Depending on where you work, you may be covered by the NLRA or other federal or state laws. See what covers you and how to use it.

The post Am I covered by the NLRA? appeared first on EWOC.

Every year the chapter conducts a census of the members and creates a report on how the dynamics of the chapter function along with vital information about demographics. Read the report here.

The post 2024 CNJ DSA Chapter Census appeared first on Central NJ DSA.

Monthly Newsletter of the Rochester Chapter of Democratic Socialists of America

ROC DSA is stepping into 2025 with the same momentum that has been steadily building our movement. Our membership continues to grow, as the realization sets in that we must do more than vote every four years to make the world a better place. Without the unified action of the working class, the gains that have been won from their struggle—through strikes, protests, and resistance—are eroded and overturned.

The post Rochester Red Star | March 2025 (Issue 11) first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

By Jean Allen

At the December General meeting, in a breakout group talking about what to do with a second Trump administration, comrade Lara (who wrote “Post-Election Reds” for our December issue) said something to the effect that under a political atmosphere that degrades any concrete interaction with reality, that degrades the truth itself, that socialists need to stand for the truth. I’ve been thinking about that since, because it’s such a lovely phrase. And so I’ve had it rolling through my head even though my reaction was initially dismissive. 

Earlier last year, at our May Day Picnic, I had a speech talking about the way the state used the Haymarket bombings to make martyrs of a group of largely unrelated anarchists. How, despite the target of the Haymarket bombing being a rally of the Labor movement, anarchists were targeted because they posed a threat to the state, which was what made the Haymarket Martyrs figures which unified the whole world’s socialist movement. I summed up the speech saying that “the capitalists have their truth, and we have ours”. 

I was thirteen when the United States invaded Iraq, starting a war for reasons that were found to be totally spurious on year 1 of 17. Since then things have only gotten worse, so when I hear that we need to stand for the truth it’s hard to believe in. What is the truth? My whole political life has been defined by lies and falsehoods in pursuit of the naked aims of power. They have their truth, and we have ours.

But for us to have our truth, we do need to stand for it. Something that is beautiful about having a truly democratic culture, which we need to constantly fight for and renew, is that by working together, as equals, and by talking to each other, we are striving to arrive at a kind of collective truth. A friend of mine and I were talking together last year about some personal conflict, and they said that people want to skip the process and work that’s required of a radical, and just be immediately Correct. That in this post-truth world, people cling to facts that make them feel good about themselves. This results in an odd feeling I’ve had multiple times this year, when the truth of the genocidal offensive that the Israeli Defense Army has undertaken in Palestine has been turned into a muddled media narrative, where people brush off facts that don’t feel right to them because they have associated their ego with their beliefs.  

This is, to some degree, always true, it is part of why I’ve advocated for socialists to be emotionally intelligent agitators for years. But accepting that, we still need to struggle with each other and hold each other to the truth. It is very easy to keep fuzzy beliefs that allow us to feel smart and correct, but we need to investigate, need to make sure what we’re saying is true, need to hold each other to account. Truth is the heart of a working democracy, and how are to be a democratic organization if we don’t stand for the truth?

The post Stand for the Truth first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

“We are attacking the cynics and the oligarchs who are trying to drive wedges into our community. This is not new. This is what they do.” Last night at the […]

By Henry McKeand

In the everchanging movie landscape of the past decade, one of the great casualties has been the wide-release R-rated comedy. In the 2000s, raunchy joke-a-minute projects were being made with big stars for less than $50 million and reliably turning a profit at the box office, but there was a shift in the industry around a decade ago. Suddenly, studios were afraid to take a risk on releases that didn’t have superhero spectacle or franchise potential, and mid-budget films began to face an uphill battle at the cineplex. Comedy moved to television and the internet, while lighthearted fare in movies was relegated mostly to direct-to-streaming leftovers and throwaway gags in larger blockbusters.

This is part of what makes One of Them Days, Lawrence Lamont’s new comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA as friends on a Los Angeles odyssey to recover their rent money, such a breath of fresh air. It’s a capital-C comedy with a back-to-basics buddy dynamic and modest budget (around $14 million), relying on a funny trailer and the strength of its stars to drive audiences to the theater. There’s an old-school appeal here that has already made it successful with critics and audiences, but the real highlight is the working class core of the narrative. When was the last time you watched a crowd-pleaser where the main dramatic question was whether or not the main characters would be evicted?

Palmer plays Dreux, an ambitious young woman working as a waitress at a small diner who has an important corporate interview coming up in the afternoon. SZA plays Alyssa, a talented artist with a laid back demeanor and “candles and crystals” sensibility. While Dreux has a plan for everything, Alyssa goes with the flow and believes that the spirits of their ancestors will guide them through anything life has in store. But when Alyssa’s do-nothing boyfriend Keshawn runs off with their rent money, they’re forced to work as a team and race against the clock to get their money back before their landlord kicks them out, contending with various local oddballs, criminals, and love interests along the way. 

The ticking clock, escalating insanity, and “best friends” bickering call to mind countless comedies from yesteryear, from House Party to Superbad, but the best reference point may be the original Friday. Syreeta Singleton’s script shares not only a working class LA milieu with the F. Gary Gray and Ice Cube classic, but also a similar blend of social realism and class clown silliness. The best Black comedies of the 90s and 2000s, such as Friday and The Wood, served as more socially conscious alternatives to their “white yuppie in crisis” peers, and One of Them Days is no different. Whereas the few big-budget comedies of the past ten years have either been absurdist romps disconnected from reality (Bottoms, Barb and Star go to Vista Del Mar) or Hangover-esque tales of well-off middle class characters cutting loose (Booksmart, Ricky Stanicky), Lamont and Singleton focus on the daily problems that Black and working class people face. 

More so than the gangsters and bullies who stand in Dreux and Alyssa’s way (here, Friday’s Deebo is swapped out for a take-no-shit neighborhood woman nicknamed “Big Booty Berniece”), the true villain is the capitalist, white supremacist world that they live in. Their ceiling is falling apart, but their landlord hasn’t fixed it. When they get their first white neighbor (Euphoria’s Maude Apatow) as a result of ongoing gentrification, they’re shocked that her unit has a working AC. In order to whip up some quick money, their only obvious options are trying to donate at a blood bank and applying for predatory loans. And when they end up en route to the hospital after one of them is electrocuted, they decide to escape from the ambulance because they can’t afford the medical bill.

Things aren’t all bleak, though. This is a film that understands the power of friendship and solidarity in the face of oppressive systems. The various neighbors argue and isolate themselves just like everyday people, but they also come together and stand up for one another as tenants and members of a shared community. And while Dreux and Alyssa have their differences, the script never forces conflict between them. For all of her flakiness, Alyssa is refreshingly supportive in her support for Dreux, and SZA, in her first major acting role, captures the character’s eccentricities and contradictions remarkably well. Palmer, too, is predictably great; her movie star charisma has been evident for years, and she is routinely hilarious as Dreux. Together, they create a lived-in quality to their characters’ friendship that’s authentic and warm.

It doesn’t hurt that this is the funniest feature-length script in years, never afraid to balance sweet human touches with comedic big swings. One scene, involving the blood bank and Abbott Elementary’s Janelle James as an irresponsible nurse, is one of the most laugh-out-loud things to grace the big screen in a long time. There’s also no shortage of perfect cameos, including Lil Rel Howery as a sneaker obsessive and Katt Williams as a sidewalk truth teller named Lucky. But the biggest standouts are the lesser-known names, such as Patrick Cage as Dreux’s mysterious crush and Joshua Neal as Keshawn. Neal, especially, embodies an all-too-real kind of unambitious, manipulative boyfriend with hilarious conviction.

Movies like One of Them Days are often classified by Hollywood as “minor” or “low stakes.” There’s no high-concept twist or massive energy beam threatening to destroy the world. These kinds of “low stakes” movies, however, are the ones that capture the actual joys and stresses of modern life. Take, for example, the scene where Dreux has her interview and has to prove herself to a white hiring manager who doesn’t know how to pronounce her name. The sequence is overflowing with emotion and humor and suspense, and it’s all rooted in something “mundane.” 

At one point, as Dreux is talking to a neighbor who has been evicted and is worried about where he’ll go next, she says four simple words: “Your life is lifing.” It’s an acknowledgement that day-to-day existence is far too urgent and scary for the majority of us. One of Them Days isn’t a radical film, or at least it shouldn’t be. It’s not a vitriolic call to action or an openly socialist film. But by honing in on these kinds of mundane, material realities, it stands out from the endless stream of studio releases that are completely disconnected from working class concerns. 

Films are powerful in their ability to reflect and influence public opinion, and the success of One of Them Days points to a growing dissatisfaction with capitalism. The contradictions and stresses in our everyday lives have gotten to a point where audiences are ready for stories that take stands landlords and the healthcare system. Slowly but surely, the needle is moving.

If your life is lifing right now, and you want to fight for a world in which people don’t have to struggle in order to have simple necessities, then the time is now to get involved with groups like Triangle DSA and Triangle Tenant Union!

On December 9, 2024, after a years-long campaign from a broad-based coalition that DSA-LA is part of, Los Angeles Mayor Bass signed the LA Sanctuary Ordinance. The ordinance is a long overdue policy to protect and defend immigrants and a huge victory for the LA Sanctuary Coalition.  

The campaign for Sanctuary began in 2017 during the first Trump Administration. Despite pressure from the ‘ICE out of LA’ coalition, which demanded that LA adopt a law to disentangle the City from federal immigration enforcement, no policy was introduced at that time. Instead, the City of Los Angeles merely proclaimed itself a “city of sanctuary” and former Mayor Garcetti issued a directive regarding immigration enforcement. This meant that the City of Los Angeles, despite being home to large, diverse, and vibrant immigrant communities, was falling behind other localities such as Santa Ana and Berkeley that adopted policies refusing to use local resources to collude with immigration agents.

Socialists in office make the difference

Fast forward to 2023, after the successful election of DSA-endorsed candidates Nithya Raman, Hugo Soto-Martinez, and Eunisses Hernandez to Los Angeles City Council. Having three socialists in office marked a significant shift in what was possible within local politics. We finally had the champions who were willing to call out the unjust nature of immigration arrests, detentions, and deportations, and to introduce a sanctuary policy.   

The three socialist Council members introduced a motion on March 7, 2023 directing the City Attorney to draft a Sanctuary ordinance. The Sanctuary Coalition had been meeting with them for months to discuss putting forward the strongest possible language, and mobilized dozens of people to turn out that day. 

Fast forward again to October 2024. We were on the cusp of elections and the City Attorney had still not shared a draft ordinance. Worse yet, the City Council was deciding whether to approve the selection of Jim McDonnell as Chief of the Los Angeles Police Department.  During his time as the Sheriff of Los Angeles County from 2014 to 2018, McDonnell colluded with ICE to transfer Angelenos for arrest, detention and deportation, separating thousands of families in Los Angeles. In just one year (2017), the Sheriff’s Department spent $1.4 million dollars on ICE entanglement and transferred 1,223 people to ICE. Jim McDonnell also opposed a sanctuary bill at the state level. 

The coalition quickly sprang into action, mobilizing to host two press conferences—one before the Public Safety Committee meeting and the other before the full Council vote. Speakers included leaders from the Central American Resource Center, California Immigrant Policy Center, SEIU USWW, Black Alliance for Just Immigration, and Black Lives Matter-LA. They spoke intersectionally about the ways in which law enforcement has harmed communities of color and the need for the Sanctuary Ordinance. 

The coalition also organized a rally and march that featured Los Jornaleros del Norte playing from a flatbed truck. Hundreds of people showed up to call for Sanctuary, in order to ensure that no LAPD Chief—current or future—would facilitate deportations. Over 80 organizations signed onto a letter underscoring their strong concerns about McDonnell and supporting moving forward with an ordinance that would completely prohibit ICE transfers, as LA County did in September 2020.

No ignoring Trump’s mass deportations pledge

With Donald Trump’s election this past November, it became clear that the City had to take a stance to defy the anti-immigrant bigotry that has defined national discourse and news. There was no ignoring the pledge of mass deportations that was one of the cornerstones of Trump’s campaign. The City would have to prepare for ramped-up targeting, harassment, profiling, and arrests of LA residents. 

On November 19, 2024, with the City Council poised to vote on the ordinance, the Sanctuary Coalition held a vibrant press conference on the steps of City Hall. Hundreds of attendees rallied while speakers representing labor and immigrant rights groups spoke. We then went into City Hall, providing comments and holding up “Sanctuary Now” signs. That day the Los Angeles City Council unanimously voted to pass the Sanctuary Ordinance. 

The organizations that worked on this victory included DSA-LA, ACLU-So Cal, California Immigrant Policy Center, Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA), CLEAN Carwash Campaign, Garment Worker Center, National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), SEIU-USWW, Public Counsel, UCLA Center for Immigration Law & Policy, UCLA Labor Center, and many more groups! 

This victory will have a tangible, material impact. The City is committing to refuse its resources (personnel, property, funds, etc.) for immigration enforcement. Immigrants will feel more comfortable accessing City programs, without the fear that contact with the City will result in their deportation. This is significant given that 1.3 million immigrants reside in Los Angeles City, totaling over 34 percent of the population.

Not just in words

The Sanctuary Ordinance makes Los Angeles a true “sanctuary city,” not just in words but in actions. Its key components include: 

• Barring the City from asking about, or collecting, information about a person's Citizenship, Immigration Status, or place of birth

• Preventing the police from citing, arresting, holding, transferring, or detaining any person for Immigration Enforcement purposes

• Not providing any Immigration Agent access to any non-public areas of property owned or controlled by the City, including City jails, for the purpose of Immigration Enforcement

• Prohibiting the direct and indirect sharing of data with federal immigration authorities. City contractors and subcontractors must confirm in writing that they will not share personal information collected for City services with immigration authorities.

•   City staff cannot participate in any joint task force with any immigration agency

•   City staff cannot make any person in City custody available to any immigration agent for an interview

With this important step, LA will no longer support an immigration detention and deportation system that has its underpinnings in white supremacy, settler colonialism, and the exploitation of immigrant workers. The Sanctuary Coalition will continue our work to ensure that our local resources are spent on supporting City residents and making LA a place where working class immigrants can thrive.

The first half of this piece was published  in last month’s issue of California Red. There I discussed the background and initial responses to the Los Angeles fires, including from DSA-LA. 

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After the fires in Los Angeles had been extinguished, I took time to drive up Lake Avenue toward the San Gabriel Mountains and see the devastation of the Eaton Fire that had torn through Altadena. It’s one thing to see photographs, it’s another to drive past block after block of destruction. Places that I grew up visiting, where I’d share a meal with my family, the homes of friends and their parents reduced to nothing but chimneys and piles of black dust. We’re now more than a month out from the start of the disaster, and the causes, responses, and effects are all beginning to come into focus. 

Origins

Though the causes of these calamities, and ones like them, vary in slight degrees, we know that they are unleashed  by an economic system that prioritizes privatization, profit, and wealth over our safety and dignity.

The Eaton Fire was likely caused by a private utility company, Southern California Edison. For a long time, utilities have paid a lot of money to elect candidates and exploit our ballot measure system to pass laws enabling them to make even more money. Whether they’re charging us higher rates or failing to repair equipment that ends up burning down our homes and livelihoods, it’s always at our expense. They see the loss of wildlife, housing, and people merely as the cost of doing business. It wasn’t long ago when Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), a private utility that has a near monopoly on energy for much of California, started the Camp Fire, destroying the town of Paradise and the surrounding area, killing 85 people. Six years later, the people of Paradise  are still rebuilding. This story is becoming tragically common in our state.

Even when a private utility isn’t to blame for the precise origin of a fire, like the one in the Palisades, the lust for wealth in the US has been both the spark and fuel. With the reality of climate change, extreme weather events are becoming more and more frequent. This will not be the last time that Los Angeles experiences extraordinary amounts of rain followed by drought, and we know that billionaire greed certainly isn’t going to politely go away. As these events become more deadly, ruinous, and costly, it’s incumbent upon us to be serious, realistic, and strategic about our work moving forward. 

The responses

As soon as the fires started, reactionary billionaires were already sowing the seeds of distrust for our government and reciting their common antidotal script for solving our problems: only the wealthy, a market economy, and charity can solve the problems we’re facing.

Landlords also wasted no time in taking advantage of the disaster by immediately raising rents and rushing to evict tenants who’d lost their jobs and income. In response, members of the community began compiling databases that included the listings of units for which the rent had increased more than the legal amount. These efforts caught the attention of elected officials from the local to statewide level.

Billionaires like Rick Caruso have used this tragedy to relaunch their failed political brands. Yes, the same man who hired private firefighters to steal our water in order to save his shopping center is claiming he actually gives a damn about you. Using a foundation that he started in the wake of the fire, he is partnering with one of the founders of AirBnb to “donate” prefab homes to around 100 victims. He is also likely to run for governor. Funny that a company like AirBnb, which has played a significant role in causing housing costs to rise in the United States, suddenly cares about making sure people have housing.

We are also looking at the first instance in US history where a federal government, led by Republicans eager to prove their cruelty has no bounds, may put conditions on disaster relief. Even where this relief has begun, much of the focus has been on the Palisades Fire (the only site Trump bothered to visit), where residents tend to be much wealthier than those affected by the Eaton Fire in Altadena. Of course, loss of belongings and homes is always tragic, but Altadena, a historically Black community in LA County, has already found itself falling behind in the official response. 

Moving forward 

These events have highlighted both the inequities that exist in our country and the interconnectedness of their effects. When people are forced out of their homes, the housing market becomes even more strained. The people who are left able to afford staying in Los Angeles are much more likely to be white and much less likely to be working class. When smoke fills the air for weeks, working class people are much more likely to work outside and suffer the health impacts of unhealthy air quality, if they haven’t lost their jobs altogether. Those health impacts mean people need to seek medical attention from our private healthcare system. If you can afford that, great. If you can’t, well, you can’t. Insurance companies, notorious for avoiding as much coverage as they can get away with, have spent years deciding to no longer cover fire damage.

DSA-LA’s socialists in office (SiOs) on the LA City Council moved quickly to propose tenant protections through an eviction moratorium and rent freeze. Shamefully, despite pressure from DSA-LA and the Keep LA Housed Coalition, a majority of the council has continued to delay the proposal, even as rent checks are due and eviction notices begin to pour in. Thankfully, the LA County Board of Supervisors stepped in with their own temporary protections for tenants where the city failed to do so. Their action, due to the emergency declaration, extends to all the cities within Los Angeles county, providing tenants with much needed relief. 

The Long Term

While disaster relief and tenant protections are absolutely necessary at this moment, capitalism’s need for continual and more costly bailouts is not sustainable or just. We must replace our profit-centric policies with human-centric ones. In other words, though each disaster presents a new challenge, our mission is largely the same: replacing capitalism with democratic socialism.

Los Angeles once had one of the largest transit systems in the country. The problem with that system was that it was all privately owned. As soon as it was no longer profitable to its few private owners, the rails and their charming cars were sold and dismantled. Los Angeles Metro, our public transportation system reviving our rail services since the 1990s, has come a long way, but it remains too dependent on profit-seeking private contractors as it slowly constructs its way around the county. We deserve a truly public transportation system that can get us to all the places where we need to go.

Californians also deserve publicly-owned utilities that provide renewable, affordable, and safe energy to the many rather than providing profits to the few who own them. Campaigns like Build Public Power New York can serve as case studies for efforts here.

Eviction protections and rent control are steps that we can take in the short term, but beyond that, we deserve guaranteed housing that we can actually afford. This would require a major shift  from our speculative housing market toward housing as a human right.

Disasters and emergencies are going to happen again, and when they do, people will inevitably need healthcare. We know, as democratic socialists, that we need a single-payer, guaranteed healthcare system in California. 

Rather than donations from people like Rick Caruso, we deserve a tax system that forces billionaires to pay their fair share to fund our schools and services. 

As we identify what we want, our next task is to figure out how we’re going to get it. This requires us to come together, both with our chapters and across California, to understand which levers we need to take control of and pull to achieve our goals. We know that even if city-level legislation begins to favor the working class, it will eventually run up against the limitations of the laws passed at the state level

What do you you think democratic socialists should be calling for in the wake of the climate crisis and face of disaster capitalism? What would your vision for the future of California be? What are some of the ways your chapter can begin working with other chapters to win the state power necessary to fight for the working class?

These are some of the questions we can address in California DSA as we face fascism in the federal government and the new uncertainty it brings to California state politics.

Prior to November 5, 2024 we were running our introductory “California DSA 101” sessions every few months for a dozen or two mostly new members. The ninety-minute meetings were held on zoom, and comrades from across California would tune in to learn about the first statewide DSA in the country and have a chance to ask questions of the state officers. 

The presentation featured a slideshow in four parts.  The first three sections addressed basic questions: What is capitalism? What is socialism? and What is DSA? The fourth part consisted of a condensed overview of the state’s political and labor history. We augmented the slideshow with breakout rooms for small group discussion and reserved time at the end for Q&A.  The participant feedback said we were on the right track.  

We then scheduled a session for December 1, a few weeks after the election. We revised the presentation to reflect the changed political landscape, with a new section toward the end on what fascism looks like in twenty first century America.  Seventy comrades showed up; at the next one, earlier this month, we had seventy-five.  

The jump in attendance numbers reflects an understandable dismay at the election results and a healthy desire by comrades to find an organizing space in this historical moment as the curtain descends on American democracy.  With the Democratic Party leadership mostly in confused disarray after its neoliberal election strategy’s catastrophic failure, there is a hunger for answers that make more sense than ‘doing the same thing, only better’. 

We do not pretend in California DSA to have a guaranteed roadmap to success. But we do understand that it will take a powerful mass movement to defeat the fascist forces in control of the federal government. This understanding is already a step ahead of the tired old guard at the top of the Democratic Party. 

While California DSA does not have the resources to lead that mass movement, we certainly do have the ability to help build it.  Our 101 program is a part of that contribution. Come to the next one on March 30.  But don’t wait until then to build the movement. Attend your local DSA chapter meetings and join with your comrades in taking a stand. This isn’t pretend fascism we’re facing. It’s the real thing.

Sign up for our next 101