The Colorado Springs DSA strongly believes in the power of public education to empower and to liberate. We believe that the best people to decide how and what to teach are professional educators. We have been deeply troubled at the consistent interference from the extremist school board in District 11 of Colorado Springs as they deprive teachers of the very agency that allows them to excel. Their decisions are becoming ever more concerning. No novels in high school English classes. Pages physically cut out of health textbooks. And just last week we understand they cut from the curriculum the incredible abolitionist, writer, and orator Frederick Douglass.

Instead of cutting Douglass from the curriculum, we choose to live by his words, “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.” We choose to unite with Charles Johnson, a union-endorsed candidate for the school board in D11. We know that he is trying to do right, even as the allies of the extremists now vying for seats on the board play into the shameful, racist tradition of painting Black men as criminals by sending out a mass text showing the mugshot from Charles’s 2020 arrest. True to what we know of him, he was guilty only of, as John Lewis loved to say, making good trouble.

In 2019, a good friend of Charles, De’Von Bailey, was shot in the back and killed by the Colorado Springs Police Department. Charles organized for greater accountability for the department. At COS DSA, we know that Black history is fundamental to American history. Maybe if these extremists spent more time studying it instead of erasing it, they would know how predictable it was that Charles was then singled out for arrest by CSPD. But they don’t know, and we suspect they just don’t care.

We stand in solidarity with Charles Johnson. Charles has been a friend to many of us who are organizers and activists in Colorado Springs, and we know him to be kind and insightful. A product of D11 himself, his commitment to teachers and students in the district is an inspiration. As the Colorado Springs Education Association prepares to strike on October 8th, we call on everyone able to show teachers their support by joining them on the picket line and by standing with Charles and the rest of the union-endorsed school board candidates come the November election. Their only goal is one we all surely share; outstanding public education in this city we love.

On 10/1/2025 the Global Sumud Flotilla was intercepted by the IDF while trying to deliver life saving aid to the Palestinians living under a blockade in Gaza. A coalition of organizers, humanitarians, doctors, artists, clergy, lawyers, and seafarers across 57 countries were just off the coast of Gaza, intending to break Israel’s blockade with much needed humanitarian aid, when they were violently intercepted by the IDF.

We condemn this act of violence against a group of peaceful humanitarians working to end the man-made famine imposed upon the Palestinians in Gaza. While Israel continues to actively and mercilessly bomb the Gaza strip to complete its goal of genocide and ethnic cleansing, the Global Sumud Flotilla was a beacon of hope to those waiting for much needed relief. The Global Sumud Flotilla poses no threat. They are unarmed and only carrying supplies needed by the population of Gaza such as baby formula, medical supplies, and food.

To meet a peaceful convoy of humanitarian aid with such violence and little regard for human life is appalling. The response from Italy to try and force the Global Sumud Flotilla to turn away, siding with the IDF and betraying their own citizens, is shameful. The United States is turning a blind eye to the U.S. citizens that have been kidnapped from the convoy while it continues to be involved with and enable the illegal and immoral actions of the illegal occupation known as Israel.

We are living in a moment which, when looked back on, everyone will say they have always been against these violent acts. We must keep hope, because to keep hope is to believe truly and honestly that Palestine will be free.

Israel must release all the hostages they have kidnapped from the Global Sumud Flotilla, they must ensure their safety, and they must allow aid into Gaza. As activist and arguably one of the most famous members of the Global Sumud Flotilla, Greta Thunberg, has said, “I'm not scared of Israel. I'm scared of a world that has seemingly lost all sense of humanity.” We must not lose our humanity and continue to uplift the Palestinian cause as it is just, it is moral, and it is freedom, not just for the Palestinians, but for all of us. Because none of us are free until all of us are free. We stand with the Global Sumud Flotilla, we condemn the violence and kidnapping, and we stand with the Palestinians in their hope to someday soon be truly free.

Written by Central IN DSA October 3, 2025

Today, Central Indiana DSA celebrates the IPS Board of Commissioners for issuing a powerful, principled stance to preserve democratic governance and fully fund public schools in the face of Statehouse Republican-led attempts to dismantle and privatize IPS schools.

Commissioners Dr. Gayle Cosby, Alissa Impink, Dr. Nicole Carey, Ashley Thomas, Hope Duke Star, Deandra Thompson, and Angelia Moore voiced their commitment to true leadership and service to students, families, and community members and challenging the Mayor’s secretive collaboration with Statehouse Republicans and the charter industry.

This is what a fighting democratic public school board sounds like.

DSA’s Fully-Funded, Fully Public Schools campaign joins IPS Commissioners in calling for the following.

Democratic and Accountable Governance

First and foremost, DSA echoes the IPS board’s insistence that “[p]ublic education belongs to the people of Indianapolis, not to appointed bodies” and that “[public] schools must remain under the full oversight of democratically elected officials who answer directly to the community.” Without representative, democratic governance, there is no public school system. We sternly reject calls to replace our local, elected school board with unaccountable appointees who do not represent us or our children.

Consolidation of Charters Under One Democratic Authority

DSA supports the IPS board’s call for a “streamlined, transparent accountability system that sets clear expectations for all public schools.” Though DSA believes that charters must come under the accountable, democratic authority of the elected school board, and not the Hogsett-controlled Office of Education Innovation, we appreciate IPS’s call to consolidate the dysfunctional and oversaturated charter landscape under one authority.

Prioritizing the Stabilization of the Indianapolis Public School System

DSA applauds the IPS board’s common-sense declaration that “[o]ur students and families deserve quality, and quality requires stability.” We must calm the chaos that proliferation of charters has inflicted on our school system. To ensure that our public schools can serve all students, we must put a cap on new schools and models until IPS is stabilized.

Transportation for All Cannot Include a Free Ride for Charters

Every public school student must have free, efficient, safe, and equitable transportation. However, the IPS board rightly acknowledges that forcing IPS to extend free transportation to charter schools would be prohibitively expensive and unsustainable, and it would come at the cost of our schoolchildren. If IPS is to extend its transportation services to charters, we can’t rob IPS students to pay for it. We must create new funding sources, or charters must pay their fair share.

Protecting Public Ownership and Community Stewardship of IPS Facilities

“No single entity ‘owns’ [IPS] facilities; they belong to the people of Indianapolis. Responsibility for these public assets must remain with elected officials who are accountable to voters as transparent stewards.” DSA, alongside the IPS Commissioners, calls for “the immediate removal of the $1 law” and “a process by which buildings that may be repurposed” to “address other critical community needs such as housing, community service hubs, or early learning centers.”

Fully Funding Public Schools Once and For All

“[P]ublic schools are the bedrock of a healthy, thriving Indianapolis.” While it is true that “public schools have not consistently lived up to the promise of opportunity,” we know that a better world is possible, and it is our “responsibility to make good on that promise.” As demonstrated by the last school funding referendum, voters in Indianapolis schools are clear: we want our schools fully funded. We want well-rounded curricula and excellence in instruction. If given the chance, voters will also show they are willing to also pay for wraparound services, including Pre-K, health services, freely available meals and nutrition, and mental health support. Let Indianapolis voters decide our own future, without interference from the Statehouse or Hogsett’s back door deals.

As Central Indiana DSA, we too “stand ready to work with our community, for our community, and in our community . . . [to] achieve the outcomes we all desire for our students..” Although DSA has sometimes found itself at odds with IPS Commissioners, our goal remains the same: a fully-funded, fully public school system of strengthened democratic accountability, community stewardship, and excellence in education for every student.

Thank you, IPS Commissioners for speaking truth to power!

By: Terence Cawley

SOMERVILLE, MA – The last few weeks have been tumultuous for the workers at the Starbucks store in the Davis Square neighborhood. On Wednesday, September 17, workers voted to join Starbucks Workers United. That made Davis Square the 650th unionized Starbucks store. One week later, on Thursday the 25th, Starbucks announced the imminent closure of hundreds of stores nationwide – including the Davis Square store. By that Saturday the 27th, the store had permanently closed. The new unionized location was gone.

Starbucks shuttered at least twenty locations in Massachusetts in this round of closures, including eight union stores. Besides the Davis Square store, the union store closures include the Harvard Square Starbucks, which unionized in May, and the store at 874 Commonwealth Avenue in Brookline, where the longest strike in Starbucks union history occurred over 64 days in 2022.

Brief History of Starbucks Workers United

Since Starbucks workers in Buffalo, N.Y. started Starbucks Workers United in August 2021, 650 stores (representing over 12,000 workers) have unionized. More than 200 of those stores joined Starbucks Workers United since February 2024. Despite these successes, not one of these stores has so far reached a collective bargaining agreement with the company.

Starbucks Workers United’s demands include changes that will enable more baristas to make a living wage, like higher pay, expanded healthcare benefits and paid leave, and more consistent scheduling. The union is also asking for stronger protections from racial and sexual harassment, as well as the enshrinement of current benefits in a contract so they cannot be revoked by the company later.

Starbucks initially opposed unionization efforts aggressively, leading to over 700 Unfair Labor Practices (ULP) filed against Starbucks with the National Labor Relations Board. The company reached an agreement with Starbucks Workers United in February 2024 to negotiate a “foundational framework” for contracts for union stores. Starbucks then failed to meet its own deadline to agree to this framework by the end of 2024, leading to workers at over 300 Starbucks locations going on strike on Christmas Eve for the largest labor action in company history.

Starbucks Workers United and the company entered mediation in February 2025. While the union has made some progress in contract negotiations, reaching 33 tentative agreements with the company, Starbucks continues to hold out on the workers’ three core demands: increasing worker hours to address understaffing and ensure workers qualify for benefits, increasing take-home pay, and resolving all outstanding ULP charges.

Starbucks Workers United claims on their website that Starbucks could finalize fair union contracts for less than the over $97 million Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol made for four months of work in 2024. Starbucks also covered the cost of Niccol commuting from his home in California to company headquarters in Seattle via private jet.

Organizing at the Davis Square Starbucks

Ben Levin has worked at the Davis Square Starbucks since April 2023. “From the beginning,” he has loved his coworkers. However, when Levin and his partner began planning to have children, he saw how his coworkers with families struggled due to a lack of consistent scheduling, subpar benefits, and low wages, not to mention the high cost of living in the Greater Boston area. Levin reported to Working Mass:

I was like, it would be so cool to be able to keep this job and start a family, and the only way I can see that that would be possible would be to fight back and win some of those things.

Some Starbucks customers had already encouraged Levin and his fellow Davis Square workers to unionize, but workers spent several years organizing the groundwork to reach the point where the store was ready for an election. Levin partially attributes this to the “stigma Starbucks manufactures in the workplace” around unionizing. “I understand why people are scared,” Levin said. “There are very material reasons for that.”

While Levin said management at his store did not engage in active union-busting, they did discourage workers from organizing through what he characterized as “trying to manufacture a sense of divisiveness and fear.” Despite the opposition, Levin found success building support for the union by connecting with his coworkers on a human level, listening to the challenges they faced at work, and providing accurate information about how a union could help with those challenges. According to Levin:

At the end of the day, everyone cares, everyone wants a better workplace. [You just] have to keep shoring up support and reminding folks why we’re in it together.

Levin also found inspiration in the accelerating momentum of the nationwide Starbucks Workers United effort. “It’s important to be connected to a larger movement,” said Levin. “This is a really powerful and kind of explosive labor movement- you know, [Starbucks Workers United] is the fastest-growing unionization effort in modern history.”

Additionally, the Davis Square workers had the support of Julie Langevin, a Starbucks Workers United staff organizer and former barista who has been involved with the union for over three years. She sees significance in the milestone of 650 unionized stores which Starbucks Workers United reached with the Davis Square election victory. Langevin said, on a hopeful note:

Every store that unionizes shows other baristas that they can do it too. 650 is a number some people thought impossible, but to us, it’s the proof that workers know what they’re worth and that they know when they fight, they can win.

Store Closures and What Comes Next

“It was sweet to celebrate,” said Levin. “It’s just hard to think about it not in the context of the closure.”

The official reason given in Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol’s statement is that the stores being closed are “coffeehouses where we’re unable to create the physical environment our customers and partners expect, or where we don’t see a path to financial performance.” In a separate statement, the company denied that unionization impacted which stores they closed. Still, Levin believes that, while Starbucks targeted stores without customer seating (like Harvard Square) and stores with lower revenue (like Davis Square) for closure, a desire to close union stores, particularly newly unionized stores with “the most fired-up workers,” may have been a factor.

While Niccol’s statement claimed that Starbucks would offer workers at closed stores the opportunity to transfer to other stores, as of September 30, Levin and his Davis Square coworkers have yet to receive any such offer. Fortunately, Starbucks Workers United has secured several protections for laid-off union members, including an extra month of health care benefits and the option to decline a transfer offer without losing their severance package.

“For some of us, this is our last week at Starbucks, but we still got to see the real material impact that the union is having,” said Levin. And even in the face of store closures and protracted contract negotiations, Langevin and Levin remain confident that the union will ultimately prevail. As Langevin said:

We have no other choice. Workers can either accept what the company gives them, or fight for a chance at a better life. And every time workers reach out and want to fight, it brings me hope and continued inspiration.

Supporters of Starbucks Workers United can show their solidarity and receive email updates about future actions by signing the No Contract, No Coffee pledge at https://sbworkersunited.org/take-action/. The union and its supporters have been canvassing for these pledges since summer to demonstrate to Starbucks how many customers will not cross the picket line if workers go on strike. To that end, Starbucks Workers United will hold a practice picket outside the Harvard Square Starbucks on Saturday, October 4 from 11am to 1pm.

“I absolutely think that a fire has been lit. We’ve had so many customers come in and express outrage at what’s happening to us, and ask what they can do to support us.”

“We’re escalating to something major,” said Langevin. “This practice picket is just the beginning of us flexing that power to company leadership, and there’s more to come.”

Terence Cawley is a member of Boston DSA.

By: Stacey Yuen and Alana Edwards, with contributions from Thomas Baker

This article was originally published in Long-Haul Magazine in its Winter 2025 Issue.

In Fall 2024, Boston University’s Resident Assistants (RAs) pulled off a rare, week-long strike in this new corner of the labor movement. Over seven days, Residence Life (ResLife) workers held their weight amid frazzled union staffers, hostile supervisors, and internal fracturing to strike during Fall move-in – a high-leverage period during which tens of thousands of students rely on RAs to move and settle into campus housing, with parents in tow. This was our second strike to win higher stipends, better protections against harassment, and paid health insurance for those not on family plans, in the context of negotiations for our first contract. On September 5, BU threatened to withhold RAs’ compensation, which comes in the form of housing and meals. Workers voted to end the strike shortly after this threat. To the surprise of some of us, BU increased their semesterly stipend offer from $1,000 to $1,700 a few days after the strike ended.

We are two rank-and-file members who helped organize BU RAs’ “Marathon Monday” strike in the Spring and the Fall 2024 move-in strike. As RAs, our job involves looking after the safety and well-being of more than 12,000 campus residents at BU. We work on-call shifts to respond to student emergencies, assist with housing needs, connect residents with resources, and plan community programs. Undergraduate students make up around 85% of our 300-member unit and graduate students account for the rest. Workers are compensated with housing and meal plans, although only half the unit received the latter before our strikes. The unit tends to be staffed by some of the most working-class, housing and food-insecure, and racially diverse students at the university. We are, therefore, relatively young and unversed in our dealings with both management and union. Our status as workers is also complicated by our other relations to the employer, as students and tenants.

In recent time, the “upsurge” of labor organizing in higher education has drawn much attention, along with the university’s exploitation of student debt through tuition and rent.^1^ Yet the organizing potential for many thousands of residential assistants around the country, who stand uniquely at the nexus of these trends, has been comparatively overlooked. We hope our experience can be instructive for RAs elsewhere.

A YEAR ON THE JOB (STACEY)

In August 2023, I began my two-week RA training program at Boston University. The sessions ran daily from 9am and ended in the evenings, occasionally as late as 10pm. I was 30, but was immediately made to feel 12 again. Our supervisor yelled at us to keep quiet, called us out if we looked at our phones, stared at us if we talked with each other, pulled us aside if we were five minutes late, and policed us into performing a charade of attentiveness during presentations, even as they droned on for hours with few breaks. Graduate RAs (GRAs) like myself, who have some responsibility to supervise and provide additional support to undergraduate RAs, were also roped into acting like their parents. If “our” RAs were not on time for a meeting, we were told, we had to retrieve keys from the office to enter their rooms and bring them down.

On the last day of training, all 300 fatigued and pissed-off RAs were made to participate in a treasure hunt and put on dance and chant performances as part of our “team building.” The audience and judges were our supervisors (primarily university staff) along with other administrators involved in student affairs. There was a fancy buffet, staff promotion announcements, and other such things. It was clear that part of our training involved being habitually infantilized and, for the GRAs, becoming some mix of parents and managers. This dynamic was weaponized against us when we attempted to fight for ourselves as workers.

“The worst is over,” I was told. “The job isn’t actually that difficult.” But, in my first week of duties, I found myself frantically setting up meetings to try and save a coworker’s job. They had not met academic grade requirements in the spring for continuing their RA role and were only informed about their predicament after they were rehired for the fall semester, already in full swing. “If they had told me at the end of spring,” my coworker said, “I could have just taken a summer course to boost my grade and everything would have been fine.” Instead, they were removed from the role and evicted from their on-campus residence with one week’s notice.

These experiences illustrate some of the unique realities of undergraduate labor. Undergraduate workers are “young,” not only in the literal sense, but in terms of how they ought to be treated by management. Managerial truisms like “they do not know what is good for them” infiltrate supervisor-employee relations. At BU, RAs must seek their supervisors’ permission to leave their residences for more than 24 hours even when they are not on call. My coworkers have been denied permission, without explanation, for something as innocent as attending a cousin’s wedding. And so, the pressure to perform obeisance to our supervisors becomes part and parcel of life as an RA.

But many RAs have been working multiple jobs since high school. One told me about a time they had a gun pulled on them while working as a fast-food restaurant manager in their teens; another complained about working under the hot Texas sun for $12 an hour, 12 hours a day, at an amusement park while a full-time high school student. Moreover, the nature of RA work, at its most intense, requires that workers attend to residents in crisis, to violent altercations, and even deaths. In the wake of one tragic student death on campus, my coworkers and I set up emergency discussions about how to respond to our residents and support one another in the face of confusing instructions and administrative oversight that had put workers in unacceptably difficult positions. It was apparent from those discussions that undergraduates’ maturity, wisdom, and workplace savvy are in abundance, whether administrators recognize it or not. But, of course, it’s in management’s interest not to.

“WE NEED TO PROVIDE THAT EDUCATIONAL MOMENT”

For management, ResLife workers’ youth and inexperience were reason enough to dismiss our organizing. We learned that BU was characterizing us as “ungrateful” and “aggressive” at the bargaining table. These complaints about our supposed childishness spilled over into daily interactions with our supervisors.^2^ RAs made several efforts to meet with supervisors about how RAs themselves understood the negotiations – as a path toward ending food insecurity and the necessity of juggling multiple jobs. We were unable, however, to have this middle layer exert any pressure upward; more often, it came down on us in the form of mounting tension at work. During the strike, some supervisors grew openly disdainful of workers with whom they formerly had friendly and warm relationships.

Ignorance and inexperience were also key tropes in the university’s public messaging. In an interview with the university paper about the administration’s plans to slap room and board charges on striking workers, the Dean of Students stated,

My goal is to educate everybody in the bargaining unit on the effects of withholding labor during negotiations or at any point in their role. We’ve heard from many RAs who are confused about what this means; they’re not getting clear communication. We need to provide that educational moment.^3^

Unfortunately, there was also a tendency for union staff’s attitudes to resemble management’s. Micromanagement in the form of repeated calling and texting workers to track progress on tasks was common. Behaving like summer camp counselors, staff typically led meetings in ways that resembled a Q&A rather than facilitating discussions among workers.^4^

STRIKING “MARATHON MONDAY”

In Spring 2024, workers began to feel the need to do something to gain more movement at the bargaining table. The annual drop in staffing over the summer and massive turnover going into the fall semester contributed to this sense of urgency. The only meaningful concession the university had made was to offer meal plans for all workers and RA and GRA stipends of $1,000 and $1,500 per semester, respectively. Prior to contract negotiations, only about half of workers were getting meal plans and a small number were receiving stipends of a few hundred dollars.

BU RAs decided to organize a strike over Boston’s Marathon Monday (“MarMon”) long weekend in mid-April. Apart from the anticipated additional workload (responding to noise complaints, investigating overly raucous parties, booking out keys to residents who lost them, etc.), that weekend was critical because it coincided with the university’s Family and Friends weekend, where ResLife workers take on additional shifts to engage and welcome BU’s visitors and patrons.

With “MarMon” as our target, the union began assessing strike-readiness. Union staff declared that we needed strike commitments from 270 of our 300 members in order to authorize a Strike Authorization Vote (SAV). This high bar was raised further when the staff required us to collect “selfie” photographs from coworkers as proof of their strike readiness and send them to staff, who would then mark those individuals as strike-ready on our wall charts.

The process of collecting these strike-readiness selfies caused several frustrations. First, many RA organizers were confused about the logistics and purpose of the selfies. RAs themselves asked important questions about how we were tracking them, whether they would be publicized, and how they were relevant to the strike. Organizers found it difficult to explain the rationale, making for extremely awkward interactions. The lack of clarity around the process, and more importantly, the hazy analysis of the relationship between the selfies on the one hand and our collective power on the other translated into demoralization and forced us to direct our energy toward sorting these questions out with each other and with union staff. Other essential efforts, like running small group conversations focused on strike preparation, power analysis, and inoculation faded into the background. We graduated from dancing and singing for our supervisors only to send selfies to our union staff.

Some organizers attempted to address the lack of bottom-up organizing and worker segmentation across campus by starting at the “neighborhood” level. ResLife workers are split across seven residential areas, also called “neighborhoods,” that are spread out around BU’s famously long and skinny campus. Workers do not interact across neighborhoods for most of the academic year. Until this point, neighborhood meetings were either poorly attended or nonexistent. This was true for both neighborhoods that relied on union staff’s initiative as well as those that attempted a more bottom-up approach. Three neighborhoods were almost totally disengaged. Meanwhile, attendance at bargaining and collective action team meetings flagged, in part because those meetings often felt uninspiring or inconsequential.

Some rank-and-file organizers began meeting and talking one-on-one and in very small groups with workers from different neighborhoods in an effort to build a core of cross-neighborhood stewards. One priority was engaging “organic leaders” from disengaged neighborhoods. Since we wanted more workers to take ownership of our workplace and union, we began with workers who were less habituated to staff-led decision-making. Within weeks, a new core developed, comprising about eight workers, three of whom were from previously disengaged neighborhoods. We also formed a group of about 15 rank-and-file neighborhood stewards and began sharing and discussing neighborhood organizing strategies and resources on WhatsApp.

Workers had no edit access to their own wall charts and could only leave comments. So we made our own chart, which decoupled strike-readiness from selfie commits. In the second half of March 2024, these rank-and-file leaders started strike assessments, focusing especially on three newly organized neighborhoods where staff had limited reach.

Our approach enabled us to gain traction within certain neighborhoods. As a result, it eventually became necessary to hash out our differences with the advocates of the selfie-based strike readiness plan. This led to an emergency meeting between rank-and-file leaders and the Local president, during which workers attempted to convince staff that we were ready to strike, whatever the selfie metrics indicated. We negotiated over the number of selfies that would trigger a strike authorization, ultimately compromising on a reduction from 270 to 170, or from 90 percent to approximately 56 percent of our bargaining unit.

Unfortunately, in the same meeting, we were less successful in winning over coworkers or staff to the idea of an indefinite strike. The staff proposal for a four-day “warning strike” over MarMon ultimately prevailed, hoping that the threat of a strike would win specific demands like back pay, better training provisions, and having masks in offices. Although unconvinced that this could force such concessions from the university, our new group oriented towards this action as a “practice strike” – i.e. a window to learn BU’s pressure points and tactics, as well as our areas of strength and weakness, in order to organize for an indefinite strike during the move-out window at the end of the semester. Within a mere week, led in large part by a surge in the newly organized neighborhoods, ResLife workers hit 92% assessment, 70% of whom were strike-ready, and another 12% leaning yes. The Local conducted our SAV, which passed comfortably: we were going on strike.

In hindsight, our approach had not adequately prepared for the realities of a strike. Our assessment of strike-readiness had fallen into the trap of getting as many Yes votes as possible at the cost of creating power-building spaces where workers could collectively build the necessary relationships, skills, and structures to navigate high-stress, high-stakes situations. There was no way we could critically discuss and respond to problems that arose in real time.

After the strike, rank-and-filers got together to discuss what we had accomplished, how we fell short, and where we were headed. The strike forced small victories. We began to receive masks at big meetings and our RA training the next academic year was much improved in terms of duration. By summertime, BU also provided air conditioning for all RAs and relocated summer RAs out of the notoriously stuffy rooms at Warren Towers. We had managed to strike roughly 90 percent of assigned shifts over the MarMon weekend. However, this overwhelming success was achieved, in part, by strike-ready workers swapping shifts with less confident workers. This, of course, was only possible because we were not on the long-term strike that we thought was necessary to win.

We also identified the picket line (combined with staff insistence that the strength of our strike could be gleaned from picket attendance) as a site of demoralization, alongside the pervasive feeling of just trying something disruptive and hoping that it might work, rather than formulating a defensible strategy based on a rigorous assessment of our leverage relative to our demands. Workers came away from this “warning” or “practice” strike less, rather than more, unified, coherent, and ready to fight. Our plan to organize for a subsequent indefinite strike was in tatters, and our experience defied the commonplace wisdom of successively escalatory action.

Finally, we reflected on the role played by union staff and considered possible ways of navigating our relationship with them differently in future. We discussed setting boundaries with them and crafted a memorandum that we then signed, presented to, and discussed with staffers. The memo emphasized that workers would maintain full control of our organizing strategy, timelines, goals, wall charts, and data. Staff were directed to refrain from repeatedly calling or texting us.

“I’VE NEVER SEEN THIS MUCH PARTICIPATION IN ALL MY TIME ORGANIZING”

By the end of the four-day MarMon strike, our major contract demands remained unmet and an agreement was nowhere in sight. Though much of the unit had turned over between the Spring and Summer semesters, a small core of committed rank-and-file organizers remained. Restrictive timelines regarding SAVs in the Local’s constitution made the prospect of launching a sanctioned strike incompatible with striking at the point of our highest leverage vis-a-vis the employer: namely, Fall move-in. Our core organizers decided therefore to organize towards a wildcat strike to begin on the first day of Fall semester move-in.^5^ Fortunately, the intensive RA training in August provided, in addition to much frustration with supervisors, an opportunity for RAs to discuss this plan.

During August’s RA 2024 training, core organizers called a general membership meeting that saw our largest attendance yet, with more than a third of the unit showing up. Importantly, there was a new energy and hunger in the room and this moment felt to workers like a high point in our campaign. In a vote, 94 percent of us agreed to start preparing for a move-in strike by talking with our coworkers who were not present. At the same time, these deliberations revealed concern about striking without support from the Local, as did a follow-up survey, filled by close to 80% of membership. However, the genuine swell of militant energy and collective deliberation from below was not lost on the Local’s staff or officers. Following a second meeting attended by more than half of the membership, one of them said, “I’ve never seen this much participation in all my time organizing.”

The conviction of workers pushing for immediate action even compelled the union to permit a constitutional amendment that would allow an SAV to pass quickly enough that we could strike at least part of move-in. The SAV stipulated that, in order to pass, we would need 80% of the entire unit to vote Yes and it is a testament to this swell of momentum that such an outcome was possible. We cleared this high bar and set out on strike. Here is the reflection of a core undergraduate organizer:

Even after participating in the MarMon strike, striking move-in felt wildly new, exciting, and empowering, although very challenging. The emotional rollercoaster lasted from strike preparations all the way through the strike itself. The morning of the walk-out, my racing heartbeat woke me up before my alarm could. I would regularly remind myself that even though fear and doubt would always seem more valid responses to the decision we were making, I was choosing to strike because I believed in the justice we were seeking, because I knew it was what was right and it would be worth it, and because I committed to myself and my coworkers that I would give it everything I could.

Throughout that day and each that followed, me and my coworkers exerted our collective power, took action, and formed new bonds of comradeship together. We stood by each other while we anxiously waited to be picked up by a strike train. Every chant I sang, every flyer I handed out, and every poster I attempted to put up was part of a larger struggle. I also fought for former coworkers, and every future and current 19-year-old RA who deserved better than the harassment my friends and I should have never faced. I even fought by doing TikTok dances in our ResLife polos with a friend I’d made just days before, in the most visible spot on campus, when we were too frustrated with each other to make another rushed decision.

We won the battles we faced simultaneously as individuals and collectively. We won as we met each other’s eyes when passing on the picket line. We won as security guards raised their fists and cheered with us as we walked out of campus’s largest dorm. And we won as students, parents, faculty and staff members, community members and leaders expressed their support through every email, tweet, and repost, through loud shouts of encouragement, through the moments they spent listening and calling on our behalf, even the smallest gestures of solidarity.

Notwithstanding such tireless efforts, confidence in the strike had begun to erode with the many sudden turns and lurches in the lead-up. Not a few who had previously agreed to strike pulled out. This was partly due to misinformation from Local staff, who were trying to rework restrictive internal policies to support our strike (we are the first RA unit in the Local). Core organizers were also under great pressure to make high-stakes decisions within a compressed time frame and tried to do so democratically. But the high tempo of informational and procedural changes, charged emotions, and clunky mass decision-making wore us out. Another challenge was that a large proportion of workers were brand new to the job, much less the union.

In the days that followed, ResLife workers went on what turned out to be a minority strike, with uneven numbers of workers withholding labor across neighborhoods during their move-in shifts. After the time lost in the back-and-forth with the Local, the strike ended up beginning on the fourth day of the week-long move-in and continued beyond it. Seven days into the strike, the university threatened to impose room and board charges for striking workers. Organizers, scrambling to respond, tried to assuage fears by saying workers would be more protected if more people struck. This was the wrong approach, especially as numbers dropped, because it divested workers of a sense of their own power when striking by sidelining genuine questions of strategy. It instead encouraged workers to find security in abstract metrics rather than to build structures, processes, and resources that would support a long-haul strike, one that might even have been powerful if concentrated in specific neighborhoods, despite relatively low overall numbers. There was widespread demoralization when some coworkers pulled out of the strike, creating a domino effect and the eventual collapse of the strike.

CONCLUSION

To workers’ surprise, BU increased their semesterly stipend offer from $1,000 to $1,700 after the fall move-in strike ended, despite its weaknesses. We think that the chaos and visibility of the strike meant that management, far from being unbothered, felt relieved that things did not get as disruptive as they might have. The many last-minute emergency meetings called by middle management, as well as the outbursts of various managers, suggested a workplace in panic. Although many of our shifts were successfully scabbed, our strikes caused logistical headaches for management because we do essential university labor in housing safely some 12,000 residents and patrons, who each pay upwards of $16,000 annually in room and board.

Importantly, both ResLife strikes occurred alongside a militant long strike undertaken by the university’s graduate workers. From March to October 2024, the BU Graduate Workers Union (BUGWU) ran the longest graduate strike in US history, pushing for demands such as a cost-of-living-adjustment tied to the rental market. When ResLife workers hit the picket, the university was also facing the prospect of another semester with BUGWU workers on strike. It is conceivable that the university, sensing this new worker militancy from RAs on the ground, was eager to settle the ResLife contract to foreclose the possibility of another strike like BUGWU’s. Less than a month after the RAs reached a tentative agreement, BU also made unusually quick concessions in a clear effort to reach a contract with BUGWU and end the strike. Their contract was eventually ratified in October.

Despite the persistent and frustrating condescension by our employer and, at least initially, our union staff, budding militancy within BU’s ResLife union delivered us to two strikes that pushed our Local and won us materially significant pay and compensation increases from the boss, as well as stronger protections and a relatively streamlined training program. From where we sit, the collective deliberation by rank-and-file workers, which dramatically changed the course of our campaign, was the real “educational moment,” impressing upon management and our Local staff certain lessons they won’t easily forget. After the strike, a staffer said to one of us that getting ResLife representation on the Local’s chapter executive board was critical to reforming the Local’s existing policies – clear recognition that we had something to teach the “old timers” as well.

Building up and layering this kind of militancy in both graduate and RA unions within the same university, in order to strategize and move in tandem, is a clear next step. While the connections between these struggles were glimpsed at BU, where some workers are members of both BUGWU and ResLife and where we share the same Local, we cannot claim to have fully developed the potential leverage of joint solidarity against the employer. This is no simple prospect, but appears newly in reach in the aftermath of our respective struggles, and might be pursued wherever undergrad and grad workers are in motion, whatever their organizational affiliation.

1 – See Notes From Below, Correspondences from the Upsurge, August 28, 2023, available at https://notesfrombelow.org/issue/correspondences-upsurge; Coalition Against Campus Debt, Lend and Rule: Fighting the Shadow Financialization of Public Universities (Philadelphia: Common Notions, 2024).

2 – For context, the university’s bargaining team included managers above our direct supervisor, who would receive reports on bargaining from above. Our direct supervisors, therefore, did not have direct access to bargaining sessions, and as a result, their understanding of negotiations was shaped heavily by management, especially as they were unwilling to consider our perspectives seriously.

3 – See Rich Barlow, “BU to Suspend Free Room and Meals for Striking Student RAs,” BU Today, September 5, 2024, https://www.bu.edu/articles/2024/suspended-free-room-and-meals-for-striking-student-ras.

4 – A comrade from the graduate worker union who sat in at a staff-led ResLife union meeting said he had not observed such condescension in a long time and felt he was in middle school again.

5 – The strike would be a “wildcat” insofar as we expected that it would not be authorized by the Local, even if it might be legally protected as concerted action under Article 7 of the NLRA, given that our demands were clearly “mandatory” subjects of bargaining and, this being our first contract, we had no pre-existing “no-strikes” provisions.

The post On for Young and Old: How Boston University’s Resident Assistants Pulled Off a Double Strike appeared first on Working Mass.

Wages for retail workers have decreased over the past three decades. It’s not for lack of money. In July 2025 alone, U.S. retail and food services sales reached over $726 billion. While CEOs and retail higher-ups rake in millions, the workers who make it all possible struggle to keep up with rising costs.

Unionizing your retail workplace can help push for much needed wage raises, protect against inconsistent scheduling and wage theft, and grant you and your co-workers collective bargaining power when advocating for your rights as a worker.

Talk to your retail co-workers

Unionizing begins with getting to know your co-workers. Chances are you aren’t the only one in your retail workplace with concerns or issues regarding your work environment.

Start low stakes conversations to get to know your co-workers. Ask about what issues are affecting them in and out of the workplace and bring up your own workplace gripes. They may already be exhibiting interest in pushing for safer conditions, or they may have a certain level of allegiance to upper management or the company. Either way, this is good information to have!

Don’t just try to turn every conversation into an organizing conversation right away, though: Build community with your co-workers to organically gauge common workplace issues and see which co-workers have skills that would be useful to a union organizing campaign or which co-workers may pose a threat to union building efforts.

Build a retail organizing committee

Create a small, close, and trusted group of fellow workers (often called an “organizing committee”) to chart your workplace: record what issues your co-workers are focused on, note who does or does not seem interested in unionizing, and make a plan to win your demands and what to do if your bosses retaliate (which they likely will try, legally or illegally).

It is crucial at this stage to educate yourself and others on the labor laws in your state and document any violations of these laws in your workplace. After you and your organizing committee have developed a list of demands and prepared for possible retaliation, it’s time to take necessary action to win your demands. Who has the power to make the workplace changes you’re looking for? What is the most effective way to convey these needs? These are questions with answers that may be specific to your workplace and state.

Fighting anti-union retaliation in your retail workplace

When unionizing your retail workplace, management will likely retaliate. Due to the undeniably weak labor laws in the U.S., managers and corporations openly and shamelessly use illegal union busting tactics.

The National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) is supposed to protect employees’ rights to unionize and ensure the illegality of employer interference; however, labor organizers have criticized many multi-billion dollar retail corporations like Starbucks, Amazon and Trader Joe’s for anti-union tactics. These can look like anything, like bribing workers to reject the union, terminating the employment of union activists and supporters, and threatening and following through on closing unionized facilities.

These companies and many others have also been caught firing managers who were not deemed anti-union enough, utilizing employee data surveys and covert surveillance to gather data on possible union activity, and even partnering with entire “union avoidance” law firms in an attempt to work around the rights of employees. Amazon alone spent $4.3 million in 2021 on anti-union consultants, holding mandatory meetings where employees endured sitting through anti-union propaganda in the run-up to union elections! Although Amazon has received pushback legally and publicly for some of those cases, these types of insidious union busting tactics are being used by employers and corporations all over the country.

Wage theft and the targeting of retail workers

Retail workers are especially affected by wage theft. This includes stolen tips, illegal paycheck deductions, unpaid overtime, withholding paychecks and making employees work through breaks. As recently as 2017, researchers calculated that employers steal at least $15 billion from workers annually simply by paying less than the minimum wage.

Unfortunately, when it comes to filing a complaint against your employer for violations of your rights as a worker, the options are somewhat becoming more difficult to achieve. With the Trump administration’s continuous interference with the power of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) along with other agencies such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), a lot of their ability to make rulings has been stripped away.

However, no administration can take away our right to organize on the job: as Jennifer Abruzzo, the recently dismissed general counsel of the NLRB, said in January, if the NLRB doesn’t fulfill its duty to defend workers’ rights, “I expect that workers with assistance from their advocates will take matters into their own hands in order to get the well-deserved dignity and respect in the workplace, as well as a fair share of the significant value they add to their employers’ operations.”

Recent retail workplace organizing wins

In 2024, 400 Macy’s employees across three stores unionized with the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW), which represents over 50,000 U.S. workers. They fought for and won better safety conditions and higher pay, including the highest signing bonus in the country. A majority of Macy’s workers are women and people of color who had been decades-long loyal employees, but the company didn’t recognize their worth until workers made them.

In March 2025, three Barnes & Noble stores across New York City announced the signing of their first union contracts, establishing higher standards for safety, wages, and healthcare for their union members. These union contracts collectively cover over 200 workers, including the flagship Union Square location which is below the corporate headquarters. Another 10,000 Kroger workers struck in February, and now they’re winning amazing bargaining demands. Amazon workers all over the world have been striking and pushing back against the company’s unfair labor practices and winning small but powerful union elections from Italy to Canada to Staten Island.

First steps to build a retail union

The fight for adequate representation is hard, but never impossible, and having a strong union behind you for support when advocating yourself is often crucial when up against management and corporate greed. Reach out to an EWOC organizer to unionize your workplace, and start the fight for your rights today!

The Illusion of Choice

What Americans call political diversity is actually ideological uniformity. Turn on any news channel, scroll through any political debate, and you’ll see the same tired performance: conservatives versus liberals, Republicans versus Democrats, each side convinced they represent fundamentally different worldviews. But here’s what I’ve come to understand as a socialist looking at this spectacle from the outside — they’re all playing variations of the same tune.

Conservatives, liberals, and even libertarians aren’t offering different philosophical frameworks. They’re offering different flavors of the same ice cream: liberalism. The marketing makes them seem distinct, even opposed, but strip away the branding and you find they all believe in the same core values — just different approaches to achieving them.

This confusion runs so deep that when progressives push for reforms like universal healthcare or wealth taxes, they get labeled as “radical leftists” when they’re actually just trying to make the existing liberal-capitalist system function closer to its stated ideals. True leftist positions — like worker ownership of the means of production or democratic economic planning — don’t even register in mainstream political discourse because they fall outside the artificially constrained liberal framework that defines America’s political vocabulary.

Unmasking the Liberal Consensus

At their very core, conservatives, liberals, and libertarians all operate within the classical liberal tradition that emerged from the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. They all accept:

• Individual rights as the foundation of society
• Private property as sacred and natural
• Market relations as the default way of organizing economic life
• Constitutional government with checks and balances
• The basic legitimacy of democratic institutions (though they may disagree on their scope)

The differences people get so heated about are really just different emphases within this shared framework. Conservatives might say they want minimal government interference in the economy while liberals want more regulation, but both accept that the economy should be organized around private ownership and market exchange. Libertarians take classical liberalism to its logical extreme, but they’re still working within the same philosophical boundaries.

When I say this is about marketing, I don’t mean the policy differences are trivial — they have real impacts on people’s lives. What I mean is that the ideological packaging makes these tactical disagreements appear to be fundamental philosophical divisions when they’re really just different management styles for the same basic system.

Libertarianism perfectly illustrates this point. Libertarians present themselves as radically different from both conservatives and liberals, advocating for minimal government and maximum individual freedom. But libertarianism is actually what you get when you push liberal principles of individual rights and limited government as far as they can go while still maintaining private property and market relations. The libertarian’s “radical” position of eliminating most government functions isn’t a departure from liberalism; it’s liberalism without the moderating influences that other liberals accept as necessary to manage capitalism’s contradictions. This is why libertarianism sits even further right than conservatism — conservatives at least accept some government intervention as necessary, while libertarians want to strip it down to almost nothing.

Here’s where American political discourse gets it fundamentally wrong: liberalism isn’t the “left” — it’s the center of the political spectrum. In mainstream American conversation, “liberal” gets treated as synonymous with “left-wing,” but this is a profound misunderstanding that distorts our entire political vocabulary.

The real political spectrum runs like this: To the left of the liberal center, you have progressivism (what Americans often mistakenly call “liberalism”), then socialism, then communism, then anarchism. To the right of the liberal center, you have conservatism, then libertarianism, then far-right extremism.

But American discourse compresses this entire range into a false binary where “liberal” means left and “conservative” means right, completely erasing actual left-wing positions from the conversation. When Americans say someone is “liberal,” they’re usually describing what should properly be called progressive — someone who wants to reform the liberal system to make it work better, not someone who wants to replace it entirely.

This linguistic confusion isn’t accidental. It serves to make the liberal framework appear to encompass the full range of legitimate political thought, when in reality it represents just the center position with some variations to either side.

The Structural Contradiction

Here’s where it gets interesting from a theoretical standpoint. Capitalism developed as a purely economic system focused on market relations and private ownership. But any economic system needs a political and social framework to sustain it, and liberalism provided that framework for capitalism.

The problem is that these two systems have contradictory logics. Liberalism promises political equality — the idea that all individuals have equal rights and equal say in democratic governance. But capitalism requires economic inequality to function. Someone has to own the means of production, someone else has to sell their labor. Capital needs to accumulate, which means wealth concentrates. The system literally cannot work without creating and maintaining class divisions.

This isn’t some unintended side effect –- it’s structural. Political theorist and historian Roy Casagrande describes how liberalism essentially became capitalism’s philosophical framework, providing the ideological justification for a system that contradicts liberalism’s own stated values.

Even early Enlightenment thinkers who developed liberal theory recognized this tension. They understood that capitalism’s tendency toward inequality could undermine political equality, but they believed this could be managed through institutions and reforms rather than by questioning the economic system itself.

The Evidence: When Theory Meets Reality

This contradiction isn’t just theoretical — it plays out in concrete ways that affect real people’s lives.

Black Americans provide the clearest example of how formal political equality coexists with systematic economic exclusion. Despite decades of civil rights legislation, anti-discrimination laws, and diversity initiatives –- all liberal solutions — the racial wealth gap has barely budged. Median Black family wealth remains about one-tenth that of white families. This isn’t because liberal reforms haven’t been implemented, but because they address symptoms while leaving untouched the underlying system that created and maintains these disparities.

The caste system that affects Black Americans operates alongside the class system. When economic downturns happen, Black Americans face distinct and often disproportionate impacts not just because of class position but because of how race and class interact under racial capitalism. Liberal frameworks struggle to address this because they’re designed to treat race and class as separate issues rather than understanding how they’re systematically intertwined.

Native Americans face even starker contradictions. They’re simultaneously sovereign nations and colonial subjects, with formal treaty rights that exist alongside ongoing land theft and resource extraction. The reservation system creates a form of internal colonialism that liberal political theory can’t even properly name, let alone address. How do you reconcile individual property rights –- a cornerstone of liberalism — with collective indigenous sovereignty and traditional land use practices? You can’t, which is why liberal solutions consistently fail to address the root issues.

Latino Americans demonstrate how immigration status creates tiered citizenship that serves capital’s need for exploitable labor. Some have formal rights while others are deliberately kept in precarious legal positions that make them more vulnerable to exploitation. This isn’t a policy oversight — it’s exactly what the economic system requires to maintain cheap labor pools.

Even European social democratic models, often held up as examples of successful liberal reform, reveal these same fundamental contradictions. Sweden’s domestic equality coexists with arms exports to authoritarian regimes. Germany’s strong worker protections rely on exploiting Southern European labor through EU economic structures. The welfare state ameliorates capitalism’s worst effects domestically while often intensifying exploitation elsewhere.

The Progressive Trap

Here’s what’s particularly revealing: every time progressives push for reforms to address inequality, they’re essentially admitting that capitalism doesn’t naturally produce the outcomes liberalism promises.

Universal healthcare? That’s because market-based healthcare creates inequality. Strong labor protections? Because unregulated capitalism exploits workers. Wealth taxes? Because capitalism concentrates wealth. Affirmative action? Because “merit-based” systems reproduce existing inequalities.

Each progressive reform is an acknowledgment that the economic system undermines the political ideals. The more adjustments liberals have to make to capitalism to achieve their stated goals of equality and freedom, the more they’re proving that socialism’s analysis was correct — that you can’t have genuine political equality while maintaining private ownership of the means of production.

This is why liberal reforms, no matter how well-intentioned, keep failing to address root causes. They’re trying to solve systemic problems with tools provided by the same system that created those problems. It’s like trying to fix a broken foundation by rearranging the furniture.

Beyond the Liberal Horizon

Understanding this helps explain why American political discourse feels so constrained and circular. When both major parties operate within the same fundamental framework, when the boundaries of “realistic” policy are drawn by that framework’s limitations, genuine alternatives become literally unthinkable within mainstream political conversation.

Socialism offers something different because it addresses both the economic system and its supporting political structures. Instead of trying to manage capitalism’s contradictions, it proposes replacing the system that creates those contradictions in the first place. Worker ownership of the means of production. Democratic planning of economic priorities. An economic system designed to serve human needs rather than accumulate capital.

This isn’t utopian thinking — it’s practical recognition that the problems liberalism struggles to solve are inherent to the economic system liberalism was designed to support.

Breaking the Frame

The first step toward real political alternatives is recognizing how narrow the current frame actually is. What gets presented as the full spectrum of political possibility is really just different management strategies for the same basic arrangement of economic and political power.

Once you see this, a lot of things start making sense. Why Democrats and Republicans seem to agree on so much when it comes to fundamental economic structures. Why reforms that sound transformative end up changing so little. Why the same problems keep recurring regardless of which party is in power.

We live in a liberal Enlightenment society with capitalism as its economic model. Until we’re willing to question that framework itself, we’ll keep having the same debates, implementing the same types of solutions, and wondering why the same problems persist.

The real political spectrum is much broader than American discourse suggests. It’s time we started acting like it.

This article represents the opinion of the author and does not necessarily represent the views of The Detroit Socialist or Metro Detroit DSA as a whole.

On September 19, 2025, news broke about cases being filed against the warden of the Basile Detention center in Louisiana. Because Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has increased arrests in the past few months, more immigrants than ever are incarcerated in Basile and across Louisiana. Four of the people previously incarcerated in the Basile facility have filed legal complaints against the warden for sexual abuse, physical abuse, and coerced labor. In addition, transgender detainees report consistent abuse by prison staff.^1^ Immigrants detained in the Angola Prison have begun a hunger strike to protest lack of medical care, medication, clean water, toilet paper, and hygiene products.^2^

Intentionally, the stories of abuses in Louisiana prisons are only reported on the second page of local newspapers, and completely ignored by national papers. Instead, articles and statements by pundits and politicians decried “political violence” in response to the most recent high-profile killing. While incarcerated transgender people are abused in prison, the right-wing attempts to blame “transgender gangs” for the violence throughout our society.^3^ While liberal centrists claim that we are too polarized and need to learn to have conversations again, they refuse to allow any criticism of Israel.^4^

The United States, Martin Luther King said, “is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.”^5^ Dr. King correctly identified that the violence in the streets was simply a reflection of how the United States government reacts to things that threaten it. When a child grows up, seeing police, prison guards, FBI agents, the US military, and ICE agents “solving” their problems with murderous violence, they begin to believe that this is the way to solve their own problems. Certainly, any crime that an individual teenager in Chicago or DC or New Orleans commits pales in comparison to Baton Rouge PD’s “Brave Cave.”^6^ It pales in comparison to ICE tearing families apart, wrongly arresting and detaining people like Rümeysa Öztürk for their free speech. It certainly cannot compare with the genocide in Palestine, fully funded and backed by our taxes. Are these things not political violence? They were enacted for political reasons against members of a political underclass. These things are considered necessary political violence, and are allowed by those on both sides of our limited political binary.

The unjust detention of immigrants in the United States is not unique to Donald Trump. It would certainly be easier if the end of President Trump’s administration meant the end of political violence toward immigrants in the United States. However, mass deportations are a bipartisan cause. Barack “Deporter in Chief” Obama earned his nickname, much to Donald Trump’s chagrin.^7^ The groundwork for today’s fascism was laid by his presidential predecessors, both Republican and Democrat.

Despite claims to be “tough on crime,” the majority of politicians refuse to do the difficult things that are proven to reduce crime. Like that child who believes only violence can solve their problems, our political leaders believe that only state violence via police, prisons, and execution can solve theirs. If our leaders truly want to be tough, they should stop accepting donations from private prison corporation Geo Group,^8^ which runs the detention center in Basile and the one in Jena, Louisiana that incarcerated Mahmoud Khalil. If they want to do the difficult thing, they must do what Dr. King demanded when he said, “The real cost lies ahead” and describes a world with equal education, guaranteed jobs, and housing millions of people: ^9^

"The Constitution assured the right to vote, but there is no such assurance of the right to adequate housing, or the right to an adequate income. And yet, in a nation which has a gross national product of $750 billion a year, it is morally right to insist that every person have a decent house, an adequate education and enough money to provide basic necessities for one’s family. Achievement of these goals will be a lot more difficult and require much more discipline, understanding, organization and sacrifice."

Our “tough on crime” politicians are not tough enough to do what is necessary: end the unjust prison-industrial system that breeds crime, abuse, and community destruction.^10^ Instead, they continue violently arresting and locking people in cages while claiming that will keep us safe. The United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world. Louisiana doles out some of the longest sentences in the country. While we must not fall for the fiction that crime is increasing and “out of control” in the US, we cannot ignore the immense violence within our communities. Nor can we ignore that incarceration simply replaces one type of violence for another. Two million people are in prison, and 113 million people, in a country of 340 million, have an immediate family member who has been in jail or prison. Prisons are not keeping “society” safe.^11^ Millions of members of “society” are incarcerated, and they are not safe. The recent abuse in the Basile detention center makes the point.

ICE, the US’s gestapo, is a non-solution to a non-problem. It is making our already existing problem of mass incarceration even worse by caging more people in ICE detention centers, which are prisons by another name. Like all fascist movements, MAGA has sought to blame the failures of capitalism on an outside “other,” creating an underclass of hyper-exploited workers. ICE must be abolished. But ICE is just the most visible part of this system. It is not coincidental that Louisiana’s Angola prison is built on a former forced labor camp (a so-called “plantation”). Similarly, it is not a coincidence that poverty and crime are interlinked. Our politicians are so concerned with the latter, but have no solutions for the former.

A world without prisons, without detention centers, without poverty is possible. It will take a lot of work, but it is possible. If those deploring “political violence” are serious about stopping it, let’s start with abolishing ICE.

Join the Baton Rouge Democratic Socialists of America. A better world is possible. Together, we can make it real.🌹

References

1. Complaints allege sexual, physical abuse at Louisiana ICE facility
2. State officials deny mistreatment, hunger strike claims at Angola ICE site
3. Charlie Kirk railed against transgender rights. His killing has further fueled the fight
4. Democrats reject Gaza protesters' demand to give speaking slot to Palestinian
5. Excerpts from Martin Luther King, Jr., "Beyond Vietnam": Speech at Riverside Church Meeting, New York, N.Y., April 4, 1967. In Clayborne Carson et al., eds., Eyes on the Prize: A Reader and Guide (New York: Penguin, 1987), 201-04.
6. Four Louisiana officers charged in ‘Brave Cave’ abuse investigation
7. Obama Has Deported More People Than Any Other President
8. Open Secrets: Geo Group
9. King, Martin Luther Jr. (2010). Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos Or Community?. Beacon Press. pp. ix–xxi. ISBN 978-0-8070-0067-0.
10. Why Punishing People in Jail and Prison Isn’t Working
11. Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2025

by Jean allen

This speech is something i have had swirling in my head for months, as I wrote Unite The Class and then as I worked on the program process. The Fighting Socialist program ended up not passing by 45-55, and it had its flaws, but it seems that this speech legitimized it to the body. As motivations and deliberation occurred, Communist Caucus voted to change its recommendation from a No to Neutral. I hope that this forwarded the ideas present in the Fighting Socialist Program—that the path forward is to connect with all the segments of the working class who understand our struggles are connected—and that this is the start of an organization wide discussion of program.

Hello comrades, Jean Allen Rochester NY they/them.

This proposed program is trying to answer a simple question: how can the working class, as a class, rule society?

Our settler colonial history has been one of a working class divided against itself, allowing a small minority of capitalists to rule the rest of us towards their interests.

This division continues to this day. This year there was a graduate workers strike in my home at the University of Rochester. During that strike, twelve student organizers were deported for showing solidarity with the Palestinian movement. Two months later, president Trump began threatening to deport our dear comrade Zohran Mamdani for winning his election as a Muslim Socialist. That shows us—if we allow division anywhere, we are affected by it everywhere. If the state can deport organizers, they can deport our electeds. If our trans siblings are disallowed from participating from society we are all affected by their absence. And if the prison system continues as a way to disempower and enslave poor workers, it will continue the color lines within our movement.

This program is aimed at uniting the WHOLE of the US working class towards immediate demands, and the greater transformation of society. It has both short term demands every chapter can take up, but it also builds on the value of the workers deserve more program by giving it a long term horizon for socialist victory, not present in either the main motion or in our comrades’ carnation program. It also uniquely speaks to the need of DSA to unite with and support our trans and migrant comrades.

It calls for the democratization and socialization of our economy, the end of US empire, and a new, democratic socialist, republic. If passed, we can use this to organize in every field and every community, saying that your struggles are workers struggles, that every fight for democracy, every cry of the oppressed, can find its voice the struggle for socialism. Thank you, vote yes on the Fighting Socialist Program

by Dahlia Green

American higher education is under assault.

Research funding, whether for sciences or humanities, has been cut off. The thugs of ICE descend upon college campuses, abducting students who dared speak out against the American-backed genocide in Gaza. International students are subject to a campaign of terror and arbitrary restrictions justified on vague “national security” grounds, a paper-thin disguise for racism and a targeted anti-intellectualism.

The most prestigious and wealthy universities, those that can best defend themselves, have responded to this assault by rolling over. Administrators have rushed to gag their students and faculty, to invite the regime to monitor their output for ideological deviation, and fork over whatever bribes the the state demands. In some cases, these lackeys of capital have used the opportunity to settle scores with their faculty, slashing positions and trumpeting the closure or gutting of departments and programs they disapprove of with a malicious glee. They have not used their privileges to stand up to the assault on their staff, students, and supposed values; they have done everything in their power to ensure its success.

The representatives of the loyal opposition have said little in response, barely bringing themselves to condemn the practice of disappearing dissidents they themselves would rather like to disappear. Jeffries and the liberal establishment he represents have decided that the universities are not popular enough for them to defend. They deem this to be another of Trump’s “distractions”, which they should ignore to talk about the more comfortable, “electable” topics of social security or law and order. These heirs to the Copperheads will not save us.

Into this carnage step the gentlemen (and it is almost all men) of the Academy who think they have found the answer to this crisis.

Writing for the Dispatch, Evan D. Morris cries for the sciences to be set free from the humanities. After all, he says, it is the fault of the ideologically astray, “woke” humanities that the axe has fallen upon universities, not the dutifully apolitical sciences! Mr. Morris lets his contempt for the humanities blind him to the reality at hand. He conjures a fantasy in which he can throw the English department to a bear in order to escape, not realizing that he will be next on the menu. In doing so, he becomes a collaborator in waiting, a delusional toadie of the regime. Pity him, for such fools do not tend to outlive their usefulness.

In contrast, Jacob Hale Russell & Dennis Patterson, both humanities professors at Rutgers University, set out to save the university, humanities and all. Writing in the Guardian, that bastion of the British Liberal, they bemoan the assault on higher education, the decline in public trust in universities, and the tendency of administrators to throw their faculty under the bus. They rightly regard this as a crisis – but one which is strictly institutional, rather than political. In their worldview, the problem is not that universities will no longer be spaces of open political struggle, but that they have been so in the first place.

Their solution is for the academy to further retreat into institutional redoubts, to extricate itself from the very field of politics where this battle is now being fought. They propose, in other words, to vacate the field of conflict before the battle has even been fought, retreating behind a shield of legitimating, institutional neutrality.

Such a position is the equivalent of burying one’s head in the sand, of substituting lofty sounding phrases like “freedom of inquiry” for a hard reckoning with the grim realities facing higher education. Russell and Patterson hail the “Chicago Principles” while failing to engage with the fact that the University of Chicago has begun the liquidation of its humanities grad programs and cracking down on “DEI”, executing the program of the regime alongside empty pronouncements of academic freedom.

The “neutrality” they trumpet is a false hope, little more than a smokescreen for the shock troops of the right in their effort to dismantle higher education. Perhaps, as Russell and Patterson say, an error was made in the past regarding the left’s discursive strategies, that “safetyism” was a mistake. Even so, we cannot change the past, and no amount of performative neutrality will stay the axe. Attempting to adopt a position of neutrality will only embolden and strengthen the assault on universities, not stop it.

Indeed, many colleges already adopted so-called neutrality in response to the wave of protests that swept college campuses in the last two years. This supposed neutrality has not coincided with a flourishing of free inquiry, as Russell and Patterson would have us think, but an intensification of the assault on campus groups condemned by the state and right-wing activists!

What then, is to be done?

The true solution lies in embracing the political nature of the struggle now ongoing on college campuses, in fostering consciousness and solidarity among students and staff alike. We must organize ourselves, in unions, in professional organizations, in student organizations, and we must work together to fight. Graduate assistant unions and professor’s associations must create a united front to resist pressure from administrations and the state to curb free inquiry and end the very existence of academia.

Administrations which fight must receive full support in their struggle, while those that capitulate must be fought at every turn, pressured into reversing course. Administrators have generally proven to be cowards, and so we must make it a more unappealing proposition to go to war with their own university than it is to comply with the state’s directives. If they are punished for assisting in the assault and rewarded for resisting, the hope is that some might find some spine.

This will not be easy. It will require hard work, cooperation, and a willingness to endure hardship. Yet the advancement of human knowledge is far too precious a pursuit to abandon without a fight.

This week, the residents of the Sunset District removed Joel Engardio from the Board of Supervisors. DSA SF didn’t lead the recall, but we didn’t try to stop it. Engardio is anti-worker, pro-cop, landlord-first, and fully backed by GrowSF and the real estate elite. He ignored the demands of working-class residents and DSA members in D4. He has been a mouthpiece for the owning class, and we won’t be sad when he’s gone. Good riddance.

Joel Engardio never represented the working class. In his three years in office, he introduced a paltry 32 pieces of legislation (DSA SF member and D9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder has already authored 21 pieces in her 10 months in office), none of which addressed the affordability crisis strangling this city’s working families. Instead, he backed a budget that cut funding for violence prevention in the Mission, slashed emergency shelter for survivors of domestic violence, defunded immigrant legal services, and eliminated good, unionized city jobs.

While working-class people are struggling to survive, Engardio pushed for money to pad the pockets of the police. He backed increased overtime for SFPD just months after an independent audit found a pattern of rampant abuse of overtime funds by the cops.

He voted to strip money from Prop C (Our City, our Home), directly undermining the will of the voters and reducing the city’s ability to build desperately needed affordable housing. Capitalism cannot solve the housing crisis, and Engardio’s votes have made it worse.

As Engardio is well aware, the right to recall is not just a procedural tool, it’s a weapon. And like any weapon, it must be wielded with discipline. We believe it belongs in the hands of the working class, and the working class alone.

We’ve seen how recalls can be used as weapons by the right. Just ask our comrades in Seattle, where big business tried (And failed! Three times!) to unseat Kshama Sawant. These efforts failed because she was deeply rooted in labor and class struggle.

A recall against a socialist organizer is an attack on the people, and the people will respond. A recall against a reactionary with no genuine base? That’s a very different story.

Unfortunately, our billionaire Mayor Lurie will not replace Engardio with a champion of the working class. But to whoever does get appointed, may you learn from Joel’s sorry tale: If you stand for nothing, nobody will have your back.

If you want to build a working class movement with substance, join DSA.

This week, the residents of the Sunset District removed Joel Engardio from the Board of Supervisors. DSA SF didn’t lead the recall, but we didn’t try to stop it. Engardio is anti-worker, pro-cop, landlord-first, and fully backed by GrowSF and the real estate elite. He ignored the demands of working-class residents and DSA members in D4. He has been a mouthpiece for the owning class, and we won’t be sad when he’s gone. Good riddance.

Joel Engardio never represented the working class. In his three years in office, he introduced a paltry 32 pieces of legislation (DSA SF member and D9 Supervisor Jackie Fielder has already authored 21 pieces in her 10 months in office), none of which addressed the affordability crisis strangling this city’s working families. Instead, he backed a budget that cut funding for violence prevention in the Mission, slashed emergency shelter for survivors of domestic violence, defunded immigrant legal services, and eliminated good, unionized city jobs.

While working-class people are struggling to survive, Engardio pushed for money to pad the pockets of the police. He backed increased overtime for SFPD just months after an independent audit found a pattern of rampant abuse of overtime funds by the cops.

He voted to strip money from Prop C (Our City, our Home), directly undermining the will of the voters and reducing the city’s ability to build desperately needed affordable housing. Capitalism cannot solve the housing crisis, and Engardio’s votes have made it worse.

As Engardio is well aware, the right to recall is not just a procedural tool, it’s a weapon. And like any weapon, it must be wielded with discipline. We believe it belongs in the hands of the working class, and the working class alone.

We’ve seen how recalls can be used as weapons by the right. Just ask our comrades in Seattle, where big business tried (And failed! Three times!) to unseat Kshama Sawant. These efforts failed because she was deeply rooted in labor and class struggle.

A recall against a socialist organizer is an attack on the people, and the people will respond. A recall against a reactionary with no genuine base? That’s a very different story.

Unfortunately, our billionaire Mayor Lurie will not replace Engardio with a champion of the working class. But to whoever does get appointed, may you learn from Joel’s sorry tale: If you stand for nothing, nobody will have your back.

If you want to build a working class movement with substance, join DSA.

by Elizabeth Henderson

Our long-tailed rodent neighbors, the squirrels set an example for us humanoids to imitate—when harvests are plentiful, they stash food away for the winter, much to the annoyance of city gardeners who find their veg and flower beds full of holes. We have many more storage choices—we could dig a deep hole, but we can also dry, can, juice, freeze and root-cellar the foods we wish to preserve.

At area farmers markets or direct from farmers, you can buy large quantities of locally grown produce at much lower prices than when you buy a single pound of fruit or head of broccoli. Bulk prices are lower for a few reasons. When every local farm has tomatoes, the large supply lowers the price, especially since tomatoes are also still coming in from points west and south. Selling a large quantity costs a farmer less in time and materials for packaging and marketing. Often, farmers sell the very best-looking produce at the highest price they can get and then sell “seconds” for less. Produce that appears perfect is not necessarily any better to eat. In fact, it may have more residues from the chemicals used to achieve that perfection.

There are many good sources of information on putting food by—books, videos, classes at the Monroe County Cooperative Extension, Taproot and 490 Farmers. The easiest way is to learn from someone who knows how—volunteer to help a skilled friend. (I will keep DSA Ecosoc posted on when I plan to can!) Or you can hold a canning party where friends make sauce or prep veggies to freeze together. You have to cook most vegetables for a few minutes before you freeze them. I have posted my CSA Cookbook: Food Book for a Sustainable Harvest on the DSA Slack. Along with recipes, I include information about storing vegetables short and long term, a bit of history of each crop and what nutrients it provides.

Although canned tomato sauce is relatively inexpensive, I like to make big batches of my own sauce. I can the sauce in quart bell jars using the hot-pack method. I boil the jars and fill them while still hot with hot sauce. As the sauce cools, you can hear the lids click as a vacuum forms at the top of the jar.

According to Your Money or Your Life by Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez, investing in a chest freezer pays for itself faster than almost any other investment you can make. During the warm months, I fill our freezer with enough jars of berries that I pick myself to liven up my oatmeal all winter. A few nights a week, I cook twice as much for dinner as we can eat so that I can freeze half to eat later. In good years, we eat summer-cooked meals out of the freezer into March or April. Since you have to cook low-acid vegetables like cucumbers for a long time to prevent botulism, I freeze the dill pickles I make in quart jars. I also keep a 25-pound sack of rice in the freezer to prevent grain moths from getting into it.

If you have a cool space in a cellar or a section of a porch or garage that does not freeze, you can store bins of potatoes and other root crops. Onions and garlic need a drier space that is also cool.

Two of my favorite crops—red peppers and leeks—are very expensive most of the year. In September, you can find both vegetables at lower prices. Peppers are easy to freeze. You just wash them, clean out the seeds, cut them up and freeze them without any cooking. Leeks will keep for months with their roots in a bit of soil in a bucket in a cellar or garage. You may have to peel off an outer leaf that has turned yellow, but the center will still be good.

Renters with small or shared apartments might be able to partner with comrades who have more space. If ROC DSA ever gets an office, it could include a big chest freezer and shelves to store members’ canned food. A place to store your squirrel bulk might be a great benefit for the chapter to offer!

Remember to sign up for the Soil Health Field Day, Tuesday, September 16, 3:00pm – 6:00pm at the Foodlink Community Farm, 585 Lexington Ave, Rochester. You will get free cover crop seed if you a part of a community garden!

Register: bit.ly/roc-soil. The program will start promptly at 3:00 PM. Light refreshments provided

Topics include:

• Cover cropping in small spaces- species selection, seeding and termination strategies
• Cover crop demonstration plots
• Building soil health in raised beds
• Best practices for dealing with heavy metals soil contamination in the urban environment
• Soil health demonstrations on impacts of cover crop and other management practices from NY Soil Health

COST: FREE, but pre-registration is required. Space is limited!

On July 28th 2025, the Freelizabeth campaign clenched victory in the first of two initiatives in Elizabeth, NJ by reinstating the $20 rent cap for rent controlled buildings. After two months of petitioning, DSA members presented to City Council, with the expectation of the question going to ballot in November, an amended ordinance returning the cap after its removal at the behest of landlords in 2022. After 6 days of deliberation by the Council and pressure from tenants, the Council voted unanimously to bring back the cap.

As of this moment, tenants in rent controlled buildings (those older than 30 years and with 3 or more non-landlord dwelling units) may only see rent hikes of $20 annually for at least the next two years; essentially freezing the rent for thousands of tenants in the state’s fourth largest city.

Comrades, compañeros from Movimiento Cosecha, and neighbors all across Elizabeth are responsible for this win but our fight is not yet over. As of July 28th, an organized group of landlords have sued the City and our petitioners in an effort to nullify the amended ordinance. We’re confident in our defense of the ordinance both on the merits of the nearly 800 petitions collected and the constitutionality of imposing such caps on rent, and soon we’ll level any legal challenge to the cap. Just recently, on September 19th, we won the first of the several challenges to our rent cap and the City’s passage of the ordinance. Show up and support in our remaining court appearances to defend the cap this fall.

Like our comrade New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani has said and done through his campaign, we’re fighting the affordability crisis from within, and Trump’s attacks on democracy from Washington. Moreover, we’re building a movement powered by the working class, and one that can withstand any legal, political and constitutional challenge.

We encourage neighbors to join, donate, and volunteer at freelizabeth.com to help us build the tenants’ movement, defend from legal challenges, and win universal suffrage in such a key city for the movement for socialism.

Written By Allison Claire Chang

San Mateo County Opts In to Regional Funding Measure

Follow-up to Get on the Bus: Retaking Bay Area Public Transit

Bay Area public transit notched a generational win for operational funding thanks to grassroots organizers and transit advocates. Throughout 2025, Peninsula DSA (PDSA) in suburban San Mateo County engaged transit riders and activists to save light rail Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART, 178,000 weekday riders) and commuter rail Caltrain (37,000 weekday riders) from looming fiscal cliffs and severe service cuts.

In partnership with Transbay Coalition, PDSA organizers reached people via many channels, including PDSA’s social media; flyering BART and Caltrain stations and talking to riders; posting to r/BART and r/Caltrain on Reddit; mobilizing PDSA chapter members via email, text messages, and our own Discord server; and a successful coalition rally during rush hour at a major transit hub in Millbrae. Our underlying message to transit riders? Demand San Mateo County opt in to SB 63!

PDSA identified SB 63, Senator Scott Weiner (District 11) and Senator Jesse Arreguín (District 7)’s 2026 five-county regional funding measure, as a priority campaign for our chapter. The Senate bill authorizes a 2026 citizens ballot initiative campaign to raise new funds to sustain BART, Caltrain, Muni (San Francisco), and other transit agencies in the Bay Area as they continue to recover their pre-COVID ridership. The tens of millions of dollars in new dedicated revenue would save these fixed-rail operators from massive service cuts that would render them virtually unusable.

The importance of maximum funding

But of course there’s a catch: Politicians chose to give both Santa Clara County and San Mateo County, the two wealthiest counties of the five, the option to decline to participate in the group project or opt in at a lower tax rate than the other three counties. Transit riders like us immediately understood exactly how important it is to get maximum funding for our county, which relies on Caltrain for more than just Giants games and has six BART stations, including an essential stop at San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

But transit riders aren’t the decision makers in San Mateo County. That’d be SamTrans, the county-wide bus system, or more specifically, the nine members of the Board of Directors. To save BART and Caltrain, PDSA members and allies attended the monthly SamTrans Board of Directors meetings to push them to think beyond San Mateo County’s borders and invest in regional transit for the people through SB 63. Our consistent pressure tactic—whether in person, via Zoom, or by email—was making well-coordinated public comments in support of opting in to a progressively funded regional funding measure.

Comrades and allies used our time at the podium to share personal transit stories and educate the Board members, most of whom never use transit, on how transit cuts would negatively impact local SamTrans riders and San Mateo County residents. We also took the opportunity to push for funding SB 63 with a gross receipts tax (0.112% tax on the top 2% of businesses) instead of a regular regressive sales tax (of ¼ or ½ cent) that would hit low-income SamTrans riders the hardest.

Final Showdown with SamTrans

The August 6 SamTrans Board meeting, when the Directors voted on SB 63, was highly unusual. Chair Jeff Gee refused to hear or discuss any public comments focused on the gross receipts tax, despite the hundreds of emails on that topic that we had encouraged transit riders to send to the Board of Supervisors and other influential political bodies. PDSA member Marc S used his public comment to gesture to gross receipts anyway: “The proposed sales tax, compared to other tax options, might not even prevent all cuts. Participating in SB 63 today is the bare minimum [to] address the San Mateo County residents' need for affordable, safe, and equitable transit both within the county and around the Bay Area.”

In the eleventh hour, California Assemblymember Diane Papan was given the floor and used her time to advertise her own overreaching amendment to SB 63 that called for “accountability” regarding how other counties would spend the funds at their transit agencies, while repeating misinformation about how BART operates and railing against “taxation without representation”—the Boston Tea Party was mentioned. (Note: San Mateo County would already have a seat on BART’s Board of Directors, and the vote and oversight Papan desires, if politicians hadn’t opted out of the network in the 1960s!) “The fiscally conservative rhetoric came from the fact that none of these board members seem to know there are citizens of San Mateo County who rely on transit to get around,” said Becca W, a PDSA member who publicly commented. “But now with this public pressure, they are well aware.”

Even so, PDSA’s s organizing efforts paid off. The SamTrans Board voted 8-1 to opt in to SB 63 to raise new revenue to fund the transit agencies in the five-county Bay Area: Alameda, Contra Costa, San Mateo, Santa Clara, and San Francisco. (The one dissenting vote was Jackie Speier.) SamTrans opted in at the higher ½ cent sales tax rate, a huge win considering they had been leaning toward opting out of the measure before our campaign kicked into gear. The public records of their official correspondence shows SamTrans received more than a hundred emailed public comments specifically in support of SB 63, exceeding their average inbox haul by a factor of ten.

Coordinated Public Transit Is the Way Forward

Assuming the citizens’ ballot measure is approved by a simple majority of voters in November 2026, the five-county Bay Area will have a new shared revenue source for maintaining current levels of service for public transit. Because Bay Area residents and visitors cross county borders all the time, it only makes sense that we plan and fund projects together. Robust public transit networks will be key in building a green future where a polluting private car is no longer the only viable option for getting around San Mateo County.

Of course, with inflation and tariffs, even more money will be necessary if transit operators are to deliver faster, rider-friendly, affordable, and coordinated service around the region. Though the gross receipts tax didn’t make it into the final bill, keeping Bay Area transit operational with an assist from wealthy San Mateo County allows PDSA organizers the space and time to plan our next strategic move to win better (and eventually free!) transit for all.

Allison Claire Chang

Allison Claire Chang is a writer, editor, Peninsula DSA Steering Committee member, and community organizer or public transit. She can be reached at [email protected]

Written By Taylor Brown

Coordinated banner drops at 25+ sites escalate DSA boycott targeting Chevron’s Israel portfolio

DSA chapters from Seattle to San Diego joined dozens of autonomous pro-Palestine and Climate Justice groups on August 29 to stage a coordinated banner drop at more than 25 locations across the West Coast. The action grew out of the escalating boycott of Chevron, linking everyday fuel purchases to the company’s role in enabling human rights abuses in Gaza.

“The genocide in Gaza involves many actors,” said Tim Husarik, a San Diego DSA member. “Chevron is among the most complicit—profiting from destruction—so building support for boycott, divestment, and sanctions is essential in the imperial core.”

The banner drop

Chapters unfurled banners and handed out flyers urging neighbors to join the boycott and to ask Chevron franchise owners to press corporate leadership to end business in Israel. Local actions were autonomous, but timing and messaging were coordinated to maximize visibility and underscore a sustained, multi-chapter campaign. “The banner drop was a good tactic,” said Bonnie Lockhart, an East Bay DSA member. “Small groups could pull it off with a few people, and larger groups could span multiple sites or draw a crowd on an overpass to create drama and space to plan next steps.” These banner drops are part of the broader #StopFuelingGenocide campaign, of which our national DSA International Committee is a leading coalition member. The coalition has staged protests in more than 20 U.S. cities at Chevron gas stations, refineries, and corporate offices. At stations, volunteers have asked drivers to fill up elsewhere and sign the boycott pledge—an effort that has drawn tens of thousands of consumer commitments since launch.

Why Chevron and why now

According to the American Friends Service Committee, after acquiring Noble Energy in 2020, Chevron became the operator of the Tamar field and a major partner at Leviathan, making it Israel’s largest natural gas producer. In 2023, the company earned an estimated $1.5 billion from these projects while Israel collected roughly $820 million in royalties and fees. About 71 percent of Israel’s electricity that year came from fossil gas, with roughly two-thirds supplied from Tamar under contract to the state-owned Israel Electric Corporation through 2030. Chevron also operates and partially owns the East Mediterranean Gas (EMG) pipeline, which links Israel and Egypt. The Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement has since elevated Chevron as a strategic boycott target in light of its role in operating Israel’s gas fields and exporting to regional markets. Electricity generated from Chevron-supplied gas powers military bases, prisons, police, and illegal settlements via the Israel Electric Corporation. Control over generation and transmission has repeatedly been used against Palestinians through exclusionary service and punitive restrictions. Offshore, the Israeli Navy has tightened Gaza’s maritime blockade in part to secure the Tamar rig and the nearby EMG pipeline—further devastating coastal livelihoods.

One of the boycott’s innovations is to tie the human rights abuses in Palestine to the growing devastation of climate change. Chevron’s investment in Israel not only enables genocide, but it also contributes to the broader degradation of the planet. Long-term supply contracts and new pipeline capacity lock in fossil dependence through at least the 2030s, crowding out renewables and delaying decarbonization. The same chains that power military bases and settlements in Israel also contribute to the heat waves, wildfires, and floods facing communities around the world.

Franchisee strategy

The campaign focuses on Chevron’s franchise network as a locally rooted pressure point. Petitions delivered to station owners make a neighbor-to-neighbor ask: sign a letter urging Chevron to exit Israel and post a statement condemning the company’s role in genocide. Franchisees who sign the letter and post a notice will not be picketed, keeping pressure focused on Chevron’s corporate decision-makers rather than small business owners. A parallel sign-on letter from franchisees frames the issue as brand and revenue risk—boycotts and protests harm independent operators—pressing corporate leadership to end the practices that generate that risk.

What’s next

The boycott will continue until Chevron ceases operations in Israel and ends business practices that enable human rights abuses in Gaza. That means sustained station outreach, more franchisee sign-ons, and visible actions that grow the boycott’s base. Since October 2023, Chevron has repeatedly shut the Tamar field and scaled back exports; expansion at Leviathan and proposed pipelines have been halted or postponed, and Egyptian buyers have sought alternatives. The company’s own filings warn that future impacts on production and revenue remain uncertain—uncertainty we aim to leverage through neighbor-to-neighbor organizing. To build momentum, the coalition is coordinating additional action that links Palestine solidarity groups with climate-justice, labor, and Indigenous organizers—using station-level outreach to pressure corporate, fighting for a more just and sustainable future.

West Coast coordination of actions will continue, and we urge CA DSA comrades to get involved. As Eddie Vcelikova of DSA Los Angeles put it, “I found it really inspiring to think that a car could drive from Orange County to Bakersfield and hit four banner drops, all about how Chevron is complicit in genocide. I think these organized actions show power. The unified message is hard to ignore.”

To learn more about DSA’s Stop Fueling Genocide campaign and to join the West Coast Boycott Chevron coalition, contact [email protected]

Taylor Brown

Taylor Brown is a member of East Bay DSA.

Written By Brenna Silbory and Mike Van Gorder

Enriching the wealthy owners of for-profit companies at public expense is central to the current administration's vast, inhumane, racist, frequently illegal, and economically reckless deportation machine. Among those receiving this federal largesse are private charter airlines, which appear to be profitably relocating individual ICE detainees up to twenty times each, all over the country, for no apparent reason other than to immiserate them and thwart their legal representation.

But in a huge victory for a national boycott campaign undertaken by multiple DSA chapters and other organizations, one ICE-sub-contracted deporter, budget flyer Avelo Airlines, is abandoning all of its normal commercial flights on the West Coast, previously a core part of its business.

Unusual Commercial Exposure

Before its contract with ICE, Avelo's prior business model had it simply selling individual commercial tickets to willing passengers in over 50 smaller, "secondary" public airports in the normal fashion. It launched service between southern California's Burbank and northern California's Santa Rosa in 2021. By contrast, other airlines colluding with "ICE Air" are little-known private charter companies like Global Crossing Airlines (aka Global X) and Eastern Air Express, which, when they aren't tormenting deportees, quietly fly sports teams and rock bands between gigs. Like extraordinarily profitable immigrant detention center operators CoreCivic and GEO Group, these entities don't exactly appeal to a broad customer base. This made Avelo a unique target.

In early April 2025, Avelo announced its ICE deportation flights would begin the following month. The backlash was immediate. The Association of Flight Attendants/Communications Worker of America called out the inhumane nature of these deportation flights, which compromise passenger safety, and stated "We cannot do our jobs in these conditions.”

In Connecticut, where Avelo had deep financial ties and reportedly 24% of its operational capacity, the New Haven Immigrants Coalition launched a Change.org petition against the airline that quickly went viral, and began protesting at Connecticut's Tweed New Haven Airport. State Attorney General William Tong expressed alarm in a letter sent to the airline, writing:

"These are flights where people—men, women and children—are shackled in handcuffs, waist chains and leg irons, where [...] people soil themselves because they are denied access to bathrooms. These are flights to dangerous jungle prisons in El Salvador and Guantanamo, where chained, bowed and shaved men are paraded before cameras for propaganda videos. These are flights flown overseas in direct defiance of court orders to return, and operated pursuant to a questionable declaration of war subject to active legal challenge. These are flights carrying terrified international students, snatched off the streets of their college towns for daring to protest. These are flights ordered by an administration that has sought to eliminate birthright citizenship—the core constitutional principle that has given me and so many others our futures in this country."

Avelo refused to confirm to AG Tong that it would comply with court orders, refrain from these human rights abuses, guarantee passenger safety and well-being, or honor birthright citizenship. "It is clear all they intend to do is take state support and make money off other people’s suffering," Tong lamented, noting that in Connecticut (as elsewhere), public funds subsidized the company's presence.

Soon after, DSA International Committee's Migrant Rights Working Group began boycott organizing, toxifying Avelo's brand, creating a useful chapter toolkit and launching a letter campaign to Avelo executives and financiers. Other early adopters of the boycott campaign included Siembra North Carolina and chapters of Indivisible and 50501 around the country.

The West Coast Fights Back

Here's my (Mike’s) take on the events in Burbank:

We knew after that second asteroid strike of an election that fascism was coming to our country, but it was still a shock to see it naked and brazen in our own neighborhoods. It was in early spring, as ridiculous displays of force and cruelty rounded up dozens of our neighbors, when DSA-LA members like me first heard about Avelo's ICE contract. Hollywood Burbank Airport was Avelo's largest West Coast hub. Burbank is a progressive, artsy town full of union stagehands and animators. Like everywhere else cool in America, it has become prohibitively expensive and has produced a robust community of tenant activists in response. It was in a Signal thread on this topic that I pitched my fellow activists, “Y’all, we have to protest against the fascist airline in our backyard.” Three other angry Burbankers agreed with me and we picked the following week for an action at the airport, putting out a general call to the community to stand against a company trying to profit from human rights abuses. We expected a modest turnout.

On April 18, well over a hundred people came out to the Burbank Airport on a Friday at noon, in the middle of the workday. Local elected officials, DSA-endorsed candidates for office (I’m proud to have been one!) and activists from a half dozen local organizations turned out. We got a constant stream of honks and support to about six middle fingers per hour. Somebody mentioned that we should do it again, so we made it a biweekly protest for Friday at noon. Another community group started an entirely separate regular protest on the weekends; both protests had substantial community attendance. And so it went for months, hammering Avelo, while across town another boycott took on Tesla and Elon Musk. We had a clear demand made against a clear antagonist – cancel the ICE contract or get the hell out of our town.

Meanwhile, following Santa Rosa airport protests by Sonoma DSAers and others, Avelo suddenly announced on May 1 it was ending service there. And in Oregon's capital city, Salem DSA's Labor Working Group developed its own boycott pressure campaign, holding four well-attended public rallies at the airport and town hall, as well as a petition and letter-writing campaign.

Back in Burbank in June, we watched ICE hurriedly shuttle more victims across the tarmac and onto unmarked charter flights. Protests at federal facilities provoked an absurd and violent overreaction from the LAPD on June 8 (you may have seen the five torched Waymos), and LAPD shot some reporters in the back with “less lethal” munitions that are designed and mandated to be fired at the ground. I helped provide first aid to a man who was shot with a tear gas canister at point blank range while he committed the supposedly threatening act of pulling to their feet someone who had fallen.

We deserve real justice for these sickening abuses of force, and we certainly deserve justice for the state-sponsored terrorism hiding behind masks, Oakley sunglasses and government-issue rifles, but such justice is some distance away. Avelo Airlines, in contrast, was right there. So we kept protesting.

Surprise From Behind the Redwood Curtain

California Redwood Coast Humboldt County Airport (ACV) is a small commercial airport notable for its fog, lush and verdant scenery, and alternative to driving three to five hours on winding rural roads to get to a city larger than the Eureka/Arcata "metropolitan" area, population roughly 40,000. Only Avelo and United offer flights here.

Humboldt DSA was still a tiny pre-Organizing Committee, and had never even held a public meeting or tabled at an event, when our anger at the southern California ICE abuses prompted us to vote on June 13 to join the Boycott Avelo campaign as our very first...anything. Part of our reasoning was strategic: we were meeting in a sanctuary city in a sanctuary county in a sanctuary state, so surely here of all places we could find some foothold on the issue? And another part was practical: the toolkit, training and friendly coaching from the International Committee's Migrant Rights Working Group were resources we needed to learn how to do DSA pressure campaigns.

Local DSAer G. Mario Fernandez, a Eureka city councilmember, confirmed that a couple thousand dollars in city funds had recently gone to Avelo tickets for staff travel. Along with other locals, including the more established Humboldt Democracy Connections (HDC), Humboldt DSA began pressuring the council to join the boycott. We contacted them as concerned voters, spread the word personally, online, and while tabling at local events, and wrote an organizational letter to the city council that was picked up and published on July 7 by a local news blog, prompting additional local media coverage.

The next night, on July 8, we waited for hours at a Eureka City Council meeting alongside HDC members until public comment was called on Item I.2, "Use of Avelo Airline". All nerves, uncertainty, and moral clarity, 8 DSA members and soon-to-be members provided half the public comment that night.

Even though the city attorney had expressed liability concerns about the city council voting to join the boycott, after hearing from all of us, Councilmember Fernandez put forward a motion to "Discontinue use of Avelo as a vendor until such time that they are no longer in contract with the Department of Homeland Security to operate deportation [flights]." Then we watched in amazement as councilmember after councilmember publicly declared their disgust at the grotesqueries of the current administration's deportation policies. They ultimately voted 5-0 to pass the motion.

The City of Eureka had just become the first public jurisdiction in the country to join the boycott.

Avelo’s West Coast Retreat

Less than a week later, Avelo announced it would be withdrawing from Humboldt, and ultimately all of its West Coast service by early December. This meant not only Humboldt County and Burbank, but Salem, Eugene, and Medford in Oregon; Pasco and Redmond in Washington; Las Vegas, Nevada; and Kalispell, Montana. After all the public investment in the company by many of these places, Avelo was taking the money and running, as it had done before.

While the company would only attribute its decision to vague economic factors, multiple news outlets connected it to the boycott. One industry publication called it "a major strategic shift away from a geography that has comprised a significant share of its flying". On July 17, its competitor Breeze Airways, under a "Seriously Nice" slogan, announced it would be adding service to Humboldt and several other locales just abandoned by Avelo.

These events galvanized the boycott movement elsewhere. After a relentless campaign where it all began, the City of New Haven finally joined the boycott July 28, prohibiting staff from spending public funds on Avelo tickets or marketing. Its mayor noted, "Travel should be about bringing people together, not tearing families apart." Avelo then dropped service it had only begun providing between New Haven and Portland, Maine three months before.

At DSA's August Convention in Chicago, thirty chapters attended the Boycott Avelo Summit. The work continues all over the country. Marilia M., co-chair of DSA IC's International Migrant Rights Working Group notes:

I've felt really energized by the DSA members leading the Avelo Boycott in their chapters. People are getting really creative with the tactics they are experimenting with. It feels really good to be engaged in a campaign that has a clear path to victory, even if it's only a small win in the bigger picture of dismantling the ICE apparatus. It'll be all of the small victories together that ultimately take down the machinery that profits from the detention of our communities.

On September 17, over sixty DSAers working on chapter communications nationwide attended a communications training focused on the Avelo boycott. An additional victory came the next day when, after continued pressure, on September 18, Humboldt County residents learned Avelo was withdrawing even sooner than previously announced, effective October 20. On September 30, a power mapping workshop will further equip chapters working on the boycott.

As the movement grows within DSA, it is complemented by The Coalition to Stop Avelo, groundavelo.org, groundice.org (which targets aviation fuel providers), and Who's Profiting from ICE, which identifies other deportation machine companies.

We are too rarely afforded opportunities in life for triumph. When it happens, we must savor it so we can draw strength and determination when we face inevitable setbacks. We earned this West Coast victory together, and so shall we earn the next, and the next, and the next.

Brenna Silbory and Mike Van Gorder

Brenna Silbory is a founding member of Humboldt DSA and California Red's Horrible Things Subsubsubcommittee. She writes from unceded Wiyot territory. Mike Van Gorder is a housing policy analyst for the State of California and was the cofounder of the Glendale Tenants Union. He was a DSA-endorsed candidate for Burbank City Council in 2024 and plans to run again.