just saying nice things about a just transition, but actually fighting to make sure that that’s a crucial piece in developing renewable energy.

Part of our getting to collaborate with labor was just showing how serious we were, showing that this is a bill that had support. It was already gaining support in the legislature and when they saw that, for example, the state AFL-CIO then wanted to collaborate on developing the labor language in the law. That’s how we came out with a law that has the best possible labor protections, because they were determined by the labor movement. That was crucial as we built up. Also rank-and-file workers, especially in education, were very behind this and moved resolutions to ultimately move their parent unions to support this. That was huge.

Now we’re kind of moving into a new phase where projects are actually being developed and work is going to be starting very soon. Really our hope is that the more projects are built and going forward, the more we can collaborate with labor unions so that they get what they want to see out of this. To make sure, for example, their workers have a really good future where there’s plentiful work and that’s happening with all of the protections of a union in terms of wages and benefits and protection from bad treatment from employers.

So it passed two years ago. What’s been happening with the implementation since then?

Partly from all the lessons we learned in the campaign, we knew that the fight was not going to end with passing the law. With very little of a break after passing it, we launched a campaign to essentially dismiss the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority, who is a registered Republican who worked for a law firm or lobbying firm that worked for fossil fuel companies, who had a very spotty record on civil rights under his tenure as CEO, and who was just dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal in terms of how he ran the Authority. We were able, very quickly, to build a mini campaign that actually prevented him from being confirmed by the New York State Senate as the permanent CEO. Unfortunately, he got to stay through a weird legal loophole that literally no one knew about.

But that really put them on notice. We’re not messing around, we’re not going to settle for scraps—you build a couple of solar fields and call it a day. No, we are in this to effect the full transition in our energy system. From there we prepared ourselves to have a phase two of our campaign where, instead of fighting to pass a law, we’re developing and propagating a vision for what it looks to realize all of this, to actually build these projects. Where should they be built? How much? What kinds of technologies? Where does the system need the most help? All these kinds of questions.

We had to develop our own vision and then, basically at every step of the way, try to preempt wishy-washy planning by the state with popularizing a really strong vision that foregrounded all of the benefits people would get: lower bills, green jobs, less dangerous air pollution, and of course, hopefully a livable future. It entailed building even more expertise and publishing serious research modeling the future of the grid in New York State, but, like everything else, grounded in building tremendous people power.

People spent weekends tabling and gathering public comments. We also worked with the Professional Staff Congress, which is the faculty and staff union at the City University of New York. They organized 10 town halls across the City University system. Then when they actually had public hearings around the State, we were able to send crowds of people to all of these hearings, and I think that the State officials were legitimately shocked because this kind of public comment process hearings is generally an incredibly sleepy thing because nobody even knows about it. They’re not making an effort to engage the public. Our idea was the State should consult the public to see what is needed. What do people want to see? But instead, we had to kind of build that ourselves.

So on some level, I’ve seen our campaign over the last two years as essentially an exercise in, Okay, if you don’t want to run a democracy, we’re going to build the democratic mechanisms to force the input on you. In the end, we had over 5,300 public comments on their first plan. Then the New York City hearing was packed to the rafters. Dozens of people couldn’t even speak because there were so many speakers. Because of that, they have already said they’re going to double the amount of renewable energy that they’re planning to build.

To me, as an organizer, when I see people acceding to our demands, that is a signal not to rest, but to actually go harder because it’s working. So that fight is going to continue. There are a lot of things we need to push for. We need to make sure that they’re actually building projects all over the State. Right now, their earlier stuff is much more focused on upstate, but actually for urban areas like New York City, there are tremendous benefits to building renewables near where a huge amount of the demand is. That will also allow us to shut down these peaker plants, which are hyper-polluting when they’re spinning up to actually provide power to the grid. They emit all kinds of noxious chemicals that cause hugely disproportionate asthma rates. They contribute to massive hospitalization for children and adults.

So these are things that we need to address, and we can’t do that unless we’re actually building the renewable energy to replace the super-dirty fossil fuel energy. A bright spot there is, thanks to our influence, the New York Power Authority is moving ahead with starting to plan for large-scale battery storage in the city, which is one way to replace the capacity of those fossil fuel plants. But they’re barely scratching the surface of what they can do in New York City. Yes, it’s not like we have millions of acres of open space, but there’s massive amounts of space available to build distributed energy resources that are smaller scale, but lots of them all over the place. We see our role as we continue to push and fight until we get what we need, essentially.

So, thanks to you guys, they’ve doubled the amount of renewables they’re going to build. This is their first plan, then they’re going to start building their first projects because of BPRA?

Yes. So the first plan was approved in January. Even in that plan document, they already said, “Okay, we’re going to look at doubling this.” They didn’t say, “This is because these massive crowds of people came and confronted us,” but we know that that’s why. They had a Board of Trustees meeting last week where they formally said, “Yes, we’re going to do this.” So that’s our pressure working.

Another thing I want to mention is, on the labor front, BPRA authorized the State to give up to $25 million per year for green job training. And so far, NYPA has, I think, dispersed over $25 million. This is going to a mix of training programs with labor unions, with trade schools, with state universities. So we’re really winning tangible help for people. We fought to make sure that that would include programs like apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs with wraparound services for people who take this on. A lot of people can’t break into the green jobs area because maybe they don’t have a car, they can’t afford to get to the union training center, or they can’t afford childcare so they can’t do evening classes or something like that. These programs are going to be able to pay for all of that stuff so that we can bring people who have been locked out of being able to get these good-paying and family-sustaining type jobs into this workforce so that everyone benefits.

The vision of the private developing sphere is a bunch of private companies make money. But ultimately, it’s really big finance that is driving all the private renewable development and reaping the benefits because they’re the ones who are fronting the money for all of these projects. We have always been about: if we’re going to make climate action popular, we need to show that it can be a part of improving people’s lives. We need to dispel the very powerful propaganda of the Right that there’s a zero-sum game between climate action and people’s quality of life.

It’s a vision in the Green New Deal that the climate transition is an opportunity to restructure our economy, our society, and our democracy, and put some of this into the hands of regular people, because we do the work, we make things run, and it’s our world.

How has BPRA built up the strength of New York City DSA? Do you feel like it’s helped set the stage for you guys to do even more?

One thing is a lot of leaders in the chapter now went through the crucible of this campaign. Even if they’re working on something else now—maybe they’re working on electoral races or trans rights organizing or recruitment and building our future as a political party—a lot of these people cut their teeth and went from somebody who is just enthusiastic and excited to someone who is an ultra-experienced organizer who knows how to lead large numbers of people into action, which is what organizing is all about. So that’s a huge part of it.

I do think having BPRA as a shared policy plank in electoral campaigns really helped create a certain identity and cohesion in what we were putting forward. Having managed one of those campaigns, it was really motivating to people at the doors to see a positive vision for climate. And that actually is a massive piece of this. For a lot of people, the conventional wisdom was you cannot run on climate, that’s too scary or it’s too dicey. People want to talk about only bread-and-butter, kitchen table-type stuff. But ultimately, this is that. How much are you paying for utilities? How much are you paying in medical bills because your kid has asthma? So that’s another part of it. Ultimately BPRA put our chapter and chapters statewide on the map as one of the key forces shaping the climate fight in New York.

And it has brought in a lot of new people into our orbit. We work extremely closely with the City University staff, faculty, and students. These are all people who are now closer to the center of the organizing bullseye. We’ve made this seem possible, to actually win something. That was also always a part of this, to show socialists can pass transformative legislation that actually delivers results for the working class in the short, medium, and long term. It’s really a proof of concept for what our chapter has been doing all along. It remains one of our biggest legislative victories ever.

The post Campaign Q&A: Building Public Renewables in New York appeared first on Building for Power.

Pasco hernando DSA is back and now on instagram, with plenty of new members ready to organize! See us on instagram, twitter, and bluesky. Check the bottom of the website for the links!