This article is reprinted from the Socialist Forum, a publication of DSA. It was authored by Todd Chretien, who serves both on DSA’s Editorial Board as well as Pine & Roses’ Editorial Collective. It was originally published on May 30, 2025.

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What happened? 

Hundreds of thousands of workers marched and rallied on May Day, making it the largest International Workers Day since 2006 when two million immigrant workers left work and marched to demand their rights. Protests were organized in 1300 locations, large and small; no doubt the first May Day protest in many places. Broadly speaking, there were three different levels of mobilization. First, as in 2006, Chicago stood out with some 30,000 marching, organized by a mass coalition of labor and immigrant rights organizations. Second, cities like Philly, New York, Baltimore, San Francisco, Oakland, Burlington, and Portland, Maine mobilized between two and fifteen thousand. Third, hundreds of cities and towns turned out crowds from a couple dozen to hundreds, including smaller cities like Davis, California. This ranking is not intended as a judgement on the organizers. In fact, some of the smaller rallies included higher percentages of the population than the largest. For instance, in the town of Wayne, Maine—population 1,000—seventy-five people turned out for both morning and evening rallies. 

It’s worth noting that the crowds were not as large as the April 5 day of protest initiated by Indivisible; however, participants were noticeably more multiracial, younger, and radical with widespread support for transgender rights and opposition to the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Though an important step in the process of building working-class unity against the billionaires and capitalist class, these efforts have a long way to go. For instance, although multiracial, at the national level, the marches did not entirely reflect working-class diversity. And if immigrant rights organizations were critical in many cities, Trump’s reign of terror against immigrant workers suppressed turnout from this community in many places. 

Who organized it and how? 

Memory and sacrifice play a role in sustaining oppositional working-class culture. No Haymarket Martyrs, no May Day. More recently, the 2006 May Day protests provided a living link to the past as well as the importance of International Workers Day globally. UAW president Shawn Fain’s call for unions to align contracts and lead a 2028 general strike, have introduced May Day to a whole new generation of labor organizers.

 Recently, precursor actions in the wake of Trump’s election laid the basis for pulling together a mass, class-based response. As the saying goes, the best organizing tool is a bad boss and Trump is one of the worst bosses possible. Repression and widespread layoffs do not always provoke resistance, but this time targeted workers put up a critical mass of opposition that gummed up the works and provided the time to organize a strategic response. 

Thousands of teachers from across the country responded to a call by the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers for walk-ins in March to protest Trump’s destruction of the Department of Education. Bay Area activists organized a “Day of Resistance” against ICE even before Trump was inaugurated. The Maine State Nurses Association led a rally to protest Medicaid cuts in March and organized a mass town hall to prevent the closure of the obstetrics department in the small town of Houlton. Kathryn Lybarger, president of AFSCME 3299 representing 22,000 workers at the University of California, summarizes her union’s approach, “My union went on its fourth strike in six months on May Day, and the energy felt great. For union members fighting a powerful employer for our families’ futures, it was amazing to be joined on the picket line by all kinds of community members who are fighting billionaires for their futures too. The day felt like an event and an important step in building the movement we need to stop Trump and win a better world.”   In the single biggest display of working-class power on May Day, 55,000 LA County employees in SEIU 721 walked off the job and marched through downtown LA. 

As federal workers reeled from Trump’s layoffs, the Federal Unionist Network was one of the most important elements blunting the blitzkrieg. FUN organizer Chris Dols explains, “Amidst all the necessary defense we’re playing against the billionaires’ offensive, May Day is the labor movement’s opportunity to articulate a positive vision for the world we deserve. Federal workers are uniquely positioned and proud to help advance such a vision because, above all else, we are public servants, and it is the entire public that is under assault. As is captured by the FUN’s ‘Save Our Services’ demand, our approach to May Day was to foreground the crucial services and protections federal workers provide in an effort to not only cohere fighting federal labor movement but also to develop and deepen alliances with all who stand to lose the most if Trump gets away with smashing up our agencies.”

Pair these factors with decades of bipartisan misery inflicted on the working class, and it’s not surprising workers are angry. Politicians have failed to deliver on demands like healthcare for all, affordable housing, and a stronger public education system. Add inflation, union-busting, white supremacy, misogyny, transphobia and homophobia, genocide in Gaza, and anti-immigrant bigotry, and the potential for uniting large parts of the working class across its many divisions comes into focus.

Chicago takes the lead

Yet objective conditions alone cannot make a plan. Organized forces with the credibility and capacity to think through a strategy and to put it into practice are needed. 

According to Jesse Sharkey, past president of the Chicago Teachers Union and lead organizer with the newly-formed May Day Strong coalition, “Chicago became a center of May Day organizing this year for two reasons—first, there was a local coalition that got a lot of people involved. Activists from the immigrants rights community were extremely important in initiating it, and they held open meetings. They invited anyone who wanted to help organize. That drew in trade unionists, and many others. On a second front, Chicago was in the middle of initiating a national call for May Day protests… The call for that effort came from the Chicago Teachers Union and a handful of allied organizations such as Midwest Academy, Bargaining for the Common Good, and the Action Center on Race and the Economy. The NEA also played an extremely helpful role. In late March, we had about 220 people from over 100 organizations join us in Chicago to start planning for May 1 actions. The reason we were able to initiate such a widespread effort was because we have a past practice of closely linking trade union fights to wider working-class demands. In places where local unions have worked with community and activist groups, we had networks of communication and trust. Then, once that effort had reached a certain critical mass, some of the big national networks like Indivisible and 50501 got on board, and that really grew the reach of the day.”

It’s not that the CTU and immigrant community organizers in Chicago were the only ones thinking about May Day, but their action drew together and amplified similar efforts across the country, nationalizing the protest by providing a framework and resources for labor and community organizers in hundreds of towns and cities. Chicago didn’t create May Day 2025—thousands of activists across the country had to take up the call—but it did open a door. 

Socialists and the united front

Assessing the impact of May Day for the working class as a whole should not be conflated with DSA’s role in the organizing. But as this is an article that will mostly reach DSA members, it’s worth reviewing what we contributed. First, thousands of DSA members across the country turned out for May Day. This fact alone shows our organization’s strength, and it points to opportunities and responsibilities. If all your chapter was able to do was to turn out members or help publicize the local protest among coworkers and the broader community, that’s an important contribution. Second, at the National Level, DSA’s National Political Committee and National Labor Commission joined May Day Strong and organized membership Zoom meetings to encourage branches to take action starting in March. Third, and this should come as no surprise, DSA played a bigger role in some places than others. I think it’s worth considering the impact of the strategic and tactical choices local chapters made on the influence they wielded and the organic ties they deepened. After speaking with comrades from across the country, I will offer a few positive examples. I hope comrades will add to this picture and offer alternative ideas or criticisms. 

New York 

In October, the NYC-DSA chapter adopted a resolution to support the UAW’s call for a 2028 May Day strike. The chapter subsequently held an internal May Day 2028 strategy retreat and identified May Day 2025 as a key link in the chain of developing power and political momentum to fight against Trump and the broader machine. As one DSA organizer puts it, “It’s not enough to circle May Day 2028 on a calendar, we need to build a coalition to organize it and politicize it.” Rooted in this perspective, NYC-DSA turned out to support a mass post-election labor-left anti-Trump rally, the FUN day of action in February, the subsequent Stop the Cuts rally on March 15, and Hands Off on April 5. 

Olivia Gonzalez Killingsworth, co-chair of NYC-DSA Labor Working Group and National Labor Commission SC member (as well as a twenty-year member of Actors’ Equity Association and SAG-AFTRA) picks up the story, reflecting, “After Stop the Cuts, I went to Chicago on March 19 and 20 as an NLC representative to join the May Day Strong meeting. Stacy Davis Gates, Jackson Potter, and Jesse Sharkey welcomed us all into the house that CTU built. Shawn Fain was there along with Randi Weingarten, who was enraged because Trump signed his executive order gutting the Department of Education that same day. We broke out into regions and were charged with going back home to build May Day as big as possible. In New York City, broadly speaking, there were three important currents: the core of the union movement represented by the Central Labor Council, the left-liberals like Tesla Takedown, and the labor/left, of which DSA is a part. Through a lot of coalition work, we made a circle out of this Venn diagram. Trump helped along the way. Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation really angered the Building Trades, further galvanizing them into participation. DSA played an important role in mobilizing: we had a huge contingent, and even more members marching with their unions. But more than that, we helped politicize May Day to point to the billionaires who are benefiting from the Trump administration’s attacks on us.” 

Part of this work included successfully advocating—alongside many others—for both AOC and Mahmoud Khalil’s lawyer to speak at the rally, which garnered significant national media attention, helping broadcast our message far beyond May Day participants. It’s important to point out that DSA did not initiate the coalition, but worked alongside long-time labor activists to support May Day, earning our stripes as a trusted and capable partner. 

On the day, NYC-DSA turned out some 500 members, many of whom marched with their unions. They did so while keeping up with other work—DSA member Zohran Mamdani is running for mayor—with NYC-DSA labor organizers having advanced a month-long Build to May Day campaign. Organizers called on committees and working groups across the chapter to make May Day a priority, turning out members and volunteer marshalls. The chapter is now in a stronger position to discuss next steps with the broader coalition and consolidate a layer of new members and allies. There’s more pain ahead, but May Day helped gather working-class forces together for action and to take the temperature of the most active and militant layer of trade unionists and community activists. As NYC-DSA Labor Working Group member David Duhalde suggests, “The New York City May Day rally and march from Foley Square to the iconic Wall Street Bull statue was a microcosm of the shift in energy in labor during Trump’s second term.” How far that shift goes can only be tested in practice.

Philadelphia

As in New York, Philadelphia DSA did not initiate the call for the May Day rallies. The AFL-CIO led the charge in alliance with immigrants rights organizations such as Milpa, New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, and Juntos, mobilizing some 5,000 workers. But Philadelphia DSA did add its organizing muscle, assigning Luke M to act as liaison. The chapter followed many of the same tactics as their New York comrades. When the AFL-CIO opened up the coalition, DSA members proved themselves energetic organizers; for instance, running the marshal training and providing a large portion of marshals. DSA members constituted a large part of the seventy-two people arrested at the end of the march in a civil disobedience action, including Rick Krajewski, a DSA member elected to the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Seven union presidents joined in this calculated escalation of tactics, demonstrating a broad understanding that workers will have to take matters into their own hands to back down the billionaires and capitalist elites. 

And in a lesson passed down through generations, from the IWW to Sit-Down Strikes to the Civil Rights Movement to Occupy to Black Lives Matter to Gaza, no protest is finished until jail support is organized, a responsibility that was taken up by DSA members and coalition partners alike. That unity in action demonstrated the most important aspect of united front work, but the chapter also raised the socialist banner. Taking placards and membership interest card ideas from DSA members in California, Philadelphia DSA formed a visible presence on the march with some 200 members, and signed up sixty-two new recruits. It didn’t hurt that the unions invited Bernie to speak. After all the hard work, Luke praised his Philly comrades, “I have to say I’m genuinely proud of what we accomplished, and I’m looking forward to the debrief meeting to see what comes next.”

Portland, Maine

Maine DSA’s Labor Rising working group decided to focus on May Day in December, laying the basis to help initiate an organizing meeting open to all community groups and unions. Maine AFL-CIO leaders and UAW graduate students participated in a preliminary meeting to brainstorm ideas, and more than 70 people attended an April 12 meeting in the South Portland Teamsters’ Hall, where the group democratically planned Portland’s May Day. Working groups took up all aspects of the action, and we took all important decisions back to the coalition for votes. Running a long a related track, Maine Education Association and Maine AFL-CIO leaders called for actions across the state, amplifying the Chicago May Day Strong call and dramatically broadening what the Portland coalition could organize. 

Nearly 2,000 people turned out in Portland, starting with a rally at the University of Southern Maine to back UAW graduate students’ demands for a first contract and then marching to the Post Office to hear from postal workers. Members of the Portland Education Association and a trans student poet headlined the stop at Portland High School and a librarian union rep spoke in Monument Square before the final rally that heard from the president of the Metal Trades Council at the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, a rep from the Maine State Nurses Association, members of the Maine Coalition for Palestine, an organizer from LGTBQ+ community group Portland Outright, a local immigrant rights group called Presente! Maine, and others. It was a great demonstration and showed the thirst for a broader coalition. Twenty-five other towns held actions, bringing the total number of Maine participants to over 5,000, the largest Maine May Day anyone can remember. 

It would be shortsighted to overstate the power and stability of this fledgling coalition. Large doses of patience and understanding will be necessary to foster bonds of trust. Sectarian pressures to draw “red lines” that exclude workers new to political activity and organizations who have various programs and interests represent one danger. A narrow focus on the midterm elections represents another. Fortunately, there’s a lot of room for creativity between those two extremes. 

Long road ahead

May Day was the first test of strength for the left and working class against Trump, MAGA, and forty-plus years of neoliberal rot. We face a long, complex problem where political pressures to return to passivity will be strong, but May Day 2025 constitutes a small step towards healing deep wounds in the American working class, the divide between organized and unorganized, immigrant and US born, etc. If brother Fain’s call for 2028 is to grow strong, then 2026 and 2027 must be practice runs.  If 2026 and 2027 are to be real demonstrations of strength, they must grow out of tighter bonds between labor, community, and the left, more active membership participation in all of those forces, and a combination of defensive struggles we are forced to fight and battles we pick on our own terms. As Sarah Hurd, co-chair of DSA’s National Labor Commission, spells out, “This year’s May Day actions showed the power of what we can accomplish just by setting a date and inviting people to take action together. It has also highlighted what work we need to do to scale up our level of organization in the next three years.” 

What did May Day teach us? Fittingly, the last word goes to Kirsten Roberts, a rank-and-file Chicago teacher, “The most important element of May Day 2025 is the explicit entry of organized and unorganized labor into resistance to Trump. Trump’s attacks are aimed directly at dividing the working class and turning ordinary people against one another while the billionaires rob and plunder us all. An agenda for working class unity can be built when we stand up for those most victimized and vilified by the right-wing bigots AND when we stand together to fight for the things that the billionaire class has denied us—the fight for healthcare, education, housing, and good-paying jobs for starters. For decades, we’ve been told by both parties that funding war, incarceration, and border militarization are their priorities. May Day showed that working people have another agenda. Now let’s organize to win it.”

The post Unions and Community Unite for May Day: Lessons for the Fight Ahead appeared first on Pine & Roses.

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

Rochester’s mayoral primary debate took place on May 28, between incumbent Mayor Malik Evans, ROC DSA-endorsee and city councilmember Mary Lupien, and local businessman Shashi Sinha. Lupien spoke ambitiously of her vision for a better future, while Evans and Sinha invoked limitations and appealed to the status quo. The satirical exchange in the footnote below humorously captures the tone of the debate.*

About halfway through, the candidates were asked: “What is your stance on encampment sweeps? Do you support their removal, or do you think their removal [exacerbates] the issues of homelessness?” 

“How many people have we arrested for being on the street? The answer is zero,” said Mayor Evans. He elaborates, “you can’t arrest someone for being in poverty or having a substance abuse disorder.” But closer consideration reveals that arrest is the all too frequent response to poverty and substance abuse.

How does Mayor Evans’ logic hold up against racial disparities in policing? Black Americans comprise 33% of the prison population despite being just 14% of the general population, and are arrested at five times the rate of whites. Yet would Mayor Evans believe that “nobody has been arrested for being Black?” (or driving, running, shopping, and swimming while Black).

Of course, racial profiling will always be denied as the true motivation behind such outcomes. Following the Civil War vagrancy laws were enacted across the South, describes historian Eric Foner in his account of Reconstruction, punishing “the idle, disorderly, and those who ‘misspend what they earn,’” with fines or involuntary plantation labor. Virginia’s law punished those who demanded higher wages, while in Florida, disobedience and disrespect to the employer were criminalized. 

Many of these laws “made no reference to race, to avoid the appearance of discrimination and comply with the federal Civil Rights Act of 1866,” says Foner. “But it was well understood, as Alabama planter and Democratic politico John W. DuBois later remarked, that ‘the vagrant contemplated was the plantation negro.’”

Similarly, capitalist society builds a carceral framework around homelessness in more devious ways. The threat of homelessness disciplines labor, while the vulnerability of the homeless establishes a hyper-exploitable reserve army of labor. 

Today, more than 1,000 Rochester residents are homeless, and the city boasts the fifth highest child poverty rate in the nation, at over 40%. Homelessness in Rochester testifies to the racial legacy of America, with Black residents representing 40% of the general population but 55% of those experiencing homelessness. Meanwhile, rent continues to increase—a single-bedroom apartment now averages $1,200 per month—and a surging housing market pushes home ownership further out of reach. 

Housing is not the only rising cost of living, and income growth lags behind. Employment can be difficult to obtain, requiring a stable address, transportation, and a passing background check. Even retaining a job does not guarantee alleviation from homelessness, as employers provide low wages, unreliable hours, and limited time off, and employees are subject to termination at will. 

Rochester lacks adequate shelters for the unhoused, and those in extreme poverty have nowhere to go. Capitalism privatizes everything it can profitably possess. Modern public space carries a cost of occupancy, and minor violations such as sleeping in public or an open container can lead to arrest or a trespass notice. “Urinating and sleeping in public are both unavoidable and criminalized,” says Alex Vitale in The End of Policing, “creating a terrible dynamic.”

The unhoused are targeted by police and ostracized by the community. Despite Mayor Evans’ denial, encampment sweeps have traumatically displaced inhabitants and destroyed their belongings and continue to do so. Those occupying public spaces are more likely to have police contact or be subject to search, while poverty encourages crimes of desperation and nihilism—if society doesn’t care about me, why should I follow their rules?

Once the unhoused enter the criminal justice system, problems compound: “The criminal justice system, with its emphasis on punishment,” says Vitale, “[cannot] address the underlying and intertwined problems of homelessness, mental illness, and substance abuse.” 

The unhoused are more likely to be held in jail, as they are denied release due to a lack of stable housing and cannot afford bail. They will encounter more difficulty paying fines, necessitating more court appearances or consequences such as license suspensions, and they can’t reliably stay in contact with their attorney or the court. Criminal entanglement can disrupt social services and limit job opportunities, leading to a downward spiral. 

So, yes, Mayor Evans, we arrest people for being on the street, in all but invocation.

Sinha’s response to this issue is not any better. Solving homelessness, he says, is “very simple and of course it’s [a] very complicated issue.” This answer is revealing—solving homelessness is simple in that the answer appears on its face: providing homes. It is complicated, however, because the desire for profit means this option cannot be delivered by the market. 

As mayor, Mary Lupien promises “[to] end homeless encampment sweeps day one.” “Homeless encampment sweeps can kill people,” says Lupien, by disrupting forms of support available to the homeless community through outreach and solidarity. Lupien clearly identifies the “simple answer”—“to provide them homes.” 

Mayor Evans admits “[homelessness] is not a problem that you can arrest your way out of.” Yet disproportionate city funding goes to policing rather than social services. With society’s wealth and capacity for production, we have the means to provide housing and a dignified lifestyle to all. When we arrange our society toward these ends, we will find not only that we can eliminate homelessness, but can create a more comfortable and safe community for all. 

* “Question: What pizza should we order?

Sinha: Pizza. Ordering. It has some crust. It has some cheese. But we never ask if we can afford it. You know…. sauce. Why aren’t we asking about why we need pizza? We need to fix this problem.

Lupien: I have been a staunch believer in pepperoni pizza, standing with the communities. More pizza in more mouths will feed so many hungry people. It is disappointing that Mayor Evans threw away two whole pizzas at the last pizza party that could have gone to feeding more people. We have the pizza available, we just need to get it to the right mouths. I’ve partnered with Pizza Justice and over a dozen other pizza communities, who understands what it takes to get there. It works.

Evans: I will never apologize for my pizza choices, because my pizza choices are right. I have personally delivered pizza to people, wasting not a single slice. When I was 14 I worked for Salvatores and cannot be ashamed at that. I have never thrown away a pizza. Three years ago we had a pizza crisis in this city. I rolled out Slice of the Night, which gave pizza to pizzaless communities. I will never apologize for what I’ve done. We don’t have the budget to just give everyone pizza. We could all make up misunderstandings about pizza waste, but that’s just not how things work. I have a three topping approach to pizza: sausage, onions, and peppers. You need all three. Let me be clear: without onions a pizza cannot happen. Just like I’ve been doing for 3.5 years, I’ve been bringing these together.

‘Sinha, you have your hand raised.’

Sinha: These two keep arguing. It just isn’t like that. It won’t happen unless we try.” – Reddit user Mysterious-Gold2220.

The post No Mayor Evans, the Answer is not “Zero”: On Arresting the Unhoused first appeared on Rochester Red Star.

On April 15, Border Patrol agents tackled a 27-year-old Salvadoran man to the pavement on Massachusetts Avenue in Portland. They zip-tied his limbs and threw him into the back of an unmarked vehicle. “It looked like someone getting kidnapped,” a witness told reporters. That’s because it was: a state-sponsored abduction, a spectacle of fear, and a message.

Eyidi Ambila, a man from the Democratic Republic of Congo, served a short sentence in Cumberland County Jail and has since been caged for over eight months by ICE with no new charges, no passport, and nowhere to be deported. This is not immigration enforcement—it’s indefinite detention and state-sanctioned cruelty. A federal judge ruled that Ambila can stay in the U.S. while appealing his deportation, acknowledging that returning him could mean arbitrary arrest, prolonged imprisonment, or torture. Let that sink in: the government admits deportation could lead to torture and still wants to deport him. He’s not a threat. He’s not a flight risk. He’s a living example of a system that dehumanizes, disappears, and discards. 

Marcos Henrique and Lucas Segobia, two skilled immigrant workers en route to a job in Maine, were abducted by ICE without charges. They were disappeared for over 36 hours and moved from one facility to another, while ICE lied to their families about their location. Jail staff refused responsibility. It was only after public pressure that officials finally tell their families where they were detained but the respite was brief, ICE, against their families wishes, moved them out of state.

These are not outliers. These are the cases that made it into the press. In April, documents obtained by the ACLU revealed that Cumberland County Jail was detaining 80 people for ICE, and Two Bridges Jail another 25. That’s over 100 people disappeared into the deportation pipeline with the full cooperation of local law enforcement. This is not policy failure—it’s policy success. It is not an accident—it is the infrastructure of repression being put to work to manage the turbulence of dying world.

We are living in the chaos of a collapsing order. Since the 1970s, the twin engines of neoliberal globalization and carceral expansion have reshaped United States: dismantling public institutions, deregulating capital, and replacing mass employment with mass policing, imprisonment, and deportation. What we are witnessing now is not an aberration but the terminal stage of this conjuncture—a world where crisis is met not with care or redistribution, but with cages and scapegoats. Immigration enforcement emerged to discipline labor, to create a hyper exploited strata of the labor market. Now it is being used by the Trump Administration to impose a blatantly fascist order.

To confront this reality, we start with a simple demand: End Cooperation Between Cumberland County Jail and ICE. And we understand that this demand is also a call to end suffering now, dismantle the deportation machine, and it opens the door to new solidarities and new ways of life.

The Event: Spectacle, Terror, and the Demand for Community Defense

The spectacle of forced removal is meant to terrify. It’s meant to be seen. It teaches entire communities to live in fear and sends a warning: no one is safe. The raids, the unmarked vans, the zip-ties—this is fascism in rehearsal. These moments are not isolated incidents; they are performances of state power. The goal is not merely removal. It is submission.

But for every spectacle of fear, we must respond with a celebration of solidarity. These bewildering, terrifying event demand community defense. They demand mutual aid. They demand we show up: outside jails, inside courtrooms, on the streets. The Trump Administration wants to fear going viral. Resistance must spread faster.

The Conjuncture: Neoliberalism, The Carceral State, and Crimmigration

Beneath the immediate spectacle is a broader structure of political economy. Over the last four decades, both parties have built the crimmigration regime—a fusion of carceral control and immigration enforcement designed to regulate the labor market and manage surplus populations. Reagan began immigrant detention. Clinton passed the laws that made mass deportation possible. Bush created ICE, consolidating immigration enforcement into a nationwide, federal police force. Obama used these tools to deport more people than any president in history. And Trump, despite all his gratuitous authoritarianism, has, in both terms, been unable to match the monthly deportation numbers of his democratic predecessors.

The system was not built to ensure justice. It was built to create a precarious workforce and a permanent underclass. It fabricates social order by dividing workers, criminalizing mobility, and treating migration as a security threat. The Trump administration is now using this bipartisan machinery to impose a more openly fascist order.

This is why ending ICE cooperation in Cumberland County matters. It’s not just a local demand. It’s a strike at on the pillars of the crimmigration system. It removes key logistical support. It complicates ICE’s ability to function. It interrupts the flow of bodies from street to cell to deportation. It is a lever of disruption—and it must be pulled.

The Longue Durée: Capitalism, Racial Division, and the Possibility of a New World

Zoom out further, and the contours of a deeper struggle emerge. The United States is a settler-colonial state founded on land theft, racial hierarchy, and labor exploitation. From slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration, from the reservation to the ghetto to the border, the same logics persist. Capitalism appropriates and exploits labor and then organizes abandonment. It produces surplus people: unemployed, unhoused, undocumented, untreated. It punishes these victims and twists and contorts their situations to make them appear as enemies to be contained, excluded, and expelled.

But from within that hell, new worlds are being born.

Presente! Maine is showing us how. Their land and food sovereignty programs, mutual aid work, and wellness initiatives are rooted in the labor and leadership of Maine’s Latine immigrant communities—most of whom work in the very sectors propping up this state’s tourism and agricultural economies. This is not charity. It is not service. It is revolutionary infrastructure. It builds autonomy. It deepens solidarity. It models a different way to live—with the land, with each other, and beyond the violence of borders and bosses.

This campaign is part of that same struggle. It’s not just about removing ICE from our jails. It’s about removing ICE from our future so we can build something better, something more humane, something that can unite New and Old Mainers.

We Are Not Asking—We Are Organizing

Of course, movements that threaten power face opposition—not just from reactionaries, but from liberals who want to manage dissent. We see it already. Some prominent liberal immigration advocacy organizations oppose ending ICE cooperation with the Cumberland County Sherriff, arguing that keeping people detained in Maine in the state aids legal defense. But proximity is not justice. Marcos and Lucas were hidden for 36 hours. Their families were lied to. Eyidi has been held for months with no end in sight. The system is built on opacity and cruelty. Local detention doesn’t protect—it enables.

The point is not to make the system more efficient. The point is to make it impossible.

Real change doesn’t come from appealing to authority. It comes from disrupting business as usual. From making the status quo ungovernable. From forcing elites to choose between justice and disorder. This is how power concedes. This is how history shifts.

We are not asking for better policies. We are not asking for a seat at the table. We are organizing to break the table in half.

For Marcos and Lucas.
For Eyidi.
For every neighbor taken in silence.
For every worker forced into the shadows.
For every life destroyed, for family shattered by the perpetual police war in the name of security and order.

End ICE cooperation in Cumberland County.
Free them all.
Stop the deportation machine.

The post Stop Deportation Machine: End ICE Cooperation in Cumberland County appeared first on Pine & Roses.

FREE THEM ALL, NO IMMIGRANT TRANSFERS! Statement of the North New Jersey Democratic Socialists of America Friday, June 13, 2025 Newark, NJ On May 1, GEO Group, a private prison profiteer, illegally opened Delaney Hall in Newark’s toxic chemical corridor. In the short time since, the facility has seen horribly overcrowded conditions, rotten food and […]

I was on the street outside the Minneapolis VA Hospital, a truly giant facility that tends to the health of tens of thousands of military veterans each year.  The occasion was a demonstration sponsored by the two American Federation of Government Employees locals that represent thousands of workers at the hospital. The motivator for the […]

El Comité Nacional de Educación Política de DSA (NPEC) se complace en anunciar el lanzamiento de nuestros primeros módulos curriculares traducidos al español con tres módulos introductorios titulados: ¿Qué es el capitalismo?, ¿Qué es el socialismo? y ¿Por qué la clase trabajadora?

Estos módulos, incluyendo recursos prácticos para el desarrollo de organizadores socialistas principiantes y potenciales, se han utilizado para facilitar la educación política fundamental en todo el país desde su publicación en inglés hace dos años.

Esperamos traducir más de nuestros materiales educativos en futuras publicaciones. Si le interesa colaborar con el NPEC en este proyecto, escríbanos a politicaleducation@dsacommittees.org

Enlace a los módulos de español/Link to the modules in Spanish

DSA’s National Political Education Committee is excited to announce the release of our first translated curriculum modules, featuring all three of our introductory modules in Spanish: What is Capitalism, What is Socialism, and Why the Working Class!

These out-of-the-box modules containing guided resources for developing new and prospective socialist organizers have been used to lead foundational political education around the country since their publication two years ago.

We hope to make additional translations of our committee’s educational materials available in future releases. If you are interested in assisting NPEC with our translation efforts, write to us at politicaleducation@dsacommittees.org

Authors: Jesse D, Aiden S, Jesse J (Electoral Working Group leadership)

The city of Portland is six months into its grand experiment in a new form of government. Portland City Council’s expansion and the multi-member geographic districts are providing new horizons of political action for the socialist movement and the city’s broader progressive milieu.  When thinking about our relationship with the new system, we find it important to refer to the past – in order to understand the present and to fight for a better future. 

Historically, candidates elected by people-powered movements to Portland city council have had short shelf lives. Their elections came as shocks to the establishment, who then fought to claw back those seats for the capitalist interests which dominate our city: the developers, the metro chamber, and their intersection in the Democratic Party of Oregon. For example, Commissioners Chloe Eudaly (elected 2016) and Jo Ann Hardesty (elected 2018), were identified by the establishment as part of the left. They both served single terms and then faced well-funded and aggressive opposition in their second elections, resulting in losses in 2020 and 2022 respectively. 

The second round of elections under the new system will fall first in Districts 3 & 4, where three DSA members are going to be up for re-election. It is imperative that we create a vigorous campaign plan to maintain our socialists in office. It is in the interest of all chapter members, and the city at large, that we succeed in that plan in 2026.

If you believe in our councilors’ mission – building a city that works for everyone, and not just the rich – consider these actions to get involved in defending our mandate:

1: Commit your time to the Electoral Working Group, which meets every third Thursday (find our next meeting on the chapter calendar here)

• Train with other members on how to run an electoral campaign, how to launch a canvass, how to be an effective canvasser, and fight for the candidacies of our DSA councilors on the front line!
• Attend the National Electoral Commission‘s upcoming “Electoral Academy” training series. This series is filled with important nuts-and-bolts trainings addressing all aspects of campaign work.
• Make an outreach plan for your non-DSA network: Highlight the work of our councilors to your non-DSA friends, coworkers, and family members. Encourage them to commit to donating to our Socialists in Office re-election campaigns or to canvass when we launch our field campaigns. Watch and listen for updates on these campaigns in chapter general meetings, Electoral Working Group meetings, and via direct communications (texts, emails, etc.).

2: Help prepare the chapter for a vigorous campaign

• Make the jump to solidarity dues to fund the chapter’s work between campaigns.
• Are your friends stoked about socialists on city council? Ask them to join the chapter!
• Keep up the good work in your Working Groups, Committees, and caucuses. We’re not just running on our councilors’ achievements but everything we do as a chapter!

3: Keep active with the chapter’s interventions at city hall

• We’ve seen greater group cohesion in our Socialist bloc when the chapter is organizing and mobilizing around our councilors’ legislative priorities.
• Bolster working groups’ policy priorities in the chapter (Renter’s bill of Rights, Family Agenda, public power etc.).

The post A Call to Action to Prepare for the 2026 Elections appeared first on Portland DSA.

By Nick Lavin

SOMERVILLE, MA — Just outside the Somerville Farmers Market, two Somerville for Palestine organizers – Lauren and Hala – lead a training for a dozen canvassers prepared and ready to engage people in the street. The group is gearing up to collect signatures for a ballot question demanding the city divest from from Palestinian occupation and genocide.

“While I’m frustrated the City Council voted not to divest, I’m proud so many people are doing the hard work to make this petition happen,” said Andrew, a Somerville resident and canvasser for the campaign.

Despite heavy rain all of the past twelve weekends, Somerville for Palestine has hit the streets hard since their ballot question campaign began a couple months ago after Somerville residents nearly overwhelmed City Hall in support of city divestment, only to be struck down by council. The campaign has collected well over 2,000 verified signatures for their petition calling for Somerville to “end all current city business and prohibit future city investments and contracts with companies… that sustain Israel’s apartheid, genocide, and illegal occupation of Palestine.” In order to get on the ballot, the campaign must collect verified signatures from 10% of the voting population. That’s 5200 certified signatures in total that are necessary, which means Somerville for Palestine has collected around 38% of the signatures needed so far to obtain ballot access.

Fundamental to the ballot campaign is an intensive canvassing operation that organizers hope will develop new pro-Palestine organizers and deepen support for the movement in Somerville. “We’re aiming for 10,000 signatures, that’s 10,000 conversations about Palestine in Somerville,” says Lauren, a Jewish pro-Palestine Somerville organizer. 

For many canvassers, the latest news from Gaza underlines the urgency of their work. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, with firm backing from American allies, is systematically starving Gaza by blockading international aid. The entire 2.1 million population faces famine.

While pro-Palestine organizers had hoped national and international pressure on the American government to suspend weapons shipments would force an end to the war, the election of Trump in 2024 foreclosed the possibility of an end to the catastrophe. President Trump wholeheartedly supports Israel’s siege, explaining his vision for Gaza with an AI-generated video transforming the Palestinian territory into a luxury resort while outlining a plan for the ethnic cleansing of its population.

Many organizations like Somerville for Palestine have responded to this changing political terrain by orienting to local petitions to consolidate a pro-Palestine constituency in the town while continuing to build the national movement for BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions), operating on both levels through concerted campaigns. Just as Somerville was the first town in Massachusetts to pass a ceasefire resolution in early 2024, a movement which quickly spread like a wildfire across the state and country, organizers hope momentum for municipal divestment in Somerville will encourage similar efforts while preparing the groundwork for continued state and national pressure.

Hala, a Palestinian and longtime Somerville resident, is motivated by the overwhelmingly positive reaction to the petition from the community and hopes their work will inspire people elsewhere.

As the song says at Somerville High, Somerville leads the way, so Somerville for Palestine is leading the way on divestment.

Somerville for Palestine has had a lot of success in organizing coalitional support to harness to achieve the ballot measure and build a municipal base for Palestine. Their weekly canvasses, jointly organized with groups like Allston/Brighton for Palestine and Boston DSA, bring people from all across the Boston area to talk about Palestine, ceasefire, and divestment with Somerville residents.

Immigration, Palestine, and Civil Rights

Somerville for Palestine’s divestment campaign comes as Trump cracks down on civil rights. Just two months ago, Somerville’s own Rümeysa Öztürk was kidnapped by Trump’s ICE officers for writing an op-ed about divesting her university from Israel. Then too, Somerville for Palestine members were out in force protesting the decision and demanding her release.

Öztürk’s arrest also ignited fury from the labor movement: as a Tufts graduate student and member of SEIU 509, her arrest garnered immediate reactions from unions across the state and country demanding her release. 

While unions were on the frontline in the fight for a ceasefire and arms embargo under Biden, pro-Palestine labor activists are still finding their footing on the shifting terrain under Trump. For DSA’s National Labor Commission, the focus remains squarely on an arms embargo; but rather than targeting federal officials, union activists are plunging headfirst into organizing pressure against local governments to prevent weapons shipments through their ports and transportation hubs.

In Somerville, it is crunch time for the divestment ballot question: with about three months left to collect the needed 5,200 signatures, Somerville for Palestine needs all hands on deck to get across the threshold to be on the ballot this fall. To support Somerville for Palestine’s efforts, you can sign up for a canvass at tinyurl.com/canvass4s4p.

Nick Lavin is a Boston Public Schools paraprofessional and a member of the Boston Teachers Union.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story indicated there were 5500 signatures necessary to obtain ballot access, when the number is actually 5200.

The post Somerville Fights for Palestine appeared first on Working Mass.

Michael P. is an organizer with NYC-DSA.

This interview has been edited for content and clarity.

GNDCC: What is the Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA)? How did it happen?

Michael P: New York State has some of the most aggressive climate laws in the country—mandating a rapid transition to renewable energy, directing benefits of the transition to disadvantaged communities, people who have suffered from the adverse effects of the fossil fuel system. That is a great goal to have, but from the beginning it was clear that the State was not going to take the aggressive action that was needed to meet those goals. So when we were developing ideas for a campaign, we saw that clearly there needs to be some mechanism to force the State to deliver on this promise.

It happens that New York State has a sort of secret weapon for the energy transition, which is the New York Power Authority (NYPA). That’s the largest state-level public utility in the country. It has a very storied history, founded by Franklin Roosevelt and very much a model for a lot of the public power and electrification work that happened during the New Deal. But that legacy had kind of tailed off; over the last decades it’s been more in a holding pattern. Some of our strategy team saw it as an opportunity. The State has this amazing resource; rather than rely on private developers to build renewables, which was quite simply not happening at a rapid pace, we could get the State itself to step up and build the renewable energy we need. 

That push for renewable energy was always tied in our minds with a more comprehensive vision of a just transition that really benefits everyone and realigns politics around energy transition as a public good. So we went about this as a plan to create a huge amount of green jobs; to shut down fossil fuel plants that are continuing to pollute, especially in lower-income places with predominantly Black and brown people living there; and also work on lowering utility bills, which is really affecting everyone.

With that as the context, BPRA is basically a law to give NYPA both the power and the mandate to build a ton of publicly owned renewable energy and create all these benefits in the process.

How did you guys win? What was the campaign like?

This campaign was not waged by hardened politicos or 20-year veterans of legislative work; we really had to figure it out as we went along. Of course we have people with all kinds of skills, but it essentially took us becoming experts and taking that expertise and mixing it with what DSA does really well, which is build power and frighten people in power through organizing. So it was really a multi-year process where, on the one hand, we developed and sharpened our analysis of what the bill should do, and then, on the other hand, gradually built more and more of a base and deployed more and more aggressive tactics to first get the bill on the map—it’s hard to even have something be noticed—then make it one of the main things people were talking about in Albany for climate action, and then ultimately to a place where they had to pass it because there was so much pressure and it was really just a question of how strong we could make the final bill.

That took really every single tool in the toolbox: canvassing people and knocking on doors, tabling and talking to people on the streets, very sophisticated comms targeting a mass audience, knowing how to get our story into the press, knowing how to build relationships in the legislature and how bills really get passed and what’s the realpolitik of that. It also took significant electoral power, in the end, to show that this is a force to be reckoned with, this cannot be ignored anymore.

So it was a massive effort. It’s great to think that thousands of people contributed to passing this law. The ground is breaking for the first project in mid-July. This is something that was a massive collective achievement, and that gives me hope for replicating this and building on it at a much larger scale.

Can you say more about the electoral power and having DSA elected officials and how that helped?

There are a couple of pieces with electoral power. You mentioned the socialists in office that we had elected. That was a really important precondition, because that meant we had people who were on the inside of the legislature. They are there in conference when they are talking about what bills they’re going to debate and prioritize. They are there building relationships across the political spectrum. But they are also very much public agitators for socialist politics and policy, so they were crucial in getting our story out there into the press and in front of the public. That was the product of years of winning campaigns for State Assembly and State Senate.

But the intensification was in 2022 actually running a slate of candidates that had a shared focus on climate, and in particular BPRA, including the candidate I worked for, Sarahana Shrestha. Actually, her campaign grew out of BPRA organizing in the Hudson Valley. She was confronting a 20+ year incumbent who was functionally blocking the bill from moving. This is something we learned over time. The way things work is not, Okay, X number of legislators support this, and then it gets to a vote. It’s really gatekeepers in positions of very specific power, are they motivated to to move the bill? So we found that there’s a lot of things these people can put off and ignore, but they cannot ignore a credible electoral challenge. Obviously, we won some of these races. But even in ones where we didn’t, that had a significant impact on the bill moving through committee and to a vote.

What was the role of working with labor in this and getting it passed?

From the start, the entire concept of the law and the campaign to pass it was structured around the absolutely crucial role of labor in the transition. Both in terms of the political power labor has, but also that it’s workers who are going to build the wind turbines, solar fields, geothermal, all that stuff. They’re going to physically be the ones driving the transition. And of course, it’s also just a part of a broader socialist strategy that labor has to be central.

So from the beginning we wanted to make sure the law would have the strongest possible protections for workers. This is a notorious problem in the private sector renewable development field—a lot of abuse of workers, a lot of non-union labor. So we saw this as an opportunity to show the climate movement really does stand with workers, and that goes beyond just saying nice things about a just transition, but actually fighting to make sure that that’s a crucial piece in developing renewable energy.

Part of our getting to collaborate with labor was just showing how serious we were, showing that this is a bill that had support. It was already gaining support in the legislature and when they saw that, for example, the state AFL-CIO then wanted to collaborate on developing the labor language in the law. That’s how we came out with a law that has the best possible labor protections, because they were determined by the labor movement. That was crucial as we built up. Also rank-and-file workers, especially in education, were very behind this and moved resolutions to ultimately move their parent unions to support this. That was huge.

Now we’re kind of moving into a new phase where projects are actually being developed and work is going to be starting very soon. Really our hope is that the more projects are built and going forward, the more we can collaborate with labor unions so that they get what they want to see out of this. To make sure, for example, their workers have a really good future where there’s plentiful work and that’s happening with all of the protections of a union in terms of wages and benefits and protection from bad treatment from employers.

So it passed two years ago. What’s been happening with the implementation since then?

Partly from all the lessons we learned in the campaign, we knew that the fight was not going to end with passing the law. With very little of a break after passing it, we launched a campaign to essentially dismiss the President and CEO of the New York Power Authority, who is a registered Republican who worked for a law firm or lobbying firm that worked for fossil fuel companies, who had a very spotty record on civil rights under his tenure as CEO, and who was just dyed-in-the-wool neoliberal in terms of how he ran the Authority. We were able, very quickly, to build a mini campaign that actually prevented him from being confirmed by the New York State Senate as the permanent CEO. Unfortunately, he got to stay through a weird legal loophole that literally no one knew about.

But that really put them on notice. We’re not messing around, we’re not going to settle for scraps—you build a couple of solar fields and call it a day. No, we are in this to effect the full transition in our energy system. From there we prepared ourselves to have a phase two of our campaign where, instead of fighting to pass a law, we’re developing and propagating a vision for what it looks to realize all of this, to actually build these projects. Where should they be built? How much? What kinds of technologies? Where does the system need the most help? All these kinds of questions.

We had to develop our own vision and then, basically at every step of the way, try to preempt wishy-washy planning by the state with popularizing a really strong vision that foregrounded all of the benefits people would get: lower bills, green jobs, less dangerous air pollution, and of course, hopefully a livable future. It entailed building even more expertise and publishing serious research modeling the future of the grid in New York State, but, like everything else, grounded in building tremendous people power.

People spent weekends tabling and gathering public comments. We also worked with the Professional Staff Congress, which is the faculty and staff union at the City University of New York. They organized 10 town halls across the City University system. Then when they actually had public hearings around the State, we were able to send crowds of people to all of these hearings, and I think that the State officials were legitimately shocked because this kind of public comment process hearings is generally an incredibly sleepy thing because nobody even knows about it. They’re not making an effort to engage the public. Our idea was the State should consult the public to see what is needed. What do people want to see? But instead, we had to kind of build that ourselves.

So on some level, I’ve seen our campaign over the last two years as essentially an exercise in, Okay, if you don’t want to run a democracy, we’re going to build the democratic mechanisms to force the input on you. In the end, we had over 5,300 public comments on their first plan. Then the New York City hearing was packed to the rafters. Dozens of people couldn’t even speak because there were so many speakers. Because of that, they have already said they’re going to double the amount of renewable energy that they’re planning to build.

To me, as an organizer, when I see people acceding to our demands, that is a signal not to rest, but to actually go harder because it’s working. So that fight is going to continue. There are a lot of things we need to push for. We need to make sure that they’re actually building projects all over the State. Right now, their earlier stuff is much more focused on upstate, but actually for urban areas like New York City, there are tremendous benefits to building renewables near where a huge amount of the demand is. That will also allow us to shut down these peaker plants, which are hyper-polluting when they’re spinning up to actually provide power to the grid. They emit all kinds of noxious chemicals that cause hugely disproportionate asthma rates. They contribute to massive hospitalization for children and adults.

So these are things that we need to address, and we can’t do that unless we’re actually building the renewable energy to replace the super-dirty fossil fuel energy. A bright spot there is, thanks to our influence, the New York Power Authority is moving ahead with starting to plan for large-scale battery storage in the city, which is one way to replace the capacity of those fossil fuel plants. But they’re barely scratching the surface of what they can do in New York City. Yes, it’s not like we have millions of acres of open space, but there’s massive amounts of space available to build distributed energy resources that are smaller scale, but lots of them all over the place. We see our role as we continue to push and fight until we get what we need, essentially.

So, thanks to you guys, they’ve doubled the amount of renewables they’re going to build. This is their first plan, then they’re going to start building their first projects because of BPRA?

Yes. So the first plan was approved in January. Even in that plan document, they already said, “Okay, we’re going to look at doubling this.” They didn’t say, “This is because these massive crowds of people came and confronted us,” but we know that that’s why. They had a Board of Trustees meeting last week where they formally said, “Yes, we’re going to do this.” So that’s our pressure working.

Another thing I want to mention is, on the labor front, BPRA authorized the State to give up to $25 million per year for green job training. And so far, NYPA has, I think, dispersed over $25 million. This is going to a mix of training programs with labor unions, with trade schools, with state universities. So we’re really winning tangible help for people. We fought to make sure that that would include programs like apprenticeship and pre-apprenticeship programs with wraparound services for people who take this on. A lot of people can’t break into the green jobs area because maybe they don’t have a car, they can’t afford to get to the union training center, or they can’t afford childcare so they can’t do evening classes or something like that. These programs are going to be able to pay for all of that stuff so that we can bring people who have been locked out of being able to get these good-paying and family-sustaining type jobs into this workforce so that everyone benefits.

The vision of the private developing sphere is a bunch of private companies make money. But ultimately, it’s really big finance that is driving all the private renewable development and reaping the benefits because they’re the ones who are fronting the money for all of these projects. We have always been about: if we’re going to make climate action popular, we need to show that it can be a part of improving people’s lives. We need to dispel the very powerful propaganda of the Right that there’s a zero-sum game between climate action and people’s quality of life.

It’s a vision in the Green New Deal that the climate transition is an opportunity to restructure our economy, our society, and our democracy, and put some of this into the hands of regular people, because we do the work, we make things run, and it’s our world.

How has BPRA built up the strength of New York City DSA? Do you feel like it’s helped set the stage for you guys to do even more?

One thing is a lot of leaders in the chapter now went through the crucible of this campaign. Even if they’re working on something else now—maybe they’re working on electoral races or trans rights organizing or recruitment and building our future as a political party—a lot of these people cut their teeth and went from somebody who is just enthusiastic and excited to someone who is an ultra-experienced organizer who knows how to lead large numbers of people into action, which is what organizing is all about. So that’s a huge part of it.

I do think having BPRA as a shared policy plank in electoral campaigns really helped create a certain identity and cohesion in what we were putting forward. Having managed one of those campaigns, it was really motivating to people at the doors to see a positive vision for climate. And that actually is a massive piece of this. For a lot of people, the conventional wisdom was you cannot run on climate, that’s too scary or it’s too dicey. People want to talk about only bread-and-butter, kitchen table-type stuff. But ultimately, this is that. How much are you paying for utilities? How much are you paying in medical bills because your kid has asthma? So that’s another part of it. Ultimately BPRA put our chapter and chapters statewide on the map as one of the key forces shaping the climate fight in New York.

And it has brought in a lot of new people into our orbit. We work extremely closely with the City University staff, faculty, and students. These are all people who are now closer to the center of the organizing bullseye. We’ve made this seem possible, to actually win something. That was also always a part of this, to show socialists can pass transformative legislation that actually delivers results for the working class in the short, medium, and long term. It’s really a proof of concept for what our chapter has been doing all along. It remains one of our biggest legislative victories ever.

The post Campaign Q&A: Building Public Renewables in New York appeared first on Building for Power.

By: Liam Noble

BOSTON, MA – In early May, a supermajority of the 70 Blank Street Coffee employees in the Boston area filed for voluntary recognition from management as members of the New England Joint Board (NEJB). Their motivating factors were a desire for better wages, better schedule accommodations, better training, safety protections, and adherence to just cause discipline. 

Blank Street workers operate the shops in shifts of two to three baristas, one on the machine and one on the point-of-sale. The myriad of tasks to keep the store running (opening, cleaning, customer service, heating the food, tracking down the perennially absent manager, etc) fall to the couple of baristas. This fits neatly into that holy scripture of neoliberalism: workers do as many simultaneous jobs as possible for as little pay as warranted, for as little pay as possible.

Besides wages accounting for the sheer amount of labor done, employee safety is the biggest common reason given for organizing. 

One worker, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Working Mass that their location had a broken A/C that caused the shop to heat up to 90 degrees. While the employees labored behind the counter in brutal heat, management was vague and uncommunicative about repairs. No one seemed to care. The owners were simply unwilling to invest in keeping their employees safe, viewing quitting for burnout as merely normal employee turnover.

Coffee from Big Tech

To some extent, it’s no wonder the business model has led to both paltry pay and safety concerns. Blank Street was founded by two tech guys in Brooklyn who, after a couple failed schemes to attract the largesse of venture capitalists, aimed to automate the cafe experience into a push-button assembly line. This model has been used to justify slimming down staffing, minimalist accommodations, and a small floor space. This is not a social site. Blank Street is geared towards getting customers in, then back out again. Time is money, and quicker turnaround equals more money.

Blank Street is a company subsidized by big-name finance: Tiger Global, among others. Blank Street has money to burn in its quest to corner the market (seven locations in Boston, and thirty-six in NYC). Blank Street attracted $113.8M in funding from venture capitalists that pushed for rapid expansion across the East Coast and United Kingdom, rewarding the business model for harming workers’ livelihoods and access to healthy workplace conditions. 

Meanwhile, the boss remains difficult to access let alone march on with demands: there are only three managers between seven locations. 

Working for the Man, Working for the Machine

Blank Street is not so much focused around the process of coffee-making as around a single, finicky, over-engineered, touch-screen, all-in-one espresso robot that’s very expensive and prone to faults: the Eversys espresso machine. When the machine breaks down, everything stops. If the Wi-Fi goes down, espresso can’t be made. Cries for help on how to repair the Eversys, by both managers and baristas, are frequent posts on Reddit coffeeshop forums. Everybody tries to avoid the costly technician, who inevitably comes swaggering in with a heavy toolkit and a big invoice. In one Reddit post, a user begged for solutions for their machine needing to be torn-down and cleaned after every other use. The fix: change the time/date on the machine’s clock to before 2024. A y2k style bug in deficient software turned out to be the culprit. 

Our anonymous employee had this to say about the Eversys, following a thoughtful pause: “Could be better. It tries to clean itself every ten minutes and we have no control over that. It interrupts training and makes everything more difficult. There’s a problem where sometimes the steam wand won’t shut off, and it’s dangerous to team members and customers.” Most forbodingly, they reported:

The machine has burned people before.

Software issues plague the machine. Nobody in the store is qualified to fix the Eversys; the manager has to call the local service organization. But remember – since the managers are on-call, workers must play a game of telephone tag to reach one of the only three managers in the Boston area to access critical equipment that are needed to do their jobs. Even with preventative maintenance, the machines start breaking down about a year into use (exactly as you’d want from a machine with a $20k price sticker).

That’s a recipe for employee frustration— especially when it’s just a couple of you in a cramped and hot shop trying to tell the teeth-gnashing, convenience-addicted customers that your espresso machine that’s somehow also an iPad is broken, but at least you can still do matcha.

Coffee with Dignity

I popped down to the Harvard Square Blank Street in May and there was a line out the door. Five minutes later, I had a cappuccino in my hand. The business is built for speed, workers go fast. Everything is like clockwork. Just like any other “fast-café,” but faster. I wondered how the baristas had time for any of the other responsibilities management saddled them with, that they weren’t being compensated for. The speed of the workers, and the rhythms they followed, reminded me of working retail during a holiday rush. Everything turns into a well rehearsed blur of muscle memory. Brains tick with the rhythm of the machine, and all behind the counter are a harmonious One— except the customer who remains a precarious Other.

In contrast to management and its machine, the workers expressed that their motivating goal is being able to look out for each other.

There’s a strong sense of pride and security that comes with belonging to a good union shop. For baristas, that entails needed benefits— Boston is an expensive city, and the cost of living keeps rising. Housing alone is 119% higher than the US average. While tenant unions fight against rent, workers fight for better pay to battle the crushing weight euphemistically called the “cost of living.” And the workers in Boston are not alone, as Blank Street Coffee workers ratified their contract earlier this year after beginning a campaign in 2023.

Emma Delaney and others at the NEJB are helping the baristas in Boston to win.

Delaney is a NEJB organizer for the Blank Street unionization campaign, but comes from a proud history of barista organizing predating the NEJB. Emma was employed at Pavement Coffee, and helped lead the initial unionization effort in 2021. Pavement was the first coffee shop contract won in New England, followed by City Feed, 1369, Diesel, Bloc, and Forge. Now, the NEJB helping workers across the city accomplish the same in their own workplaces. 

Now the union is confident, and preparing for negotiations that will follow member ratification. “We want the vote to speak for itself,” Delaney said. 

Our anonymous Blank Street worker was cheerful about the prospects of belonging to a union shop.

We’re all pretty excited. We’re going forward feeling positive and want to keep spreading the word. We have a great team, and just want a safe work environment. We’re going to be able to look out for each other, now.

Liam Noble is a writer, photographer, and a member of Boston DSA. Find his substack here: liamnoble.substack.com

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article listed Blue Bottle as a contract won, when in reality, they remain in a fight for a contract. City Feed, which unionized with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) during the same year as 1369 and Diesel, was also ommitted.

The post Baristas Versus the Machine: Boston Workers of Blank Street Coffee File for a Union appeared first on Working Mass.