Socialism

Transcript

Last month, from June 27 to 29, The Emergency Workers Organizing Committee (EWOC) held its first ever in-person conference: The “United & Win” Conference, co-hosted by Labor@Wayne. The location: right here in Detroit, on the campus of Wayne State University. Hundreds of labor activists from around the United States and Canada attended, and members of our own DSA chapter made up a large contingent of organizers, volunteers, and attendees for the event.

EWOC was born in the early days of COVID-19. DSA members–many of them volunteers and workers on the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign–teamed up in its creation with the militant United Electrical Workers (UE) union. The idea was to help workers confronting COVID in their workplaces to organize for the protections they needed.

One of EWOC’s early victories was helping workers at a Michigan Taco Bell win hazard pay, paid sick leave, and personal protective equipment necessary to work during the early days of the pandemic. EWOC has stayed busy and has grown in the five years since, turning attention to the growing number of union drives in the time of Starbucks and Amazon organizing. Currently, EWOC has more than 400 volunteer organizers, 200 additional volunteers, and is supporting over 350 active campaigns.

As the genocide in Gaza continues, imperialist governments that have made Israel’s crimes possible are escalating their attacks on the movement for Palestine. From the targeting of international students to the recent firing of four CUNY faculty over Palestine activism, universities remain an important site of struggle against the genocide.

Despite the repression, there have been victories which show that it pays to take up the fight against these attacks on the movement for Palestine. One example is at Princeton University, where 13 activists from the Princeton community recently got charges dropped after more than a year.

The Clio 13 were facing “defiant trespass” charges for holding a sit-in in a building on their campus as part of the Gaza solidarity encampment at Princeton. After waging a campaign which worked to draw in support from the larger Princeton community, the Clio 13 got all their charges dropped on June 17.

Left Voice editor Samuel Karlin interviewed one of the Clio 13, PhD student Aditi Rao. Rao reflected on the experience of fighting repressive charges and how the repression impacts the fight against the genocide of Palestine. They also discussed other issues like the relationship of universities to the military industrial complex and how international and Black and Brown students have come under greater attacks from Zionists.

As Ellen David Friedman explains in Labor Notes, attendance at bargaining sessions is just the beginning. Ideally, open bargaining means “maximum participation in the whole process, not just at the table,” through surveys, worker committees that draft proposals, and relationship-building that starts long before formal negotiations begin, David Friedman argues. Not only does it build power for workers, but it can be fun.

“Some of the power of open bargaining is you can start to, as a membership, demand more,” says Erica Schatzlein. She works at Nokomis Montessori in St. Paul where she teaches students who are learning how to speak English. She has taught for over 20 years, and she has been the lead negotiator for Saint Paul Federation of Educators (SPFE) Local 28 for the past three contracts. “It’s been really fun,” she says. “We’ve hired an ice cream truck, and our community organizer has done screen printing.”

Minnesota Federation of Educators (MFE) Local 59 (previously known as Minneapolis Federation of Teachers or MFT) and SPFE Local 28 have been holding open bargaining sessions for union members whose contracts both expired on June 30. Although collective bargaining under Minnesota’s Public Employment Labor Relations Act (PELRA) must be conducted as public meetings, these unions have made an organized effort to encourage and invite all union members as well as community members to their meetings, either in-person or virtually. Additionally, this year is the earliest these unions have entered bargaining and the first year they are bargaining in the summer time. Members from other unions have been attending to show their solidarity with educators, as well as members of a local group of parents that have been able to be involved in the bargaining.

“At one meeting, a bunch of parents gave testimonials,” says Nikki O’Neil, a rank-and-file member of MFE Local 59 who has been attending the sessions. O’Neil works as an education support professional (ESP) in early childhood special education at Wilder in South Minneapolis. She says that parent support during the Minneapolis educators strike of 2022 was critical.

From the description:

The West Wing both reflected and shaped the Democratic Party in the early years of the 21st Century, as they abandoned its coalition of workers, women, and racial minorities in favor of suburban professionals. The show was dismissive of anything they viewed as trying to push them to The Left™, in favor of chasing wealthy, white voters in a movement known as Neoliberalism.

Today, many of our biggest crises are a result of the wealth inequality brought about by neoliberal policies, but the ideology has recently undergone a rebrand under the name "Abundance."

What can The West Wing teach us about the failures of neoliberalism and help us better understand a path forward for progressives?

Councilor Angelita Morillo asserts that a better Portland is possible.

It’s a catchphrase used often by the Portland chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America, to which Morillo belongs. By “better,” this is what the DSA means:

Free garbage pickup. Fareless buses and trains. Government-run grocery stores with price control. A downtown where some of the office towers are replaced by subsidized housing. If anybody in those apartments faces eviction, they’re provided an attorney. The residents of those buildings drop their kids off at tuition-free preschools and go to work at jobs with a higher starting wage.

Who pays for all this? Any resident with a high income. What’s high? The DSA won’t put a number on it, but judging by recent ballot initiatives they’ve crafted, it could start at $200,000 a year.

“We essentially have to redesign our entire economy right now,” says Morillo, who represents District 3, which covers Southeast Portland, on the Portland City Council.

Whether they realize it or not, this is the future many Portlanders voted for last fall.

cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/21033066

In which Mars-in-Theory🦋 goes into how 'common sense' and similar discussion terminating cliches are fascist and merely exist to maintain and prop up the status quo.

While the visit of the deputy chairman of the Illinois chapter of the Black Panther Party (BPP) left its mark on Regina in 1969, over 50 years later, his memory was mobilized by brothers Tiro and Thabo Mthembu through their Black-owned restaurant and gathering space, the Hampton Hub.

Tiro explains it was an opportunity for him and Thabo to assert an alternative narrative to that of Saskatchewan’s right-wing political landscape. Regina is often referred to as the “Queen City,” and noting the abundance of bars named after colonial figures, Tiro says, “We live in a place where we celebrate British monarchy on a very absurd and disgusting level […] So [there was] a need to uplift heroes of ours – Fred Hampton was one of my heroes.” As Tiro explains, the brothers wanted to “encourage [the local Black] community to recognize that, yes, under this current neo-fascist regime it can feel like we don't have any deep, progressive roots. But these prairies are built on fighting oppression.”

So, in 2022, the vegan restaurant opened in Regina’s Heritage neighbourhood. In an industry dominated by white restaurant ownership, the Hampton Hub was a site of Black agency and autonomy. The brothers created “a space that is ours,” Thabo proudly recalls.

The Hampton Hub welcomed the community in, clearly displaying their convictions. The cardinal red walls were covered in BPP memorabilia: the classic image of Huey Newton in a rattan chair; the ten-point BPP platform; images of BPP comrade Angela Davis; a poster from Hampton’s 1969 Regina campus talk; and other newspaper clippings. Across from the till, a community food board, with crayon-coloured pre-paid food items using a pay-it-forward system, invited patrons to dine without the pressure of a purchase. Any time I went there, the Hub was filled with neighbours, activists, and artists sitting on the diner chairs, discussing the Saskatchewan Party’s latest blunder over vegan pizza and beer from nearby brewery Malty National. The backdrop to the hum of laughter, music, and scheming was a large black and white mural of Fred Hampton, a visual cue aligning the Hub’s values with the BPP as well as the easily recognizable aesthetics of resistance, locating their restaurant within a history and lineage of Black power.