how many weapons of mass destruction will our country find –

searching in the burned-out craters where once stood a family’s home

symbols of resistance cooked into the flesh of civilians.

or are they victims or human shields or casualties or puppets of the regime or terrorists?

draw a peace sign on our hellcats so they know it comes with good intentions,

pray they sought the white Christian religion out before meeting an unavoidable death.

we were just following orders from America’s rich and powerful–

please don’t take it personally.

how many war crimes will our country commit

so the girls we killed can go to school,

the people elect a president, one of America’s choosing, 

give their oil rights to the rich?

& how many Iraqis will be denied a funeral–

no bodies for their family to find.

less than a hundred is an accident, more than a million is a statistic

if you’re brown – labelled collateral. 

how many Americans will be sent home in coffins?

their parents bury their kin, 

draped in the flag that sent them to die.

politicians crocodile teary-eyed speeches, lay medals drenched in blood.

called a hero, a martyr, or a symbol of a cause– 

ask not what your country won’t do for you

but what you’ll give for them.

how much of your humanity are you willing to sacrifice 

for a government that doesn’t love you back

“You can just do stuff, you know?” I’m told by Gillian Pasley, one of the organizers of the upcoming Blucifer’s First Rodeo, an artist-run music festival set to take over South Broadway this July 23rd-26th.

“It started with group texts and telling jokes and kind of spiraled into this really big thing.”

This post-ironic approach to making social change seems to be everywhere right now. It perfectly fits our strange moment in time: so much that we once sought feels just out-of-reach and yet so much possibility hangs densely in the air. It’s at once cynical and liberatory; belief in an expert-class whose gatekeeping was a rational expression of their abilities is gone, wholly replaced by a kind of faithless hope that we must – and ultimately can - get it done ourselves.

Gillian and her fellow organizers didn’t set out to start a new music festival, but when the opportunity appeared, they’d already started to lay the groundwork. “It goes back for a long time and being a part of this local music scene, but I would say the big sort of catalyzing event was perhaps our Last-Minute Last Waltz at the Hi-Dive in November.” Gillian explained. “That was like 40 or so musicians from 25 or so local bands kind of banding together over the course of three weeks to do this big show. We ended up raising about $3,000 for Kaizen Food Share. From that I think everyone was sort of feeling like we can do more big things that we want to and just sort of waiting for an opportunity for something else big to come along and feeling like we had the capacity to do something at a larger scale.”

Watching beloved cultural institutions move away from South Broadway has become an all too regular affair of late, so it wasn’t too surprising when Underground Music Showcase decided that last year’s music festival would be the last one, at least “in that form” they coyly added.

The organizers Youth on Record had been signaling for years that it was becoming increasingly untenable, taking too much time away from their non-profit arts outreach, and not long ago they’d partnered with experiential creative agency Two Parts to share the load. When they said it was over, many felt optimistic (or suspicious) that YoR just needed to get out from under its administrative burden and that we’d see UMS again. But when the buyer was announced as the RiNo Business Improvement District, that said more than enough.

The unsung heart of the festival had been cut out of the deal: South Broadway and its vibrant community of artists, venues, and fans. The once warm and airy atmosphere of the late July event had coldly blown across town and the vacuum was palpable.

“I started talking this winter about how there wasn't going to be a local music festival on South Broadway this summer and the vacancy that that created for something that could really be artist run and artist centric felt like a natural move in a lot of ways.”

It's fitting that it was the musicians themselves who stepped up. These local artists are what make South Broadway the kind of stretch you can walk down any random weekday and have a half dozen shows to choose from.

“It's affordable to go to these shows and it happens all year round. I think for a lot of people, you know, they have the idea that every July they might come down to South Broadway and see some local music, but those bands are playing all the time.”

And the dive-bars and lounges of the neighborhood know it. So when this small group of musicians who already knew these venues’ staff and ownership sought a meeting to discuss their bookings for the end of July, the response was supportive and excited. Swiftly, Blucifer’s First Rodeo was putting up a polished website, announcing lineups, and accepting hundreds of applications to perform and to volunteer from across the community.

“This is something that people really, really wanted to see happen. And so somebody just had to move really fast to make it happen.”

However, it’s one thing to be first, but it’s quite another to keep that goodwill through the festival. The organizers knew that to support a community of musicians that they would have to meet the material needs of working artists.

“We have a very equitable floor for bands and solo acts and DJs who are playing the official festival. And yeah, it's just all coming from the idea that we as working musicians should learn to value the work that we do in the community as truly valuable.”

Looking to your friends, saying to each other “why not?”, and then just putting in maximum effort is perhaps the only current strategy we can rely on. The spiritual clarion call of the down-but-not-out, looking to each other because the cost of doing nothing is just too high.

“Someone just needed to step up to the plate to organize something that now we're all going to do together.”

Hard to believe that this is the sentiment behind the first great Denver cultural victory of 2026 - but would you really believe it could happen any other way? 

If you still want there to be an organic artist-supporting musical culture in your city, visit bluciferfest.com to get tickets and get involved. Blucifer rides for you and me.

Insights from a Democratic Socialist

When a fellow comrade first mentioned the People’s Movement Assembly (PMAs) to me I was curious, but never expected the groundbreaking impact that would resonate through me, all the Atlanta DSA members, and the broader community that engaged with the idea. Done frequently enough with the goal of connecting different social activists and their groups they can become something akin to a mobilized and organized social movement against fascism, beginning in our backyard and local communities. Literature reflecting the organizational ideas made it clear that the PMA is not just about fighting fascism; it is about a whole range of different survivability tactics against ecological devastation and economic exploitation particularly affecting historically marginalized communities 

As an attendee of the March 14 PMA, one had the opportunity to engage in two sessions with the opportunity to choose from around ten breakout groups. Each group had one to three facilitators who were tasked with moderating the discussions.

​The radical, revolutionary nature of PMAs is that they bring community members together. However, true revolution happens when we involve the full extent and power of working class people. The organization that coordinated with other grassroots orgs and spearheaded this event was Project South; an org dedicated to an abolitionist approach to ending poverty so as to put people over profit. DSA runs on the same logic, but has mainly seen progress through electoral, mutual aid, and other collaborative organizational means; Even if we disagree, the very act of opening dialogue, bringing people together, and connecting different orgs breeds the political dissent not against each other but against fascism that is becoming increasingly central to American citizens in the current era.

Many participants understood proper conduct even if it was not directly outlined at the  PMA because there is a deep seated frustration with politics today. For example, diverse backgrounds breed diverse perspectives that we must acknowledge, participants should allow space for others to contribute but also honor their unique voice, even if groups do not find complete consensus there must be an effort to unify under certain values, principles, or actions, and finally cooperation over debate should be encouraged. These are all PMA rules that even if not stated are self-evident. The central theme of these PMAs is to inquire into what issues concern which citizens. 

​When the Olympics came to town in 1996, organizers formed Project South and the Hunger Coalition to react to the changing city. Project South coordinators for the PMA emphasized the generational nature of the social justice project and noted that formerly enslaved populations built the Atlanta community over 150 years ago. Some of our major goals as activists and organizers is fostering real public safety, ensuring basic needs, and fostering some semblance of equality in decision making especially during times of authoritarianism. The PMA goals are fourfold: Spreading knowledge, skills, and connections, and cultivating community building. Every PMA had a major community oriented priority: The first Atlanta PMA on March 22, 2025, sought public safety on community terms through the building of third party organizations. The second Atlanta PMA on September 6, 2025 set goals of stronger hyperlocal institutions and challenging misinformation from AI. The third PMA voted to share skills and coordinate for power, reaching beyond the assembly.

​After a second breakout session, the groups came together, appointing a representative to report back the group’s discussion on their issues. I joined participants young and old in the “Know Your Rights” breakout group, including an attorney as one of the main coordinators. We discussed how to be more aware of several legal realities in America: differences in laws between states, the importance of de-escalation work, policy changes on multiple levels, and advocacy against the most inhumane deportation laws on the books. Someone even mentioned the importance of knowing the hotline number for mentally ill crises situations that could avoid unnecessary violence. When the groups came together I was also struck by the value in having the phone number of representative state organizations like the Georgia Latino Association for Human Rights (GLAHR) to vouch for targeted citizens, and having talking points for organizers when speaking with law enforcement and other commercial bodies. I wanted to know: Is there a potential for any real social, cultural, or political power through such PMAs?

​The Step-by-Step Guide to Making your own Neighborhood Assembly emphasizes that: We must grapple with what democracy means to us, when our politicians no longer represent us, we’ve expanded the surveillance system and have an operational Cop City, seen the city privatize decisions away from democratic control, and allowed a continued housing crisis that’s forcing people onto the streets. The value of the PMAs is that they seek to transcend political partisanship in favor of true cultural and social transformation by bringing together diverse groups of people with diverse perspectives and skills to find solutions to problems in their neighborhoods. As the guide concludes: Food, housing, healthcare, education, self-determination, self-defense, resistance are all human rights, but they can only be achieved when communities organize to build real lasting change. The final ask was for individuals to connect with each other, with the sponsoring orgs, and mobilize  as many of these groups as possible for the planned May Day protest.

For DSA’s other projects, like electoral strategy, deeply democratic bodies like peoples’ assemblies are pathways to organize mass action and rally the people to our side.

The post Atlanta People’s Movement III appeared first on Red Clay Comrade.

Read more at Memphis-Midsouth

By: Siobhan McDonough

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

CAMBRIDGE — Last Monday, community members crowded into Cambridge City Hall to voice our support for a proposed resolution calling for an end to the U.S.’s devastating Cuba blockade. Cambridge City Councillors and democratic socialists Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler and Ayah Al-Zubi, along with Councillor Marc McGovern, proposed the resolution.

In opposition to her colleagues, Councillor Patty Nolan cut off discussion using her “charter right” authority, which postpones further debate to the Council’s next meeting on May 11, 2026. Councillor Nolan argued the Council had no business addressing foreign policy:

I do not believe that the City Council should deliberate or use time during regular business meetings on foreign policy issues, which I see this as.

Councillor Nolan is correct that the Cuba blockade, in a very narrow sense, is about foreign policy. Cambridge’s action on this resolution is, by itself, insufficient to force the Trump administration to change its posture toward Cuba. The people of Cambridge, like most people in the United States, have almost no say in our federal government’s aggression toward other countries. The president dictates U.S. foreign policy in practice. Trump, without Congressional approval, kidnapped Venezuelan President Maduro and started a catastrophic war with Iran. Just last week, he unilaterally issued an executive order expanding international sanctions on those participating in the Cuban economy. 

The U.S. awards its globe-spanning military and economic apparatus to the winner of the Electoral College, a system which makes most U.S. citizens’ presidential votes essentially meaningless. Through the anti-democratic Electoral College, both Republican presidents this century first came into office with fewer votes than their opponent. Winning that non-democratic institution also authorizes presidents to pick lifetime appointees to the Supreme Court. The Court gave itself the power of judicial review to strike down acts of Congress, but on foreign policy, courts allow presidents free rein by consistently refusing to enforce laws that limit presidential acts of war.

Nominally, Congress should be able to represent popular will and thwart presidential warmongering. However, both chambers of Congress—the Senate and the House—have their own barriers to popular input. The Senate prioritizes the representation of land over the representation of people and protects its members from voters with six year terms. Thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s rulings in Rucho and Callais, the House is an ever-worsening mess of gerrymandered safe seats designed to entrench the status quo and disenfranchise non-white voters. Corporations and elite interest groups flood the Senate and House with campaign contributions to offset popular pressure. Altogether, it’s no wonder that popular will has almost no impact on federal policy compared to the preferences of economic elites.

But that’s exactly why we must act. When the state of U.S. democracy itself is so woeful, representative governing bodies like the Cambridge City Council must use their democratic legitimacy to serve as a voice for the community’s values on such crucial issues as the lives and freedom of the Cuban people facing the deep violence and social murder of the blockade. The democratic structures of the Cambridge City Council are relatively strong, compared to the non-democratic ones above. Instead of gerrymandered single-member districts, we have a proportional City Council that represents the ideological diversity of Cambridge voters and open, public council meetings that begin with an opportunity for residents to be heard. 

Our democracy in Cambridge is far from perfect. We do not allow non-citizens to vote, we do not have automatic or same-day voter registration, and our unelected City Manager retains far too much power over the budget and city operations. Wealthy donors and corporate interests hold too much sway in the political process. Still, the City Council remains the best institutional voice Cambridge residents collectively have.

Our city’s residents overwhelmingly oppose the oppressive U.S. blockade of Cuba. As Trump ratchets up sanctions while openly threatening that “Cuba is next,” we demand our institutions push back on the violence done in our names. With Congress non-responsive, that duty falls to the representative Cambridge City Council.

Cambridge community members should show up in force at City Hall once again on May 11 at 5:30pm to demand Cambridge City Council affirms our city’s anti-imperialist values.

Siobhan McDonough is the treasurer for Boston Democratic Socialists of America, the trustee chair for the National Organization of Legal Services Workers (UAW 2320), and a civil rights attorney for working-class people.

The post OPINION: Cambridge, Take Action To Oppose the Cuba Blockade appeared first on Working Mass.

[[{“value”:”

By: Siobhan McDonough

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

CAMBRIDGE — Last Monday, community members crowded into Cambridge City Hall to voice our support for a proposed resolution calling for an end to the U.S.’s devastating Cuba blockade. Cambridge City Councillors and democratic socialists Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler and Ayah Al-Zubi, along with Councillor Marc McGovern, proposed the resolution.

In opposition to her colleagues, Councillor Patty Nolan cut off discussion using her “charter right” authority, which postpones further debate to the Council’s next meeting on May 11, 2026. Councillor Nolan argued the Council had no business addressing foreign policy:

I do not believe that the City Council should deliberate or use time during regular business meetings on foreign policy issues, which I see this as.

Councillor Nolan is correct that the Cuba blockade, in a very narrow sense, is about foreign policy. Cambridge’s action on this resolution is, by itself, insufficient to force the Trump administration to change its posture toward Cuba. The people of Cambridge, like most people in the United States, have almost no say in our federal government’s aggression toward other countries. The president dictates U.S. foreign policy in practice. Trump, without Congressional approval, kidnapped Venezuelan President Maduro and started a catastrophic war with Iran. Just last week, he unilaterally issued an executive order expanding international sanctions on those participating in the Cuban economy. 

The U.S. awards its globe-spanning military and economic apparatus to the winner of the Electoral College, a system which makes most U.S. citizens’ presidential votes essentially meaningless. Through the anti-democratic Electoral College, both Republican presidents this century first came into office with fewer votes than their opponent. Winning that non-democratic institution also authorizes presidents to pick lifetime appointees to the Supreme Court. The Court gave itself the power of judicial review to strike down acts of Congress, but on foreign policy, courts allow presidents free rein by consistently refusing to enforce laws that limit presidential acts of war.

Nominally, Congress should be able to represent popular will and thwart presidential warmongering. However, both chambers of Congress—the Senate and the House—have their own barriers to popular input. The Senate prioritizes the representation of land over the representation of people and protects its members from voters with six year terms. Thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s rulings in Rucho and Callais, the House is an ever-worsening mess of gerrymandered safe seats designed to entrench the status quo and disenfranchise non-white voters. Corporations and elite interest groups flood the Senate and House with campaign contributions to offset popular pressure. Altogether, it’s no wonder that popular will has almost no impact on federal policy compared to the preferences of economic elites.

But that’s exactly why we must act. When the state of U.S. democracy itself is so woeful, representative governing bodies like the Cambridge City Council must use their democratic legitimacy to serve as a voice for the community’s values on such crucial issues as the lives and freedom of the Cuban people facing the deep violence and social murder of the blockade. The democratic structures of the Cambridge City Council are relatively strong, compared to the non-democratic ones above. Instead of gerrymandered single-member districts, we have a proportional City Council that represents the ideological diversity of Cambridge voters and open, public council meetings that begin with an opportunity for residents to be heard. 

Our democracy in Cambridge is far from perfect. We do not allow non-citizens to vote, we do not have automatic or same-day voter registration, and our unelected City Manager retains far too much power over the budget and city operations. Wealthy donors and corporate interests hold too much sway in the political process. Still, the City Council remains the best institutional voice Cambridge residents collectively have.

Our city’s residents overwhelmingly oppose the oppressive U.S. blockade of Cuba. As Trump ratchets up sanctions while openly threatening that “Cuba is next,” we demand our institutions push back on the violence done in our names. With Congress non-responsive, that duty falls to the representative Cambridge City Council.

Cambridge community members should show up in force at City Hall once again on May 11 at 5:30pm to demand Cambridge City Council affirms our city’s anti-imperialist values.

Siobhan McDonough is the treasurer for Boston Democratic Socialists of America, the trustee chair for the National Organization of Legal Services Workers (UAW 2320), and a civil rights attorney for working-class people.

The post OPINION: Cambridge Can and Must Take Action To Oppose the Cuba Blockade on May 11 appeared first on Working Mass.

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By: W.J.

I found my way to a Metro Detroit DSA meeting through my work with one of the ballot initiatives the chapter endorsed last year. Another volunteer and I were there to give our pitch and try to recruit MDDSA members as petition gatherers. What struck me when I opened the door to Ant Hall was how packed it was — all the seats were full. It was standing room only. I’m a bigger guy, so I had to “ope” and “pardon me” my way from the front door to a tight corner off to the side, navigating around to the counter space where we’d set up our computer to record new volunteers and set out our clipboards and petitions.

As we got ourselves ready before the start of the general meeting, we were approached by one of the many leaders of the chapter, Jess Newman. Jess came to check in with us, made sure we had everything we needed, and gave us a rundown of how the meeting would go and when we’d be beckoned forward to make our pitch.

We were all set. Jess told us that we’d be called up front near the end of the meeting, before members would be released for the post-meeting social. With nothing to do for a bit, I decided to putz around Ant Hall and check out the meeting, not quite sure what to expect. I walked in right after the emcee got done asking new members to stand and ask what got them interested in DSA. The answers I heard were about what I’d expected: Some “recovering” Democrats, others who were unaffiliated with the two parties had just had enough and wanted to be productive, and a few who weren’t quite sure but wanted to come see what the Democratic Socialists of America were all about. Regardless of the passion or certainty in their responses, all received fervent applause and smiles from their new comrades.

I went back to the main hall after a few minutes and noticed that they’d started a panel to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Their discussion sat with me for a good long while. I’d paid some attention to what was going on over there, passively looking at the news and reading the occasional article that made it into my feed. Listening to the panelists describe the history of the occupation and the atrocities committed after the October 7th attack left me angry. Angry at my country for enabling it and angry with myself for being powerless to do anything about it.

Then the conversation changed. They talked about various humanitarian organizations on the ground, and how we, an assembly sitting in Hamtramck, could support them. There was some relief at the mention of direct action we could take, but a mix of anger and dread remained.There was a look of quiet defiance on the faces of the membership that I noticed during this panel, and I realized that I was in a space filled with people that weren’t just going to sit quietly and listen about atrocities happening and go on about their day afterwards. With that realization came some reassurance and a lingering curiosity: what would I do next?

The meeting continued. As it neared the end, Jess returned to the front with a few others to talk about the on-going petition drives within Michigan For The Many. I think the meeting had gone over time, because she proceeded to give a quick overview of each one herself instead of calling up reps to go over them (which I didn’t mind at all). What did catch me off guard was Jess calling the group’s attention to me as not only an organizer for my group, but also a future DSA member, which received a small applause. I was feeling a bit mischievous, so I smiled and said, “We’ll see.” I actually already had the membership page up on my phone and was just going back and forth on the pledge amount for a sustaining member. Afterwards, I joined my partner at the counter and signed up about a dozen comrades to carry our petition. It was not a bad day at all.

After the meeting, we packed up, and I was hungry. At Jess’s recommendation, we went to Yemen Cafe down the street, where I ate entirely too much. While I was waiting for my check, I unlocked my phone, set my pledge amount, and skimmed the page welcoming me to DSA.

So why did I join? It was being in community with others. Sharing a space that made me believe that a better world is possible, and knowing there’s over a thousand Metro Detroiters organizing to make it so.

Why I Joined DSA: To be on the Right Side of History was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Frederick Reiber

CAMBRIDGE — Harvard students are in their reading period in advance of finals as Harvard’s graduate union representing workers in around sixty programs surge to the end of their third week on a historic strike at the world’s richest university. Seeking to continue escalating pressure following a 79% turnout with 96% of its membership in favor of militant strike action for the union’s demands in April, workers have escalated to withholding teaching and research, disrupting end of semester activities, and slowing operations.

The Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU) – UAW Local 5118 strikes as other unions on campus have so far chosen other strategic routes in negotiations, despite the potential for contract alignment, but anger over workplaces issues in campus rank-and-file movements is increasing across campus and its surrounding communities. The university focused entirely on attacks from above increasingly faces dissent from below.

And since workers make Harvard run, ultimately, the workers’ threat demands the university’s attention.

Demands for Dignity and Against ICE

HGSU has been bargaining for a total of 14 months, with only two tentative agreements—one on access to space for office hours and another on holidays, personal days, and vacation. Harvard has refused to bargain over issues including access to ADA-compliant meeting spaces, union representation in cases of intellectual property disputes, rights to healthcare, and academic freedom. The university has also denied workers the right to open bargaining, recognizing the potential for increased worker power when negotiations are not done behind closed doors. 

The current campaign has coalesced around four primary demands:

First is the creation of an independent process for addressing workplace harassment, discrimination, and bullying. Union data estimates that at least one in five student workers experiences some form of harassment as researchers and teachers, while Harvard currently controls the only formal channels for reporting and resolving those cases. Graduate workers are calling for access to a neutral, third-party system, with the ability to appeal to an independent arbitration with the authority to issue binding remedies.

Workers spoke to the need for Real Recourse. In anonymous testimony published by HGSU, one student worker reported:

“I was repeatedly told I didn’t have a good Title IX case because I had a previous relationship with my harasser and because I was not assaulted. Though they suggested I could get help from CAMHS, there was no action taken to address my concerns or protect future victims… The person who harassed me did end up assaulting someone else about a year after I went to the Title IX office. If the university had acted on my concerns when I brought them, they could have prevented an assault. The way that the university failed me and the other members of my department in this process is incredibly frustrating… If I had had union representation to support me as I navigated the process, I believe I could have stood up for myself better.”

Second is the implementation of a “fair share fee.” This clause would require all workers covered by the contract to contribute to the costs of union representation, regardless of membership status. Doing so helps to spread the substantial costs of organizing and contract enforcement more equitably, helping to sustain the union’s operations. Such fees are common in states without anti-labor right-to-work laws, including Massachusetts.

Workers are also demanding wage increases, setting a baseline of $55,000 for all graduate student employees. RAs and TFs at peer schools such as MIT, Stanford, and Princeton make far more while boasting smaller endowments than a university located in the country’s most expensive city. In addition to a higher base pay, workers are calling for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) which ties annual raises to inflation, ensuring wages keep pace with rising expenses over the life of the contract. Similar clauses have been won at other universities. Organizers demand a living wage with COLA adjustment that reflects the realities of living and working in Boston’s high-cost environment while addressing longstanding pay disparities. Right now, research-based positions earn roughly $40,830, compared to about $26,300 over ten months for graduate workers in teaching roles—a gap the union argues is unjustified given the university’s reliance on both forms of labor.

Harvard heavily discourages and often forbids other forms of employment. Nonetheless, during bargaining with HGSU, university representatives called the demand for a living wage for grad workers paid far less than either bargaining staff or Harvard’s leaders “unreasonable.” Harvard indicated in bargaining that its top priority is growing its endowment, even as the university during the same November 7, 2025 session rejected the union’s requests to bargain for paid family leave, healthcare during leaves, and full compensation for RAs and TFs whose appointments cancel last minute, necessary for financial stability for the most vulnerable student workers.

Harvard University’s endowment exceeds $56.9 billion.

Finally, the union is demanding stronger protections for international student workers, with organizers pointing to an increasingly hostile national climate, including intensifying immigration enforcement and right-wing political attacks leaving noncitizen workers vulnerable. The union is fighting back against a university that has bowed to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant culture war demands. Of course, that also means that HGSU’s inclusion of the fight against ICE forces Harvard University into the position of raising the stakes of its choice to hold its head down and hope the White House stops beating its crimson walls.

The demand to protect immigrant workers has crystallized into the nexus of the union’s fight. In June 2025, HGSU introduced into contract negotiations a call for Harvard to safeguard I-9 forms, fund legal counsel, and prevent ICE agents from entering spaces without a valid judicial warrant. Some students pointed out the University of California has held these policies for a decade.

The Structural Challenges of Organizing in Academia

Organizing at a university presents many unique challenges. Workers contend with an uncertain legal landscape, as the current National Labor Relations Board has a Republican majority, which may revoke graduate students’ dual status as students and laborers. In order to help avoid such an outcome, graduate worker unions across the country have pulled numerous Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) charges in an attempt to limit such a ruling. 

One effect of this is that workers at Harvard are now on what is considered—in legal terminology—an “economic” strike. Unlike a ULP strike, which provides legal protections around employee replacement, economic strikes have no such protections allowing employers to—theoretically—hire permanent replacements for striking workers (or “scabs”). While such action is unlikely, the inability to use ULPs can negatively impact organizing.

Challenges also appear at the community level, with workers needing to overcome a highly dispersed workplace, with social connections often centered around the academic department. These siloes compound the experiences of academic workers as isolated and overextended, needing to balance multiple responsibilities, and challenges around how the broader ivory tower and surrounding communities view academic work. Harvard has attempted to weaponize these characteristics. The university forcefully removed more than 800 student workers from the union, refusing to recognize their employment status, during a series of restructurings and reclassifications that multiple staff in multiple unions described to Working Mass as latent attacks by the university on its own workers in July 2025. These included also capitulation to federal demands including the closure of offices serving communities of color on campus, which HGSU bargaining committee member Denish K. Jaswal pointed out to the Crimson.

The answer to overcoming structural obstacles for HGSU organizers was an organizing model focused on developing strong inter-personal relationships through one-on-one conversations. As grad worker Marley Hornewer explained:

It’s a lot more one-on-one conversation than in any other organizing I’ve done before. [You need to be] really accepting of the fact that organizing takes time […] folks have so much else that they’re doing that responding to a text or getting coffee with you isn’t necessarily a priority, but when it happens […] it feels so powerful to people to see themselves as a worker.

Jessica Van Meir, a TF for the Government Department, emphasized the ways in which organizing and the strike has transformed rank-and-file grad workers, whose anger at the university on behalf of every demand increases with each day of evidence from Harvard of its own obfuscation:

The outpouring of participation in the strike and refusal to cave to the administration’s scaremongering demonstrates that graduate student workers understand our importance to the university. Harvard can easily end the strike and restore business as usual by offering us a living wage, independent arbitration for harassment and discrimination cases, and protections from ICE coming on campus without a judicial warrant. But until then, no teaching, no grading, no research assistant work. How embarrassing to have to explain that to the parents who are forking over their retirement savings for their children’s education.

The choice is Harvard’s.

Creative Strategies for a Community Organization

Harvard workers have deployed community-based strategies to extend solidarity into the wider Cambridge labor movement and community. Striking workers have been blocking deliveries, a tactic in which workers will form a picket line outside of university docking sites. Drivers attempting to deliver Harvard’s packages from unionized or pro-labor workplaces like UPS or USPS will refuse to cross a picket-line, either through previously established union contracts or out of solidarity for the workers, which disrupts university operations and pressures administrators to come to the table.

HGSU has also run a number of teach-ins, covering topics like labor history, socialist activism at Harvard, and an intro to agency or “fair-share” fees. One was an Undergraduate Strike School on April 24. Workers have also launched a number of community events focused on bringing in both academic and local communities into their struggle.

One of the largest events was the first week community rally, hosted on April 23rd at the Science Center Plaza, the day before the Undergraduate Strike School. A wide range of speakers representing labor unity spoke, including current HGSU president sara speller as well as brother and sister unions at Harvard including Harvard Academic Workers (HAW), 32BJ SEIU, and UNITE HERE Local 26. The unions were also joined by organizers from the Harvard Temporary Protected Status (TPS) Coalition and undergraduates from the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM).

The event also featured a number of local and state politicians including Massachusetts State Representative Mike Connolly, DSA-endorsed Cambridge City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, as well as challenger for incumbent Marjorie Decker’s State House seat and former HGSU president Evan MacKay. City Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler said, during his speech:

I’m glad to stand here and deliver the message… if Harvard wants Cambridge to have its back, its gotta have the back of its workers.

Various other university communities have also thrown support behind the striking graduate workers. Earlier this week, around 200 first year Harvard Law School students signed letters urging their professors to press the University to come to the table with the union. Faculty—albeit at significantly smaller numbers—have also signaled their support to the striking graduate workers, agreeing not to replace or retaliate against workers on strike.

Diverging Strategies in a Shared Fight

Harvard’s graduate workers are not alone in facing an expired contract, or the brunt of the Harvard administration. Other Harvard bargaining units are also embroiled in contract fights, but have taken different tacts to striking. While multiple bargaining units are affiliated with the United Auto Workers (UAW) that have pioneered the strategy of coordinating unions to strike when bargaining happens at the same time and now lead the charge for contract alignment on May Day 2028, strategic action based on contract alignment has not been on the table at Harvard.

The Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), the largest union on campus representing over 5000 administrative workers essential to the university’s operations whose members often work closely alongside HGSU members, is scheduled to vote on May 12–13 on a modest agreement that would grant most members a $2,300 raise and expire after one year. Union leaders have proposed this contract to membership after Harvard’s central fundraising office laid off a dozen HUCTW union members and announced mass summer layoffs likely to decimate HUCTW’s ranks. David Deming later confirmed the intent to target union workers in an open forum, where the Dean of Harvard College called essential labor work “you would never really know or care about.” In one email obtained by Working Mass, HUCTW organizer Bill Jaeger intervened to ask members to vote yes on the proposed contract, while the HUCTW Rank-and-File Movement that focuses on building up the leadership of rank-and-file members over the union publicly urged membership on May 6, 2026 to remember “we can’t eat prestige” and instead vote no.

When asked about HUCTW, multiple organizers with HGSU declined to comment about their relationship with the other union. HUCTW leaders have asked members to turn down work that managers ask them to perform that would normally be done by grad workers, otherwise known as crossing the picket line, but indicated members should continue to do “their own jobs as usual.”

Harvard custodians with 32BJ SEIU ratified a 4-year contract in March that union leaders called the “biggest wage increase in decades:” a 4% hourly raise by 2029. While Harvard dining hall workers went on strike in 2016, their 500 rank-and-file workers affiliated with UNITE HERE Local 26 have not yet chosen that route even as their negotiations carry on. Members of the Harvard Academic Workers (HAW)-UAW —a unit of non-tenure-track researchers and instructors that has been bargaining for 18 months—recently decided not to strike. In a controversial move, HAW’s bargaining committee overrode the vote of membership after citing concerns on sufficient votes for strike authorization and uncertainty about support from the union international. This decision was made by a bargaining committee made up of rank-and-file members after consultation with UAW staff.

HAW recently filed a Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) against Harvard for increasing the class sizes, and thus labor, of its members.

Workers in HGSU praised the academic workers’ commitment to solidarity and struggle. One worker said:

I do feel a lot of solidarity from them. We’re fighting for a lot of the same things … and continuing to work together towards a more just academic environment generally.

Whatever the tactical differences, these parallel struggles underscore the broader potential for cross-union solidarity and coordinated fights that can reshape power across the university. Further, every single union shares an employer – one seemingly intent on facing, and then offsetting, the wrath of the federal administration onto its staff.

Higher Education, Labor, and Struggle

Higher education is not a refuge from conflict, but a site of struggle. As Harvard PhD candidate Laura Chen put it:

Every morning when we do delivery pickets and get to cheer for the Teamsters as they turn their trucks around for us, it’s incredible. It’s so fun. And getting to explain to various burly truck drivers why we’re with the UAW – delightful.

These moments capture something larger than a single strike. They show how academic workers are linking up with a broader labor movement, building relationships that extend beyond the university.

At a moment when higher education is defined by precarity, political attacks, and deepening inequality, these contract fights are about more than pay or procedure – they are battles over the basic necessities of life and worker humanity. What is unfolding in higher education organizing is not an isolated conflict, but part of a wider struggle over power and dignity.

Readers can support grad workers by joining them on the picket line, held each day, or contributing to the union hardship fund.

Frederick Reiber is a contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Harvard Faces Grad Workers’ Strike as Discontent with the University Swells From Below appeared first on Working Mass.

[[{“value”:”

By: Frederick Reiber

CAMBRIDGE — Harvard students are in their reading period in advance of finals as Harvard’s graduate union representing workers in around sixty programs of departments across the university surge to the end of their third week on a historic strike at the world’s richest university. Seeking to continue escalating pressure following a 79% turn out with 96% of its membership in favor of militant strike action for the union’s demands in April, workers have escalated to withholding teaching and research, disrupting end of semester activities, and slowing operations.

The Harvard Graduate Student Union (HGSU) – UAW Local 5118 strikes as other unions on campus have so far chosen other strategic routes in negotiations, despite the potential for contract alignment, but anger over workplaces issues in the rank-and-file movements is increasing across campus and its surrounding communities. The university focused entirely on attacks from above increasingly faces dissent from below.

And since workers make Harvard run, ultimately, the workers’ threat demands the university’s attention.

Demands for Dignity and Against ICE

HGSU has been bargaining for a total of 14 months, with only two tentative agreements—one on access to space for office hours and another on holidays, personal days, and vacation. Harvard has refused to bargain over issues including access to ADA-compliant spaces, union representation in cases of intellectual property disputes, rights to healthcare, and academic freedom. The university has also denied workers the right to open bargaining, recognizing the potential for increased worker power when negotiations are not done behind closed doors. 

The current campaign has coalesced around four primary demands:

First is the creation of an independent process for addressing workplace harassment, discrimination, and bullying. Union data estimates that at least one in five student workers experiences some form of harassment as researchers and teachers, while Harvard currently controls the only formal channels for reporting and resolving those cases. Graduate workers are calling for access to a neutral, third-party system, with the ability to appeal to an independent arbitration with the authority to issue binding remedies.

Workers spoke to the need for Real Recourse. In anonymous testimony published by HGSU, one student worker reported:

“I was repeatedly told I didn’t have a good Title IX case because I had a previous relationship with my harasser and because I was not assaulted. Though they suggested I could get help from CAMHS, there was no action taken to address my concerns or protect future victims… The person who harassed me did end up assaulting someone else about a year after I went to the Title IX office. If the university had acted on my concerns when I brought them, they could have prevented an assault. The way that the university failed me and the other members of my department in this process is incredibly frustrating… If I had had union representation to support me as I navigated the process, I believe I could have stood up for myself better.”

Second is the implementation of a “fair share fee.” This clause would require all workers covered by the contract to contribute to the costs of union representation, regardless of membership status. Doing so helps to spread the substantial costs of organizing and contract enforcement more equitably, helping to sustain the union’s operations. Such fees are common in states without anti-labor right-to-work laws, including Massachusetts.

Workers are also demanding wage increases, setting a baseline of $55,000 for all graduate student employees. RAs and TFs at peer schools such as MIT, Stanford, and Princeton make far more while boasting smaller endowments than a university located in the country’s most expensive city. In addition to a higher base pay, workers are calling for a Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) which ties annual raises to inflation, ensuring wages keep pace with rising expenses over the life of the contract. Similar clauses have been won at other universities. Organizers demand a living wage with COLA adjustment that reflects the realities of living and working in Boston’s high-cost environment while addressing longstanding pay disparities. Right now, research-based positions earn roughly $40,830, compared to about $26,300 over ten months for graduate workers in teaching roles—a gap the union argues is unjustified given the university’s reliance on both forms of labor.

Harvard heavily discourages and often forbids other forms of employment. Nonetheless, during bargaining with HGSU, university representatives called the living wage demand “unreasonable.” Harvard indicated in bargaining that its top priority is growing its endowment, even as the university during the same November 7, 2025 session rejected the union’s requests to bargain for paid family leave, healthcare during leaves, and full compensation for RAs and TFs whose appointments cancel last minute, necessary for financial stability for the most vulnerable student workers.

Harvard University has an endowment of $56.9 billion.

Finally, the union is demanding stronger protections for international student workers, with organizers pointing to an increasingly hostile national climate, including intensifying immigration enforcement and right-wing political attacks, which leave non-citizen workers vulnerable. Crucially, the union is fighting back against a university that has bowed to the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant culture war demands. Of course, that also means that HGSU’s inclusion of the fight against ICE in its organizing forces Harvard University into the position of raising the stakes of its choice to hold its head down and hope the White House stops beating its crimson walls.

The demand to protect immigrant workers has, in many ways, crystallized into the nexus of the union’s fight. In June 2025, HGSU introduced into contract negotiations a call for Harvard to safeguard I-9 forms, fund legal counsel, and prevent ICE agents from entering spaces without a valid judicial warrant. Some students pointed out the University of California has held these policies for a decade.

The Structural Challenges of Organizing in Academia

Organizing at a university presents many unique challenges. Workers contend with an uncertain legal landscape, as the current National Labor Relations Board has a Republican majority, which may revoke graduate students’ dual status as students and laborers. In order to help avoid such an outcome, graduate worker unions across the country have pulled numerous unfair labor practice charges in an attempt to limit such a ruling. 

One effect of this is that workers at Harvard are now on what is considered—in legal terminology—an “economic” strike. Unlike an unfair labor practice (ULP) strike, which provides legal protections around employee replacement, economic strikes have no such protections allowing employers to—theoretically—higher permanent replacements for striking workers. While such action is unlikely, the inability to use ULPs can negatively impact organizing and outcomes.

Challenges also appear at the community level, with workers needing to overcome a highly dispersed workplace, with social connections often centered around the academic department. These siloes compound the experiences of academic workers as isolated and overextended, needing to balance multiple responsibilities, and challenges around how the broader ivory tower and surrounding communities view academic work. Indeed, Harvard has attempted to weaponize these characteristics. The university forcefully removed more than 800 student workers from the union, refusing to recognize their employment status, during a series of restructurings and reclassifications that multiple staff in multiple unions described to Working Mass as latent attacks by the university on its own workers in July 2025. These included also capitulation to federal demands including the closure of offices serving communities of color on campus, which HGSU bargaining committee member Denish K. Jaswal pointed out to the Crimson.

The answer to overcoming structural obstacles for HGSU organizers was an organizing model focused on developing strong inter-personal relationships through one-on-one conversations. As grad worker Marley Hornewer explained:

It’s a lot more one-on-one conversation than in any other organizing I’ve done before. [You need to be] really accepting of the fact that organizing takes time […] folks have so much else that they’re doing that responding to a text or getting coffee with you isn’t necessarily a priority, but when it happens […] it feels so powerful to people to see themselves as a worker.

Jessica Van Meir, a TF at the Harvard Kennedy School, emphasized the ways in which organizing and the strike has transformed rank-and-file grad workers, whose anger at the university on behalf of every demand increases with each day of evidence from Harvard of its own obfuscation:

The outpouring of participation in the strike and refusal to cave to the administration’s scaremongering demonstrates that graduate student workers understand our importance to the university. Harvard can easily end the strike and restore business as usual by offering us a living wage, independent arbitration for harassment and discrimination cases, and protections from ICE coming on campus without a judicial warrant. But until then, no teaching, no grading, no research assistant work. How embarrassing to have to explain that to the parents who are forking over their retirement savings for their children’s education. The choice is Harvard’s.

Creative Strategies for a Community Organization

Harvard workers have deployed numerous creative and community-based strategies for the purposes of solidarity. For instance, striking workers have been blocking deliveries, a tactic in which workers will form a picket line outside of university docking sites. Drivers attempting to deliver Harvard’s packages from unionized or pro-labor workplaces like UPS or USPS will refuse to cross a picket-line, either through previously established union contracts or out of solidarity for the workers, which disrupts university operations and pressures administrators to come to the table.

HGSU has also run a number of teach-ins, covering topics like labor history, socialist activism at Harvard, and an intro to agency or “fair-share” fees. One was an Undergraduate Strike School on April 24. Workers have also launched a number of community events focused on bringing in both academic and local communities into their struggle.

One of the largest events was the first week community rally, hosted on April 23rd at the Science Center Plaza, the day before the Undergraduate Strike School. A wide range of speakers representing labor unity spoke, including current HGSU president sara speller as well as brother and sister unions at Harvard including Harvard Academic Workers (HAW) and SEIU 32BJ and UNITE-HERE Local 26. The unions were also joined by organizers from the Harvard Temporary Protected Status (TPS) Coalition and undergraduates from the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM).

The event also featured a number of local and state politicians including Massachusetts State House Rep Mike Connolly, DSA-endorsed Cambridge City Councilor Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler, as well as challenger for incumbent Marjorie Decker’s seat and former HGSU president Evan MacKay. City Councilor Sobrinho-Wheeler said, during his speech:

I’m glad to stand here and deliver the message… if Harvard wants Cambridge to have its back, its gotta have the back of its workers.

Various other university communities have also thrown support behind the striking graduate workers. Earlier this week, around 200 first year Harvard Law School students signed letters urging their professors to press the University to come to the table with the union. Faculty—albeit at significantly smaller numbers—have also signaled their support to the striking graduate workers, agreeing not to replace or retaliate against workers on strike.

Diverging Strategies in a Shared Fight

Harvard’s graduate workers are not alone in facing an expired contract, or the brunt of the Harvard administration. Other Harvard bargaining units are also embroiled in contract fights, but have taken different tacts to striking. While multiple bargaining units are affiliated with the United Auto Workers (UAW) that have pioneered the strategy of coordinating unions to strike when bargaining happens at the same time and now lead the charge for contract alignment on May Day 2028, strategic contract alignment has not been on the table at Harvard.

The Harvard Union of Clerical and Technical Workers (HUCTW), the largest union on campus representing over 5000 administrative workers essential to the university’s operations whose members often work closely alongside HGSU members, is scheduled to vote on May 12–13 on a modest agreement that would grant most members a $2,300 raise and expire after one year. The union has proposed this contract to membership after Harvard’s central fundraising office laid off a dozen HUCTW union members and announced mass summer layoffs likely to decimate HUCTW’s ranks. David Deming later confirmed the intent to target union workers in an open forum, where the Dean of Harvard College called essential labor work that “you would never really know or care about.” In one email obtained by Working Mass, HUCTW organizer Bill Jaeger intervened to ask members to vote yes on the proposed contract, while the HUCTW Rank-and-File Movement, focusing on building up the leadership of rank-and-file members over the union, publicly urged membership to remember “we can’t eat prestige” and instead vote no on May 6, 2026.

HUCTW has urged members to turn down work that managers ask them to perform that would normally be done by grad workers – crossing the picket line – but indicated members should continue to do “their own jobs as usual.” When asked about HUCTW, multiple organizers with HGSU declined to comment about their relationship with the other union.  

Harvard custodians with 32BJ SEIU ratified a 4-year contract in March that union leaders called the “biggest wage increase in decades:” a 4% hourly raise by 2029. While Harvard dining hall workers went on strike in 2016, their 500 rank-and-file workers affiliated with UNITE HERE Local 26 have not yet chosen that route even as their negotiations have dragged into. Most controversially, members of the Harvard Academic Workers (HAW) – UAW —a unit of non-tenure-track researchers and instructors that has been bargaining for 18 months—recently decided not to strike. In a controversial move, HAW’s bargaining committee overrode the vote of membership after citing concerns on sufficient votes for strike authorization and uncertainty about support from the union international. This decision was made by a bargaining committee made up of rank-and-file members after consultation with UAW staff.

The union also recently filed a Unfair Labor Practice (ULP) against Harvard. 

At the same time, workers within HGSU praised the academic workers’ commitment to solidarity and struggle. One worker said:

I do feel a lot of solidarity from them. We’re fighting for a lot of the same things … and continuing to work together towards a more just academic environment generally.

Whatever the tactical differences, these parallel struggles underscore the broader potential for cross-union solidarity and coordinated fights that can reshape power across the university. Further, every single union shares an employer – one seemingly intent on facing, and then offsetting, the wrath of the federal administration onto its staff.

Higher Education, Labor, and Struggle

Higher education is not a refuge from conflict, but a site of struggle. As Harvard PhD candidate Laura Chen put it:

Every morning when we do delivery pickets and get to cheer for the Teamsters as they turn their trucks around for us, it’s incredible. It’s so fun. And getting to explain to various burly truck drivers why we’re with the UAW – delightful.

These moments capture something larger than a single strike. They show how academic workers are linking up with a broader labor movement, building relationships that extend beyond the university.

At a moment when higher education is defined by precarity, political attacks, and deepening inequality, these contract fights are about more than pay or procedure – they are battles over the basic necessities of life and worker humanity. What is unfolding in higher education organizing is not an isolated conflict, but part of a wider struggle over power and dignity.

Readers can support grad workers by joining them on the picket line, held each day, or contributing to the union hardship fund.

Frederick Reiber is a contributing writer to Working Mass.

The post Harvard Faces Grad Workers’ Strike as Discontent with the University Rises From Below appeared first on Working Mass.

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