DSA in California is disproportionally education workers, especially higher ed workers. These people are also likely to be union members. HELU is an organization that ties together labor and higher ed in a way that socialists will recognize in its motto, “wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast”—which echoes “Medicare for All,” “An injury to one is an injury to all,” “Solidarity forever,” and “Everybody in, nobody out.” HELU attempts to organize local unions and labor organizations to implement this motto as a national response to the crisis in higher ed. This creates an opening for California DSA members to engage in a national conversation with local impacts.

Where HELU came from

When Bernie Sanders, despite winning California, did not become the Democratic Party candidate in 2020, many people active in that campaign took a time-out. Among these were people who came from higher ed organizing: grad students, union staff and leaders, activists from the various parts of the contingent faculty movement, scholars of all sorts concerned about the crisis in higher ed, and, not surprisingly, quite a few DSA members. A piece of Bernie’s platform had been a focus on labor in higher ed but once Biden faced a GOP-dominated Congress, it was obvious that the path forward was not going to go through party politics. It was going to have to go through organizing. But what kind of organizing? 

Why wall-to-wall?

By focusing on labor rather than, for example, academic freedom, HELU acknowledged that higher ed workers who probably have the most power to bring runaway managers (and the whole industry, ultimately) into line are clerical, custodial, maintenance, library, tech and the numerous other “non-faculty” job positions without which the whole ship doesn’t sail. So organizing in higher ed would have to mean something way beyond organizing faculty. That’s how “wall-to-wall” became the banner, soon to be expanded to “coast-to-coast,” under which HELU came into being in 2021. 

First the organizers held a series of zoom summits, supported by Scholars for a New Deal in Higher Education, Jobs with Justice and the Rutgers University unions. Hundreds of people participated. They produced a vision statement, sufficiently equal to the crisis to quickly gather endorsements from over 100 local unions and labor organizations. Setting a goal of 50 formal members – local unions and labor organizations paying “Solidarity Pledges” like a form of per-caps – they convened their founding Convention in May 2024, elected officers and hired staff. Now began the hard part (see higheredlaborunited.org for what has been done since). 

The higher ed crisis changes in character

That was before Biden stepped back for Kamala Harris and of course, before Trump was elected. The crises that HELU thought we faced –student debt, administrative bloat, privatization, casualization of faculty and staff, legislative attempts to wipe out tenure, abolition of DEI programs, the attacks on student and faculty protests, mass layoffs of whole departments and especially adjuncts – were now consolidated into an ideologically empowered top-level GOP agenda intended to drop a veil of ignorance (see Ruth, Shrecker and Johnson’s book The Right To Learn, from Beacon) over the whole country.

What can a newly established – but growing -- organization do in the face of this agenda? And what should be the role of California DSA members?

Three challenges facing HELU

The challenges HELU faces in implementing “wall-to-wall and coast-to-coast” are formidable, but none are insurmountable. HELU already has enough strength and structure to serve as an inside-outside hub where these very challenges and difficulties get aired and debated and solidarity commitments made. Here are the three challenges that come up most often for California.

First is that California higher ed labor unions may not see the value of a national organizing project. California is a mature labor regime that can pretty much stand alone (and hence ignore the rest of the country). It may not seem to matter that, in the absence of an industrially based higher ed labor movement, there has been no way for the many unions that represent higher ed workers to speak with one voice and provide a vehicle for horizontal solidarity between higher ed locals. It was important, with Project 2025 looming, that in October 2024 HELU managed to get the top national leaders of nine unions including AFT, NEA, UE, AAUP, CWA, OPEIU, UAW, AFSCME and UNITE HERE to sign a Statement of Unity.  

A Unity Statement may seem like distant thunder given the urgent needs of higher ed workers at the bottom rank and file level. This is especially true in the California Community Colleges, where the wrong-headed 67% law, dating back to the 1970s, placed a cap on teaching load and helped create a vast statewide faculty that is majority part-time, low-wage and insecure. Lack of job security makes union participation risky, which leaves union leadership in the hands of secure tenured faculty who have given contingent faculty issues low priority. Now, after years of pushing, the One/Tier/United Faculty program at last promises some motion on this issue and this is where the energy has gone. Therefore California community college part-timers may not see HELU’s national organizing agenda as relevant.

The second challenge is the difficulty of organizing across job positions, the wall-to-wall challenge. Higher Ed is an old-fashioned hierarchical industry with serious prestige attached to some workers and none to others. This hierarchy is structured on race and gender, with an extremely disproportionate distribution of workers in top jobs being white men, and the low-wage, low-prestige jobs are largely people of color (especially women). Can custodians and tenured faculty strategize together and act in solidarity? The good news is that the workers in the low-prestige jobs are often unionized and highly competent in the skills and power of representation and bargaining. And what workers can most effectively hold the operation of a college or university hostage? Who can really learn from whom? Knowledge of a little higher ed labor history might come in handy here too.

Then there’s the coast-to-coast challenge. While HELU presents a national vision of a different higher ed system (see the Vision statement at higheredlaborunited.org), it is mind-boggling to figure out how to bring together workers in public and private non-profit institutions, not to mention the for-profits, workers in union-hostile or union-friendly states, workers in states without public sector collective bargaining (and where, as in some states, it is actually prohibited). Some states are way ahead of others; California is one of these. Then there are places like Florida and Texas, where the raids on higher ed make headlines. Beyond that are places like North Dakota where, in addition to having no collective bargaining agreements in public higher ed, there are also attacks on tenure.  (CWA is organizing there, incidentally.) But these don’t make headlines. HELU has hosted numerous zoom conferences to bring together activists from different states and contexts but we are still at the level of self-educating and learning from people who are like and unlike ourselves. This is not a challenge that will be resolved top-down but it is happening in real time through the nuts-and-bolts magic of bottom-up solidarity. 

The rising movement is the good news

The good news is the rising movement out of which HELU was born. While HELU is a re-set to industrial organizing of the 1930s, the multiple re-sets that re-shaped higher ed in the last hundred years all were responses to the demands of the time, facing the forces in play at the time. HELU spun off out of what felt like a state of ultimate exasperation: “The solution can’t be just a fix here and a fix there – we have to get in front of the whole problem.” The current demand could be described as a right-to-learn, anti-ignorance, what-does-the-planet-need demand.  

An Inside-Outside hub for higher ed activists

DSA is a big-tent socialist organization of thinkers and activists. HELU is not an opposition site; on the contrary. But it does have the power to host the critical, open-ended debates that can be brought back to local unions and labor organizations and energize them. As part of an inside-outside hub, it’s an opportunity for us to break out of local bubbles. DSA members are already among the numerous students, grad student employees, union organizers, lecturers and members of professions like tech and healthcare that are often employed by higher ed institutions, and campuses are where some of the most energetic union activity is already taking place.  DSA members bring a point of view that is likely to be historically grounded and capable of imagining strategy for an alternative vision for a whole society, not only the need for reforms, large and small. 

What DSA members can do (individually and together)

The three dire challenges listed above will not be overcome without a lot of processing of ideas, a job that DSA is set up to do. You can start by looking at higheredlaborunited.org to see the structure and recent work done by HELU. See if you belong to a local California union that has already endorsed or formally joined HELU. If you don’t, and are curious, you can sign up to get communications and partake in some discussions. If you find that you’re already in a member union, sign up and ask your local leadership for contact information for the delegates that represent your union vis a vis HELU. If your local is not yet a member of HELU, start the process of organizational decision-making. If you are in higher ed, but not yet unionized, contact EWOC to get some help starting a union. If you are not in higher ed at all, you likely know friends, comrades, neighbors and relatives who are. Pass this information to them. Then, in either case, proceed according to the principles of equality and solidarity that brought you to DSA to begin with. With higher ed being a major employment sector in all metropolitan areas and facing the prospects of fully neo-fascist attacks, we can’t do any less to defend one of the important parts of the common good for the entire working class.

Five days before Christmas, the Teamsters called a strike at eight Amazon warehouses across the country. According to an investigation by In These Times, about six hundred Amazon workers joined the walkout. Picket lines were augmented by union retirees, staffers and shop stewards, rank and file Teamsters from other workplaces, and, at one New York plant, two busloads of volunteers from DSA. 

To be sure, those who walked off the job are a tiny fraction of Amazon’s three quarters of a million workers. The Teamsters have set aside $8 million for an organizing drive at Amazon, and it will likely take at least that much to bring the corporate behemoth to its knees. But as always, the heavy lifting needs to be done inside the plants. 

Much will be required of the people who do it. Union, a new documentary by Stephen Maing and Brett Story, provides a compelling view of the challenges they face, and what can still be accomplished in the face of those challenges. 

Fly on the wall picture

The filmmakers have trained their cameras on Amazon’s giant fulfillment center on Staten Island, site of the first successful union vote at an Amazon plant. They offer no analysis and little in the way of commentary—just a few titles for continuity and a brief summary of the mechanics of an NLRB election. What they do give us is a fly-on-the-wall picture of the campaign, focused on members of the organizing committee for the Amazon Labor Union.

Union opens with container ships gliding silently into New York harbor, then takes us into an immense warehouse where columns of towering yellow robots adjust  their positions on the workroom floor without any apparent human prompting. Later, we see small parcels being disgorged onto a moving conveyor belt. 

All this sophisticated machinery does not replace human labor so much as it disciplines it. There are 8,000 workers in the plant. They work ten-hour shifts, and their work is fast-paced, monotonous, and closely monitored. It’s also exhausting and for the most part isolating. There are shots of workers trying to catch a few winks on the subway in the wee hours of the morning, then queuing up for a bus to the plant as the sun is beginning to rise.

One of the more haunting sequences shows a woman preparing to bed down for the night in her car, parked in the plant parking lot. “Three and a half hours,” she says, looking at a digital clock. “We’ll make it work.”  We meet her again in one of management’s captive audience meetings, countering management’s anti-union propaganda, giving the union rap  in a firm, measured voice.   (Later, a whole team of ALU members completely disrupts one of these meetings, forcing the management rep to abruptly adjourn it and order people back to work.)

Under the tent

The union drive started at the height of COVID-19. Even as they prepared shipments of personal protective equipment to go out across the country, Amazon workers were denied any themselves. (One woman contracted COVID and died; the film is dedicated to her, and her sister joined the organizing committee.) A lanky, articulate worker named Chris Smalls led a walkout in protest and was fired. He raised money through GoFundMe, pitched a tent in front of the plant, and began passing out union authorization cards along with free meals.  Much of the action in the movie takes place under the tent, where union supporters gather to share experiences, proselytize their fellow workers, and figure out their next moves. 

At one point they’re approached by an unnamed union and are invited to its office for a meeting. It doesn’t go well; afterwards the workers vent in the parking lot, believing they have been patronized and not taken seriously. The ensuing discussion gets more intense towards the end of the movie, after the ALU has won the vote at Staten Island but fails to extend its victory to other plants. It’s one that has doubtless taken place wherever workers organize independently and come up against the limits of what they can do on their own: what is gained, and what is lost, by affiliating with an established union? 

The Amazon Labor Union eventually became Teamsters Local 1, but by that time Chris Smalls was no longer around. He steadfastly resisted the advice of outsiders; towards the end of the movie, his co-workers are becoming visibly impatient with his rigidity. 

Real organizing potential

In truth, there is no way to defeat Amazon in a single plant. Fulfillment centers like the Staten Island plant are like something straight out of Das Kapital, concentrating thousands of workers under a single roof and harnessing their labor power to the most advanced technology. But the real organizing potential lies with Amazon’s smaller sortation and delivery centers. Especially since the pandemic-fueled surge of on-line shopping, these have proliferated across the U.S. They are vulnerable to work stoppages that could play havoc with the company’s supply chain, and the Teamsters are old hands at using such “choke points” against employers.

Amazon is more than a distribution network. With massive amounts of capital at its disposal, it has extended its reach  to other parts of the economy, far afield from Amazon’s origins as an on-line retailer. Organized labor has taken notice. The Communications Workers hopes to organize its call centers. Whole Foods, long a bitter foe of unions, is now part of the Amazon empire and is being targeted by the United Food and Commercial Workers. Amazon even took over OneMedical, a boutique chain of  clinics for people who can afford to shell out an extra $200 to get easier access to primary care. Doctors at OneMedical complain that since the chain was bought out, “tech-leveraged medical offerings” have supplanted face-to-face treatment.

In short, Amazon is assuming the same dominant role in the US economy that giant manufacturing corporations like General Motors and US Steel enjoyed one hundred years ago. Cracking the open shop in basic industry required a major social movement, born of a seemingly unlikely alliance of Communists and other leftists with John L. Lewis, autocratic head of the United Mine Workers. Lewis and the left put aside their differences when both sides realized that neither could win without the other’s help. They did win, and the results proved transformative for two generations of workers. 

Vivid picture

Then as now, the battle began on the shop floor, and Union gives us a vivid picture of what today could grow into something bigger. That message may be a little too subversive for the movie industry: though it won a prize at the Sundance Festival, made the New York Times “best ten” list, and has been shortlisted for the Oscars, Union still hasn’t found a commercial distributor. It’s connecting with audiences through the same kind of do it yourself, seat-of-the-pants operation as the union drive it chronicles. To arrange a screening, you can go to its web site.

If you’re inspired to do more than watch a movie, you can become part of the struggle. The Teamsters are recruiting “salts” to take jobs in Amazon plants and help them organize. It’s a serious commitment, one that requires patience and listening skills as well revolutionary zeal, but well worth doing. Just go to bit.ly/amazonteamsters. As one current DSA salt observes, “The fight to organize Amazon is one of the most critical labor struggles in modern history. It’s the most meaningful organizing I’ve ever been a part of. I hope more DSA members come join the fight.”

We Are The Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big, by Eric Blanc (University of California Press, 2025, 312 pp.)

How many graduates of Buena Vista Elementary and Lowell High School in San Francisco have become labor book authors? 

Probably not many—other than Eric Blanc, whose mother taught in the city school system (and served as union president) and whose father was long active in the SF central labor council.

Blanc became a teacher himself and drew on that experience when writing his first book, Red State Revolt: The Teachers Strike Wave and Working-Class Politics. It chronicled the 2018-19 uprising in public education in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and other states.

Now an assistant professor at Rutgers University, Blanc has just published a more wide-ranging study. It grapples with a perennial question facing the labor left—namely, what kind of break with business as usual, within established unions, would help more private sector workers win union recognition, first contracts, and strikes?

A member of DSA, Blanc argues that the current imbalance of power between labor and management in the U.S. can only be changed, for the better, with large-scale, coordinated organizing efforts rooted in the rank-and-file. His most detailed case study focuses on the four-year union recognition drive at Starbucks, one of the biggest restaurant companies in the world, with 380,000 employees and market value of $108 billion.

In the U.S., that workforce is relatively high-turnover, widely dispersed and fragmented into small, retail store size groups.  The author’s interviews with founders of Starbucks Workers United (SBWU)  take us behind the scenes of an amazingly durable campaign that began when “ten young radicals started salting Buffalo Starbucks stores in early 2021.” (One was Jaz Brisack, now a “practitioner in residence” at the UC Berkeley Labor Center).

“Worker to Worker DNA”

During its early months, SBWU filed almost two representation petitions per day at the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). This implanted what Blanc calls “worker-to-worker DNA into the entire subsequent trajectory of the campaign.”  Because of its do-it-yourself spirit, the campaign’s initial Labor Board election win rate was a remarkably high 80 percent. According to Blanc, SBWU could not have gained such traction if the organizing had been done in more conventional fashion, with heavy reliance on full-time union staff.

Backed by Workers United/SEIU, SBWU has since helped about 11,000 baristas win bargaining rights at 525 Starbucks stores in 45 states.  SBWU had to develop union majorities, unit by unit and maintain them before, during, and after hotly contested NLRB voting. For two years, SBWU endured what Blanc calls a “scorched earth union busting campaign of unparalleled intensity and breadth,” with an estimated price tag of $250 million. 

That effort was orchestrated by Littler Mendelson, a corporate law firm notorious (and often victorious) in the field of “union avoidance. To achieve that management goal at Starbucks, countless workers were harassed, several hundred were fired or suspended for their union activity, and baristas who voted for collective bargaining were illegally denied wage and benefit improvements granted in non-union stores, as an incentive to keep them that way.

Collective action—especially work stoppages—were “key to sustaining momentum and forging solidarity” and keeping the pressure on management, Blanc reports. “In addition to periodic nationwide mobilizations, many Starbucks strikes were begun locally as responses to grievances at their stores.” According to the author, SBWU also “did a great job fighting for and highlighting partial concessions from management secured along the road to a first contract.”

First Contract Fight

That goal suddenly became more achievable in February, 2024, when “Starbucks raised a white flag” and agreed to “begin bargaining in good faith and stop illegally denying equal benefits to unionized workers.” The ensuing talks on a “foundational framework for union contracts” have not produced a settlement yet. If the company’s new CEO, Brian Niccol (who makes $57,000 per hour) changes course--in light of Trump’s impending hobbling of the NLRB—labor relations at Starbucks may become brutal again (if they have not already). 

In December, SBWU reported that 98% of the participants in a strike authorization vote had demonstrated their willingness to walk out, if necessary, “to win fair raises, benefits, and staffing, protest unfair labor practices, and resolve outstanding litigation.” As of last month, the union disclosed, Starbucks had “yet to bring a comprehensive economic package to the bargaining table,” hundreds of still pending unfair labor practice charges had not been settled, and “$100 million in legal liabilities remain outstanding.”

While this critical first contract fight continues, Blanc urges other unions to follow SBWU’s example: Develop and train more rank-and-file leaders in non-union workplaces, who “can self-organize and train others.” Use digital communication tools like Zoom “to quickly and widely scale up drives across huge spatial divides…so workers can directly coordinate and support each other without relying as much on paid staff and union resources.” 

The author also recommends better funding of “widespread salting at strategic targets,” like Workers United did in upstate N. Y. with a “crew of radical salts” whose efforts led to the formation of SBWU.  And he encourages organized labor to seize high-profile opportunities to “spread unionization as widely as possible”—as SBWU did when it was deluged with appeals for organizing help from baristas around the country. In short, Blanc argues, “the labor movement needs to finally start acting like a movement again.”

Union Reform Aids Organizing

Blanc’s book also highlights recent union reform victories—within the United Auto Workers (UAW) and NewsGuild/CWA—which led to organizing program improvements. One common denominator of these successful internal election campaigns was “small pockets of newly organized, radicalized young workers [who] played an outsized role.” Their efforts have led to greater rank-and-file engagement in contract campaigns, more frequent strike action, and expanded membership recruitment in both the auto industry and the media.

Given the UAW’s much bigger size, the positive impact of the election of Shawn Fain and other members of Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) to leadership positions, two years ago, is more widely known.  Blanc lauds UAW’s new leadership for internal and external organizing initiatives which “raise expectations, tap into anger at corporate overlords, and show that workers can win big through mass militancy.” 

It was no easy task rallying dues-payers understandably “cynical and checked out,” after years of Solidarity House corruption and dysfunction. Yet, during its 2023 contract talks with the Big Three, the UAW’s use of membership education and mobilization, unprecedented bargaining table transparency, and a selective strike strategy produced major gains, after years of divisive and demoralizing concessions. Just a few months later, newly energized and inspired UAW supporters at a non-union Volkswagen plant in Tennessee achieved a major southern organizing breakthrough, with more to come.

A NewsGuild Shake-Up

The catalyst for a similar organizational shake-up in the 30,000-member NewsGuild was Jon Schleuss winning the union presidency five years ago. As Blanc recounts, his main qualification for national union office was helping to organize the Los Angeles Times, a non-union paper for 135 years. Unlike Fain in the UAW, the 31-year old Schleuss had never been elected or appointed to any union position before, other than a local bargaining committee.

On this own dime, Schleuss went to the NewsGuild’s national convention in 2019 anyway. With backing from three locals, he got himself nominated as a candidate for president in a race everyone assumed was a shoe-in for an incumbent thirty years older and far more experienced than Schleuss. Eleven Guild officers, headquarters staff, and field reps, along with many local union officials, opposed his candidacy.

Nevertheless, the young journalist proved to be an effective organizer of restive media workers nationwide. During a rare union presidential campaign debate, Schleuss called for “tapping the creativity of our members” in better organized campaigns against newspaper take-overs by hedge-fund owners and others “intent on destroying journalism.” If elected, he pledged to seek more resources from the Guild’s parent organization, the Communications Workers of America (CWA) and expand rank-and-file participation in the Guild’s own “Member Organizing Program.” 

This MOP draws on four decades of CWA-backed member-based organizing in the public and private sector—using the model favored by Blanc for all unions (i.e., training and deploying active members on a “lost-time” or volunteer basis, to recruit non-union workers in the same industry or occupation as their own.)

Strike Activity

During the last five years, the Guild has become what Blanc calls “a powerhouse of new organizing.” Its reform leadership has invested heavily in on-line and in person training of activists who want to get involved in external and internal organizing, contract bargaining, job actions, and strikes. As part of the broader organizing surge that made this possible, nearly 11,000 media workers won bargaining rights in more than two hundred new units between 2018 and 2023, according to Blanc. In the last four years, the union has helped workers secure one hundred first contracts.

By last fall, when Guild members walked out at a legal publication called Law360, it was the union’s twenty-fourth strike of the year. Other targets included Teen Vogue, Vanity Fair, The NY Times, Chicago Tribune, and other media outlets, large and small.  In 2023, 36 newsrooms were struck for varying lengths of time. While many of these were quickie strikes, not open ended ones, one hundred workers at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette have been out for two years, in the longest running strike in the nation.

In We Are The Union, Schleuss recalls when he and other Guild supporters signed up enough co-workers to get an NLRB election at the LA Times seven years ago. Even then, they knew their job was not over. After winning that vote, “we would still have to do everything we could to fix the union—to make it more focused on organizing and more focused on building rank-and-file power.” To keep their spirits up during their difficult contest with management, Times organizing committee members reassured each other that “we have more power than we know.”  

In Schleuss’s view, that collective realization is a source of empowerment whether you’re “struggling against an employer who is fighting you every step of the way or you’re a rank-and-filer pushing against deadweight union leadership.” The strength of We Are The Union is Eric Blanc’s inspiring examples of workers overcoming both adversaries.

On Saturday, December 14th, the California DSA State Council had our last meeting of 2024. We reflected on our campaigns this electoral cycle and discussed our “Vision for California”—a new program that will guide our ongoing campaigns. 

In November, ten DSA-endorsed candidates across the state won their races. Notably, in Los Angeles, four out of the fifteen city councilmembers are DSA-endorsed. Sacramento DSA got one point away from electing their endorsed candidate Flo Cofer for mayor. Our California DSA voter guide got over 200,000 visits, showing that Californian voters are interested in, if not aligned with, socialist politics. We are continuing to prove that DSA is an electoral force and will only become stronger in the years to come.

We saw major defeat in the progressive statewide propositions, including Propositions 5 and 33. Those two propositions, which, if passed, would have been major victories for renters, were part of our first official statewide coordinated campaign since the founding of California, Affordable Rent Controlled Housing (ARCH). (California chapters worked together on other ballot measures in 2018 and 2020, prior to California DSA’s formation in 2022.) Despite the loss, we learned a lot and will be stronger and more organized in campaigns to come.

A new platform

In the last part of the meeting, the State Committee introduced a new platform: a Vision for California. We in California DSA have focused much of our energy on electoral campaigns. However, we are doing little campaign work of other types as a statewide body during non-election years.  In light of that reflection, we want to build out a program where we have clear goals and campaigns that will get us closer to our socialist vision of California. We engaged in fruitful discussion across chapters, discussing priorities like Medicare for All, striking Prop 13 from the state constitution, and initiatives for climate justice. We will continue to hone this vision, setting clear objectives and goals for the next five to ten years. 

Our next State Council meeting is this Saturday, February 1st. All DSA members in good standing are welcome to join. 

Workers' rights vary from state to state. Here’s what you need to know about right-to-work and at-will employment in Illinois.

The post What are my rights as a worker in Illinois? appeared first on EWOC.

Hello,

The struggle of working people for an equitable society free from injustice and oppression has sharpened in recent months, taking center stage through headlines on everything from the devastating climate catastrophe to anti-immigration raids. As that fight shows its face in Milwaukee, we must say no to the elements of hatred and division, even when our institutions appear to embrace them.

Milwaukee Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and our allies are calling on CBS 58 and their parent company, Weigel Broadcasting, to restore former meteorologist Sam Kuffel to her position.

We’ve launched a petition Monday rallying their supporters behind Kuffel and against the notion that a stand against fascism should cost someone their employment. Can you sign?

The people of Milwaukee deserve local reporting that is unafraid to challenge the rising tide of far-right hatred instead of running cover for its leading figures. As we reflect this year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, it is important that we recognize and fight the forces behind historical atrocities as we see them in the present.

Sign the petition online. View the chapter calendar.

In solidarity,
Milwaukee DSA

By Sarah Plutnicki

FITCHBURG – After months of negotiating, the final contract between Fitchburg Public Schools (FPS) and the Fitchburg Education Association (FEA) was finally approved by the district school committee and union members on January 6, 2025. Fitchburg public school teachers, paraprofessionals, custodians and clerical staff collectively won a new contract agreement that ensures access to higher wages and paid parental leave for all four units, among other benefits. 

One significant win for the FEA union was a new combined sick leave “bank,” where teachers, paraprofessionals and custodial staff can all pull sick hours into the same “bank” for extended illness or parental leave. Prior to the new contract, staffers were not able to use this bank for parental leave. The contract also won paid lunches for the clerical unit which, according to the FEA, was a very important improvement for them – prior to this contract, clerical staff were to take lunch at the end of the day rather than during the normal work day. Additionally, the union won two additional paid holidays per year for paraprofessionals.

Organizing Tactics and Points of Contention

For the Fitchburg Educators Association, changing their organizing tactics was essential to winning a more fair contract for educators and school staffers. 

One of the biggest changes that was made by the FEA and the school district was that all four units — teachers, paraprofessionals, custodians, and clerical staff— bargained together instead of bargaining separately. The idea was to “increase the amount of pressure on the district using strength in numbers during the collective bargaining process, as well as to decrease the amount of time spent bargaining,” said Maggie Goodgion from the FEA.  

During previous contract negotiation cycles, according to Hanson and Goodgion, the teachers’ contract would be negotiated first, followed by the paraprofessionals, then custodians, then clerical staff. Historically, this method of bargaining would draw out the collective bargaining process for many extra months, and tended to lead to less effective organizing due to workers across job classifications not being united: “..There wasn’t a lot of transparency before within the union… It took a lot of educating of members and education about the negotiating process.” 

This latest round of bargaining was the creation of the Contract Action Team (CAT). In a model which has been replicated across many other Massachusetts Teachers Association locals, the FEA CAT was responsible for planning the open bargaining process, allowing union members to provide feedback on the negotiation process as negotiations were happening in real time, and turning out as ‘silent reps’ to negotiations with the district. The CAT model is similar to the traditional shop-steward model, but focused on the specific contract fight rather than being open-ended. The model relies on much of the organizing theory popularized by the late organizer Jane McAlevey, utilizing one-on-one organizing conversations and ‘structure tests’ to build deep member engagement which can be tapped into as a campaign escalates.

According to Hanson and Goodgion, who are both part of the CAT, the team “held as many one on one conversations in each building as they could, tried having a strong social media presence, [went] out into the community and [talked] to community members,” acting as a transistor for union member and community feedback, and “then the team would incorporate any feedback” into future demands. The CAT also planned community events to further educate members of the public with childcare services and food provided to turn out more parents and students. 

One of the more contentious issues throughout the bargaining process was the district’s proposal to extend the school day by 30 minutes. Generally, school district staff and community members were not supportive of this proposal – many parents mentioned during public events and one-on-ones that extending the school day would be too much of a mental strain on the kids attending school. In addition to a strain on students, the extra time would also increase the teachers’ workday. According to Hanson, “twice a month for an hour after school, teachers stay for extra prep – it’s functional time that doesn’t impact students or the rest of the staff.” 

The school district also attempted to remove language from the final contract regarding safe behaviors of students, another contentious issue, but the FEA eventually strengthened the final contract language surrounding this issue.

Overall, the CAT built strong community support through active and consistent community engagement throughout the bargaining process, which can likely be attributed to the union’s coordinated organizing efforts.

Looking forward

The Fitchburg Educators Association expressed to Working Mass that they would be interested in re-opening discussions with the school district regarding special education caseload caps, and higher wage increases during the next round of negotiations in 2027. 

The union’s victory is just one example of the resurgence of the U.S. labor movement in recent years, and shows that better working conditions are always possible through coordinated, organized labor action by the working class. 

Sarah Plutnicki is a member of Metro DC DSA.

Seattle DSA Statement on the Jan. 15th announcement of a ceasefire in Gaza

Seattle DSA greets January 19th’s commencement of a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas with measured relief – after more than 450 days of unremitting Israeli bombing of Gaza, this ceasefire represents a glimmer of hope for the besieged yet steadfast Palestinians of Gaza. Over the past year, the Israeli campaign of genocide has cost the lives of hundreds of thousands in Gaza and displaced nearly all of Gaza’s 2.3 million inhabitants. 

This campaign of genocide was made possible by the unrestricted diplomatic cover provided to Israel by the disgraced Biden Administration and more than $17 billion in military aid appropriated by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress. These funds represent a theft of tax dollars by the ruling class that should have been put to use feeding, housing, educating, and caring for the working class in this country. This genocide was also made possible by Israel’s apartheid regime, which denies millions of Palestinians basic civil and political rights. Israel has a history of violating ceasefires; it can and will resume its genocide unless Palestine is free from Israeli apartheid and occupation. 

As socialists, we believe that we are not free until Palestine is free. We stand resolute in our commitment to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement in solidarity with the Palestinian people. By divesting our communities from Israel, we will work to prevent the Israeli government from repeating these atrocities and support Palestinian liberation. Through our Boycott War Profiteers campaign, we have worked over the last 6 months to collect pledges from over 1500 community members to boycott Israeli goods and fight back against companies that have fired workers for standing up for Palestine. We have built public pressure against companies that profit from the sale of Israeli goods and bolstered support for those that stand in solidarity with Palestine. This campaign is just getting started; the global Palestinian solidarity movement isn’t going anywhere and neither are we. 

You can support community divestment in the greater Seattle area by joining our Boycott War Profiteers campaign and participating in the following Boycott War Profiteers campaigns:

1. Sending an email to Artist and Craftsman Supply management to protest their firing of a worker for wearing a watermelon pin. 

2. Writing to the PCC Community Markets’ Board of Directors to urge them to drop Israeli products. 

3. Join the campaign to help identify supportive and antagonistic businesses, growing our organizational capacity.

Boycott and Divestment campaigns across the globe have already played an important role in bringing Israel back to the negotiating table for this ceasefire. From eroding Israel’s credit rating to shuttering thousands of Israeli businesses, Israel’s apartheid regime is more vulnerable than ever. Together, we can keep up the pressure to end Israeli apartheid over Palestine. 

Onward to a free Palestine, from the river to the sea. 

The post The Fight for a Free Palestine Doesn’t End With A Ceasefire appeared first on Seattle Democratic Socialists of America.

By Chris Brady

NEW BEDFORD – Visiting this city on Buzzards Bay in Massachusetts’s South Coast region, you might not expect that it was not just once, but twice the richest city per capita in North America — first from whaling, and then from textile production. The old whaling boats are remembered only by the city’s museum to that industry, although in its place now floats a vibrant fishing fleet. And although the many old textile mills still dominate the city scape, many have long ago been turned into condos, vintage shops, or trendy bakeries.

Settled in 1652 by the Plymouth Colony on historic Wampanoag lands, the region first gained prominence as an industrial hub from its near-total dominance of the whaling trade, with New Bedford whale oil illuminating lanterns across the globe. This prosperity earned the city the title of “the richest city in the world” and immortalized it as the setting of Herman Melville’s anti-capitalist monologue Moby Dick. However, as new methods of exploiting our natural world developed, petroleum made oil lanterns obsolete, and the whaling industry was left emaciated. Faced with a growing population of unemployed workers and new immigrants, the city’s ownership class recognized the need for a new direction. The textile industry became the obvious choice.

Not only New Bedford but the entire New England region is deeply intertwined with the textile industry, from Holyoke to Lowell and Lawrence, dominating our economic landscape from the early 1800s to the Great Depression. Yet, New Bedford stood apart, thanks to its unique combination of a huge population of cheap immigrant labor, the new steam engine, and convenient logistical location between its port and the financial centers Boston and New York. This convergence propelled New Bedford to become the largest mill town in the country, becoming the richest city in the world for a second time. The contradictions in this title was not lost on the working class, many of whom earned below-sustenance wages, while shareholders earned exorbitant dividend payouts. Alongside this industrial growth came a prodigious history of working-class struggle, epitomized by the 1928 textile strike—a six-month standoff that brought the city’s mills to a grinding halt. Although ultimately not successful, the 1928 strike provides valuable insights for organizers to learn from for current day application.

The Textile Mills

By 1928, textiles was the largest primary industry in the country, employing 1.1 million Americans and accounting for 13% of all manufacturing employment. Massachusetts was the single largest textile state with some 32 percent of all MA workers employed in the industry.

The American South remained a powerhouse for cotton production, and manufacturing the raw material into textiles domestically was cheaper than sending raw cotton overseas. Out of this paradigm geographic competition emerged between the Southern and New England mills. Both were predicated on cheap labor, the South exploiting the descendants of African slaves, and New England relying on the steady stream of unskilled and mostly European immigrants. The Southern mills were unmatched at producing coarse-cotton products, and the New England mills who tried to meet their production were forced to close, as the Southern industries paid around $12 a week for workers compared to Massachusetts’ $19. The reason behind the wage discrepancy is multi-faceted, but was likely a confluence of racism, less employment opportunities for Southern workers, and a significantly more antagonistic union sentiment than the Northern states had.

However, New Bedford, and much of New England’s mills reacted by producing fine-cotton products instead. For a long time this insulated New Bedford from Southern competition, and allowed it to be a major global hub for the industry. But by 1928 production was increasingly moving to the south.

The conditions were predictably horrible. Workers made on average about $1000 per year, when a subsistence wage in the 1920s was around $1400. Unsurprisingly, women made even less money, and children were regularly employed in the mills. The work was dangerous, and worker safety protections were basically non-existent. The work week was Monday to Saturday and from 60 to 80 hours per week. The mill owners constructed cramped, decrepit worker housing, and it was not atypical for three people to sleep in the same bed.

By 1928, mill workers had long played an important role in labor militancy. Mill workers in Lawrence Massachusetts shocked the nation with their successful ‘Bread and Roses’ strike in 1912. By 1926, the budding American Communist movement was intimately involved with organizing mill workers – successfully organizing the 15,000 strong Passaic New Jersey mill strike.

Launching The Strike

In April of 1928, in response to a sputtering economy and competition with the Southern mills, New Bedford mill owners to push through a 10 percent wage cut. Workers did not take this lying down. On April 16th, 1928 the workers in the mills voted to strike against the wage cut.

The New Bedford strike was a conflict between the old craft unions and the new industrial labor movement. Around 5,000 of the affected 30,000 workers were unionized, primarily for English speaking, non-immigrant skilled laborers, under the independent American Federation of Textile Operative (AFTO) and other craft unions. The AFTO leaders were well connected in New Bedford elite society, for example, the President was also the local police chief. As leaders of the local labor aristocracy, as AFTO leaders were connected to the ownership, government institutions, and social clubs – and the rank and file being composed of the skilled, better-compensated American born workers, translated to the AFTO being a reactionary organization. Still, the employers’ pay-cut was so provocative that it initially united both the skilled, native-born workers of the AFTO, and the larger numbers of semi-skilled, foreign born mill workers.

Enter The Communists

The brewing strike news made its way to American Communist organizers, who arrived prior to the strike vote. Albert Weisbord was integral in organizing the Passaic strike, Fred Beal had been a fifteen years old worker-activist during Lawrence’s Bread and Roses strike, and both of them headed to New Bedford to assist the striking workers. Describing the challenges ahead, Weisbord noted that the multi-ethnic coalition and language barriers would be difficult to organize around, as well as the crushing poverty the workers faced making sacrificing wages untenable, as well as, arguably primarily, the duplicitous craft union which neglected the needs of the unskilled workers being obstacles to liberation.

Weisboard, Beal, and other Communists distributed flyers to the unskilled immigrant workers at the mills, which contributed to the successful AFTO strike vote. They organized a group outside of the craft unions, called the Textile Mill Committee (TMC), which represented the left-wing of the mill workers. They targeted the unskilled immigrant workers. Namely, due to the AFTO not wanting to organize the unskilled workers, and because the TMC called for more radical demands: Abolishing the wage cut and increasing pay 20%, equal pay for women, a 40 hour work week, and more worker protections – for everyone, not just AFTO membership – they were more popular with the immigrant workers than was the AFTO.

The reaction to the newly organized left wing worker movement was not well received by AFTO leadership. They called the TMC ‘communists’, and claimed that the inter-union ideological struggle would negate any potential for worker gains. In reality, the real obstacle to the strike was the AFTO, who spent most of their resources publicly defaming the TMC, and trying to keep the non-unionized unskilled workers off of their picket line.

Tactics The TMC was incredibly innovative in maintaining the longevity of the strike, which lasted for six months. They picketted every workday, and leaned on the unskilled workers to join their lines. They created fliers, held demonstrations, sang songs, held mass meetings, and generally increased consciousness and militancy of the workers. Perhaps most notably, the Communists, in tandem with Workers International Relief, utilized almost all of their strike funds to help offset the poverty incurred by workers sacrificing their wages, creating soup kitchens and funding day-to-day necessities for the workers and their families. Some of the children were temporarily relocated to sympathetic families in New York City to ensure they were cared for.

Fred Beal, who had become one of the faces of the New Bedford strike, even tactically let himself get arrested to provide a moment for workers to rally around. The workers surrounded the police car he was in and tried to tip it over, although the cops eventually were able to bring him to jail for one month. Strikers routinely surrounded the prison. When released, he went back to the picket line.

The proof was in the organizing. The TMC was the lifeblood of the movement.

Capital Reacts

At the start of the strike, the poor conditions of the workers were so obvious, that even the bourgeois press responded with some sympathy, endorsing the AFTO demand to reverse the wage cut. Church leaders turned down bribes from mill owners to preach against the strike and instead sympathized with the workers. Social groups like the Rotary Club, American Legion, and Chamber of Commerce similarly expressed supportive sentiment.

However, as the red scare had been fermenting in the popular American psyche, and as the strike grew longer and more wearisome, popular sentiment shifted. AFTO leaders formally joined the American Federation of Labor Union’s subsidiary, the United Textile Workers, in order to try and wrest control away from the communist TMC faction. With the AFL on board, the Socialist Party sent in representatives from Boston and New York City to change the narrative. Indeed, the Socialist Party of the day seems to have been more concerned with consolidating power in labor institutions than with the plight of working people. Self-proclaimed socialists penned hit pieces in the local press, condemning the TMC as divisive, harmful to the workers’ cause, and claiming that organizing the unskilled workers was fruitless and counter productive. The Passiac strike was revised to be fractious, and not worth emulating in New Bedford. Socialism and the establishment union apparatus were weaponized to kneecap the true popular workers movement, to the benefit of the mill owners.

As the weeks passed, the police got more combative, targeting strike leaders with fabricated charges. Strikers grew increasingly destitute without wages. Mayor Ashley called for the national guard to support the overwhelmed police force, culminating in 256 arrests in a massive brawl with strikers on July 30th. A Department of Labor official was sent to New Bedford to help mediate, as the mills were hemorrhaging money, and demanded state intervention. The previously friendly civil society groups, the local churches, Rotary Club, and newspapers were predictably amicable no longer, and blasted the AFTO line: The TMC and the Communists are the problem!

These variables coalesced into an unrepresentative agreement between the AFTO’s skilled workers and mill owners – compromising on a 5% wage cut. Unskilled workers were not included in the mediation, nor included in the union’s one concession. Only 2,000 workers voted in the following referendum on continuing the strike after this agreement, and within this voting minority, ending the strike won out by a slim majority.

The TMC, understandably, did not accept this – and attempted to rally the workers to reject the agreement and keep striking. However, in part due to the tenuous economic conditions of the time, on October 8th, most of the strikers showed up to work, effectively ending one of the largest industrial labor actions in the history of the Commonwealth.

Lessons of the Strike

The Mills of New Bedford and the rest of the Commonwealth have since left, picking up and abandoning their workers to relocate to cheaper southern states with the advent of the Great Depression, an early premonition for the incoming neoliberal havoc of globalization. The Passaic, New Jersey mill ended up closing in 1929, in part due to owner retaliation for the workers supporting the New Bedford strikers. Beal, Weisbord, Murdoch and other American Communist organizers left town, but they were not discouraged. They understood that New Bedford was a small setback within the broader history of human class struggle. They did, however, glean some important lessons for labor organizers in the future. 

The TMC built considerable power within the working masses. They were able to achieve legitimacy, despite being led by out of state Communists, which was an ideology even the unskilled immigrant workers were not necessarily aligned with, by being more effective than the corporate-minded AFTO. The textile committee was simply more effective. They activated the unorganized, provided direction to the movement, and took better care of the striking workers with their soup kitchens and resource allocation. They were militant and uncompromising.

Additionally, the TMC was particularly focused on immigrant workers. The strategy is clear. Immigrants and unskilled workers were the clear majority of the affected strikers, yet the AFTO had left them destitute for years, preferring to solely uplift their own in a selfish and nativist play. As socialists, we know that artificial divisions among the working class only benefit the boss. Craft and company unions are antithetical to our work. Even better, the textile committee would have benefitted from elevating the immigrant workers they represented into more prominent leadership roles. The authenticity is a critical variable – and allowed the press to vilify the whole movement as the work of a few nefarious out of state ideologues.

The strike came at a key inflection point for the American communist movement, at the height of a debate on whether and to what degree to launch new unions like the TMC, or to continue pressing unions like the AFTO to organize the unorganized despite their establishment, nativist, craft, and anti-communist inclinations. Although the TMC failed in New Bedford to win the unionization of the 23,000 or so semi-skilled workers excluded from the AFTO, the general approach would later make strong inroads in the great drives of the Congress of Industrial Unions.

The current landscape of American labor is similarly scourged with compradors and class traitors. Too many modern unions are shades of AFTO, fixated on their status as an institution, leaders getting invited to dinners, and the incestuous marriage between labor and bourgeois political swindlers. Reflecting on the debates of the Communist movement of old is worthwhile when considering how to proceed.

The New Bedford strike lasted twenty-three weeks, involved over 26,000 workers, and resulted in $600,000 in lost wages and millions of lost mill profits. New Bedford has been unceremoniously written-off as a ‘gateway city’ in conjunction with the other working class cities in the Commonwealth. Local organizations have been quick to cast-off the former mill town reputation.

But Beacon Hill nomenclature cannot rewrite the incredible history which happened on the South Coast, or the broader industrial history of the Commonwealth and its mills. The next time the working class of our cities organize, and when we are in the same streets in between the recently renovated mill buildings the old strikers used to walk, we will be ready.

Chris Brady is a member of Boston DSA.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.

By Freddy Reiber

Boston University has a long history with labor organizing.

In 1979, as a reaction to the policies of famously conservative university president, John Silber, professors, clerical workers, librarians, and other workers struck. After 18 days on strike, the faculty were able to win a 32.5 percent increase in pay and union recognition for clerical workers and librarians. Unfortunately, a Supreme Court decision later ruled that private university faculty were not covered by the Nation Labor Relations Act.

When my union, the Boston University Graduate Workers Union, went on strike demanding higher wages, comprehensive health care, and childcare funding we tried to channel that same history, carrying signs painted with “UNFINISHED BUSINESS 1979 -2024”.

Graduate Workers are oftentimes the backbone of universities, with them providing more and more of the labor for the university. This labor includes conducting a large amount of the research and handling most of the instruction given to students, with much of the duties that are performed by current graduate students previously assigned to full-time faculty. At the same time, many universities have not adjusted wages while students and workers have faced significant increases in rent. A 2020 study found that 17% of graduate students experienced homelessness and 49 percent of graduated students dealt with some level of housing insecurity.

When we decided to unionize, our central demand was that the university provide us with a living wage, one free from the significant rent burden placed on us as Boston workers. Specifically, our focus was on COLA – a stipulation in our contract that ties our wage increases to cost of living calculators. Our other asks included improvements to our health care along with an actual dental or vision plan, meaningful child care stipends, and support for those with disabilities. Negotiations over our first contract stalled, and after a number of months of getting nowhere in bargaining, we voted to strike.

Organizing in a University

Organizing within a large research university is a challenge. As an organizer, you are trained to leverage social networks. Find a community and a problem, agitate over said problem, and use it to build worker power. For Boston University, the common network was the academic department. As it became clearer that a strike was needed, leaders in each department worked together to form organizing plans, hold meetings, and do power mapping around the critical workers we needed to reach. These same leaders would also communicate amongst each other, sharing data and ideas as well as planning on university wide actions and organizing goals.

One of the strengths of this leadership model is that department leaders tend to have a deep understanding of the conditions within their network. As a worker in the computer and data science departments, my rapport with my fellow workers allowed me to organize and mobilize quickly in response to calls for a strike. These included quickly developing a mutual aid network to help soften the loss pay, as well as reaching out to significantly more remote workers who had little understanding of union action. It also allowed for each department to take ownership of the strike in a highly democratic way, with workers figuring out how to respond to union-busting actions by the university as a group.

A great example of this was the Math department, which in response to having courses originally struck scabbed by university administrators, were able to organize and plan direct actions led by the workers. These actions were in turn met with union busting from university management, but due to the strong worker-to-worker organizing, the department was able to maintain its militancy and continue to hurt Boston University’s bottom line.

The issue with this somewhat disconnected network, however, is that departments that lacked a leader would often go “dark”. Unable to penetrate these almost hidden departments, many of them likely didn’t receive proper communication around how to participate or were even aware that there was a union action. This was something that my own department (a group of about 200) also suffered from.

Despite our best attempts to reach out, many workers had little interest or knowledge around union activity. Many of these workers worked remote or were masters students giving them little presence on campus. Even the university itself seemed unable to know who these workers were as the provided list of recognized workers contained numerous errors, including having a number of my co-workers as stationed in the business school.

This isn’t that uncommon for university worker and student strikes, especially when you lack a first contract and guaranteed rights for orientation. But even in places with a union orientation, the high turn-around among workers in large classes make it almost impossible to conduct meaningful organizing.

Our answer to this question was to simply force the issue and call for a strike, an answer I still stand by. Nothing was more productive in terms of getting workers involved than calling for a strike, and I suspect that any attempts to organize these workers outside of simply calling for direct action would not have actually worked, as they would have been replaced within a few months.

Our other answer to these disconnected communication networks was to use Slack, a 1500+ worker digital communication channel that quickly became the focal point for many controversial discussions around larger union actions. So often workers who hadn’t been a part of any union actions or had any background in the union would join Slack as a means of airing grievances over union discussions. More arguments occurred over Slack than I think anyone would care to admit, and none of which were productive to our organizing. Unlike traditional shop-floor organizing, important discussions happened digitally, with workers unable to properly understand each other, leading to divisions instead of solidarity. What was supposed to be a tool to help communication became a burden, with so many of my fellow organizers deleting the application as soon as possible.

In It For The Long-haul

The other main learning point for us as organizers was the long haul strategy. Adopted from strikes at other universities like University of California and University of Michigan, our strike was defined by the “long haul”. Instead of setting a specific deadline, our strike’s end is decided by the workers within the bargaining unit, with votes being held, in our case, every week. As grad workers, we see our economic and structural power as something that builds over time. Unlike strikes in manufacturing or in K-12 education, graduate workers’ work isn’t felt day to day. Instead, it is felt by the numerous grades not being submitted, the missed lectures and discussions, and the lack of feedback on work that is critical to higher education.

During the first semester of our strike, the long haul was, without a doubt, effective. The distributed and somewhat messy network of BUGWU leaders were able to channel the frustrations of our worker population into pretty wide and effective mass action. Numerous courses had to either be canceled or have substantial changes in structure. In my own turf, we ended up being able to get a significant amount of workers to go on strike, with many classes in the department not having grades, discussion sections, or even lectures for most of the remaining semester.

We also hosted a significant number of rallies, pickets, and marches all of which had great turn out. Some of these included our initial strike rally, in which congresswomen Ayanna Pressley and Elizabeth Warren showed up to speak and show solidarity, as well as our May Day rally which had participants in the thousands.

This isn’t to say that the early strike wasn’t still a challenge. Other than our internal problems highlighted above, we also faced numerous external challenges as the university attempted to strike bust. One example of this was the bringing of academic charges against those striking not a

Oftentimes graduate students are the primary people responsible for the production of course materials, with much of this work being stored on digital repositories. To limit the potential for scab work, striking workers would often take said materials down, removing access to them. This ended up being a rather controversial tactic with the university, with many administrators falsely claiming that we had destroyed student exams and assignments. They would then use these strike actions as the basis for academic discipline that was targeted at our student status, not our worker status.

Other examples included aggressive removal of union flyers and literature, with one dean going so far as to verbally harass and chase flyering workers around a building. Still, despite these challenges, the spring semester strike was a success. No vote to end the strike was anywhere close to being contentious, and we won serious improvements in a number of critical areas.

As spring died down, and we started to plan for summer, a season in which many graduate workers are not employed by the university, we decided to treat summer like a resting period. The plan was for most of us to take time away from the fight, and then ramp back up to the large full strike when school started again in the fall.

For a few departments, like math or computer science, there was no such break. Many of the math department workers still had teaching positions over the summer, with most of them continuing to strike. To ensure that no one was left behind, I, along with other organizers in computer science and math, expanded our mutual aid network to help cover the cost to workers, many of which had not received a paycheck in over 3 months. By leveraging graduate workers’ other employment positions, we were able to ensure that workers could continue to strike, resulting in the cancellation of a number of classes.

Many of my fellow organizers have congratulated me on this work, as we really were the center of the summer strike. However, upon reflection I think it was a mistake. The limited summer strike heavily drained most of our resources and as summer moved into fall, many of us were at our financial limits. At the same time, the limited summer strike had limited impact. Although numerous classes needed to be changed, the limited number of positions we had to strike ensured the university was able to limit our damage.

For departments that didn’t have work in the summer, many of them tried but failed to recapture the same militancy that they had shown during the spring, in part due to the spatial and temporal issues discussed above, as well as just general burn out.

At the same time, the university offered us a full contract which gave significant raises in both compensation and benefits to certain groups of workers like parents or humanities, while also leaving other workers high and dry.

All of these factors compounded into a significantly weaker fall strike. Numerous departments who felt like the strike had gone on for long enough organized around ending the strike, while other workers who were still dedicated to the fight had to return to work for financial or personal reasons. Still, we pressed on, and were able to get the university to make some small, but significant moves at the table, like cheaper health care for dependents.

Discussions then turned to securing back to work protections for workers on strike, which while contentious, ensured that no worker was left without a job, which once settled, led to a pretty quick ratification. The seventh month strike was over and we had secured our first contract.

Is It Over?

When I first set out to write the article, the main question that was posed to me was, “Do you think the strike was a success?”, a question that is probably unanswerable for me, due to my close ties with the strike.

There were a number of wins, especially for our lowest paid workers, and in other in areas like child care. This contract allows for people who were originally going to need to leave the university to stay. At the same time, there were also so many things that were left on the table, like better access rights for those with disabilities or an actual dental plan.

Instead of answering this question, I have tried to highlight and share, what I think are, learning moments for other workers attempting to secure a first contract of their own. There are numerous decisions we made, like our use of digital technology to try and bridge communication gaps, our lack of a centralized leadership structure, and our use of the long-haul strike that I hope other unions can learn from.

To close, I want to briefly remind us that no single contract will ever be enough.

There will always be more left on the table, more to win, and battles over contract enforcement. As an organizer, the fight doesn’t start or end during a strike, instead it’s something that we must live for everyday. And when it comes to the Boston University Graduate Workers Union and its fight for social and economic justice, we still have unfinished business.

Freddy Reiber is a member of BUGWU and Boston DSA.

Photo Credits – Henry De Groot