DFA – The Northeast Milk Monopoly
Note: posts by individual GMDSA members do not necessarily reflect the views of the broader membership or of its leadership and should not be regarded as official statements by the chapter.
Photo Credit: Glenn Russell/VTDigger
Eighty of our neighbors, including fifty-five hard-working members of Teamsters 597, are losing their jobs.
On June 17th, the Dairy Farmers of America announced plans to “idle” their Saint Albans City facility. The effects of this idling will be catastrophic and will ripple out across Vermont and the Northeast: dairy farms will be forced to shoulder the financial cost of transporting their raw milk to facilities in faraway New York or Massachusetts where it will be mixed with milk from other farms during processing; markets will see distribution and supply of their dairy products change; local companies that produce dairy products, including Ben and Jerry’s, will grapple with supply chain alterations and changes in milk quality; the plant itself on Federal Street will sit empty save a skeleton maintenance crew; and most importantly, eighty employees will become jobless. The decision follows years of DFA slowly undermining farmer co-operatives throughout the Northeast with anticompetitive, antitrust monopolization that’s left local farmers struggling to break even while DFA reaps the spoils. Now we’re all hung out to dry.
Franklin County deserves better. Vermont deserves better. Our friends and neighbors, the hard-working members of Teamsters 597, deserve better.
This isn’t the first time that DFA has engaged in antitrust action: a 2020 lawsuit filed against DFA by Food Lion LLC and the Maryland and Virginia Milk Producers Cooperation Association claims that “DFA’s conduct threatens to and will result in antitrust injury as it tends to and will substantially lessen competition.” A lawsuit filed closer to home in Vermont two years later, S.R.J.F Inc vs. DFA, argues that “over time, DFA has taken predatory and exclusionary actions to position itself as the sole conduit for Northeastern dairy farmers to get their raw milk to market, and to control Northeast raw milk processing capacity, the only market into which Northeast dairy farmers can sell their perishable product.” Other examples of DFA seizing regional dairy industries abound, and a dairy processing plant in Connecticut currently faces similar unexpected closure.
This also isn’t the first time that DFA has proven itself a bad neighbor. Poor working conditions and unfair treatment from management led Teamsters 597 members to strike in October 2025, picketing on Federal Street late into the night. And ongoing discussions with Saint Albans City Council regarding rotten smells coming from the facility hit their most contentious note days before announcement of the plant's idling. DFA has proven itself more concerned with controlling our industry for their own gain than in supporting us, the dairy farmers, employees, and community members that call Vermont home.
We all deserve better than an idling plant and hard-working union members without work, and we can’t allow monopolistic corporations with no regard for Vermont to strangle our dairy industry. We need legislators that use statute to create an economy where we can all succeed. We need laws that protect employees, to build strong participatory unions with greater investment from employees, and a pivot to co-operative worker-owned businesses over monolithic corporations without accountability. Our farmers and dairy workers deserve fair pay for the dairy products they produce instead of scraping by. Franklin County deserves better than a vacant DFA plant and the disruption of our dairy industry. And DFA needs to amend for the harm they’ve caused to our community and to the members of Teamsters 597.
400 Years of U.S. Pilgrimage: Why This Quaker is Walking Across the Country
On Wednesday, July 8, on day 54 of the National Peace Walk, two of us headed down Bradford Quarry Road in Alamance County, NC, toward Saxapahaw. The heat was oppressive. We had made a morning stop already at a church to refill our water reservoirs, taking a minute to tell a passerby about this nationwide pilgrimage that began in Brooklyn almost two months earlier. He remarked, as most tend to, that it seemed like a lot of walking. I tried, as I usually do, to downplay the physical challenge, as it is always made worthwhile by the spiritual nourishment of meeting with 
community at our destinations. Still, I had just bought a new set of insoles to replace the ones that I had walked to tatters, and I wasn’t sure how far this new two liters of hose water would get us.
An hour later, Luther Livermon, a friend-to-be, slowed his car next to us and welcomed us to rest and refill at his house, a few yards down the road. When we arrived, we were officially introduced to Luther; his wife, Karen; and the two nurses who are her caretakers. Karen lives with dementia.
Luther told us about his plan to eventually offer his 75-acre farm to Teepa Snow, a world-renowned specialist in care for those living with brain-change. Luther hoped that this offering would create a sanctuary for specialized care, as well as stewardship of the natural world, which could weather the impending changes of our society. He spoke on all of this unprompted, not aware yet that a core mission of our pilgrimage was to meet with communities working actively to create resilience through mutual aid in the United States.
Luther also had posted signs along his farm’s frontage for the Preserve Alamance Coalition, an effort by Alamance County residents to halt the clearcutting of mature forest for construction of 1000 units of low-density housing by developers. A local friend and walk organizer, Krysten Voelkner, had coincidentally planned to meet us at the exact time we visited Luther’s farm, giving the two of them an opportunity to be introduced as neighbors and allies in the struggle to protect local forests and water.
The simple, grounding activity of walking has led to many encounters like these. Our visit with those on Luther’s farm that morning was an affirmation that this project is one of making a path toward continual serendipity, walked by those who are ready to encounter it.
Last fall, I was part of the organizing committee for the Quaker Walk to Washington, and the work that has continued from this act of public witness now has me on a pilgrimage bound for Minneapolis. Throughout my life, my tendency to be drawn toward egalitarian communities has kept me in overlapping circles of Quaker and socialist groups.
Since beginning pilgrimage work with Brooklyn Quakers in early 2025, I have literally and figuratively followed a tradition that is older than what is known now as the United States. Quakers have been walking pilgrimages on this continent for nearly four hundred years as an act of peace. This simple act continues to be an effective way to step outside of many oppressive, interconnected systems to meet with friends in true intention.
Quakerism has always had much to offer fellow socialists. Our historic mode of governance prioritizes long, thoughtful discernment which necessarily resolves in consensus. Quaker governance serves as the basis for the theory of sociocracy. In what was then known as New Netherland, Peter Stuyvesant famously banned Quakers from practicing their religion. A 1657 petition called the Flushing Remonstrance was a call by residents of the borough for ratified religious liberty. Over a hundred years later, the petition inspired the Founders to include freedom of religion in the Bill of Rights, connecting Quaker society to this essential feature of spiritual freedom in the United States.
The National Peace Walk 2026 follows this tradition of publicly expressing faith as an immovable societal foundation, one that weathers all periods of change. Walking to bring this good news to friends extends from a literal and metaphorical lineage that exists both on this continent, and throughout the world. Dozens of folks we have met along the way speak of the Camino de Santiago, currently experiencing the highest number of pilgrims since the 16th century.
More recently, in our own country, a group of Buddhist monks walked 3,500 kilometers and gained international attention for the cause of peace and understanding. Their walk extended to Sri Lanka after the U.S. phase was finished. The tradition of pilgrimage in the United States in modern times has been upheld by a few notable figures, including Peace Pilgrim, who walked for nearly 30 years, crossing the United States seven times, speaking before crowds and on radio. According to her story, she rested when offered lodging, ate when offered food, and carried nothing except the clothes she wore.
In the days before the United States. celebrated “America250,” the National Peace Walk finally crossed the North Carolina border, leaving only two days of walking to the next Quaker meeting in Raleigh. Those days in Virginia proved to be a challenge unlike the prior 300 miles between New York City and Washington. The heat and fatigue were factors, but the size and remoteness of Route 1 outside of Richmond were staggering at points. On this section, we could no longer count on a nightly station with Quakers, other faith groups, or communities of people activated toward building peace. We saw instead a kind of cultural blight: towns that had emptied after the dissolution of an unsustainable industry or the construction of I-95/85. In earlier days, when we might have stopped at some center of community for rest and water, there was now just a Wawa store, and then at a certain latitude, a Sheetz. We took our overnight rest on an abandoned porch or in the prohibitively expensive, soulless interior of a hotel room.
The act of intentionally meeting with friends at times can feel utterly inaccessible without acquiescing to a number of oppressive systems, installed by the force of convenience. “America at 250” on its face would like to be a celebration of a unity among states, but the lived reality for most in the Covid-era is an encroaching stasis of isolation, even “post” lockdown.
The recent work of pilgrimage by NYC Quakers has been a modern effort to transcend these divides and to meet with friends as companions and partners in the realization of a peaceful world. Our intention as walkers is to reach Minneapolis by November, in order to celebrate the work of residents of the Twin Cities to build resilience under the pressure of full-bore state violence. From where we stand now, in Boone, North Carolina, a walk to Minneapolis could seem like an untraversable distance. What is certain, as it has been revealed to us many times over at this point, is that applied faith shared by community will open a way. The serendipity of the journey will be found by those who set out to meet it.
The post 400 Years of U.S. Pilgrimage: Why This Quaker is Walking Across the Country appeared first on DSA Religious Socialism.
Voter Guide August 2026: Shelby County General and Federal & State Primary Election
The Voter Guide Subcommittee of the Memphis-Midsouth Democratic Socialists of America Electoral & Policy Committee has done deep work to unpack the races in the Shelby County General Election and Federal & State Primary Election, which run early voting from now through August 1 and will hold election day on August 6. To view or download the guide to see who has our recommendation, follow this link to visit https://memphisdsa.org/vote or check out the Voter Guide tab.
Note: The full revised guide was published on July 28, 2026. This guide was updated to include information on candidates in the judicial races.
Read more at Memphis-Midsouth
Looking Back to Look Forward
Former members of the U.S. Communist Party recount their "Red Lives."
The post Looking Back to Look Forward appeared first on Democratic Left.
Weekly Roundup: July 28, 2026
Events and Actions
Tuesday July 28 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Ecosocialist Bi-Weekly Meeting (1916 McAllister St)
Tuesday July 28 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) EWOC Fundamentals of Workplace Organizing (1916 McAllister St)
Wednesday July 29 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) 
DSA SF Electoral Board x WFP Happy Hour (Teeth Bar SF, 2323 Mission St)
Wednesday July 29 (6:00 PM – 7:30 PM) 
Phonebank for the Affordable Housing Guarantee Act (1916 McAllister St)
Wednesday July 29 (6:45 PM – 8:30 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (1916 McAllister St)
Thursday July 30 (7:00 PM – 9:00 PM) ICE Out Orientation (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Saturday August 1 (1:00 PM – 3:00 PM) Immigrant Justice KYR Canvassing – Pacific Heights (Raymond Kimbell Playground Park, 1901 Geary Blvd)
Monday August 3 (6:30 PM – 8:00 PM) Homelessness Working Group Regular Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Tuesday August 4 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Social Housing Working Group
(zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Wednesday August 5 (5:30 PM – 7:00 PM) Tenant Organizing Working Group Meeting (zoom only)
Wednesday August 5 (6:00 PM – 9:00 PM) Social Housing Happy Hour (MOTHERSHIP, 3152 Mission St)
Thursday August 6 (6:00 PM – 7:00 PM) 
Education Board Open Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Thursday August 6 (7:00 PM – 8:30 PM) Immigrant Justice regular meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Friday August 7 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines (in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Saturday August 8 (11:00 PM – 2:00 PM) Fundamentals of Tenant Organizing [ETOC] (in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Sunday August 9 (5:00 PM – 6:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle Working Group Meeting (zoom only)
Monday August 10 (6:00 PM – 8:00 PM) Tenderloin Healing Circle (Kelly Cullen Community, 220 Golden Gate Ave)
Monday August 10 (7:00 PM – 8:00 PM)Labor Working Group Meeting (zoom and in person at 1916 McAllister St)
Happy Hour with the Working Families Party
New to organizing? Looking to get more involved? Come to our joint happy hour with the Working Families Party TOMORROW Wednesday July 29th at Teeth Bar, 2323 Mission, from 6:00 – 8:00 PM and meet cool people organizing cool campaigns. The event is all ages AND it’s Teeth’s “Wings Wednesday” so you gotta come out — RSVP here!
Immigrant Justice Know Your Rights Canvassing Event & Social
The Immigrant Justice Working Group will be hosting an ICE Out Orientation session this Thursday, July 30 from 7:00 – 9:00 PM at the office (1916 Mcallister) and virtually over Zoom! This is perfect for if you are interested in learning where to plug in with your local community initiatives and learn how to best utilize your skills, or even just to connect with others if you’re already active!
If you plan to attend either in person or on Zoom, please RSVP here!
Immigrant Justice Know Your Rights Canvassing Event & Social
Join the Immigrant Justice Working Group for Know Your Rights (KYR) canvassing Saturday August 1 at 1:00PM at Raymond Kimbell Playground Park!
We will be distributing red cards and KYR materials to businesses and community members in the Pacific Heights neighborhood.
We will meet at Raymond Kimbell Playground Park on the corner of Geary Blvd. & Steiner St. to receive training and materials before canvassing.
Join us after for a social/debrief session at a local spot and grab food/drinks!
New to canvassing? No worries! There will be a brief how-to training before we go out in pairs or small groups.
Bloody Sugar: the C&H Strike and Justice for Land Defenders in the Philippines
DSA SF is hosting a guest speaker from San Francisco Committee for Human Rights in the Philippines (SFCHRP) to discuss the recent events that connect the strike against C&H Sugar in Crockett, California to the massacre of 19 land defenders and activists in Toboso, Negros Occidental in the Philippines. We’ll dive into sugar’s bloody history, learn about the links in the imperialist global supply chain that bind us together in struggle, and discuss what we can do here in San Francisco.
Join us on the evening of Friday, August 7th in the office at 1916 McAllister St. (RSVP link coming soon!).
Reportback: Tenant Organizing Working Group Provide Support for Socialist in Office Jackie Fielder’s Town Hall
On Thursday, our Socialist In Office Supervisor Jackie Fielder hosted a Town Hall at La Fénix on Mission as part of a D9 listening series. Last Tuesday, DSA members posted flyers throughout the Mission inviting residents to the Town Hall and the Citywide Tenant Assembly in August, and providing information to help tenants know their rights when facing eviction. DSA’s Tenant Organizing Working Group was joined in tabling the event by the Eviction Defense Collaborative, and DSA SF members were in attendance to support and listen to ideas and concerns from working class residents in the Mission.
The room was packed with constituents who shared questions and comments to a panel including Jackie and representatives from the Mayor’s Office, the Department of Emergency Management, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, SFPD, and SFMTA. Mission residents took the floor and advocated for many important community needs such as funding for peer counselors, mental health and substance use treatment, housing-first policies and funding for affordable housing, and against recent shelter closures and surveillance by Flock cameras. The departments took notes and responded to questions directed at them, including requests for greater transparency and regular reporting. Jackie’s team followed up with residents who still had comments after the event to make sure their concerns were noted.
If you’re interested in showing up to support our Socialist in Office, Jackie’s next Town Hall will be in Portola on Thursday, July 30 from 6:30 – 7:30 PM at the Family Connections Center, located at 2565 San Bruno Ave!
Getting Grounded, July 2026-Out in the Garden!
by Elizabeth Henderson
This month’s column will be short – lots to say, but too busy gardening and digging in the dirt to write it down!
New booth at the Public Market! Fresh Farmers Together launched their shared booth in early June. Please visit Shed D on Saturdays from 7:00am to 1:00pm to purchase their freshly picked organically grown produce. The 8 or so farms use the label “Sustainable” because they are not certified organic, although they use organic systems on their tiny farms that range in size from 2 backyards to 6 acres.
Final Hearing on Zoning Alignment. July 13 @ 6:00 pm, Rochester City Hall – final-final hearing on final comments on city Zoning. Us community garden folks will be waiting to hear if the ZAP writers will finally understand the difference between a high tunnel and a row cover!
The Rochester Food Policy Council hopes to hear that the zoners are heeding the call “to read its urban agriculture provisions not only as technical land use code, but as environmental justice policy.” The Food Policy Council comments summarize the Taproot Collective 2024-25 report on their survey of 109 community gardens:
“Rochester’s community gardens are concentrated in neighborhoods that face the greatest combined burdens of poverty, food insecurity, environmental contamination, and disinvestment. The Gardening Together Study found that the majority of Rochester’s 109 documented food-producing gardens serve neighborhoods where, as one grower described it, residents overwhelmingly live below the poverty line, where children may never have seen a fruit tree, and where healthy food – free of chemicals, grown with care – is a form of public health infrastructure, not a hobby.”
“90% of the people in my community live below the poverty level. 90% of the people in my community’s children don’t know how it is to see an apple tree, a pear tree, a plum tree. I want to teach the people in the community how to live off the land.”
Inez Burns-Nixon, Garden of Hope, North Marketview Heights.
The Gardening Together Study’s analysis questions explicitly tested whether gardens cluster in neighborhoods with lower tree canopy cover, fewer parks, and greater food access barriers – the same neighborhoods that bear the most concentrated environmental burdens from Rochester’s legacy of redlining, industrial disinvestment, and infrastructure disinvestment. This pattern is consistent with national research on urban agriculture in rust belt cities, where community gardens function as environmental justice interventions: they green vacant land that would otherwise accumulate pollution and illegal dumping, provide fresh produce in areas that retail markets have abandoned, and build community resilience in neighborhoods where social cohesion has been systematically undermined.”
Pest management field day! July 23 @ 3:30pm – 6:30pm, Foodlink Community Farm [585 Lexington Ave, Rochester, NY 14613]. Join us for a hands-on field day exploring integrated pest management tools for small-scale growing spaces and the opportunity to build community with local growers! This event will focus on best practices for using row covers, biocontrols, trapping, and more. We will highlight a Cornell Cooperative Extension demonstration trial using insect exclusion netting and entomopathogenic nematodes to manage swede midge, an invasive fly that causes damage to brassica crops. We will hear from local growers on how they manage pests on their farms and gardens with a focus on organic management.
You can learn how to set up low tunnels, and there will be tabling by the Food Policy Council, Northeast Organic Farming Association, Taproot, and more.
Please check out the Taproot Collective Facebook and Instagram pages for announcements of workshops and volunteer opportunities through the season.
If you want to participate in a garden, please contact the author of this piece, and maybe she can point you in the right direction!
The post Getting Grounded, July 2026-Out in the Garden! first appeared on Rochester Red Star.
Statement on the Murder of Corey Ruiz
On Wednesday, July 22, four Madison Police Department officers surrounded and executed Corey Ruiz on the corner of Williamson and South Baldwin streets, mere blocks away from where Tony Robinson was murdered by Matt Kenny in 2015. We condemn in no uncertain terms the murder of Corey Ruiz by the Madison Police Department. Regardless of the events leading up to the murder, there is no situation where this is justified. For days our members have participated in demonstrations, protests, and vigils in solidarity with our community.
This is not the first time Madison Police officers have taken a neighbor’s life; the police continue to use excessive force and perpetuate racism and classism with absolute impunity. In March 2015, Madison Police officer Matt Kenny shot and killed 19-year-old Tony Robinson. Despite widespread protests and calls for accountability, Matt Kenny has faced no charges and is still employed by the Madison Police Department more than ten years later. He even trains new officers. Even Tony Robinson was not the first victim of police murder in this neighborhood—in 2012, Paul Heenan was murdered by police on South Baldwin Street, and in 2006, Victor Montero-Diaz was murdered by police at the gas station on Williamson Street.
We stand behind the community’s demands for:
- The immediate arrest of Kiel Baitinger-Peterson and all those accessory to the murder we witnessed on Wednesday afternoon
- That all information found in the investigation conducted by the Department of Criminal Investigation be turned over to the Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Civilian Oversight Board
- Community control over the police.
We demand accountability for Corey’s murder, and for the systems that have led to this point— systems that value property over human life. We demand full transparency, including the immediate release of the names of every officer involved and all available squad car camera and surveillance footage.
These common-sense demands only address this most recent harm done to the community and ensure accountability follows. If we truly want to stop further violence, we must not treat this as an isolated instance but rather a part of a larger structure that perpetuates violence. Instead, we must focus on the kinds of reforms that will prevent future police violence against our communities.
We must demilitarize police departments, redirect funding to public services, and strengthen the Office of the Independent Police Monitor and Civilian Oversight Board to have real community authority over the police. These changes, among others, are steps that will bring us closer to changing the violent carceral system that destroys communities and takes lives. We need to recognize that any reform that does not decrease the power of the modern punishment bureaucracy is no reform at all.
Time and again we’ve seen politicians break promises, make compromises that lead to half measures, and roll back reforms. We’ve seen momentum toward progress stall as soon as the news cycle moves on. Non-profits are limited by their mandate, structure, and fundraising, and advocate but do not deliver. To win our demands, members of the community must get organized and work together.
Support and attend the vigil, connect with your community, and be ready to take concrete action in the coming days and weeks to ensure true accountability and justice for Corey Ruiz.
They Tried to Cut Off the Head: School Bus Workers in Central Mass Confront Private Equity
By: Cayla Dodd
MARLBOROUGH- A union contract campaign among school bus drivers and monitors has developed into something much larger than a dispute over wages and benefits. What is unfolding reveals in stark clarity the architecture of privatization – how private equity reshapes essential services, how union-busting operates under contemporary labor relations, and why even basic fights for dignity at work eventually run up against the larger structure of capitalism itself.
This is a story about a group of workers trying to win a decent contract. They want better wages, more stable hours, stronger benefits, safer buses, fairer route assignments, and protection from arbitrary discipline and on-the-job surveillance. They want, in other words, the same things workers have always wanted: security, respect, and some measure of control over the conditions under which they labor.
The question is why those demands are treated as unreasonable in the first place.
Workers who transport children every day can be left without meaningful retirement security, with subpar healthcare, and with schedules so fragmented and unstable that some cannot reliably afford housing, a car, or even their basic monthly bills. A sector plagued by chronic driver shortages continues to produce working conditions that drive experienced workers out. When workers begin organizing seriously enough to challenge those conditions, management responds with escalation.
Work Unseen by the Public
School bus driving is routinely misunderstood by people who don’t do its work. From the outside, school bus driving is often imagined as part-time work with limited responsibilities: a few hours in the morning, a few in the afternoon, summers off, and not much more to it. That caricature has done enormous ideological work on behalf of employers and municipalities alike, helping justify low standards, weak benefits, and public indifference. But it has very little to do with the actual labor involved.
In reality, school transportation is skilled, stressful, high-responsibility work. Drivers are responsible for safely transporting children through traffic, weather, construction, behavioral incidents, shifting route conditions, vehicle issues, and the endless unpredictability of day-to-day life. They are expected to exercise judgment constantly. They are responsible for operating large vehicles safely, managing student conduct, navigating difficult roads, responding to emergencies, and ensuring that students are released appropriately and arrive where they are supposed to be. A mistake can have enormous consequences. The job requires discipline, focus, and local knowledge. This is not a casual side gig. This is essential infrastructure.
Yet the structure of the work is built around instability. Drivers are commonly scheduled on split shifts, with a block of work in the morning and another in the afternoon. On paper, that can look manageable. In practice, it means the workday stretches across most of the day while providing only a fraction of full-time pay. A driver may start very early, finish a morning run, sit unpaid for hours in the middle of the day, and then return for afternoon routes. Those unpaid gaps are too large to ignore and too awkward to make a second job realistic. The result is a schedule that dominates your day without paying for your day.
That contradiction sits at the center of the economic misery so many school bus workers experience. They are not fully employed in a way that provides a stable living, but they are also not free enough to easily build a second source of income around the job. Workers can find themselves trapped between part-time pay and full-day obligation. From the standpoint of capital, that structure is useful. From the standpoint of labor, it is punishing.
Benefits do not compensate for that instability. Healthcare is often inadequate. Workers may technically have coverage while still facing costs substantial enough to make actually using that coverage a source of stress. Retirement security is rare. A worker can spend years performing essential public labor and still face old age with little to show for it beyond worn-out knees, accumulated stress, and a deep familiarity with financial precarity. That is one of the clearest expressions of what the system thinks workers are worth.
These conditions have real human consequences. Workers fall behind on rent. They fear eviction. They delay car repairs because they cannot afford them, even though a reliable car may be necessary just to get to work. They struggle to secure stable housing. Some take on humiliating and physically draining side measures just to survive, including selling plasma to cover everyday expenses. This is the lived reality produced when socially necessary labor is organized around cost minimization rather than human need.
Shortages as Tactic in the Class Strategy
Massachusetts has dealt for years with school bus driver shortages. Public discussion of this crisis is often shallow, described as though a natural disaster or demographic inevitability: a regrettable staffing problem that somehow descended on the industry from outside. Employers and public officials talk about recruitment, as if the main challenge is persuading enough people to enter the field.
Workers know better. The real crisis is retention. People leave because the job has been made unsustainable.
There is no mystery about why workers leave a job with unstable hours, weak benefits, inadequate retirement, rising surveillance, stagnant wages, and constant stress. There is no mystery about why new hires do not stay when they quickly realize the public image of the job bears little resemblance to its reality. There is no mystery about why experienced drivers burn out, seek better-paying work elsewhere, or leave the profession entirely. The shortage is the predictable result of labor conditions designed to suppress costs.
Once you see that clearly, much else comes into focus. The constant shortages intensify pressure on the workers who remain. Routes are stretched, doubled up, or constantly rearranged. Expectations increase. Management leans harder on flexibility. Workers are told to absorb more instability in the name of keeping the operation functioning. The strain accumulates. More people consider leaving. The shortage deepens. The system devours the very workforce it depends on. This is one of the ways capitalism presents its own contradictions as technical problems: treating the workforce as an input to be purchased as cheaply as possible, then acts confused when that workforce becomes difficult to sustain.
The conditions in school transportation did not emerge in a vacuum. They are the product of a political project. Municipalities were steered toward privatization over decades through austerity politics, anti-union ideology, and the broader neoliberal assault on public goods. Public services were increasingly reimagined as budget lines to be minimized rather than social obligations to be met. Outsourcing became attractive because private firms promised savings, but those savings had to come from somewhere.
They came, overwhelmingly, from labor.
Privatization is often defended in the language of efficiency. This is one of the ruling class’s great rhetorical tricks. Efficiency sounds neutral, modern, and practical. But in the context of public services, “efficiency” usually means shifting risk downward, stripping labor standards, weakening democratic accountability, and enabling more aggressive management over workers than would be politically tolerable in direct public employment. A private contractor can more easily suppress wages and benefits, fragment the workforce, impose unstable schedules, and retaliate against worker organization while local officials keep their hands clean and point to lower budget numbers.
That is the real social meaning of privatization: a class strategy. School bus workers are facing hardship through privatization. The whole model depends on labor being cheaper, more replaceable, and easier to discipline than it would be under more robust public-sector standards. Municipalities outsource because private companies are willing to do what public employers often cannot or will not: grind labor harder.
The worker experiences this as a thousand small humiliations and pressures. The politician experiences it as budget relief. The company experiences it as a business opportunity.
Sharpening the Blade of Capital
In this case, that logic runs through NRT Bus, Inc., its parent company Beacon Mobility, and, as workers understand it, the private equity firm Audax. Whatever the precise current corporate structure may be at the moment this article is read, the broader pattern is clear enough: school transportation has been folded into a larger world of corporate consolidation and financial ownership in which essential public services are treated as sites of extraction.
Privatization supplies the basic structure. Private equity intensifies its logic. When financial firms enter sectors like school transportation, the pressure to extract returns becomes even more relentless. The service itself becomes secondary to the imperatives of financial management. Essential public goods are treated as revenue streams. The workforce becomes a site of value extraction. Every wage increase, every improved benefit, every additional guarantee, and every reduction in management discretion is viewed through the lens of profitability.
This is what financialization does to work: it disciplines the entire enterprise around investor return. That means pressure for labor flexibility, tighter cost controls, consolidation, standardized management practices, and hostility toward anything that reduces managerial command over the workforce.
In a sector like school transportation, private equity’s influence is especially corrosive because the service is socially indispensable but politically neglected. Children still have to get to school. Families still depend on buses running. Municipalities still need contracts fulfilled. That creates a relatively stable flow of public money into the industry. For finance, that looks appealing. For workers, it means they are trapped inside a system where public necessity is being mined for private return.
This helps explain why even modest worker demands are so fiercely resisted. Better healthcare is a cost increase. Retirement security creates obligations that constrain extraction. Guaranteed hours reduce managerial flexibility and increase labor expense. Under a private-equity-influenced model, these become threats because they interfere with the deeper function of the enterprise.
Private equity brings a more concentrated and shameless form of capitalist discipline. It strips away even the remnants of paternalism or long-term stewardship some employers once used to legitimize themselves. What remains is naked extraction.
To Act in Concert
Against these conditions, workers built a contract campaign that aimed at more than symbolic change. The demands at its core were practical, concrete, and rooted in lived experience. Workers sought stronger hour guarantees because they knew unstable scheduling was wrecking their finances and their ability to remain in the job. They sought better wages because the existing structure was not keeping pace with the real cost of living. They sought improved healthcare because nominal coverage without actual affordability is not security. They sought retirement because a lifetime of work should not end in poverty. They sought safer buses, better route practices, and enforceable maintenance expectations because the labor itself is dangerous enough without being compounded by management neglect. They sought limits on surveillance and arbitrary discipline because “safety” rhetoric is too often weaponized as a tool of control rather than used to genuinely support workers and students.
None of these are fringe demands. They are exactly the kinds of demands any rational society would consider baseline. But because they conflict with the cost discipline built into privatized school transportation, they immediately become political.
What also distinguished this campaign was the way it was built. This was not simply a staff-driven process of bargaining behind closed doors, with workers receiving occasional updates. Rank-and-file workers themselves played a central role in the organizing. They held conversations with coworkers. They built visible solidarity actions. They created shared expectations that participation mattered. They used meetings, chats, and direct outreach to transform the campaign from something happening above workers into something workers were doing together.
Employers can tolerate a certain amount of passive dissatisfaction. They can tolerate symbolic complaints. They can even tolerate low-level grievances as long as the workforce remains fragmented and dependent. What they fear is organization: workers understanding themselves as a collective force with shared interests and the capacity to act in concert.
Visible Solidarity
To outsiders, a solidarity action like a red-shirt day can look small. But that misunderstands the function such actions serve. In a workplace structured by isolation, where drivers are split across routes, schedules, and classifications, visible collective participation is not cosmetic. It is one of the first ways workers learn to see each other politically.
When a worker looks around and sees that many of their coworkers are willing to participate in a common action, however modest, something changes. Fear begins to loosen. A private frustration starts becoming a public alignment. What had previously existed as scattered grievances begins to cohere into an organized workforce. Small collective acts create the conditions for larger ones. They build confidence, social trust, and a sense that the employer’s authority is not total.
This is one reason bosses often react disproportionately even to low-risk collective actions. They understand what many observers do not: participation itself is dangerous. Once workers get used to acting together, more becomes possible.
By the time a campaign reaches the point of a strike authorization vote, much of the real work has already been done. Such votes are measurements of trust, political development, and collective will. A workforce does not produce an overwhelming yes vote by accident. It does so because countless conversations, tests of solidarity, and small decisions have accumulated into something stronger.
That is why a 98 percent yes vote matters so much. It is evidence that workers were crossing from grievance into power.
Retaliation
Management’s response must be understood in that light. When a key rank-and-file leader is terminated at a critical point in a campaign, the question is not only whether the stated justification is plausible on its own terms. The question is what function the action serves in the broader struggle.
People often expect union-busting to look dramatic and explicit. Sometimes it does. But under modern labor relations, employers often operate through deniability, selective discipline, legal complexity, and timing. A worker is targeted in a way that does not openly announce anti-union intent, but can be narrated as an individualized matter detached from the collective context. This does not prove anti-union motive is absent. It shows that employers have become more sophisticated.
The purpose of such discipline is larger than the individual case. The point is to introduce uncertainty into the workforce, to make workers wonder whether participation is worth the risk, to force organizers to divert time, energy, and emotional bandwidth into defense, to destabilize the social infrastructure of the campaign, and to remind everyone that management still claims the power to punish.
Retaliation belongs inside the contract fight. In fact, it often emerges precisely when workers are becoming effective enough that management sees no other way to regain initiative.
The same is true of broader escalation through legal threats or lawsuits. Whatever their technical merits, such moves function politically. They muddy the waters. They force workers and unions to defend themselves on terrain chosen by the employer. They attempt to recast the conflict from one about wages, benefits, and worker power into one about impropriety, scandal, or misconduct. They raise the stakes of participation and create a climate in which caution can start masquerading as prudence.
This too is union-busting, just adapted to a labor regime in which employers know how to use formal legality as a weapon.
Labor-Management Relations and Their Contradiction
Mainstream discourse often treats labor-management conflict as though it were a misunderstanding between stakeholders who ultimately want the same thing. That fiction is useful to employers and to the political class that mediates between labor and capital without ever wanting to resolve their antagonism. But it does not survive contact with reality.
Workers and employers do not stand in a neutral relationship. The employer purchases labor power and seeks to get as much from it as possible for as little as possible. The worker sells labor power because they must survive, but has every interest in increasing their compensation, securing their conditions, limiting arbitrary control, and preserving their body and time. There can be temporary accommodations. There can be negotiated settlements. There can even be periods of relative peace. But the underlying interests remain opposed.
In school transportation, that contradiction appears in condensed form. Workers need stable hours, strong benefits, safe equipment, and real voice on the job in order to make the work livable. The employer, especially under privatization and private equity pressure, needs labor costs contained, managerial flexibility maintained, and worker militancy suppressed in order to preserve margins and secure contracts. These are conflicting goals.
That is why so many workers eventually reach a political realization through workplace struggle: management is not simply failing to understand their needs. Management understands perfectly well and resists because meeting those needs would alter the balance of power and the distribution of resources.
That is class analysis born from experience.
None of this means contract fights do not matter. They matter deeply. Workers need better contracts. Workers need to defend themselves using every tool available, including grievances, bargaining, arbitration, public pressure, and strike readiness. But campaigns like this also reveal the limits of what can be won if the fight remains confined to the level of a single workplace and a single employer.
Even strong workplace organization is forced to operate within a broader structure that reproduces the same pressures. Competitive bidding pits contractors against one another on labor cost. Municipal austerity rewards cheapness over human need. Private equity demands returns. Labor law constrains worker power while legitimizing endless employer aggression. A union can win gains, but those gains are always under pressure so long as the structure remains in place.
This is one of the central political lessons of the campaign. Workers can and should fight for every immediate improvement. But they also run up against the reality that exploitation is not just a matter of bad bosses or bad decisions. It is institutional. It is reproduced through markets, contracts, finance, and the state.
That realization is often the bridge between trade union consciousness and socialist consciousness. It is the moment when workers begin to see that they are not only fighting an employer but confronting a mode of social organization.
The answer cannot be better management of privatized services. The answer cannot be pleading for more enlightened contractors or slightly less predatory financial owners. The answer has to be political and structural. Essential public services should not be organized around private profit. School transportation should be brought back into public ownership and operated as a public good. The financial actors extracting wealth from essential services should be removed. Labor standards should be raised across the sector in ways that prevent public entities from using outsourcing to undercut workers. Drivers and monitors should have stable, sufficient hours, real healthcare, and meaningful retirement security. Workers should have enforceable rights on the job, including protection from surveillance abuse and retaliation. And the people who do the work should have a meaningful voice in how the work is organized.
This is far more practical than the existing system, which produces chronic shortages, burnout, turnover, declining conditions, and endless labor conflict while pretending to be efficient.
Capitalism does not merely generate inequality in the abstract. It organizes everyday life in ways that subordinate human need to accumulation. It takes indispensable work and turns it into a site of austerity. It transforms public necessity into private opportunity. It relies on worker insecurity as a lever of discipline. And when workers resist, it deploys law, management authority, and financial pressure to preserve that arrangement.
The campaign in Central Massachusetts therefore matters beyond one contract or one yard. Instead, it’s a window into the broader social order.
They Tried to Cut Off The Head
For socialists, labor organizers, union members, and community supporters, the appropriate response is not passive sympathy. It is organized solidarity linked to a political program.
That means materially supporting workers in active struggle. It means treating retaliation against worker leaders as an attack on the whole class, not an isolated personnel matter, demanding that municipalities stop hiding behind the language of contracting and take responsibility for the labor standards of the services on which the public depends. It means fighting privatization not only where it is proposed, but where it is already entrenched. It means building connections between workplace fights and wider campaigns for decommodified public goods.
It also means rejecting the idea that labor struggles should remain narrow, apolitical, or purely economistic. Workers do not benefit when socialism is kept out of labor politics; employers do. The more clearly workers can connect their immediate experience to the structures of capital, the more durable and transformative their organizing can become.
A contract campaign can win raises. A strong shop-floor organization can beat back some retaliation. But a movement capable of ending the rule of private equity over public services would do much more than that. It would begin to shift who society is actually organized for. When management moved against a key organizer, the intention was clear. It was a classic move in a contemporary form: isolate leadership, destabilize the campaign, remind workers who claims power in the workplace. But that move also had another effect: clarifying the struggle, making visible what is so often hidden, showing the conflict was never just about a few contract proposals. The move showed that workers had built enough power to provoke a serious response. And once workers begin to see all of this together, it becomes much harder to return to the comforting fictions of before.
The fiction that management and labor fundamentally want the same things. The fiction that shortages happen for mysterious reasons. The fiction that privatization is about efficiency rather than class power. The fiction that private equity is just another ownership model rather than a machine for intensified extraction. The fiction that the problems facing workers are isolated, accidental, or unfortunate rather than systemic.
When those fictions start to fall apart, something politically dangerous begins to happen. Workers stop interpreting their conditions as personal failure or bad luck. They start recognizing them as products of a social order. And once that recognition is collective, once it is organized, once it is tied to solidarity and action, the balance of power can begin to shift.
That is why this fight matters.
The fight matters because it is about wages and healthcare and retirement and schedules and safe buses and retaliation and respect. It matters because it is about whether workers can remain in the profession at all. It matters because it reveals the real causes of driver shortages. It matters because it exposes the class content of privatization. And it matters because it points beyond itself, toward a socialist politics capable of saying plainly what liberal management discourse never will: that essential public services should not be run for profit, that workers are entitled to dignity and control, and that the capitalist organization of social life is incompatible with either.
The workers in this campaign are fighting for a contract. They are also, whether everyone around them fully recognizes it yet or not, fighting over a much larger question.
Who should society serve: the people who do the work and rely on it, or the people who profit from keeping them insecure?
That question is not limited to one bus yard in Massachusetts. But it is being asked there with unusual clarity. And how workers answer it together — on the job, in the union, and in politics — will matter far beyond this one campaign.
Cayla Dodd is a school bus worker and member of Worcester DSA.
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