Organizers and workers from across Alameda County, California, scored a major victory for the BDS movement on December 10th, successfully pressuring the Board of Supervisors to vote to develop an ethical investment policy that, when implemented, could move tens of millions of dollars in investments out of companies profiting off of Israel’s genocide and system of apartheid.

The County Treasurer, Hank Levy, who is an independent elected official, also announced that he had already dropped all $32 million in bonds the County held in Caterpillar (CAT), which directly profits from Israeli apartheid and the ongoing genocide, after sustained organizing from county residents and organizations requesting him to do so. 

This vote comes after months of grassroots organizing and pressure, including from many organizers with Bay Area Divest! (BAD!) and the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America’s (EBDSA) “Divest from Apartheid” campaign.

Top priority

“Organizing local governments to divest from Israeli apartheid and genocide is our chapter’s top priority,” said Zach Weinstein, co-chair of EBDSA. “It’s been incredible to see the combined power of organized workers, faith communities, racial justice organizations, Palestinian and Arab-led groups, and Jewish anti-zionists to win this major victory for the Palestine solidarity movement in the US, even as state repression of that movement continues to escalate.”

Thousands of Alameda County residents signed petitions, made phone calls, and sent emails to their County supervisors calling on them to divest from companies like Caterpillar. In November, well over one hundred people came out in person to pack the Board of Supervisors’ hearing room in support of divestment. Even more attended the hearing this month, with supporters also filling an overflow room across the street.

Labor unions like SEIU 1021, as well as the Alameda County Labor Council, played a pivotal role; the Council passed a resolution supporting local divestment campaigns. 

“Since Israel began their most recent assault on Palestinians over a year ago, our members have been leaders in doing what we can to stand in solidarity with Palestine and in opposition the US government’s role in these genocidal attacks – from organizing actions at our workplaces, to divesting our own dues from companies that profit from war, apartheid and climate change,” said Felix Thomson, a shop steward with SEIU 1021. “From our over one hundred rank-and-file members of SEIU 1021 Members for Palestine to our Local President, we have made this a priority issue in our union. It’s clear that the Board of Supervisors felt they had to pay attention to this level of organization from the workers who keep this county running.”

Alameda County is the first U.S. county to divest in this manner, and, once this policy is fully developed and implemented, it will be the largest jurisdiction in the US to have divested from Israel, following the Bay Area cities of Richmond and Hayward, California and a handful of other cities across the country.

“Along with other Bay Area organizers, we will continue to organize to ensure that this policy is faithfully developed and implemented and to get other Bay Area governments to follow Alameda County’s lead,” said Weinstein. “Millions of people of conscience across the US will continue to resist this country’s complicity in the ongoing genocide, displacement, and oppression of Palestinians – until Palestine is free, from the river to the sea.”

Under the banner “Make Big Oil Pay,” about 50 climate activists marched to the gates of the Chevron refinery in Richmond for a boisterous rally on January 17. Organized by the Sunrise Movement and joined by other enviros, the rally was hastily put together in solidarity with an action by climate activists in fire-ravaged Los Angeles. 

The Richmond action was tightly-organized. The gathering point was a park where beautiful signs and banners were distributed, chants rehearsed, and spirits lifted by young energetic Sunrise organizers. 

The march was choreographed to safeguard us amidst speedy commute-hour traffic. A dozen or so cameras—wielded mostly by the marchers themselves, I suspect—recorded virtually every moment of the march and subsequent rally at a Chevron gate. Speakers lambasted Big Oil for profiting at the expense of fire-ravaged Los Angeles. At age 74—one of the oldest marchers—I felt deep affection and gratitude for the young organizers who clearly put heart and soul into the action.

What’s the plan?

At the same time, I was plagued by the nagging feeling I get at every climate rally: What’s the plan to grow this into a mass movement? 

Sure, some rallies have attracted hundreds, like the Wall Street West blockade that shut down some banks in downtown San Francisco for most of a day in 2019. Gorgeous protest art was everywhere —displayed on placards, unfurled on banners, chalked onto the closed streets. But inexplicably, organizers provided no leaflets for blockaders to give to the hundreds of passersby we encountered that day. Leaflets to explain the perfidy of oil giants and their enabling banks, to assure passersby of our nonviolent intent, to invite everyone to join the next action, whose date, time and location would be prominently displayed on the leaflet. Instead, the climate actions I’ve attended feel to me like one-offs, a giant splash of anger and art after which most participants go home and wait to be summoned to the next one. 

Is it possible for the plethora of environmental action groups in the Bay Area to collaborate on a single target to generate widespread excitement and attract larger numbers in the future? My experience in the direct action campaign to stop construction of a nuclear reactor in Seabrook, NH suggests the answer is “YES”. 

In 1976, 18 members of the Clamshell Alliance non-violently occupied the Seabrook construction site while several hundred rallied in support. After three weeks of non-stop proselytizing, 180 “Clams”—organized into affinity groups—occupied the site as a thousand or more rallied in support. After eight more months of non-stop proselytizing, some 2,000 Clams occupied the site for 24 hours, then began planning the next occupation while being detained together in National Guard armories for 13 days. (Curious how we did it? See my new documentary “Acres of Clams” at https://youtu.be/RPuE9oKh6-I or just search YouTube for “Acres of Clams Eric Wolfe”.)

The chance to be human

Clamshell had strong support from Seabrook residents, who appreciated the open communications we maintained with local cops, state police and National Guard. Our nonviolence trainer, the late Sukie Rice, encouraged us to always make eye contact, speak from the heart, and defuse tension during actions by being human. In doing so, she said, you give each person you encounter—police, politicians, the press, the public—the chance to be human as well.

By contrast, at the climate non-violence trainings I’ve attended we are told to never speak to the police lest we inadvertently increase our legal jeopardy, or give away strategy. Sure, participants should be cautioned to avoid self-incriminating statements. But bathing our actions in secrecy isn’t a formula for building a mass movement. The better approach, in my experience, is to be as open as practicable with the police, build public trust in our tactics and intent, and bring thousands as close to the targeted facility as we can, then sit down peacefully. Yes, police might react with violent dispersal tactics, but I believe that becomes less likely when you’ve made concerted overtures to the police in advance, and continually reinforce to the public and media that nonviolence is a core part of your identity. Forcing large-scale peaceful arrests makes news and can build numbers going into the next action.

Of course there are many complications with any given action, which participants themselves must game out as best they can during nonviolence training. But when we are able to repeatedly mobilize thousands the publicity will be immense and there is a better chance to inspire concerned citizens elsewhere to action.

On January 17, Sunrise organizers clearly demonstrated the importance of upbeat, even joyful, energy. I wonder who will find a way to marry that energy to a strategy for sustained, disciplined nonviolent direct action.

How should American labor respond to the coming assaults under the Trump administration? A few weeks ago, I highlighted American Federation of Teachers National President Randi Weingarten’s speech calling for an abandonment of neoliberalism. In addition to her remarks, there have been several other notable responses and strategic proposals by unionists and advocates of labor that speak to the need for unions to get out in front of the predictable attacks on the horizon.

Indeed, before the Trump administration has even started, some are signaling the need to preempt likely attempts to gut unions in higher education. As the Guardian recently reported:

Student workers are bracing for the incoming Trump administration to “constrict or eliminate” their labor rights, after a surge in union organizing on college campuses.

Nearly 45,000 student employees formed unions between 2022 to 2024 between 44 bargaining units. As of earlier this year, an estimated 38% of all graduate student employees in the US were unionized.

But organizers fear this trend will stutter as Trump prepares to return to office. During his first presidency, officials tried to exclude 1.5 million private college and university student employees from exercising collective bargaining rights under the National Labor Relations Act, arguing these workers were not “employees”.

While the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the country’s top labor watchdog, withdrew this proposal months after Joe Biden took office in March 2021, Trump’s re-election sets the stage for another battle.

Representation and contracts now

Thus, academic unionists at campuses across the country are organizing to secure representation and win contracts now so they are better positioned for battles in the near future.

This is what labor reporter Hamilton Nolan recommends in “Lean Into the Punch: Labor Under Trump” at his Substack, How Things Work—organize and fight rather than cower and wait:

There are precisely two things to be done, beginning now, and continuing for the next four years. One thing is to organize. Unions are weak because they represent only ten percent of American workers. To gain power, we need to grow. That means that unions need to resist their impulses now to say, “Organizing is about to get harder so we shouldn’t waste our resources on it,” cut their organizing budgets, and spend their money trying to build a moat to protect their existing members. No. That is the first step to death. We all need to organize our ass off. Spend every last cent trying to bring new people in to the labor movement. In hostile times, workers need the protection of unions more than ever. It’s our responsibility to give it to them. We all get stronger when we grow, and we are all an easier target when we are small.

The other thing to do is to strike. More bluntly: to do more legal as well as illegal strikes. (Teachers in Massachusetts are showing us the way right this minute.) The legal regime that corporations are salivating to dismantle is the same one that has, for decades, laid out the ground rules for who and how and where and when strikes could expect to be sanctioned by the law. Take away those rules and the only silver lining for workers is that the shackles are off. Strikes carry their own power apart from any laws—the inherent power that goes with the fact that when workers stop working, nothing gets done. This is the core power of the labor movement. Time to lean into this. When you are in a fight and the referee leaves, you can either stand there exclaiming “My word! I say! This is highly improper!” as your opponent gouges your eyes out, or you can start fighting dirtier.

Of course, the key to his suggestions, as Nolan observes, is for labor leaders to double down on funding organizing, even if that means moving some funds away from other areas to do so. “Organize, organize, organize” has long been the mantra of the union movement; the problem is that rarely has the requisite financial muscle been put behind that rhetoric.

Labor growth

In “Labor’s Resurgence Can Continue Despite Trump”, Chris Bohner and Eric Blanc counsel against despair and argue that:

Conditions overall remain favorable for labor growth, despite Trump’s re-election. Political contexts matter, but so do factors like the economy, high public support for unions, labor’s deep financial pockets, the growth of union reform efforts, labor’s continued disruptive capacity, and the spread of young worker activism. Rebuilding a powerful labor movement remains our best bet to defeat Trumpism, reverse rampant inequalities, and transform American politics. Now is not the time for retreat.

To bolster their claim, they point out that organizing was more robust during the Bush era than it was under Obama:

Unions organized significantly more workers under George W. Bush’s administration than under Barack Obama. Why? The main reason is that the labor movement in the early 2000s was still in the midst of a relatively well-resourced push to organize the unorganized, whereas by the time Obama took office labor had mostly thrown in the towel on external organizing, hoping instead to be saved from above by lobbying establishment Democrats to pass national labor law reform. Labor can grow over the coming years if it starts putting serious resources towards this goal.

Therefore, the authors insist, labor can not just survive but prosper if unions take advantage of their existing resources and commit to a more robust, reformed, future-leaning movement that attracts some of the same disaffected workers who may have voted for Trump.

“Block and Build”

The United Teachers of Los Angeles’s Alex Caputo-Pearl lays out a thorough formula for “How Labor Can Fight Trump’s Authoritarianism” in Portside Labor:

In the coming years, defeating MAGA authoritarianism must be US labor’s main objective, embedded within a long-term strategy to fight for multi-racial democracy and an economy in which working-class people thrive. I propose that labor adopt an intensified “Block and Build” approach.

“Blocking” means organizing broad labor, community, and political alliances against authoritarianism, fighting tooth-and-nail against attacks on democratic rights, and vigorously defending the most vulnerable. “Building” means massively expanding a social base and movement infrastructure that will fight authoritarianism long-term and build campaigns for multi-racial democracy and an economy that radically departs from the corporate-driven, unequal model that has dominated since the 1970s.

More specifically, as Caputo-Pearl outlines, “five elements are needed in the overall program to defeat authoritarianism and build the foundations for a just society”: plow resources into organizing; campaign and negotiate for the common good with universalist demands for healthcare, childcare, and minimum wage while also defending the rights of communities under assault; strike and walk out; build independent political power by combining political and electoral work with member organizing aiming to create a new vision for society; and coordinate on as many levels as possible and build toward a nationwide general strike on May 1st, 2028.

Hence, amidst the sea of defeatism, retreat, and withdrawal, it is encouraging to see that folks in labor circles are not just exercising some optimism of the will in the face of the pessimism of the intellect that is not unfounded given our present political circumstances. I am reminded of the many other times in our history when the death of the labor movement was predicted and yet unions somehow managed to persevere against all odds. Most recently, many saw doom in the wake of the Janus Supreme Court decision that greatly restricted public sector unions, and yet this was followed by a wave of activism and organizing that helped keep public sector unions afloat.

That said, the challenges labor faces in this moment with an emboldened corporate class and an ideologically hardened rightwing in power across the board at the Federal level are perhaps unprecedented in the modern era.

Danger ahead

Also, in addition to the institutional obstacles within unions to more aggressive organizing, the labor movement faces the danger of divide and conquer tactics on the right that will pit private sector unions that have many members who may have supported Trump against public sector unions to which he represents an existential threat. This kind of split would be devastating for unionism as a whole and weaken the movement to such an extent that even those who stood with Trump would eventually be attacked by the same forces in his ranks that are aiming first for the public sector.

It is also up for debate whether the labor movement as currently constituted has what it takes to muster something like the national general strike that leaders such as UAW’s Shawn Fain and Alex Caputo-Pearl are proposing. Nonetheless, it is certainly true that dire times tend to focus the mind and summon unexpected courage.

At its best, labor can serve as a model for an inclusionary, multiracial democracy with the everyday needs of ordinary folks at its heart. If we act upon the bedrock principle that an injury to one is the concern of all, perhaps unionists can provide an alternative model to the war of all against all that MAGA embodies more than anything else.

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.