For the past 2 years, our DSA chapter has attended Rock Hill Pride to show solidarity with our queer comrades and share with the broader queer community how queer liberation and socialism are intertwined. 

We recently learned that Rock Hill Pride has hired Shane Windmeyer, aka drag performer Buff Faye, to headline the Pride festival. Windmeyer is the former CEO of Campus Pride. QNotes has reported and Campus Pride officers confirmed that he embezzled over $100,000 in Campus Pride funds, spending money that should’ve gone to building queer friendly spaces to instead build his personal drag performing business.

As socialists, we recognize that bosses dominate our working lives, the resources of our communities, and through this, the public life of our society. The LGBTQ+ community is no different. Socialists organize with our community to reclaim this power and our lives, and it starts by organizing to hold particularly bad bosses in our community accountable. Following a deep discussion with our membership and The Charlotte Gaymers Network (CGN), our leadership voted to join CGN’s calls for vendors to pull support from Rock Hill Pride, so long as Buff Faye skirts public accountability and remains employed by the festival. We hope that Windmeyer can make amends with Campus Pride and the local queer community so that we can stay united at a time of growing hate against queer people.

We do not take it lightly when we call on our members, the community, and other vendors to boycott Rock Hill Pride this year. We recognize that, while Rock Hill Pride and most local Pride events are funded and controlled by corporations and the non-profits they fund, they are refuges for our queer comrades. Our members found solace, joy, and community there in past years and are disappointed they can’t in good conscience attend. But we build our own community. That is why we recommend y’all check out events from queer community groups like CGN and T4T, or other Pride in the area unaffiliated with Rock Hill Pride. Our chapter will be tabling at Salisbury Pride on June 22nd and will host a post-Pride new & prospective member meeting on June 26th and a Socialist Social June 27th! Check out our events calendar for more details!

Happy Pride,

Charlotte Metro DSA

We are pleased to announce that, at our chapter-wide General Assembly in April, members of our chapter overwhelmingly voted in support of a resolution that reinforces DSA San Diego as an anti-Zionist organization both in principle and in practice. The adopted resolution explicitly defines anti-Zionist expectations for both our membership and endorsed candidates. As a [...]

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It is with tremendous pride that we announce that Mexico has made history with the election of Claudia Sheinbaum as Mexico’s next president. Not only has Sheinbaum broken the glass ceiling to become the country’s first female president, she has done so with a wholehearted embrace of the progressive platform of social and economic justice championed by our comrades at MORENA.

Sheinbaum – a descendent of Bulgarian Jews who fled the Holocaust – has earned her way to history through a remarkable career as a student activist, physicist, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, and finally, an effective politician. Her 30-point victory on May 2 is a resounding vote of confidence that comes from Mexicans of all regions and abroad. MORENA has a resounding mandate with victories in 24 of the 31 governorships and supermajorities in both houses of Congress. These victories amidst an unprecedented amount of political violence and an extreme drought demonstrate Mexicans’ unwavering support for the profound program of social and economic justice and development known as the Fourth Transformation (‘Cuarta Transformacion’ or ‘4T’).

MORENA also retained the Jefa de Gobernatura with the victory of Clara Brugada who. Brugada will succeed Sheinbaum as the chief executive for the entire Mexico City region. Sheinbaum previously succeeded current president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in that position. Brugada began her career as a militant member of the Zapatista Movement before serving as mayor of Iztapalapa from 2009-12. During which, she successfully oversaw an expansion of transit infrastructure, the opening of cultural centers called ‘utopias’, and reduced crime. 

DSA proudly participated as credentialed election observers for this historic moment and helped verify that the election was conducted freely and fairly as part of a large cadre of electoral observers from across the Americas and Europe. This is the fifth election in Latin America that DSA has participated as invited observers since 2021, demonstrating our organization’s growing integration with the Latin American Left. We look forward to continuing and expanding our delegation work for the benefit of our members and the region. 

The DSA delegation also held preliminary discussions with MORENA as well as with various sectors of Mexico’s organized labor for future collaborations that would mutually benefit members of both organizations and provide a political alternative to the current state of US-Mexican relations. 

¡Que viva la 4T!

¡Que viva la democracia, las mujeres, y el pobre!

The post Progressive Feminists Break Mexico’s Glass Ceiling appeared first on DSA International Committee.

by Sara G.

Austin Socialist News Bulletin – May 2024

At the end of April, we had comrades in jail for peacefully speaking up for Palestine, while other comrades served as legal counsel, marshaled protests, and waited around the clock at Travis County jail to greet released prisoners with hot coffee and provide rides home.The violence of the University of Texas, Austin Police Department, Greg Abbott and DPS deeply affected our community and left little time for writing a monthly roundup. We didn’t stop our organizing, though, and had a May full of activities in support of Palestine and workers. We also held our yearly chapter convention and inaugurated a new Leadership Committee who will continue the struggle for the next year.

In the past month…

• We kicked off the month with our second annual May Day Job Fair. Ten unions were on site to talk to job applicants about the work they do, how to get hired, and how to help develop more union density and militancy in Austin. When it started misting, we threw up a tent to cover the bands and played on. We munched on giant grilled burritos and listened to local bands Ama, Medieval Snails, Pony Soprano, Provoked Emotions, and Gummy Fang and had an all around great time.

• As part of the Austin for Palestine coalition, we participated in the 76th remembrance of Nakba Day at the Capitol, and the emergency protest for Rafah. Members continue to pressure the City Council at each council meeting to stand up for Palestine.

• Alongside the Council for American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), DSA is suing Greg Abbott to challenge Executive Order GA-44, which targets protestors supporting Palestine and suppresses our rights to speech and assembly. We strive to take our fight for Palestine to every front.

• Our most recent reading group studied Comrade: An Essay on Political Belonging by Jodi Dean at Alienated Majesty. We discussed how to shift from an “ally” to a “comrade” mindset where we are all responsible and accountable to one another. Our next study group is in conjunction with the Austin Against Apartheid campaign, starting with Max Ajl’s 2023 article “Palestine’s Great Flood, Part 1.”

• We continued to support workers, participating in the Food Service Workers picket line at Meta and showing up for Integral care workers to demand Just Cause termination and an employee ombudsmen. Nationally, DSA is supporting the workers of UAW 4811 who are striking in response to the University of California’s harsh response to pro-Palestinian protests, and DSA Labor is matching donations to their hardship fund.

The post Austin Socialist News Bulletin first appeared on Red Fault.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
May 29, 2024

MADISON, WI – America’s Credit Unions (formerly “Credit Union National Association, Inc.”) has informed the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) Local 39 of its intent to eliminate lay off up to 30% of the workforce at its headquarters in Madison. America’s Credit Unions is the result of the merger between Madison’s CUNA and its primary competitor, National Association of Federally-Insured Credit Unions (NAFCU).

The Company filed a notice with the Department of Workforce Development on January 12, 2024, cc’ing City of Madison Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway: “This is a difficult decision, and we appreciate any assistance you may provide to our employees in this difficult period with their job search and transition.”

America’s Credit Unions refused to meet or provide any details to OPEIU 39, the employees’ Union, until April. At a second meeting in May, the Company announced that it had completed a reorganization, and that position eliminations and layoffs were “imminent”. OPEIU 39 has been committed to maintaining quality jobs in the community.

Jillian Crubel, a Conference Specialist and union member, said, “Trying to understand how layoffs will impact us has been exhausting. Union-represented employees have been asking management for information about layoffs for months. The organization has been purposely withholding while at the same time putting a target on the union’s back.”

Executive Vice President Jill Tomalin explained the reduction was necessary in anticipation of a shortfall of up to $12 million. “They’re making cuts to workers while their tax returns show that they’re paying CEO Jim Nussle over $2.5 million,” said Andy Sernatinger, Business Representative for OPEIU 39. “They could keep everyone employed and Nussle would still be a millionaire.”

America’s Credit Unions has retained attorneys from Littler Mendelson, a law firm specializing in “union avoidance”. Littler is renowned for representing companies like Starbucks and Amazon, who face scores of unfair labor practice complaints in front of the National Labor Relations Board. Littler charges clients up to $1000/hour for its services.

Sarah Shepler, Chief Steward for the Union, added, “For months, we have sought to engage America’s Credit Unions in meaningful dialogue regarding the announced 25-30% reduction in the workforce. Despite our repeated attempts, America’s Credit Unions has persistently refused to provide critical documents requested through information requests and has continually avoided scheduling necessary meetings. It signifies a stark departure from the cultural equality that CUNA had diligently established over the years.”

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FOR MORE INFORMATION CONTACT:
Andrew Sernatinger – Business Representative, OPEIU 39 asernatinger@opeiu39.org | 608-572-7947

For over five and half years and 220+ episodes, we here at Revolutions Per Minute have brought the voices of activists and organizers fighting for a better world to the listeners of WBAI. Tonight, we dig into the show’s archives to hear some of those interviews through the years. Each of the interviews you will hear tonight, in their own ways, exemplify the different dimensions of our show, the members of our collective, and showcase the perspectives that you won’t hear anywhere else. Ultimately, this is a show about the RPM difference.  

 

Segments Used from Past Episodes:  

1- PSC and New Deal for CUNY

2- Build Public Renewables Act

3- Kansas DSA and Protecting Abortion Rights

4- The Bronx Fires

5- Palestinian Solidarity in the UAW

 

We in Houston DSA stand in unwavering solidarity with our brave public-school teachers as they choose to risk their careers to stand up to the inhumane treatment of students, teachers, […]

The post Houston DSA Stands with HISD Teachers During Their Sickout appeared first on Houston DSA.

Jeff Wells joins the podcast to talk with us about the new book he coedited: Preaching the Uncontrolling Love of God: Sermons, Essays, and Worship Elements from the Perspective of Open, Relational, and Process Theology. Purchase his book! https://www.amazon.com/Preaching-Uncontrolling-Love-God-Perspective/dp/1958670324 To speak with Jeff or join the mailing list, contact jefferywells.love@gmail.com Join us October 17–19 in Denver for theologybeer.camp ! Use the coupon code TAKEHEARTHOBBIT for $50 off your ticket. Sign up before June 1 for reduced ticket prices. Email us at religioussocialism@gmail.com if you plan to come, we'd love to meet up.

After seizing control of an Alexandria city council meeting, Northern Virginia locals introduced and passed their own resolution calling for an end to Israel's genocide.

At the start of the COVID pandemic, AC Transit cut bus service dramatically. The District has been slow in spending budgeted funds toward restoring cuts because it lacks the workforce to operate additional service. The same hiring and retention crisis faces many other transit agencies, and impacts other sectors like education and healthcare, as well. 

At AC Transit, one of the major drivers of the retention crisis is bus schedules that don’t build in enough time to ensure workers get a break to stretch, use the bathroom, or eat a meal. Nathaniel Arnold, vice president of Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 192, spoke at the April 24 board meeting about the dire situation, expressing the union’s frustration that the agency has “not been putting the time on the runs that they said that they were going to,” and adding, “We’ll be able to retain our workforce by also making better working conditions for them so that they don’t leave.”

AC Transit’s board has called a special meeting on Wednesday, June 5, as part of its service realignment initiative. The issue of schedules that don’t work for bus operators and are unreliable for riders will be a major topic of discussion. A petition for workers and riders is circulating this month, and the union is calling on its members, and riders who support them, to turn out on June 5.

Majority spoke with ATU 192 member, AC Transit bus operator and assistant shop steward Jack Watkins about the stakes in the struggle for better schedules. – The Editors

Majority: What’s the problem with the schedules? What impacts are they having on you and your co-workers as bus operators?

Jack Watkins: The schedules are designed to be unsustainable. They’re designed to place subliminal stress onto the driver to where we internalize the necessity to make it to the end of the line [on time], with the implicit understanding that we know that it’s not possible to do safely. And that gets coupled with the [AC Transit] District constantly putting out “drive safely, drive safely,” to cover themselves. They put up paperwork and memos around driving safely, but then they create schedules and cut time off of the schedules, and create a situation where they know that it’s impossible to do that, and they expect us to silently adhere to that, to walk that impossible tightrope. And that eats into our mental health, our physical health and the way that we’re able to show up for the community.

Majority: Talk more about the impacts on the drivers.

JW: Most simply, we are pressured to strategize when and how to step away from the bus and take a moment to breathe. When we get to the end of the line, we’re often feeling that pressure of calculating to the minute how much time we have to find a bathroom, use the bathroom, come back from the bathroom and get back to that bus. So that we can make that next trip on time. The same regarding our ability to take breaks to recover mentally, to have water, and to have food. I know drivers that say that they don’t get the opportunity to eat their lunch so often that they’ve stop packing lunches. And then when they get off work late they end up stopping to get some fast food on the way home which negatively affects their bodies. With us having a sedentary job, we do try to plan for our mental and physical health needs, and that gets undermined by trying to maintain the schedule because even if we pack a salad or something that is nutritionally beneficial to us, we are often unable to eat it and we find ourselves eating when we get off work late at night, which throws off any healthy routine.

And also our mental health is messed up because we do a good amount of mental math at all times in addition to driving: our brain power is used up doing math to figure out how long it’s gonna take to get from one time point to the next time point. “I have to make it from Seminary and MacArthur down to MacArthur and Fruitvale in five minutes. How can I do that?” Driving safely and doing that is impossible. On a busy day or even at nighttime, it’s impossible to make it that many miles in five minutes with the lights and all that stuff while trying to drive safely. Calculating the risk-reward with me running through this yellow light? Keeping our heads on the swivel looking out for other cars driving around us and making sure that we maintain a safe distance from other vehicles. How fast are we trying to pull off from red lights or stop signs? We’re compromising all of these safety aspects, trying to maintain the schedules which is unreasonable. And it’s this pressure that goes unaddressed.  Management functions in a space where they’re able to pretend it doesn’t exist. 

Majority: How do the unsustainable schedules affect your riders? 

JW: Bus drivers make decisions to pass up passengers, particularly disabled passengers, passengers in wheelchairs. Not a week goes by that I don’t have somebody in a wheelchair that says the last bus passed them up. I believe that is a calculation that the bus drivers are making based on trying to maintain time.  Every day, a passenger says “hey, this bus passed me up,” if not the bus directly in front of me a bus earlier today or a bus on a different line. 

In addition to the way that we treat the passengers when they get on the bus with a pocketful of change, the immediate reaction to every bus driver that I know when they think about a passenger with a bunch of pennies is,  “oh man, they’re so slow,” and that in itself is evidence that they’re thinking about the speed at which they can operate the bus. And the passengers feel that; we treat the passengers like they’re a nuisance or we treat them like we’re rushing them. When I talk to passengers about my personal actions they talk to me about how they wish bus drivers were nicer to them, or they wish that bus drivers would take more time with them. The passengers regularly will apologize preemptively about doing regular things because they have been mentally trained to feel like by default they are going to be an inconvenience to the bus driver. 

Majority: How do the schedules impact attendance by operators? 

JW: We get burned out. I said to myself the other day, “Man, I wish I could call off today. I’m tired. Oh man, this day was really really stressful for me.” And a sizable amount of that stress comes from the constant act of doing all this math, finding these shortcuts, risk-reward, safety measures, all in effort to maintain these schedules. In addition to driving the bus, traffic, passengers, mental health, all of these things. That pressure from the schedules is making a job that’s already difficult, far more difficult.  And so people decide, “hey, I might not even have any hours available to take off but I’m calling off because I CAN NOT do this tomorrow.” And that’s when people have to make a difficult decision between their mental health and their ability to feed their families. And that’s a position none of us should have to be forced in to. And sometimes they end up making the decision to just come in to work because we need the money, but ultimately in a largely unfit position to drive the bus that day. And then, they may get into an accident or burn out one way or another, cuss somebody out and end up getting some type of disciplinary response. Because of the way that they’ve responded to the stresses, they get a one day suspension or whatever, and those things can certainly be mitigated through designing these schedules with operators in mind. 

Majority: What are the impacts on riders when an operator calls off due to stress? And what about longer-term absences like when they are injured or have kidney disease?

When people are out on injury or health reasons, that’s difficult. Because there is a culture that I believe has been created that automatically assumes that the people who are out on injury are not being honest about their injuries. When I hear people talk about injury, they say “no, no, it’s legitimate. I wish I didn’t have to do this but I have to go out because my shoulder is in so much pain.”  If somebody’s out and they don’t have enough people to cover that shift, then that bus just won’t show up and then somebody’s waiting for an extra 20 minutes. And things like repetitive motion injury is a regular part of the job. But I think a lot of injuries are exacerbated by our schedules being so awful. And then that ends up affecting everybody.

East Bay DSA stands in solidarity with ATU 192’s contract fight in 2019. (Photo: Keith Brower Brown)

Majority: What needs to be done to fix this?

JW: We need better schedules. The District creates the schedules. And they’re creating them knowing that they’re not sustainable, but also knowing that drivers have been internalizing the stress and the pressure to adhere to the schedules.  The District uses these metrics around “is the bus physically making it to the location on time?” Without any care or consideration for the internalized pressure. They value the bus making it to the end of the line, but not the driver making it happen.  And the way that operators can push back is by rejecting that internalized pressure. “Hey, I know you want me to do this job in this way, according to the schedule, but it is impossible.” We must show management how impossible it is. I think operators need to be vocal about it, and they need to move to action by following not the schedule itself, but following the safety protocols primarily. And I think that would make it harder for the district to justify their schedule cuts. A lot of passengers do have consideration for bus drivers driving safely.  The way that bus drivers will be able to show the District, management, and the board of directors the severity of the unsustainable schedules is by taking that power back, rejecting the internalized stress that the management and district puts on our shoulders. That’s how we use our power as bus drivers to show them that “hey, I understand that you’re telling me to do these contradictory things. But you’re paying me to drive this bus safely – and not even paying well enough to do that – the labor that you’re asking me for contractually is in regards to driving this bus safely, not in regards to doing these mental gymnastics and mathematical calculations on how I can thread an impossible needle.”

Majority: How can your riders support ATU workers in this struggle?

JW: The riders can can show up with us to the AC Transit board meeting on June 5. They can sign the petition asking the board to meet drivers’ needs by fixing the schedules to address our harsh working conditions. But mainly by showing up to the board meetings and speaking out to let the board of directors know about the conditions of the bus drivers and how that affects their ability to get where they need to go reliably. Riders can tell the board the conditions that they see for the bus drivers and how that translates to them. 

Members of the community can speak out at the AC Transit Board Meeting on June 5, 2024, at 5pm. The meeting will be held at AC Transit’s Oakland headquarters, at 1600 Franklin Street, second floor.