Season '23 Overview
Doing a Repair: Meditations on an Ordinary Experience
Member Bruce Nissen shares a story about repairing his air fryer, and what it can teach us about capitalism and global exploitation.
The other day our air fryer had a minor breakdown. The drawer that you pull out of the main body to put in food was becoming loose and a machine screw was missing. Here’s what the entire thing, drawer and the container pan that holds it, looks like:
If you look at this closely, you can see that it is an inner drawer where you place the food, and an outside container that holds it. The problem was the outer container. Here’s a picture without the inner drawer in it:
If you look carefully at this outside container pan (taken after I fixed it), you can see two screws which attach the outside cover and the inner pan. At the time, one of these two screws was missing. At first, I thought I would just find a similar size screw, screw it in, and be done. However, when I did that, the screw didn’t engage with anything; you could turn it clockwise forever freely and nothing was happening. The screw would fall right back out.
I could hear something rattling around inside the front cover and soon realized that these screws connected with nuts that were inside the cover. One of the nuts had come loose, the screw had fallen out and was lost, while the nut was still trapped inside the cover. My only hope of fixing it would require me to disassemble the cover itself.
If you look carefully at the last picture, you can also see two much smaller screws that are helping to hold the two pieces of the front cover together. I removed those two screws — not enough. Then I found two more identical screws down at the bottom and removed them. Still not enough. Then I noticed 6 extremely tiny screws (3 on each side) that also connected the two parts of the outer cover. I took them out and finally was able to separate the two parts of the outer cover. Sure enough, a loose nut was rattling around in the cavity between the outer and inner walls of the front cover.
As I was going through this elaborate job of removing layer after layer of screws just to get to the inside of the front cover, I was thinking to myself, “What’s with this? Why this elaborate and intricate assembly of parts? It’s ridiculous. Why would they design something like this?” I was also thinking was that it was a good thing I did not do this kind of work for a living — I was thorough but way too slow to ever last as an employee. Any repair company would require much faster work so they could get me on to the next profitable job. It reminded me of my dad who lost several jobs as a welder because he did a thorough quality job of welding but not rapidly enough to suit the employer’s speed requirements.
I put the nut back into its designated cubbyhole, reattached the six tiny screws, put in the four screws, and finally inserted a suitable size/length/thread screw to replace the missing one. It engaged with the reinserted nut and screwed in tight. I was done! Repair completed! I felt proud of myself but noted that it had taken close to two hours to do the job, most of it sifting through my mason jar of random screws accumulated through the years to find the exact right size and length and thread of screw. Job done well but not efficiently.
I was still puzzling why the construction of the container pan and its outside front cover had been so complicated. It reminded me of an experience back in the mid-1970s when I was trying to help the United Electrical Workers Union (UE) organize shops in New Jersey. I applied for jobs at numerous places, both UE-represented shops and unorganized shops they hoped to organize in the future. I was first hired at a non-union shop at minimum wage. I was what later became known as a “salt” — someone taking a job in a nonunion workplace to aid a union in beginning an organizing drive.
The shop assembled electronic parts for some final product that I’ve long since forgotten about. Our job was to sit all day assembling an intricate array of circuit boards, washers, wires, nuts, etc. It was not an assembly line — each person individually did each product (or component) according to a choreographed routine. Over and over. Over and over. I especially remember that some wire posts required two washers, some required one, and some none. It was all very confusing, and I made repeated mistakes at this allegedly unskilled minimum wage job.
The job was abysmal. Almost all the workers were Black or Hispanic or Asian. A majority were women. The foremen were white men. I lasted at that job approximately one week because a UE-represented union shop called and offered me a job at double the wages and a much more relaxed atmosphere. I jumped at that offer and thus began my career in union activities.
At the time of my one-week job, companies doing that kind of minimum-wage work were going out of business because their work was being outsourced to China or Mexico or Central American countries. They had only survived in business because they offered extremely cheap labor, but even cheaper labor was becoming available elsewhere in the world.
This repair job led to a Eureka! moment when I realized that the air fryer’s front cover is designed to require manually tightening numerous screws because labor is so cheap (in some parts of the world) that it is economical to require more repetitive manual labor than it is to expend any more money on better design or different materials. If work was paid decently around the world, these products would be designed very differently. I looked to see where my air fryer had been assembled and sure enough, there it was: designed in California and built in China.
If you repair a household appliance with an enquiring and analytical mindset, there’s a lot to ponder. You might develop insights into the structure of worldwide capitalism and the exploitative conditions under which many of our consumer products are produced. Ditto for how our capitalist consumer culture discards people like my father who did high quality work but not at a fast assembly line pace. Our mass production worldwide economic system fails some segments of humanity even as it provides ever-higher levels of mass consumption for growing numbers. As Karl Marx noted, capitalism is a progressive force compared to earlier economic systems, but it is an exploitative system at its core and should be replaced by a more humane system that is centered on people, not private profit. Who would have thought that repairing a household appliance could illustrate all this? For me, it did!
GEO is Fighting for You
By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso
The Graduate Employees’ Organization (GEO), the graduate worker union at the University of Michigan, is currently in the process of bargaining with the university to obtain a new contract for the upcoming three-year contract cycle. Despite months of ongoing negotiations, the university has left the union with little if anything to work with thus far. It wasn’t until earlier this year that their Human Resources (HR) representatives agreed to allow open bargaining, a process by which all graduate workers — as well as invited guests affected by the negotiation process — are allowed to attend bargaining sessions in-person/virtually alongside the union negotiators themselves. This is a substantial win for GEO, as open bargaining allows for a comprehensive viewing of the negotiation process, giving grad workers and other stakeholders the chance to see their futures deliberated on first-hand. However, with this victory coming in the middle of January, little time remains to conduct actual bargaining, as the deadline to finalize a contract with HR is March 1. What’s more, the union’s demands have been almost entirely rejected by the university, with its central editorial mouthpiece, The Michigan Daily, even referring to them as “unreasonable and extravagant”. Under such circumstances, it has become paramount to clarify and emphasize one outstanding point: GEO’s current contract campaign — and by extension, its rich history of labor organizing — is not just about the betterment of graduate worker life; it is a fight for the rights and dignity of our university and city-wide communities at large.
Talks of union contracts often begin with mentions of pay and working conditions. GEO’s campaign is no different in this regard. According to the MIT Living Wage Calculator, a living wage in Ann Arbor amounts to an annual salary of approximately $38,537. As it stands, graduate workers at the university earn approximately $24,053 annually for their labor, meaning that a $14,484 gap exists between the compensation graduate workers are currently receiving and that which they require to survive. Perhaps this is why 1 out of every 10 graduate workers at the university worry about having enough food to eat and another 1 out of every 6 would not be able to incur a spontaneous $500 emergency expense. The same is true for working conditions. GEO is currently demanding a discussion section class size cap of 18, as larger class sizes mean burdensome workloads for graduate workers and lackluster educational experiences for students as a result. Moreover, a lack of agency pertaining to COVID policies has left many grad students — especially those with disabilities and/or immunodeficiency disorders — without recourse in the event of a nearby contamination, as the university does not currently grant Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) the ability to require masking nor pivot to a virtual modality if need be.
However, it is when one moves beyond these two areas of demands that GEO’s contract campaign truly begins to encapsulate the university and broader Ann Arbor communities. As a union that engages in “bargaining for the common good”, GEO stands out as an organization that uses the contract negotiation process to its advantage, leveraging worker-specific demands alongside asks that speak to the needs of its surrounding communities. Examples of this dynamic abound, but two outstanding manifestations are its calls for paid positions to establish a Disability Culture Center as well as a community-based, unarmed non-police emergency response team. In solidarity with disabled university community members — and in support of Central Student Government’s (CSG) campaign to establish a Disability Culture Center — GEO has decided to take the conversation of on-campus disability justice a step further by proposing paid positions for those spearheading these efforts. Similarly, the union acknowledges the inherent danger posed to BIPOC students, faculty, and staff by a robust police presence and law enforcement-based response to on-campus emergencies. As such, they’ve reiterated the vision put forth by the Coalition for Re-envisioning Our Safety (CROS) and demanded that the university contribute funds of its own to finance this community-centered approach to public safety across Washtenaw County. Beyond these asks, GEO has also championed trans-inclusive/gender-affirming healthcare, parent/caregiver accommodations, and harassment/discrimination protections with their demands.
This isn’t a new course of action for the union, either. GEO has a rich history of pushing the envelope when it comes to individual and community-level changemaking. Officially certified in 1974, GEO was one of the first unions to represent graduate student workers in the country. In the mid-1980s, the union won a formal recognition of Affirmative Action from the university alongside tuition waivers for Teaching Assistants (TAs). The 1990s and 2000s similarly featured victories in International GSI compensation and trans-inclusive health benefits, respectively. Since then, GEO has worked to fortify the university’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives and has maintained an unwavering commitment to organizing efforts and collective power building, even as conservative state-level decision making — such as the “Right to Work” legislation approved by Republicans in 2012 — seeks to hinder their progress.
So where does this leave us? Well, it leaves us with a comprehensive contract campaign — formulated by hundreds of grad workers over an extended period of time — chalk full of reasonable and necessary demands that improve the lives of graduate workers as well as those of our university and Ann Arbor communities. As we close out the month of February and approach March 1, we cannot forget that the success of this campaign relies not just on the efforts of the union, but on the solidarity of every university community member and ally, working alongside GEO to make these demands a reality.
To show your support, sign the “I Stand With U-M Grad Workers” letter and remain up to date on campaign happenings via GEO’s social media platforms which can be found @geo3550.
GEO is Fighting for You was originally published in The Michigan Specter on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
Abolition Zine Resource Page
References
Statistics on Racial Disparities: Sentencing Project, The Vera Institute, MacArthur Foundation
U.S. Ranking in Incarceration Rates vs. The World: Prison Policy Initiative
Incarceration Rates in Colorado by Geography (heatmaps), including breakdowns by ZIP codes
The private contractor families blame for deaths in El Paso County CJC
Suicide and mental health disparities in El Paso County CJC
The complete list of CJC deaths in 2022
The growth of jails in the U.S. - and how they are harming our communities
A Reuter’s investigative report on deaths in jails nationwide
66% of the people who died in jails from 2009-2019 were awaiting trial - meaning they were never convicted of a crime
How for-profit “community corrections” facilities set parolees up for failure and contribute to high recidivism
Report on recidivism rates state-by-state
Out of Reach Colorado Housing Prices (report by the National Low Income Housing Coalition)
Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) in jails & prisons*
Mental illness in jails and prisons nationwide
The mental health impacts of incarceration
*The original ACE study was racist. Check out this resource instead.
Police Brutality in Colorado Springs
De’Von Bailey murdered by CSPD after being stopped for a false report
CSPD murders a 63-year-old man having a mental health crisis
CSPD Excessive force against a 17-year-old girl
CSPD Excessive force and violent language against Colorado Springs Black Lives Matter protestors in summer 2020
Club Q
The Club Q shooter’s 2021 terrorism
How the D.A. and Judge failed to prevent the shooting at Club Q
Low enforcement of red flag laws in Colorado
Preliminary Hearings that presented evidence against Aldrich, including evidence that the shooting was bias-motivated
The Receipts
Reporting on CSPD’s infiltration and surveillance of leftist organizations in Southeast Colorado Springs
Reporting on attempts by CSPD and the FBI to entrap leftists
CSPD Body camera footage of cops discussing beating Colorado Springs Housing for All protestors
The Alphabet Boys podcast series on how the FBI planted a sex offender in the Denver BLM movement to surveil, incite violence, & entrap leftists (with an episode on surveillance and attempts at entrapment in Colorado Springs)
Community Alternatives to Public Safety
CAHOOTS (Crisis Assistance Helping Out On The Streets) is a Eugene, Oregon-based street clinic that intervenes in mental health crises without the presence of law enforcement. They receive funding as an alternative to policing and have saved the city millions of dollars.
STAR (Support Team Assisted Response) Program is a response program in Denver that sends trauma-informed behavioral health professionals to respond to community crises related to mental health, homelessness, substance use, and more without the assistance of police. They have reduced the number of arrests and improved community well-being since their beginnings in 2020.
Colorado HB17-1326 was a two-part bill that created parole reform by reducing the amount of time a person could be reincarcerated for a technical parole violation. The second part of the bill redirected $4 million in savings from the parole reform into a program called Transforming Safety , which provides grants to community organizations in North Aurora and Southeast Colorado Springs — two communities that are overpoliced and disproportionately impacted by mass incarceration — for creating crime prevention programs.
Work and Gain Education and Employment Skills (WAGEES) is a program to support people reentering society from incarceration by using Colorado Department of Corrections funds to allow community organizations to provide job skills training and assist with employment placement. This program has been so successful at reducing recidivism and helping people transition back into community that it has received increased funding and been set for renewal in legislative sunset reviews.
The Gathering Place in Denver provides free supportive, wrap-around services to women, children, and transgender people struggling with poverty in the Denver area. They provide housing assistance, food assistance, education and job training, healthcare, and mental health services.
Liberatory Harm Reduction is a philosophy that centers freedom of choice and treatment for those who use substances if they want it. Colorado has several harm reduction programs that offer clean syringes, overdose prevention education, and Narcan distribution to help people stay safer as opposed to using incarceration to punish substance use. However, many of these programs operate under a public health model rather than a liberatory model. Check out the link to learn more about the difference and why we need more programming that works under a liberatory harm reduction model.
One Million Experiments is a project that shares stories of community projects that redefine safety and explore alternatives to community-based public safety.
Interrupting Criminalization is a resource organization that provides a platform for programs and ideas around alternatives to policing and incarceration. They also coordinate between organizations to help build bigger campaigns for abolition work.
Do No Harm is a philosophy and guide for healthcare professionals to commit to serving clients while refusing to cooperate with the process of criminalizing and incarcerating them.
What is Transformative Justice?
Abolition Reading List
We Do This Til We Free Us by Mariame Kaba
Abolition. Feminism. Now. by Angela Y. Davis, Gina Dent, Beth Richie, and Erica Meiners
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander
Change Everything: Racial Capitalism and the Case for Abolition by Ruth Wilson Gilmore
The End of Policing by Alex Vitale
Saving Our Own Lives: Liberatory Harm Reduction by Shira Hassan
Ready to join the fight against mass incarceration and police brutality? Join DSA!
You can also help support our work by donating to help us print more copies of our abolition zine! You can also share a downloadable version here.
Letter to Fred Miller of Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group
We recently received a request from Fred Miller of Kaleel Jamison Consulting Group, asking to join one of our meetings to promote the work they’ve done with Troy Police Department.
We are not interested. This is our full response.
Dear Fred,
We received your request to come to our meeting “to share information about our work with the Troy Police Department and the May event … and answer any questions. We only need 10-15 minutes on your agenda.”
You’ve done work with the City of Troy and the Troy Police Department for two years with no community involvement until now. To presume that 10-15 minutes to talk at our membership about your solutions to problems we were never originally consulted on underscores that this is nothing but a public relations campaign to whitewash the Troy Police Department’s long history of reckless and hateful violence.
We are not interested in exposing our members or the community to your pro bono work to overhaul the TPD’s reputation. We are connected to this community as residents, students, workers, parents, and neighbors. When we received this invitation, our first step was to check who else you’ve included in this long process up to now. We were made aware that you have not reached out to prominent Black-led organizations, and your work has lacked transparency and real outreach. By removing the voices of those most impacted by police violence, you told us everything we need to know about your event.
You are not welcome in our space, because you represent cops, not the people of Troy. Cops hurt the people in our community. This is a fact. The Times Union’s editorial board released a statement today on the city’s secrecy around police disciplinary records, and the long history of violence against Black and Brown people in Troy. Meanwhile all media outlets are covering how an officer killed a young man while driving recklessly through a dangerous intersection.
The people in our communities do not need to be subjected to your PR campaign about emotionally disturbed persons training and six new community officers. The City and TPD have repeatedly ignored years of outreach, activism, political involvement, social justice work, requests from leaders and non-profits, an executive order from the NYS governor, and the cries of 11,000 people in the streets of Troy.
We provided our recommendations publicly in the past. We’d like to know how many of those were considered in your work. You can share the status of that free labor in writing.
Troy DSA encourages anyone who received a similar invitation to boycott this meeting in May.
-Troy DSA
Public Power is Gaining Ground in New York + Mutual Aid for Migrant Justice
It’s budget season again here in New York! We caught up with freshman Assemblymember Sarahana Shrestha to talk about a major development in the fight for Public Power here in New York State and what her budget priorities are in her first year in office.
And in City budget news, Eric Adams is using the influx of migrants to justify an austerity budget this year. His preliminary budget proposes deep cuts to public education, libraries and other essential social services- while it appears he is leaving the New York Police Department budget untouched. Desiree and Caitlin have been doing mutual aid work with migrants and are joining us live tonight to give us an update on what happened to the migrants who camped outside the Watson Hotel and to comment on the Mayor’s austerity budget.
To call your rep and urge them to Tax the Rich and include Build Public Renewables in the budget, visit https://taxtherichny.com/contact-your-reps/
To connect with Desiree and Caitlin you can show up to the Red Hook Mutual Aid Store at 147 Pioneer Street in Brooklyn and follow South Bronx Mutual Aid on twitter @SBXMutualAid and on Instagram @southbronxmutualaid
Why Mayor Wu’s Rent Control Proposal is Lacking
On Feb. 21st Boston DSA emailed out the following call to action to Boston residents encouraging them to give public testimony on how the Mayor’s rent control proposal is in need of serious changes
Tomorrow, Wednesday, Feb. 22nd, at 10 am the Boston City Council will be hearing public comment on the Mayor’s proposed rent control legislation. Unfortunately, the proposal as is does not adequately protect tenants from increasing rents. It excludes many renters’ landlords and still allows for annual rent increases of 6 percentage points more than inflation (and rent increases of up to 10%). Most gravely, since the proposal lacks vacancy controls it may even incentivize evictions.
We are asking people to either submit written testimony or show up to give public comment tomorrow to point out to the Council that Boston deserves better. Boston is one of the most expensive cities to live in within the US; we need more affordable housing options.
To testify virtually on Zoom, email this address and ask for a link to give public comment: Christine.oDonnell@Boston.Gov. To submit written testimony, simply email your comments to this email: Ccc.Go@Boston.Gov. There is no deadline to submit written testimony.
If while drafting your testimony you’re looking for specific points to make on how Boston City Government could be ensuring people have affordable housing, here are some suggestions:
- First and foremost, the rent control proposal absolutely needs vacancy controls added in. Meaning, rent-increase caps must extend to both current and new tenants. Absent vacancy control, landlords will just have an extra incentive to evict renters and find higher-income tenants.
- The rent control proposal’s ‘just cause’ eviction protections have too many exemptions / potential loopholes to make up for the lack of vacancy controls. Most importantly, the vast majority of evictions in Boston are for non-payment of rent, which are not protected at all.
- The rent control proposal should limit increases to no higher than inflation in the given year.
- The rent control proposal excludes too many tenants. For example, it excludes buildings where the property owner lives there and there are also six or fewer dwelling units.
- The rent control proposal does not give due consideration to students who also suffer from their universities’ exorbitant housing costs.
- The rent control proposal should also include an overall rent cap, in an actual dollar amount.
Furthermore, we encourage folks to point out to the Council how rent control alone is not sufficient to end the exploitation of tenants by real-estate interests. More needs to be done to address the core problems the housing market generates.
- More municipal dollars should be committed to community-land trusts.
- We need more social housing and greater public funding for maintenance so as to have the upkeep residents deserve. Accordingly, the State Legislature must approve Boston’s request for a real estate transfer fee.
- The State Legislature must also pass legislation guaranteeing a universal right to free legal counsel in housing court for tenants.
Again, the public hearing is tomorrow at 10 am. And to testify virtually on Zoom, email this address and ask for a link to give public comment: Christine.oDonnell@Boston.Gov. To submit written testimony, send your comments to this email: Ccc.Go@Boston.Gov.
P.S. We want to further acknowledge that housing justice isn’t simply attained with governmental policy changes, but through tenants collectively organizing and compelling real-estate interests to act. So, we encourage you to get in touch with the chapter’s Housing Working Group if you wish to plug in to that sort of organizing — simply email Housing@BostonDsa.Org and ask to join.
OEA Rallies for the Common Good
By Michael Sebastian
As the Oakland Education Association bargains a new contract, it has raised a comprehensive set of common good demands to help strengthen Oakland’s public schools and support students. OEA rallied hundreds of teachers and community members in support of these demands at the February 8 school board meeting.
At the rally outside La Escuelita elementary school ahead of the board meeting, participants heard speeches from OEA teachers and parent leader Pecolia Manigo, who fired up the crowd with chants of “Who’s schools? Our schools!” Manigo, a leader of the Bay Area Parent Leadership Action Network (PLAN) and recent candidate for school board, said “we can get this confused, that this is just about a contract. The contract is a representation of what we want in our schools.”
As the school board meeting opened to the public, hundreds flowed into the gymnasium where the meeting was held. Ismael Armendariz’s suggestion to “cut pork at the top” sparked chants of “chop from the top,” referencing the top-heavy finances of the district’s budget, where the superintendent makes $294,000 and other administrators pull in large salaries which divert money away from schools, teachers, and children. As OEA observed in a pamphlet in 2019: “OUSD is ‘broke’ on purpose so billionaire influencers can make financial arguments for closing neighborhood schools, refusing living wages for teachers, and denying students the support they need in order to learn and grow.” The chronic lack of resources has less to do with funding and more to do with who will foot the bill. The budget will either be balanced on the backs of black and brown students, as Armendariz said in the gymnasium, or the district will need to “chop from the top”.
As the meeting continued and the floor opened for public comment, attendees spoke about the dangerous consequences of chronically underfunded schools. One teacher spoke via Zoom about finding guns in school lockers, and a student report back showed that roughly half of high school students in OUSD don’t feel safe at the school that they attend. These problems arise because schools are understaffed, which is why OEA is calling for smaller class sizes, more nurses, counselors, psychologists and school librarians. Reinvesting in our schools and fully staffing them is the only way to create safe and productive learning environments for children.
Part of the reason that Oakland schools are so understaffed is that teachers in Oakland are substantially underpaid. Oakland is one of the most expensive cities to live in the state, and one of the lowest paid for teachers in Alameda county. “Living wages continue to be an issue in Oakland,” said OEA president Keith Brown in Edsource. “An experienced teacher can move to Hayward Unified and make $28,000 more overnight.” This results in high turnover, with one in four teachers leaving the district each year. In order to increase teacher retention rates, provide quality teachers for students, and maintain a stable learning environment in public schools, Oakland Unified will need to increase salaries so that teachers don’t leave the district or change careers to meet cost of living in the Bay Area.
Finally, OEA wants to reinvest in the Community School model, which has received over $4 billion in new state funding over the past two years. Engaging parents and communities so that schools become places where neighborhoods can flourish, community schools will provide needed resources for families, organizing in and out of school to make sure that students can thrive. This will help the district fulfill another one of OEA’s common good demands, a Reparations 4 Black Students resolution which aims to eliminate the black student opportunity gap in literacy and educational outcomes, and provide resources for black families who predominantly live in the city’s most disadvantaged communities.
Combining the teachers’ requests for living wages and better working conditions with resources that will help Oakland children thrive, OEA is mindful that without the support of the community most of their demands will go unmet. The fight for better teacher wages, better working conditions, and better schools for children are completely intertwined. This is why the union fought so hard to save Oakland schools from closure, culminating in the 4-3 vote in January to overturn last year’s decision to close five elementary schools. This is also why it continues to fight to hold on to these victories and set the stage for more gains for our schools, children, and communities in the future.
Join teachers at the Lake Merritt Amphitheater on Wed, March 15 at 2pm to demand that OUSD bargain in good faith.
Michael Sebastian is a member of the steering committee of East Bay DSA.
Organizing Amazon, from New York to the UK
Revolutions Per Minute spans the Atlantic Ocean this week, exploring the parallels between Labor movements in the UK and the US, with special guest Jordan Flowers, a co-founder of the Amazon Labor Union. We speak to Stuart Richards, a senior organizer with the GMB in the UK’s West Midlands focused on Amazon workers, and James Meadway, a Council Member at the Progressive Economy Forum and a former advisor to the shadow chancellor John McDonnell MP.
Learning From Rosa Parks on Transit Equity Day
By: The People’s Transit Alliance
5 minute read
tw: racism, sexual assault
This past Saturday, Feb. 4th, 2023, was Transit Equity Day, “a collaborative effort of several organizations and unions to promote public transit as a civil right and a strategy to combat climate change…” organized by Labor 4 Sustainability.
For Transit Equity Day 2023, the People’s Transit Alliance held a canvass of transit riders in Downtown Berkeley to discuss what improvements could be made to the bus system, the planned service redesign, and the importance of transit workers and riders building power together.
Labor 4 Sustainability chose Feb. 4th, Rosa Parks’ birthday, in order to honor her legacy as a civil rights icon, and her courageous action taken on a segregated bus on December 1, 1955. Those of us raised in the United States know the story of Rosa Parks, and her refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger.
What is less well known is her long history as an organizer for the NAACP, her radical politics, and her lifelong commitment to fighting white supremacy in the United States.
The People’s Transit Alliance wishes to share this neglected side of Rosa Parks’ story. As we organize in her name, we must disrupt the whitewashed version of her life that is taught in schools, and used by politicians and corporations to maintain the very systems of oppression that she spent her life fighting against.
Rosa Louise McCauley was born on February 4, 1913 in Tuskegee, Alabama. She grew up with her maternal grandparents and mother. Her grandfather was a follower of Marcus Garvey, and taught young Parks the importance of self-defense, sitting on his porch with a shotgun when the Ku Klux Klan came into town.
She was a member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church for her entire life, where she learned a “theology of liberation that affirmed the equality of all people, laid forth a Christian responsibility to act and provided sustenance to struggle against injustice.”
Mrs. Parks first met her husband, Raymond Parks, while he worked as an organizer on the Scottsboro Boys case. Mr. Parks was a committed activist and revolutionary, who often had to hold secret meetings and avoid police, who were seeking to harass and arrest him for his activism. He and Mrs. Parks attended Communist Party meetings, and worked with other important socialist and communist organizers in the Deep South.
Mrs. Parks began working with the Montgomery NAACP in 1943, where she would soon meet E.D. Nixon. Nixon, Parks, and a small group of activists at the NAACP would lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Movement in the decade leading up to the bus boycott.
Parks worked as the secretary of both the Montgomery and Alabama State chapters of the NAACP, seeking justice for black women who had been raped by white men, and black men who had been wrongly accused of sexually assaulting white women.
She and Nixon represented a working class presence at the NAACP, which was often dominated by more affluent members of the black community. When the national NAACP directed local chapters to expel members with socialist or communist tendencies, Parks spoke out against the purge. The Montgomery chapter refused to carry out the resolution.
On December 1, 1955, when Mrs. Parks refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, she was not the first to do so. Claudette Colvin, who was 15 years old at the time of her arrest, had refused to give up their seat months before Parks, as had others.
(Associated Press via Wikimedia Commons)
In fact, it was a case against Colvin, not Parks, that was brought before the Supreme Court and led to the decision that bus segregation was illegal.
Parks’ decision to remain in her seat was not wholly spontaneous, but a result of her growing frustration with the lack of success that negotiating with the city government had produced, as well as an intimate understanding of the consequences of taking such an action.
Often, Parks’ role in the boycott is diminished. Rather, it is seen as the moment where Martin Luther King Jr. achieved national prominence. However, this version of events ignores Parks’ work as a carpool operator, and a key member of the inner circle of organizers at the Montgomery NAACP.
Eventually, due to death threats, red baiting, an inability to find work in Montgomery, and disagreements over the direction of the Civil Rights movement, Mrs. Parks and her husband were forced to move to Detroit.
In Detroit, Mrs. Parks worked tirelessly as an organizer, particularly focused on freeing political prisoners, expanding access to reproductive rights, defending the rights of women prisoners, and defending black women who had been sexually assaulted. She was a primary organizer of the Joann Little Defense Committee.
Rosa Parks’ politics were truly radical, and clearly opposed to the goals and actions of the powerful politicians who claim to honor her legacy today. She called Malcolm X her personal political hero, and believed in the power of organized nonviolent direct action and the moral right to self-defense.
In 1973, she wrote a letter that included the statement, “The attempt to solve our racial problems nonviolently was discredited in the eyes of many by the hard core segregationists who met peaceful demonstrations with countless acts of violence and bloodshed. Time is running out for a peaceful solution. It may even be too late to save our society from total destruction.”
She was a committed supporter of the Black Power movement, showing up to support radical organizations such as The Black Panthers and working alongside the League of Revolutionary Black Workers and Republic of New Afrika in the wake of the 1967 Detroit Riots.
She was also an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War, apartheid in South Africa, and the march towards war in the aftermath of 9/11.
To recount the entirety of her activism, organizing, and incredible life is beyond the scope of this article. Rather, our goal with this piece is to shed light on an important piece of history that is often ignored, in favor of a quiet, modest Rosa Parks.
Organizing around public transit was not her primary political project but rather one part of a broader struggle against white supremacy, patriarchy, and imperialism. On this Transit Equity Day and beyond, The People’s Transit Alliance seeks to carry Parks’ radical history into the present and imagine organizing for a better transit system as one part of a broader struggle.
When we organize transit workers and riders, we build power at a key political and economic intersection in the East Bay. We reconnect organized labor with a radical political project, and develop concrete strategies to improve the working conditions of those that operate the transit system, which in turn improves riding conditions.
Public transit serves the East Bay’s multiracial working class. It ensures that workers can get to their jobs, the grocery store, doctor’s appointments, places of worship, friends and family, and access all parts of the city.
Improving public transit alleviates the economic burden of maintaining a car, lowers the carbon emissions that deepen the climate crisis and pollute the air we breathe, improves mobility for disabled people, and provides critical access to the working poor of the East Bay.
Transit organizing is a key priority in the fight against white supremacy, the climate crisis, patriarchy, and liberation of the working class. To honor Rosa Parks on Transit Equity Day, we must remember that we are still fighting the same systems of oppression she began fighting more than 80 years ago.
Solidarity forever!
Note: For further reading about the incredible contributions of Rosa Parks to the Civil Rights Movement and beyond, please visit these links:
https://archive.org/details/rebelliouslifeof0000theo_i7s2/page/n24/mode/1up?view=theater
The People’s Transit Alliance is a project of East Bay DSA, organizing for an equitable, democratically controlled transit system that serves the multiracial working class of the East Bay and beyond.