Monthly Newsletter of the Rochester Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America

The post Rochester Red Star | November 2024 (Issue 07) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

WORCESTER — On October 24, the Clark University graduate workers union, affiliated with Teamsters Local 170, organized a panel of grad worker union activists from universities in Worcester and Boston to speak about their organizing experiences. Contract negotiations for Clark University Graduate Workers United (CUGWU) are set to begin in January, and the panel was held on Clark’s campus as part of CUGWU’s efforts to prepare its members.

The hosts of the event – two CUGWU shop stewards, including one Worcester DSA member –  introduced the panelists, started with opening questions, and then fielded questions from the audience on the successes and failures panelists have experienced in their respective unions’ contract campaigns.

Represented on the panel were CUGWU and the Worcester Polytechnic Institute Graduate Workers Union (WPI-GWU), which have bargaining units of around 150 and 600 members, respectively, and the grad worker unions at Boston University and MIT, which have upward of 3,500 and 5,000 members.

Building and Activating Membership

In large units, it’s not possible for a small group to form personal relationships with every grad worker. At MIT, for example, a large Organizing Committee (OC) breaks the workplace down into groups so individual OC members can focus their agitational efforts.

One-on-one organizing conversations are an integral part of this work, and they need to build trust in the union. They must center the struggles of the worker themselves, and should feel casual. The current president of MIT’s union, told the audience, “Don’t be a robot. If you go point-blank into union issues, people will struggle to come up with an answer. Ask how they’re doing, how classes are, what their advisor is like. You’d be surprised at how much people will reveal to you.”

These conversations are a constant necessity throughout a contract campaign and must continue after the contract is won. A founding member of CUGWU stressed the importance of continuing to have deep connections with the bargaining unit even after the contract is ratified. The contract will eventually expire and bargaining will begin again; organizers can’t lose that connection with their coworkers between contract campaigns.

Making these conversations empowering and educational for members can be a challenge. Jake, a member of Worcester DSA and an organizer in WPI-GWU, stressed that “People need to know that the union is not a service that is done for them, but a membership organization that they should engage in if they have an opinion on what the union should do.”

Bargaining Tactics

The panel shifted focus to the different democratic styles and bargaining tactics that their units have utilized.

A Boston DSA member who is an organizer in the BU Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) described not only the deep, ongoing work to build participation, but also unique structures in BUGWU that placed more power directly in members’ hands. In BUGWU, membership meetings, rather than the elected bargaining committee, have the authority to create proposal language.

Open bargaining can also be a tool to strengthen member democracy if wielded properly, but organizers can’t rely on an open invitation alone to draw in members. Negotiators at MIT needed to consistently go out to the membership themselves to collect feedback to bring back to the table.

Jake discussed the challenges of a brand new shop uncritically accepting the advice of union staff. Staff are great resources and are not enemies of the membership, he said, but their livelihood is dependent on the union, which has its own political dynamics. “They may be receiving pressure from their boss to do things a certain way,” and the merits and drawbacks of those methods might not be clear to new organizers if staff aren’t able to give them a complete picture.

Jake also commented on a breakdown of organizing practices, wherein practically all organizing work became concentrated in the bargaining committee. “This was easier than developing the membership, but you really need to diffuse the work to be effective.”

Strike Force

Panelists made clear that the withdrawal of labor is a union’s ultimate tool to win concessions from the employer.

When asked by the audience, “What are the most effective negotiation styles?” a panelist from BU quickly chimed in with one word: “Striking,” which received applause. She elaborated, saying that “the words exchanged during negotiations don’t matter. We had people be aggressive, and eloquent, and kind… but bargaining with the employer is not a dialogue. If you are trying to get the university to give up something that will meaningfully change your life, you have to force their hand.”

To that end, empowering and preparing the membership to strike is of primary importance. Organizers at MIT entered negotiations without an escalation strategy, but when the university showed skepticism that they could activate a unit of 5,000 members effectively, they soon realized strike readiness required thorough coordination. They created a six-month plan to convince members of why striking could be necessary and how strikes work. To build and test organizational strength, they ran 12-hour informational pickets, which stoked fear in the administration that thousands of workers were indeed ready to fight.

At WPI, on the other hand, the bargaining committee found itself ill-positioned to push a strike campaign forward late in the negotiation cycle because the proper groundwork had not been laid.

Successes

The panel concluded with panelists recalling the joys of standing in solidarity with their coworkers, knowing that they had fought together for the same purpose and won serious gains.

Some grad workers at Clark made as little as $15,000 per year before they won their first contract in 2022, and a CUGWU panelist recalled “bursting into tears on the picket line when word came down that we had gotten a contract… All that preparation we did from July into October was the hardest work I ever did as part of the organizing committee… the sheer joy of when it was finally over and we won; it was all worth it.”

Jake ended the final round of questions by noting that “There’s a long socialist tradition of posing questions about the American working class and whether it is capable of being activated in a revolutionary way. Antonio Gramsci had that good quote: ‘Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.’”

Trade unions are not inherently revolutionary or socialist in character, but the challenges of moving layers of the working class into struggle overlap, and it may often seem like nothing is working. But the satisfaction comes “when my two labmates say they’ll be on the elections committee… or when I talk to a first-year who says ‘I had no idea what this thing was until I heard you explain it to me and it made so much sense.’ These things do work, and this is why we do them. It’s a long process… but it’s supremely satisfying when you realize that you are doing this for a reason. It is going to work, and you just need to have faith that it’s going to work.”

Ivy Elliott is a member of the Worcester DSA Steering Committee.

Featured image credit: Shane Levett/Working Mass

Upcoming Events

Wednesday, October 30 (5:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Phonebank for Extreme Dean (In person at 1630 Haight)

Wednesday, October 30 (7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.): Organizing 102  (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, October 31 (5:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Phonebank for Extreme Dean (In person at 1630 Haight)

Thursday, October 31 (6:00 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.): Palestine Solidarity and Anti-Imperialist Working Group (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Friday, November 1 (12:00 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.): Office Hours (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Friday, November 1 (3:00 p.m. – 4:00 p.m.): No Appetite for Apartheid Canvass (Location TBD)

Saturday, November 2 – Tuesday, November 5 (9:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.): All Day Get Out the Vote with Team Jackie (In person at 3389 26th St)

Saturday, November 2 – Tuesday, November 5 (9:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m.): All Day Get Out the Vote with the Dean Team (In person at 1630 Haight)

Monday, November 4 (12:30 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.): No Appetite for Apartheid Canvass (In person at Le Beau Market, 1263 Leavenworth)

Monday, November 4 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Board Reading Group – Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry (Zoom)

Wednesday, November 6 (7:00 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): Board Game Night (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, November 7 (6:30 p.m. – 7:30 p.m.): Ecosocialist Monthly Meeting (In person at 1916 McAllister)

Thursday, November 7 (7:30 p.m. – 9:00 p.m.): Palestine and Socialism Study Group: Session 3 (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Saturday, November 9 (6:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Food Serve (Castro, location TBD)

Monday, November 11 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Homelessness Working Group Meeting (Zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister)

Monday, November 11 (6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Tenderloin Healing Circle (In person at 220 Golden Gate)

Monday, November 11 (7:00 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.): Labor Board Meeting (Zoom)

Check out https://dsasf.org/events for more events and updates.

Events & Actions

Organizing 102

Interested in learning about labor organizing or picking up organizing skills? Join us for our second session on labor organizing on Wednesday, October 30 at 7:00 p.m. at 1916 McAllister and on Zoom! 

We’ll be taking a closer look at what collective action looks like and how to prepare for pushback from the boss, as well as learning organizing skills that could be used outside the workplace.

Everyone is welcome even if you weren’t at the first session RSVP here.

Get Out the Vote

Join comrades on the Dean and Jackie campaigns for the final Get Out the Vote (GOTV) push this weekend! Starting this Saturday, October 2, we are getting out the vote across the entirety of Districts 5 and 9 for our endorsed candidates and reminding folks to vote yes on L for transit funding and yes on 5 and 33 for affordable housing and rent control.

Volunteer dispatching will be happening all day 9:00 a.m. until 8:00 p.m. every night on Saturday, Sunday, Monday and Election Day. We will be knocking on doors and making calls to remind folks to turn in their ballots and raising DSA’s profile with our own brochures promoting yes on Props 5 and 33. Our campaigns have been building up momentum for over a year and we are finally at the finish line. We are well positioned to finish strong across the city—only 20% of ballots have been submitted so far!

Limited edition merch is on the line! If you volunteer for an entire day, you’ll earn a 2024 Socialist Power Grab long sleeve t-shirt as a badge of honor to show off your contributions to the struggle.

Join at the Dean HQ at 1630 Haight St or the Jackie HQ at 3389 26th St to plug in. See you there!

Get Out in the Field and Get a T-Shirt!

If you’ve been considering doing some door-knocking but haven’t yet found the right motivation, let this be it! DSA SF is giving out free t-shirts exclusive to volunteers who meet either (or both!) of the following criteria:

• you’ve completed 6 field shifts for a candidate campaign between October 11th and election day on November 5th
• you’ve one a full day of Get Out the Vote work for one of our candidate campaigns in the days right before the election

T-shirts will be arriving soon, and we can’t wait to give them out, so let’s give it our all and show SF the power of socialist organizing and get this socialist power grab done!

Tenderloin Healing Circle

We’d like to invite you (yes, you!) to join the Tenderloin Healing Circle every 2nd and 4th Monday of the month! We serve food right before the meeting at 6:00 p.m., and meet from 6:30 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at 220 Golden Gate Avenue.

This is a free healing circle for the neighborhood. Join other Tenderloin folks for support, hope, and food. All are welcome. The venue is wheelchair accessible, bathrooms are available, and masks are encouraged.

No Appetite for Apartheid in SF!

Inspired by long-standing Palestinian boycott tactics and the BDS call, the Palestine Solidarity Anti-Imperialist Working Group are canvassing local stores and asking them to pledge to become Apartheid-Free by dropping products from companies complicit in the genocide of Palestinians and colonization of Palestine. It’s time to turn up the heat on this apartheid regime and take apartheid off our plates!

Want to show your support? Sign our Apartheid-Free Pledge so business owners know how popular this movement is with their local customers. After signing the pledge, we would love to see you at any of our upcoming campaign strategy sessions and canvassing days. Check dsasf.org/events for updates.

Behind the Scenes

The Chapter Coordination Committee (CCC) regularly rotates duties among chapter members. This allows us to train new members in key duties that help keep the chapter running like organizing chapter meetings, keeping records updated, office cleanup, updating the DSA SF website and newsletter, etc. Members can view current CCC rotations.

To help with the day-to-day tasks that keep the chapter running, fill out the CCC help form.

By the Editorial Board

At 1:45am on April 25, 2024, Boston Police and MA State Troopers stormed the peaceful pro-Palestine Emerson College student encampment and arrested students en masse.

Emerson student activists set up one of the nation’s first college campus Palestine encampments in the public alleyway to call attention to Israel’s genocide and devastation in Gaza and Emerson’s complicity.

Scandal-ensnared Emerson College President Jay Bernhardt’s decision to forcibly clear the alley in the dark overnight provoked fear and panic in students seeking to protect the encampment.

At 1:45am, dozens of riot police enclosed the alleyway and began ripping at students’ linked arms, slamming the youth to the ground, bloodying the brick and cuffing en masse.

The majority of students could not hear BPD’s 1:39am dispersal notice on the far Boylston Street end of the alleyway before droves of riot police swarmed the back of the alley and sealed all exit points for mass arrests.

Emerson President Jay Bernhardt and Boston Mayor Michelle Wu carried out the sweep in the middle of the night to minimize public scrutiny.

Were it not for volunteer reporters with Working Mass and student journalists, they may have succeeded. Instead, Working Mass and student videos exposed the brutal police raid, amassing hundreds of thousands of views online and appearing in major news publications.

Students were not the only ones subject to arrest. In violation of the freedom of the press, Boston Police indiscriminately arrested Working Mass journalist (and Emerson alum ‘16) Dan Abright who was filming on assignment. Albright was held overnight and charged with disorderly conduct, a criminal offense.

As of now, Suffolk County District Attorney Kevin Hayden is still pressing this unjust charge, although multiple video angles of the night’s events show Dan was filming when police kettled the alley and cuffed him without reason.

Boston Police’s brute force razing of the Emerson encampment is an alarming attack on the rights to free assembly, speech and press, and a dark blight on Mayor Wu’s supposedly progressive administration.

Since April 25, Emerson College has doubled down its suppression of political speech, canceling its long-running and popular Bright Lights film screening series, firing its programmer for political activity and revoking students’ rights to freely protest and assemble on campus.

Tell Mayor Wu and DA Hayden: Drop all charges remaining related to the police raid on the peaceful Emerson College Palestine encampment.

Court support is needed tomorrow 10/30 starting at 9am at Boston Municipal Court, 24 New Chardon St, 5th floor! Join us to support the rights to free speech, assembly and free press!

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass. This article was originally a public statement issued by Mass-Care, the Massachusetts Campaign for Single Payer Health Care. Republished with permission.

By Kimberley Connors

The Boston Globe editorial, “Wanted: local, nonprofit operator for Norwood Hospital” (10/22/24) puts forward a good explanation of why Norwood Hospital should be reopened.

Norwood Hospital was temporarily shut down because of a massive flood, and because of mismanagement by Steward Healthcare, it remains half rebuilt.

The solution is clear. The State should take Norwood Hospital by eminent domain from Medical Properties Trust and run it as a community hospital.

We should have no compunctions about taking the property from MPT as it was Steward Hospital’s partner in mismanagement and corporate greed. 

The Constitution of Massachusetts states the purpose of state government:

“The end of the institution, maintenance, and administration of government, is to secure the existence of the body politic, to protect it, and to furnish the individuals who compose it with the power of enjoying in safety and tranquility their natural rights, and the blessings of life.”

Providing health care to Massachusetts residents clearly falls within this opening paragraph of our constitution. Easily accessible good health care is key to providing “safety, tranquility and the blessings of life” for the people of the Commonwealth. Certainly this is justification enough for seizing the property. 

Eminent domain is not an unusual or uncommon exercise of a right of a public body. Property is taken for the common good in many circumstances, past and present. Roads, bridges, schools, by cities, towns, and other public bodies are the obvious examples of property taking.

We have learned from the Steward disaster that providing health care via profit making corporations doesn’t work. In 2015 the legislature eased restrictions on privatizing portions of the MBTA; how did that work out? A disaster that the MBTA is still digging itself out from.

But should Norwood Hospital be run by a non-profit corporation?

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is the real non-profit corporation. Many of the supposedly “non-profit” corporations that run hospitals in Massachusetts are really just “for profit” entities in disguise. 

For example Baystate Health in Western Mass. is a “non-profit” but spends $2.6 million per year on its CEO and has been cutting services in its Franklin County hospital in Greenfield. Patients are forced to drive 40 to 60 miles to Springfield for routine treatment. In 2016 Baystate had $100 million stashed away in offshore accounts in the Cayman Islands.

Can the State run a hospital? Yes, it already does. The Department of Public Health successfully runs four institutions in Massachusetts.

• Lemuel Shattuck Hospital, Jamaica Plain, a 225-bed acute care hospital;
• Pappas Rehabilitation Hospital for Children, Canton, care to children and young adults with multiple disabilities;
• Tewksbury Hospital, Tewksbury, a 370-bed hospital for adults with medical and/or mental illness;
• Western Massachusetts Hospital, Westfield, an 87-bed long-term acute care hospital.

Can Massachusetts afford it?  While it would cost the State to take the unfinished Norwood Hospital from its current owner, as the Globe points out, Gov. Healey has said, “For too long, MPT has put their greed before the health and well-being of the people of Massachusetts.”  The “Rainy Day” Fund of Massachusetts had a balance of $8.831 billion as of August 9, 2024, clearly enough to buy and finish building Norwood Hospital.

As the Globe also says, Norwood Hospital was a profitable operation in the past, another reason for the State to take it over and run it.

Finally we see that health care in general is under significant threat in Massachusetts. We need a fundamental change in how health care is financed and run. There is a bill in the House and Senate, the Massachusetts Medicare for All Bill, which would solve many of the problems of health care in Massachusetts. It would 

• save billions of dollars by eliminating insurance companies and by negotiating prices with drug companies;
• carry out studies of where and what kind of health care is needed by people;
• eliminate co-pays and deductibles;
• have the power to make sure all residents of Massachusetts have equal access to quality health care. 

Ask your Senators and Representatives to sign on to An Act Establishing Medicare for All in Massachusetts.

Contact: Kimberley Connors, Executive Director, Mass-Care, 617-297-8011

Democratic Socialists of America – Los Angeles chapter condemn Mayor Bass’ nomination of former sheriff Jim McDonnell for LAPD Chief.

Los Angeles, CA (October 28, 2024) – The Democratic Socialists of America – Los Angeles chapter (DSA–LA) condemns the nomination of former Sheriff Jim McDonnell to Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department and urges the Los Angeles City Council and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass to reject and withdraw the nomination.

As Los Angeles County Sheriff from 2014 to 2018, McDonnell advanced and embraced anti-immigrant policies and actively colluded with former President Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), directly harming thousands of Angelenos. Modern Los Angeles is a city that proudly embraces and protects immigrants, documented and undocumented, a sentiment that Mayor Bass expressed when radical anti-immigrant politician Governor Greg Abbott bussed immigrants from Texas to Los Angeles last summer. Since then, radical anti-immigrant rhetoric has only grown bolder among the far-right Republican Party, with GOP nominee Donald Trump using eliminationist rhetoric to discuss immigrants in the United States. Mayor Bass must not appoint to the Los Angeles Police Department a Chief whose decades-long career indicates he will collude with the far-right to oppress, terrorize, and deport our neighbors.

Prior to his election to County Sheriff, McDonnell served as second-in-command to Police Chief Bill Bratton, who popularized the “broken windows” theory of policing, a harmful methodology that intensifies racial and class biases in policing. As sheriff, McDonnell’s active collusion with ICE went above and beyond the legal requirements of his position, going out of his way to use county funding to transfer County residents and databases to ICE. He rejected policy efforts to protect Californian immigrants during his tenure and continued to do so under the radically anti-immigrant Trump presidency. Further, as Black Lives Matter L.A. points out, under Sheriff McDonnell, the power of deputies’ unlawful and murderous gangs grew, and the horrific conditions at the County Jail worsened.

Sheriff McDonnell’s failure to curb his department’s abuses was protested by DSA Los Angeles and many of our pro-immigrant allies in 2017 and 2018, and his failure to modify his racist and anti-immigrant policies paved the way for his corrupt, violent, and gang-enabling successor Alex Villanueva. 

We urge Mayor Bass to withdraw McDonnell’s nomination. Should she fail to do so, we urge the members of Los Angeles City Council to reject Jim McDonnell’s nomination and to take all available steps to prevent his policies from harming Angelenos.

Finally, we invite concerned residents of Los Angeles County to attend upcoming City Council meetings to oppose Sheriff McDonnell’s appointment, beginning with the Council Public Safety meeting at City Hall on Tuesday, October 29th at 3:30 pm. 

# # #

About DSA

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the largest socialist organization in the United States. DSA’s members are building progressive movements for social change while establishing a democratic socialist presence in American communities and politics.

At the root of our socialism is a profound commitment to democracy, as means and end. DSA fights for reforms today that will weaken the power of corporations and increase the power of working people, so that we can enact systematic change and build a better, socialist world. 

To learn more about Democratic Socialism, check out the Q&A page from the national DSA website.