People Are Going to Rise Up! Longshore, Automation, AI On The Docks & The Effect On All Workers
At Crockett SugarFest Workers Speak Out On ILWU 6 Strike Against Union Busting C&H Sugar Refinery
https://youtu.be/VQZbJos-cg4
At the Crockett Sugar Festival, workers joined the ILWU Local 6 picket lines at the C & H sugar refinery and spoke out about that struggle and the issues …facing all working people. Also, a Filipino American from Hawaii talked about his families life and their against the owners and the connection between the Philippine
sugar cane workers from the island of Negros and the ILWU Local 6 struggle. He reported that the ILWU Local 10 had endorsed the campaign for justice with Negros sugar cane workers.
The C & H refinery which is the only sugar refinery on the West Coast is controlled by American Sugar Refineries ASR which is owned by the Fanjul family. They are big financial supporters and neighbors of Trump and also were the clients of Epstein.
They have used slave labor in the Dominican Republic and have gotten Trump to remove of the ban on
importation of sugar cane from the Dominican Republic because of the slave labor conditions of the cane workers. The festival was held on July 19, 2026.
Additional Media:
Hawaiian Workers Join ILWU Local 6 Strike Against C&H ASR Fanjul Family Refinery in Crockett
https://youtu.be/99_qhAJ8d98
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https://youtu.be/QEkB5QUAQG8
ILWU 6 Workers Strike At Crockett C&H ASR Sugar Plant To Protect Their Contract & Conditions
https://youtu.be/PY6Rj82n_cs
ILWU Struggles 1984-2010, The Struggle Continues
https://youtu.be/ABosvjawnj4
The Sugar Babies Amy Serrano 2005 2006
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gyVcyRjy52Q
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https://youtu.be/3fTLkPEEu34
On Juneteenth, ILWU Local 10 VP Trent Willis Talks About History & Struggle For General Strike Today
https://youtu.be/-dqrEQHYzqI
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https://youtu.be/DdIzrM2B-9w
ILWU 10 Solidarity Meeting On Palestine: An Injury To One Is An Injury To All
https://youtu.be/XiPs6lccJM0
Zim Line Hit With Pickets-ILWU 10 & 34 Workers Stand Against Israeli Apartheid
https://youtu.be/2Gp503j9WSk
Mass March & Picket At Oakland Port To Stop Israel's Zim Line Ship Piraeus To Protest Crimes In Gaza
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PcJHlnq4YIo
Danny Glover Joins ILWU 10 In Supporting Freedom For Mumia on February 16, 2023
https://youtu.be/j0qJX4zDf9s
ILUW 1984 San Francisco Local 10 & 34 Anti-Apartheid Action Against Racist South African
For More Information
ILWU 6 Crockett C&G Strike Fund
https://square.link/u/ifFpgkRO
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
At the Crockett Sugar Festival, workers joined the ILWU Local 6 pic…
youtu.beSilicon Valley prides itself on looking to the future. This play shows how an ancient bias still shapes it
https://www.sfchronicle.com/entertainment/theater/article/caste-system-tech-indian-22316021.php
By Zara Irshad,
Staff Writer
Updated July 11, 2026 9:53 a.m.
Actors …Kunal Dudheker, from left, Kapil Talwalkar and Megan Suri react to Ranjita Chakravarty’s monologue during rehearsal for “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Actors Kunal Dudheker, from left, Kapil Talwalkar and Megan Suri react to Ranjita Chakravarty’s monologue during rehearsal for “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle
Beneath Silicon Valley’s image of innovation lies an ancient system of division that still determines who succeeds and who doesn’t.
In “The Employee Dharma Handbook,” directed by Snehal Desai in its world premiere at TheatreWorks Silicon Valley on Saturday, July 11, playwright Geetha Reddy examines how the Indian caste system quietly shapes power dynamics in the workplace.
More Information
“The Employee Dharma Handbook”: 2 and 7:30 p.m Saturdays and Wednesdays; 1 and 6 p.m. Sundays; 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays and Thursdays-Fridays. Through Aug. 2. $54-$104. Lucie Stern Theatre, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto. 877-662-8978. https://theatreworks.org
Set at a Silicon Valley aerospace firm, the play follows HR executive Val (Kathryn Smith-McGlynn) as she investigates lead engineers who she suspects overlooked young female engineer Leela (Megan Suri) for a promotion due to sexism. While investigating mission manager Krish (Kapil Talwalkar) and recently promoted engineer Baasu (Kunal Dudheker), she instead uncovers deep-rooted caste tensions among the company’s Indian immigrant employees that are complicating their relationships.
“No one has done this. No American playwright has ventured into this topic,” Talwalkar, a Cupertino native, said. “Caste for most people has sort of been this archaic, abstract concept — especially if you’re not Indian.”
Review: ‘The Employee Dharma Handbook’ is too good to end with its world premiere
Kapil Talwalkar plays Krish, an employee in a Silicon Valley aerospace firm, in “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Kapil Talwalkar plays Krish, an employee in a Silicon Valley aerospace firm, in “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle
Caste refers to the social group into which a person is born, often tied to traditional occupations and social status. While most Americans learn about the caste system as an archaic practice through history books, its influence persists for many Indians today, shaping social interactions and opportunities — whether consciously acknowledged or not. Even now, a person’s surname can sometimes signal their caste background.
Reddy drew inspiration for “The Employee Dharma Handbook” from a 2020 lawsuitoriginally filed in the San Jose Federal Court against Cisco and two of its engineers by the California Civil Rights Department, which alleged caste discrimination. After learning about other instances of such harassment in the workplace and the discourse that the case sparked within the Indian community, she decided to delve deeper.
“You have the caste system at work, and you have the capitalist system of work. They’re both systems of worker exploitation,” she explained. “It was really interesting to me to see how these corporate cultures and an actual culture intersect.”
Playwright Geetha Reddy examines how the Indian caste system quietly shapes power dynamics in the workplace in “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Playwright Geetha Reddy examines how the Indian caste system quietly shapes power dynamics in the workplace in “The Employee Dharma Handbook.”
Jess Lynn Goss/For the S.F. Chronicle
The show’s opening in the heart of Silicon Valley, home to one of the Bay Area’s largest populations of Indian Americans, was no coincidence. One-quarter of the region’s tech employees were born in India, second only to U.S.-born employees, according to the 2026 Silicon Valley Index. A recent Chronicle study also found that the Bay Area had 488,000 residents who identify as Indian in 2024, a figure more than three times the region’s Indian population in 2000.
“I think it’s brave,” Smith-McGlynn said of the play. “It’s going to land in a lot of different ways to a lot of people in the valley, and I think that that is going to spark conversation.”
Reddy admitted taking on the subject was daunting, given the complications of caste tensions and how often South Asian characters are reduced to flat stereotypes in popular culture — such as STEM nerds like Raj from “The Big Bang Theory” and comic-relief roles like Apu from “The Simpsons.” But she hopes as the play “keeps unraveling the complexity of it,” the community will reflect on its own subconscious behaviors and biases.
“Consciously, everyone thinks that they’re really great. It’s these subconscious (biases and behaviors) that are going on in the background that are hard for us to accept,” Talwalkar said. “If we do it right, so many people will see themselves in every character.”
July 10, 2026|Updated July 11, 2026 9:53 a.m.
of Zara Irshad
TheatreWorks Silicon Valley’s world premiere of Geetha Reddy’s “The Employee Dharma Handbook” examines caste discrimination in a modern tech…
www.sfchronicle.comAt Crockett SugarFest Workers Speak Out On ILWU 6 Strike Against Union Busting C&H Sugar Refinery
Notes on the Formation of the Chinese Working Class, 1840–1989
https://crpnews.com/asia/notes-on-the-formation-of-the-chinese-working-class-1840-1989/
The history of the Chinese labor movement intertwines with the history of the country’s industrial development, stemming from clashes …against foreign oppression in China and military conflagration among imperialist powers. Already in the early stages of its confrontation with the ruling class, we observe two essential traits: first, Chinese workers can hardly be classified, at any point in their history, as mere objects of exploitation; second, their class struggle became accustomed to unfolding simultaneously against the native ruling class and foreign oppression. Below, we outline in brief strokes some decisive moments of proletarian struggle in China over the last century and a half.
André Barbieri
INDEPENDENT
Current for Permanent Revolution (FI)
Jul 17, 2026
The history of the Chinese labor movement intertwines with the history of the country’s industrial development, stemming from clashes against foreign oppression in China and military conflagration among imperialist powers. Already in the early stages of its confrontation with the ruling class, we observe two essential traits: first, Chinese workers can hardly be classified, at any point in their history, as mere objects of exploitation; second, their class struggle became accustomed to unfolding simultaneously against the native ruling class and foreign oppression. Below, we outline in brief strokes some decisive moments of proletarian struggle in China over the last century and a half.
The properly national formation of China, with the very long process of territorial unification still underway during the Qing dynasty, and later its fall until the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949, was intertwined with increasingly significant cycles of workers’ struggles. According to historian Elizabeth Perry, in Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor:
“Workers’ protests played a central role in the political transformations that traversed China in the twentieth century. The 1911 Revolution that overthrew the imperial system, the May Fourth Movement that inaugurated a new political culture, the rise and fall of the nationalist regime, the victory of the communists, and even the post-1949 political design—all these events were profoundly affected by the Chinese labor movement” (Perry, 1993, p. 2).
In the nineteenth century, only the outline of the Chinese proletariat was present, emerging from the powerful combination of migrant rural workers heading to port cities and dispersed urban artisans. In the twentieth century, with the proletariat fully forming in the “forge of Hephaestus” of the nascent industry, the history of the Chinese labor movement had multiple explosive points. Most notable was the “cataclysmic eruption,” in the words of Mark Selden in Labor Unrest in China (1995), in the mid-1920s, as a consequence of World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917. This period, considered by many analysts (Chan 1995; Perry 1993; Selden 1995) as the most convulsive in the history of the Chinese labor movement, is located between 1922 and 1927, encompassing the founding of the Chinese Communist Party and the great workers’ uprising of the Chinese Revolution of 1925–27.
A second explosion of vitality in the Chinese labor movement, though of lesser intensity than the first, occurred during the Civil War (1946–49), which culminated in the Revolution that brought Mao Zedong to power, giving rise to the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Three other relevant moments in which the labor movement played a major role occurred within the PRC itself: in 1967, at the height of the Cultural Revolution; in 1979, during the turbulent transition from the Mao era to the Deng era; and in 1989, with the events related to the Tiananmen Square Massacre. All these periods of workers’ struggle reveal the intimate relationship of the Chinese proletariat with global events, in sharp contrast to the imperial Chinese tradition of isolationism and hostility toward foreigners (a characteristic later adopted by the CCP bureaucracy as part of its strategy to block the expansion of international revolution).
Anti-Colonial Struggles in Nineteenth-Century China
In the early stages of workers’ activity in China, still in the first half of the nineteenth century, disturbances aimed to oppose national oppression by European powers, particularly England. Sparse and immersed in a sea of peasants, the working class had little numerical weight at the time of the First Opium War (1839–1842), concentrated in guilds that animated artisanal production in coastal cities such as Shanghai and Canton. Even under these conditions, port workers played an important role as vanguard fighters against foreign military intervention.
Before the Sino-British conflict, there are records of disturbances by textile workers in Nanhai and Panyu, near Canton, against the entry of British yarn into Chinese ports, as a way to defend native spinning manufacture. During the Opium War, textile workers also acted in militias that attacked British invaders in the Sanyuanli Incident of 1841 (Selden, 1995, p. 71). After Emperor Daoguang announced the suspension of British trade rights and the forced seizure of Crown merchants’ opium, dockworkers played a prominent role in military resistance—though with little chance of success—against the British fleet commanded by plenipotentiary Henry Pottinger (later the first governor of Hong Kong).
Before the Treaty of Nanking sealed Britain’s victory, Chinese workers had already taken advantage of contact with enemy military technology to absorb it into their own arms industry. This curious aptitude for appropriating foreign technology, which would later mark China’s industrial life in the transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century, was already visible in embryo by the mid-nineteenth century. British China specialist Jonathan Spence recounts:
“In Xiamen, for example, they found an almost completed replica of a double-deck English warship with thirty cannons; it was nearly ready to be launched, and work on several similar ships was well advanced. In Wusong, they found five paddle-wheel boats ready, armed with newly cast bronze cannons. In Shanghai, they captured eighteen eighteen-pounder naval cannons, new and well executed, perfect in every detail, such as the sights cast into the body and the flintlock ears. All were mounted on sturdy wooden carriages with iron axles” (Spence, 1996, p. 169).
Similarly, dockworkers in the Sino-French War of 1885 resisted colonialism by refusing to unload enemy warships—despite the clear military disadvantage given France’s naval superiority. In 1894, during the conflict against Japan that also ended in foreign victory, native workers labored under the command of the Zongli Yamen (a kind of Qing “Foreign Ministry”) to build a military apparatus minimally compatible with the challenges posed by Japan. Numerous examples exist of these small skirmishes by Chinese militias against European and Asian colonialism, in which the labor force of major port cities, crushed under Qing rule, served as material strength against invaders.
British bombardment during the First Opium War (1839–1842). Duncan, Edward; ‘Nemesis’, East India Iron Armed Steamship; Williamson Art Gallery & Museum; http://www.artuk.org/artworks/nemesis-east-india-iron-armed-steamship-67222
Composition of the Chinese Working Class
It is crucial to note the degree of confrontation against foreign oppression as a defining mark of the nascent Chinese proletariat. The incidents that triggered the great waves of insurrectionary strikes in the early twentieth century began with abuses by the British and Japanese, who between 1860 and 1895 imposed harsh survival conditions on the Chinese empire after military victories over the Qing.
With the Treaty of Tianjin (1858), Britain opened Chinese territory to the opium trade. With the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895), Japan secured the right to build factories in all of China’s open ports, especially in the cotton industry—a bastion of major workers’ revolts prior to the 1925 Revolution and a stronghold of Communist Party influence.
Another notable point was the composition of the Chinese working class: differences in worker qualifications were often decisive in industrial cities for the level and type of organization achieved. Elizabeth Perry notes that in Shanghai, while specialized artisans from southern China held better jobs and enjoyed guild protection (regulating wages and working hours), northern peasants usually could not attain these positions and had to settle for more precarious work. These rural workers, lacking specialization, could not join guilds and were forced to organize into different gangs (such as the “Green Gang” after the 1911 Revolution), whose hierarchical control over precarious workers placed them in supervisory roles.
This division into “two souls” of the Chinese working class would later reappear in renewed form in the split between the old state-sector working class and the new rural proletariat that filled export factories during Deng Xiaoping’s pro-capitalist reforms.
Divisions and Workers’ Solidarity
These divisions were encouraged by manufacturing managers and foreign administrators operating in China (the gangs had material ties of interest with the bosses). Foremen, who held influence over workers through the hierarchy of gangs or guilds, used this power to extract monetary benefits from owners, under threat of facilitating controlled strikes. However, these divisions did not necessarily predispose workers against common action. On the contrary, Emily Honig (1986; 1989), Gail Hershatter (1986), and Elizabeth Perry (1993) describe processes of workers’ solidarity that integrated—into the incipient traits of class consciousness emerging at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century—lines of gender and place of origin as factors of collective organization and action, for example, in the segment of women workers in the cotton industry, long dominated by the Japanese.
Except for certain excesses in characterizing the identity motives of protests, which permeated Chinese workers’ consciousness, these were not obstacles but rather factors that encouraged a new kind of collective consciousness, often class consciousness, among urban workers. These reasons help illuminate the creative combination of epochal transformations in imperialist capitalism, especially at the turn of the twentieth century, and the influence of revolutionary ideas after the Russian Revolution of 1905, which began to take root in small circles of Chinese industrial cities. Thus, propelled by the defense of class conditions at work, strikes or disturbances against employer arbitrariness were not scarce:
“In 1868, workers at the Shanghai Dock and Engineering Company went on strike to prevent a wage cut. In 1879, blacksmiths at Pudong Engineering Works stopped work to protest physical abuse from a foreign supervisor. In 1883, workers at the Jiangnan Arsenal mutinied when a factory foreman tried to extend the workday. Two years later, they staged a walkout demanding higher wages. In 1890, a new administrator provoked a strike by announcing an increase in the workday from 8 to 9 hours. These early protests were largely defensive in nature. Wage cuts, physical abuse, and longer workdays precipitated conflicts. With industrial expansion after the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–95, however, the pattern of artisan strikes changed notably. The greater demand for skilled workers encouraged more aggressive forms of protest by this more favored sector of the workforce” (Perry, 1993, p. 38).
The workers’ strikes that emerged, especially among skilled artisans (carpentry, masonry, printing, painting), acquired a character not only defensive but also offensive, demanding new concessions during the period leading to the 1911 Revolution, directed by bourgeois nationalist Sun Yat-sen. With the overthrow of the Qing dynasty and the last emperor, Xuantong, the freedom of action of the Chinese labor movement, already in full course of industrial concentration, increased, since the penal code that stipulated severe punishments for strikers lost effect. The general politicization of urban discourse at the beginning of the republic encouraged workers, especially skilled artisans, to formulate more ambitious demands in their labor conflicts.
Industrialization and the Formation of the Chinese Proletariat
But nineteenth-century China saw only the outlines of a still fragmented, sparse, and small proletariat, rooted in urban crafts and small-scale textile manufacture. Submerged in the vast peasantry, the Chinese working class began to concentrate in urban centers connected to the slow and gradual expansion of foreign maritime trade. The period from 1895 to 1918—spanning from the beginning of reform movements against Qing political oppression to the end of World War I—represents the transitional and maturing phase of the incipient urban working class, which would undergo an intense period of industrialization beginning in 1914, spurred by the war.
The center of the nascent labor movement in China was Shanghai, the country’s largest city and beneficiary of maritime trade development in the second half of the nineteenth century. Other coastal cities, such as Canton and Tianjin, also saw their industries flourish through foreign trade and developed proletariats tied to these activities.
“Examining the early decades of the Chinese labor movement, Jean Chesneaux identified four strike peaks: 1898–99 (10 strikes), 1904–06 (15 strikes), 1909–13 (38 strikes), 1917–19 (46 strikes). Each peak was longer than the previous one. The first coincided with the Reform Movement of 1898, the second with the anti-U.S. boycott of 1905, the third with the 1911 Revolution, and the fourth drew energy from nationalist stimulus during World War I and the Russian Revolution of 1917, culminating in the May Fourth Movement of 1919. While Chesneaux’s reconstruction of national dates is useful, Elizabeth Perry’s detailed study of Shanghai suggests an important modification. Contrary to Chesneaux, Perry found a sharp increase in strikes in Shanghai: from 30 strikes between 1909 and 1913 to 86 strikes between 1914 and 1918. World War I was the “golden age” of Chinese industry, a moment when China benefited both from high demand for manufactured goods and from the weakening of foreign capital’s control, occupied with the war—a favorable situation for the flourishing of labor militancy” (Selden, 1995, p. 72).
The major events that strengthened Chinese industry and, consequently, increased the weight of the working class were World War I and the Russian Revolution, which enabled the connection of the labor vanguard with the best of Marxist strategic experience developed by Lenin and Trotsky in the Third International (despite the many difficulties arising from linguistic differences and China’s particular political traditions). The stimulus of these international events, along with relentless Japanese aggression in Chinese territory and the growth of the urban proletariat in central economic regions, paved the way for the most intense cycle of labor activism in Chinese history, between 1919 and 1927.
Shanghai was the center of this dynamic emerging proletariat. In 1933, nearly half of the Chinese working class was located there; between 1918 and 1940, 2,291 strikes were staged in the city, with 65% achieving partial or total success.
Proportionally, the number of urban workers paled in comparison to the numerical strength of the peasantry. In 1919, China had 2 million urban industrial workers, compared to hundreds of millions of peasants and tens of millions of rural laborers, in a predominantly agrarian society (as was also the case in neighboring Russia). However, as in Russia, the issue was not merely about absolute numbers of these relative populations, but rather their role in production and their concentration in the nerve centers that defined the course of the national economy. In Shanghai, Canton, Tianjin, and Beijing, the importance of the Chinese proletariat was magnified by its concentration in the most strategic positions of the economy and in urban zones most sensitive from the standpoint of national politics.
A process similar to what Trotsky described in Russia was occurring in China, under the law of combined development: a few million workers, concentrated in the strategic centers of the economy, led a hundred million peasants:
“The law of combined development manifests itself at every step, in the economic domain, both in simple and complex phenomena. Almost without national routes, Russia was obliged to build railways. Without having passed through European handicrafts and manufacture, Russia leapt directly into mechanized production. While peasant economy often remained at the level of the seventeenth century, Russian industry was at the same level as advanced countries and sometimes surpassed them in many respects […] A numerically weak Russian bourgeoisie, which had no national roots, thus confronted a relatively strong proletariat with deep and solid roots in the people.”
Nationalism and Communism
In this social formation of the Chinese working class, as noted earlier, the tradition of resistance against foreign aggression marked the consciousness of its political activity. The May Fourth Movement of 1919 and the May 30th Movement of 1925 (not to mention the clashes from 1840 to 1895 against Euro-Asian colonialism) were carried out in the name of resistance to English and Japanese imperialism. National liberation struggles influenced the development of the subjectivity of the Chinese labor movement, and it is no surprise that, politically, this subjectivity expressed itself in heterogeneous ways. Bourgeois nationalism, embodied in Sun Yat-sen’s and Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang, had as much interest as the communists in winning the working-class base to their ranks in the 1920s. This was one of the reasons that led Chen Duxiu, future founder of the Chinese Communist Party, to seek to create Marxist workers’ associations in Shanghai.
Whether demonstrating loyalty to Sun Yat-sen’s Three Principles of the People or to Marxism, leaders of both the CCP and the Kuomintang felt compelled to assign high priority to the working class:
“Believing that industrialization was the hope of the future, both nationalists and communists made great efforts to enlist the labor movement under their political banners […] Deep divisions persisted within the working class, opening the way to a fragmented base for both parties” (Perry, 1993, p. 68).
This political dispute between nationalism and communism would become central throughout the cycle of revolutions and wars spanning 1922 to 1949. It is therefore important not to examine the results of cycles of strikes and workers’ disturbances as leading to a homogeneous ideological affiliation. As history has often shown, and China was no exception, class struggle shapes political loyalties in contradictory ways, depending heavily on the balance of forces at the national and international level.
hk-seamens-strike.jpg
Hong Kong Seamen’s Strike and the Canton-Hong Kong Strike, May-June 1926
In Shanghai itself, which saw the birth of the CCP in June 1921, communists and nationalists competed to organize the working class through rival unions. Kuomintang politicians, aided by factory foremen and the same gangsters who controlled precarious labor, sought to channel workers’ activism toward their own ends. The Shanghai Federation of Trade Unions, controlled by the Kuomintang’s conservative nationalist ideology, persecuted and attacked members of the Shanghai General Federation of Trade Unions, created after the May 30th Movement in 1925 and influenced by the CCP. This communist federation gained considerable prestige between 1923–1926, bringing together 117 unions, including the Shanghai Graphic Workers’ Union and unions representing workers in Japanese-owned cotton factories. This strength, however, rested on fragile foundations, as the CCP abandoned political independence in favor of integration into the Kuomintang, following the orientation of the majority faction of the Communist International at the time, led by Stalin and Bukharin.
We will see later that the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party itself, under the auspices of the Communist International, decided to dissolve itself within the Kuomintang and hand over to Chiang Kai-shek the power of life and death over thousands of workers. Few intellectuals manage to untangle this knot, which belongs to the field of strategy. To understand the political disputes between these two currents, the history of internal factional struggles within the parties is conditio sine qua non, so as not to fall into superficial examinations.
From the participation of Shanghai workers in the May Fourth Movement of 1919, with 60,000 strikers protesting against the Chinese government’s passivity in the face of Japan’s imperialist intentions under the Treaty of Versailles; through the strike of Hong Kong and Canton sailors in 1922, which virtually paralyzed regional trade for months; to the May 30th Movement in 1925, which began in Shanghai factories and spread throughout the country to give rise to the Chinese Revolution—the labor movement was at the center of national political life as never before. Once again, the Chinese working class, now far stronger than during the British Crown’s incursions in the Opium War, positioned itself as a vanguard against imperialist aggression, especially from Japan and England. To do so, it had to confront obstacles imposed by the Chinese national bourgeoisie (organized in the Kuomintang), which, although not accepting all foreign impositions, harbored a much deeper hatred of the dangers posed by the Chinese working class than of Euro-Asian capital.
1925-05-30-may-thirtieth-movement-shootings-600-1e0e4.jpg
Shootout during the May 30th Movement, 1925
The May 30th Movement of 1925 was sparked by one of the brutal arbitrariness committed by Japanese imperialism and its capital in China. The high point of a great wave of strikes, it began with the murder in Shanghai of a Chinese worker, Gu Zhenghong, a member of the cotton workers’ union, during a three-month strike in a Japanese-owned cotton factory. His funeral, attended by more than 10,000 workers, awakened the sympathy of the city’s proletariat and became a major event. When ten other Chinese workers were shot dead by the British police operating in Shanghai, 160,000 workers went on strike (50,000 students boycotted classes in support). When dockworkers blocked Shanghai’s port, Japanese ships entered the Whangpoo River to reopen it, killing another 60 workers. The continuation of the massacre increased workers’ anger, igniting the Chinese Revolution. Strikes and mass assemblies spread across coastal industrial cities. In 1925, the consequences of the May 30th Movement led to 130 strikes involving 400,000 workers. That year, another foreign power followed closely behind Japan’s crimes: England, which had actively participated in exploiting and militarily devastating Chinese ports in the nineteenth century, also demanded rights over native labor. When British troops killed 52 demonstrators on June 23, 1925, 300,000 Chinese workers took to the streets, once again fueling one of the most significant strike cycles in national history.
The Revolutionary Peak of 1925–27
This was the most concentrated period of strike activity in the history of the Chinese working class. To defeat Anglo-Japanese oppression and carry out an agrarian revolution, workers—hundreds of thousands organized in the Communist Party—had the strength to overcome the national bourgeoisie itself, a condition for eliminating the remnants of China’s social backwardness inherited from feudal “warlords.” But there was something rotten in the kingdom of Denmark (in this case, in the “Middle Kingdom”).
Since 1923, the CCP leadership had been acting in close alignment with the nationalist bourgeoisie, reducing the battle for proletarian hegemony in favor of collaboration in an “anti-imperialist united front,” whose essence was the abandonment of class independence—to the point that this “front” included the triumvirate Huang Jinrong, Du Yuesheng, and Zhang Xiaolin, the leading opium traffickers in Shanghai, who later became Chiang Kai-shek’s intimate allies in the anti-communist offensive of 1927.
In 1925, a series of strikes began following Gu Zhenghong’s assassination. Chiang Kai-shek’s troops were advancing in their “Northern Expedition” in 1926 against the warlords, aiming at national unification. The peasant revolt, which followed the expeditionary forces by occupying estates and killing landlords, and the agitation in the cities, deeply disturbed the Kuomintang, which awaited the moment to violently end the disturbances—and the Communist Party. Despite this, all strike activity, which unfolded into a series of insurrectionary calls, was conducted by the CCP with the tactical objective of collaborating in the rear with Chiang’s troops.
This was because, following the line of the Fifth Congress of 1924—in which Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev began organizing the campaign against Trotsky and Lenin’s legacy—the Communist International defined that the CCP should incorporate itself into the Kuomintang (something Trotsky had opposed since 1923). This definition was based on a selective reading of the “General Theses on the Eastern Question,” one of the results of the Fourth Congress of the Comintern in 1922. The “Theses” clearly stated that the national bourgeoisies of colonies and semi-colonies were incapable of achieving national independence and resolving the agrarian question; however, they did not generalize the Russian experience of 1917, failing to assert that the working class must lead the revolution to achieve these goals.
Despite the semi-staged character of the “Theses”—which would be fully surpassed by Trotsky’s global conception of the theory of permanent revolution in 1930—their strategic aim was the development of communist parties in the East, with class independence as a fundamental principle. Ignoring this principle, Stalin elaborated a rigid “theoretical” division between “mature and immature” countries for revolution—China fell fatally into the latter category—restoring the old formula of the “democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants” for backward capitalist countries, a conception already marked as outdated by Lenin himself, to cover his open policy of class collaboration with the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, he revived the idea of “workers’ and peasants’ parties” for these countries, a way of renouncing the construction of independent revolutionary parties, which objectively led to the subordination of the CCP to the Kuomintang and its gangsters. Nothing could be further removed from the theoretical foundations that had originally given rise to the “Eastern Theses.”
In 1926, already under Stalin’s direct orders, this orientation deepened, and the CCP was commanded to dissolve organizationally and submit to Chiang’s orders, who was elevated by Stalin to “honorary member of the Comintern.” Against the formation of soviet-type organs of Chinese workers and peasants, and even demanding that the CCP hand over its weapons to nationalist troops, Stalin prepared the catastrophe of the Chinese Revolution. With such a strategy, the enemy needed no great strategic thought to defeat the workers. The issue becomes even more astonishing in light of the successes the Chinese proletariat had achieved in Shanghai in March and April 1927—successes handed over, under Stalin’s orders, to the executioners.
The real test of class struggle did not take long. On March 21, 1927, a general strike was launched in Shanghai, with undeniable success, founded on the railway strike that paralyzed government functions. The CCP unleashed the insurrectional plan, disarming the police and multiplying workers’ armament. From the standpoint of military preparation and tactical development, the Shanghai insurrection appeared triumphant. But strategically, this partial success was not used to defeat the enemy. Instead of promoting soviets—or self-organization bodies adapted to Chinese tradition—on the night of March 22 the CCP opened Shanghai’s gates to Bai Chongxi’s Kuomintang expeditionary troops. The awaited moment for Chiang Kai-shek had arrived, and in alliance with opium magnates and the British embassy (eager to eliminate communists from factories), repression was unleashed under General Bai’s command against Shanghai’s workers. On April 12, thousands of workers were executed, having previously surrendered their weapons to the Kuomintang under Comintern orders. Strikes and union organization were banned—the gangsters Du Yuesheng and Zhang Xiaolin raised the “Society of Mutual Advancement,” a shock troop for exterminating communists—while Chiang negotiated with warlords for a pact-based national unification, without land for peasants. Not satisfied with this defeat, the Comintern leadership instructed the CCP to subordinate itself to a supposed “left wing” of the Kuomintang, personified in Wang Jingwei (an occasional adversary of Chiang on the issue of “alliances”), who led the nationalists in Wuhan. The experience led to another massacre of workers, with Wang and Chiang’s rapprochement in 1927.
shanghaimassacre-75933.jpeg
Chinese poster on the Shanghai Massacre of April 1927
Alarmed by the results of its policy, the Stalinist Kremlin suggested a 180º turn and launched an insurrectional offensive in Canton. Isolated and weakened by the Shanghai Massacre, Canton’s communists took up arms and seized political and economic control of the city. Under Li Lisan’s leadership, the CCP launched the insurrection on December 11, 1927; within hours, government services and the arsenal were in insurgents’ hands. Unlike in Shanghai, soviets were immediately erected in Canton to organize the economy: a series of decrees instituted land nationalization, confiscation of the city’s great fortunes, nationalization of major industry, banks, and railways.
Canton proved that it was possible for the Chinese working class to take power in Shanghai independently of the bourgeoisie and to lead the democratic-structural tasks of the oppressed nation, combined with socialist tasks of expropriating capitalists. The workers’ vanguard, supported by millions, was willing to resolve national emancipation and land distribution to peasants with its own independent program, against the bourgeoisie and warlords. However, the situation had changed after April’s events in Shanghai: Kuomintang troops entered Canton and militarily defeated the insurrection. The defeat was “splendidly” organized by Stalin and the new Comintern leadership.
From 1927 to 1949: Brief Lines
After the defeat of the 1925–27 Chinese Revolution, the labor movement fell into a state of catatonia. Under the dictatorial domination of the Kuomintang and warlords in the countryside, as well as Japanese repression, the Chinese working class endured years of setback and did not lead major conflicts until the end of World War II in 1945. Betrayed by the CCP and the Comintern under Stalin and Bukharin’s leadership, Chinese workers were atomized in the cities, disorganized and terrorized by Chiang Kai-shek’s repression and constant surveillance. The economic depression experienced in the country also discouraged any revival, even of defensive resistance.
In this nearly 20-year interim of workers’ quietism, some exceptions showed the vigor of anti-imperialist combat that had been part of the Chinese working class’s formation, especially in the late 1930s, when Japan prepared a new war against China. Centered in Shanghai, workers, in reduced expression, left their mark in resisting Japanese oppression between 1935–36—years of national protests against the Mikado’s interference—as well as between 1939–40, when Shanghai had already recovered from Japan’s military attacks of 1937.
The second major cycle of workers’ activism in China came with the end of World War II and the beginning of the civil war (1946–49) between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party, after Japan’s defeat. Just as the first cycle emerged from revolutionary processes after World War I, this new workers’ uprising arose in tune with revolutionary processes spreading worldwide after World War II (decolonization in Africa and Asia, revolutionary waves in Greece, Italy, and France, anti-bureaucratic processes in countries under Soviet control). However, unlike the impulse given by the Russian Revolution of 1917, which under Lenin and Trotsky sought to expand revolution internationally and strategically aid the construction of new communist leaderships globally, in the post–World War II period Stalin’s bureaucratic leadership—responsible for the defeat of the Chinese Revolution—emerged with greater prestige. The Red Army, with tens of millions dead and the old revolutionary guard murdered in Stalin’s Moscow Trials, was the only force capable of defeating the Nazi German army, which gave the Soviet Union international respect within the workers’ movement.
For the Soviet Union, this scenario meant strengthening bureaucratic control over Russian workers and over one-third of the globe, where capitalists were expropriated by the Red Army (without workers’ protagonism), through the Yalta and Potsdam Agreements between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill. For China, it meant strengthening the Stalinist bureaucracy of the CCP, headed by Mao Zedong.
Mao, who argued that the revolution in China was directed “against imperialism and feudalism, not against capitalism” [4], defended that its driving forces included not only workers and peasants but also national bourgeois sectors and even landlords who “sensibly” opposed the Japanese. With Mao, we see Stalin’s earlier strategy of class collaboration with the national bourgeoisie under the idea that it would play a revolutionary role. This meant that, for Mao, the political front with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang was the central political-strategic piece, subordinating to it his conception of protracted people’s war for victory against the Japanese. Thus, Mao largely defended the policy that had led to the failure of the 1925–27 revolution, though unlike Stalin, he did not accept dissolving the CCP—an organizational detail compared to the open renunciation of workers’ political independence. For Mao, the CCP’s role was to guarantee unity with the national bourgeoisie at all costs and therefore protect it from the masses, strictly limiting workers’ and bourgeois struggles as a strategic condition for maintaining the protracted fight against Japanese imperialism. National liberation war was to impose limits on revolution.
Thus, based on a peasant party-army, Mao’s strategy of “protracted people’s war” did not aim to revive mass self-organization bodies of workers and peasants, but rather to suppress any soviet-type tendencies, like those in Russia in 1917 (which Stalinist bureaucracy had also suppressed). The CCP’s break with the Kuomintang only occurred by Chiang Kai-shek’s imposition, who, after Japan’s defeat and with U.S. support, rejected Mao’s policy of cooperation with the bourgeoisie and sought to eliminate the CCP. With no choice of alliance with bourgeois nationalism and rejecting the revival of democratic-soviet bases for the still atomized urban proletariat, Mao seized power after militarily defeating the Kuomintang. At the end of the civil war, the People’s Republic of China was born already bureaucratized, without Chinese workers having any freedom to decide the country’s political course, much less rational economic planning based on social ownership of the means of production.
Even with the obstacles imposed by Maoist bureaucracy, the second cycle of workers’ activism in China in the late 1940s was stronger than the passivity and resignation of the previous 20 years after 1927. However, the bureaucratic obstacle was strong enough that workers’ activity leading to the PRC’s constitution was substantially weaker than during the 1922–27 cycle.
The results of World War II were decisive for shaping the new cycle of workers’ activism, located on social terrain where Japanese imperialist aggression had practically receded after its defeat. After Japan’s surrender, the Kuomintang returned to China’s coastal regions. Japanese capital was expropriated, and its former Chinese workers placed under state administration. From 1946 onward, workers’ disturbances in China no longer occurred in the terrain of private capital but in the state arena. The combination of civil war, high unemployment, and rampant inflation after the war spurred major workers’ protests in Kuomintang-controlled cities (the CCP remained in rural areas surrounding major urban regions). In 1946, one in five people in Canton (228,000) were unemployed, and 30% (200,000 people) of Nanjing’s population were jobless. This panorama of poverty imposed by war’s consequences led to 1,716 strikes recorded in Shanghai in 1946, rising to 2,538 strikes in 1947. Behind workers’ revolt, the CCP fanned the flames in Kuomintang-controlled cities, without encouraging any soviet-type self-organization in the cities, over which it sought to exert control. After victory in 1949, the CCP dismantled, by coercion or repression, the labor unrest that had allowed it to defeat Chiang Kai-shek’s followers.
From the People’s Republic to the Tiananmen Square Massacre
This was a moment of growth in the material forces of the Chinese working class concentrated in urban regions. Between 1949 and 1956, the Chinese proletariat completed its transition from private property bases to state property. The industrial working class reached 25 million in 1952, increased to 54 million in 1966, and reached 148 million in 1988; of this total by the late 1980s, 100 million workers were employed in state-owned enterprises, while only 8 million were in private industry (Fairbank, 1986).
The situation of the working class in China, with the expropriation of Japanese imperialism and the socialization of strategic sectors of the economy, improved substantially. In fact, conditions improved for part of the working class—excluding rural workers and peasants. Workers in large state-owned enterprises, such as heavy industry (metallurgy and steel), gained multiple social rights: social security, lifetime employment, retirement, free healthcare, and wage increases. In exchange, the country’s military apparatus blocked all pores of political expression for the masses. The right to strike was virtually abolished, and People’s Liberation Army committees suffocated intellectual life in workplaces, whose administration was ossified by various levels of central and local bureaucracy. Except for scattered protests in the 1950s and 1960s, such as during the Hundred Flowers Movement led by intellectuals in 1957, there are no records of significant workers’ unrest between 1949 and the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
In 1967–68, with the major internal split in the CCP and the PLA, resulting from the economic catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese working class appeared as one of the important actors in the Cultural Revolution. Mao needed to restore his prestige, shaken by the economic adventure that starved millions of peasants by accelerating disordered collectivization of the countryside (in the style of Stalin and Bukharin in 1928), beginning in 1958. Peasants who failed to meet extraordinary production targets (with outdated means of production) were accused of sabotage. Against Mao, a faction within the CCP emerged, encouraging an orientation opposite to his regarding reforms. At the head of this opposition were Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The dispute between factions unfolded in Shanghai’s streets, involving millions. In this contradictory movement, a window opened to strike at a sector of Beijing’s bureaucracy, for which the Red Guards were organized, composed mainly of students and, to a lesser extent, workers. Political turbulence could have escaped Mao’s control; it was not impossible that, under certain conditions, a generalized repudiation of the entire state bureaucracy might develop—a specter haunting the Politburo during the Shanghai Commune. Mao decided to violently end the experiment once the rival faction was weakened; the PLA reestablished control, first in factories. The iron discipline imposed on Chinese workers stabilized the country politically through the provisional reunification of CCP leadership. One result was the transfer of the vanguard of these struggles in Shanghai and cities like Canton, Nanjing, and Tianjin to forced labor in the countryside: seventeen million young urban workers were sent to rural zones to rebuild food production between 1964 and 1978.
The other two landmark events of the Chinese proletariat in national life occurred in 1979 and 1989. In the first case, Mao Zedong’s death and the succession process revived factional disputes within the CCP between 1977–78. Deng Xiaoping, after returning from exile, sought to seize party machinery against Mao’s chosen successor, Hua Guofeng. Fighting for a faster orientation toward pro-capitalist reforms than his internal adversaries, Deng resorted to a kind of second Hundred Flowers Movement, encouraging questioning of Guofeng’s faction. If we recall the observations of nineteenth-century Prussian general Carl von Clausewitz, we realize that small objectives can mobilize only limited moral forces. Subsequent workers’ activities were thus modest, though the most relevant since 1966, given central government repression.
By 1989, however, workers’ protests were more robust—led by students—against rampant inflation, and inspired by questioning of Stalinist bureaucracy in Poland (which, lacking a political force simultaneously anti-bureaucratic and anti-imperialist, allowed Lech Walesa and Solidarność, with support from Pope John Paul II and Washington, to restore Polish capitalism). Workers took to the streets to improve living conditions. They were mercilessly repressed, in what became known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
By Way of (In)Conclusion
From this brief overview of workers’ activity in twentieth-century China, we see that the Chinese proletariat was always involved in the ebbs and flows of the international situation, acting on the diverse terrain that class struggle produced—whether under foreign private property or under state property commanded by the Communist Party bureaucracy. Having most of its social rights restricted during the twentieth century, with trade union freedom and the right to strike reduced to zero, the Chinese proletariat was forged in the “heroic” mold, to use Giovanni Arrighi’s terms.
Workers’ movements in China tended to reach their peaks at decisive moments of national political conflict, and were both product and cause of political outcomes and economic crises. But in contrast to the 1922–27 period, when workers were at the center of conflict, in earlier and later insurgencies the dominant actors were students, intellectuals, peasants, or the political and military elites of the CCP and the People’s Liberation Army. In sum, we find one epochal moment (1925–27), a second important uprising (1947–49), and five smaller disturbances of the Chinese working class (1935–36, 1940, 1957, 1979, 1989) in its modern history. The most powerful manifestation of working-class strength came in the wake of World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution; the second, as a consequence of World War II, coincided with the final stage of the civil war that culminated in communist victory. In China’s case, we observe social conflicts in which workers’ insurgencies were part of a broader revolutionary pattern. During the People’s Republic, workers’ protests arose in the Hundred Flowers Movement of 1957, in 1967 at the height of the Cultural Revolution, in 1979 during the Democracy Wall Movement and Deng Xiaoping’s rise, and in the 1989 movement. In all these moments, deep internal political divisions, usually intensified by international crises, opened the way for large-scale workers’ struggles in China’s major cities.
This is important when considering China’s rise in the world system of states and its place as a power. Chinese workers today must act under conditions of bureaucratic chauvinism encouraged by the CCP, and with contradictions that combine major traits of dependency and backwardness with significant technological-scientific developments that allow it to challenge imperialist powers such as the United States in certain areas. Within this, China seems to constitute itself as a dependent capitalist state with imperialist traits. This descriptive formula has the advantage of better showing what China is today, highlighting its contradictory characteristics, its dependency, and its imperialist tendencies. It is against this internal enemy—the bourgeoisie organized in the CCP, engaged in a structural dispute as a rising power against the world’s greatest imperialist power—that Chinese workers must carve a path toward a policy independent of the post-Maoist bureaucracy and global imperialism.
More than the comprehensive organization of their struggles, the history of the Chinese proletariat is imbued with heroism in combat, and especially with the possibility of victory. Not only victory internally against the national bourgeoisie, but also the expansion of revolutionary triumph internationally, with the Chinese working class carrying forward a great communist strategy worthy of the name, as Trotsky defended. This has not yet happened. In the twentieth century, this perspective was blocked first by Stalinism, and then by its successor, Maoism, from 1949 onward—a brutal tradition to which current plenipotentiary Xi Jinping is heir. But the last word has not yet been spoken for the Chinese giant, and it does not seem that the turbulence will be limited to renewed skirmishes of Chinese nationalism along its Asian borders.
References
Perry, Elizabeth. Shanghai on Strike: The Politics of Chinese Labor. California: Stanford University Press, 1993.
Selden, Mark. Labor Unrest in China, 1831–1990. Review (Fernand Braudel Center), Vol. 18, No. 1, Labor Unrest in the World-Economy, 1870–1990 (Winter, 1995), pp. 69–86.
Honig, Emily. Sisters and Strangers: Women in the Shanghai Cotton Mills, 1911–1949. Stanford: California, 1986.
———. The Politics of Prejudice: Subei People in Republican Shanghai. Modern China 15, no. 3, 1989, pp. 259–62.
Hershatter, Gail. The Workers of Tianjin, 1900–1949. California: Stanford University Press, 1986.
Fairbank, John King. The Great Chinese Revolution, 1800-1985. New York: Harper & Row, 1986.
Maspero, Henri. Histoire et institutions de la Chine ancienne. Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2025 (réédition).
Gernet, Jacques. Le monde chinois. Paris: Armand Colin, 1972. 2 tomes.
Grousset, René. Histoire de la Chine: des origines à la seconde révolution. Paris: Payot, 1942.
Elisseeff, Danielle. Histoire de la Chine. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997.
Cheng, Anne. Histoire de la pensée chinoise. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1997.
The history of the Chinese labor movement intertwines with the history of the country’s industrial development, stemming from clashes against…
crpnews.comUAW Divests from Israel Bonds Over Gaza
https://theanalysis.news/uaw-divests-from-israel-bonds-over-gaza/?cmid=2a7a3637-2aa6-4092-b768-08502e01ded8
Sharmini Peries
By Sharmini Peries
June 26, 2026
Rank-and-file delegates amended the UAW Constitution at the union’s 39th …Constitutional Convention, requiring the union to divest from Israel Bonds after a grassroots campaign led by auto workers, academic workers, and graduate employees.
Welcome to theAnalysis.news. One of the most significant stories emerging from last week’s 39th United Auto Workers Constitutional Convention is that the autoworkers voted to divest union funds from Israeli bonds. You probably heard this in the headlines, but honestly, the real story is how they got the autoworkers to vote in favor of this divestment resolution, particularly in these tumultuous political times in the United States, where everything political is so divided and contentious.
For decades now, the UAW convention has been largely shaped by the union’s Administrative Caucus. This year, however, delegates on the convention floor, not the leadership, drove one of the most consequential debates for UAW and the union movement at large. All this resulted in a constitutional amendment at the UAW, which will require them to reissue the UAW Constitution. This resolution commits the union to divest from Israeli bonds— about $475,000 it currently holds. But the decision is much more consequential than the actual dollar amount. This decision of the members also means charting a new course on the question of war, international solidarity, labor politics, essentially, what international class struggle really means, and what solidarity really means, in this case, with the Palestinian labor movement.
Joining me now are two people who led this effort at UAW. Olga Karounos is a public defender at the Legal Aid Society in Brooklyn with the Criminal Defense Practice. She’s also vice president of the Brooklyn Criminal Defense Practice and a member of the UAW Local 2325. Olga, very good to have you with us.
Also joining us is Jay Makled. He is a 30-year member of the United Auto Workers and has served in numerous elected leadership positions over the past 23 years with the Local 600 in Dearborn, Michigan. He represents approximately 26,000 active and retired workers. Welcome, Jay.
Olga, let me start with you. Now, you were on the convention stage representing this resolution to the members. Take us inside that room.
I mean, it felt honestly scarier than talking to a jury before trial because this is a fight that has been going on for over 50 years. There were so many workers who came before me who made these same demands. In 1974, there were workers just like me who brought a very similar amendment to the UAW Constitution to the floor, and it was not successful at getting it passed. So it really felt like no matter what, how it went on the floor, whether it went the way that we hoped or it didn’t, that I was standing on the shoulders of so many other workers who had come before me, and that it was really my duty just at that moment in time for the fact that I was there with the baton at that moment to fight my hardest to make sure that our voices were heard, that the voices of not only the workers in Palestine were heard, but the voices of all of the members across the country who had fought hard to make this the Constitutional Convention where divestment from Israel bonds wasn’t just a demand but a reality.
Sharmini Peries
Jay is one of those people whose shoulders you were standing on because he’s been a part of the struggle for so long. Jay, what was the moment like for you, and how did the hall feel with all those workers finally supporting your long road here?
Jay Makled
Well, when they announced that we were victorious in this resolution, I stood up in just shock, amazement, and full of so much emotion that this meant so much, not only to me, our members, the community I live in, and people around the world. I was overwhelmed with emotion to the point where I had to leave the convention because I needed some time to myself. I thought it was the most democratic convention that we have had, and I’ve been to quite a few of them.
But to get this done, and like Olga said, they’ve done— they’ve tried this before, and they’ve tried it in the ’70s. They really tried to get the union to divest from bonds for bombs, and they were unsuccessful. Now, they were successful at the local union level, but as an institution as a whole, they failed, and they weren’t able to get it done. For us to be able to put this into the Constitution makes it law. The people have spoken. We voted on it. That’s our process. That’s our democracy. This is the will of the people.
I couldn’t be prouder at that moment to be a UAW member. I couldn’t be more prouder of the community that I’m in because I have received so, so many phone calls from people within our community just saying that we’re so proud of what the UAW has done. We’ve finally stood up. So it was a very emotional moment for me, and I felt liberated, to be honest with you.
There were two amendments and two resolutions that were pulled— that were brought to the floor relating to the UAW’s relationship with the genocidal state of Israel, frankly. One, the first amendment that we tried to pull to the floor was not only about divestment, it did include divestment, but also supported workers across the UAW who wanted to, or who might want to, engage in any sort of embargo. This is something that we are seeing across the world right now, especially among dock workers in Italy and in Greece. This is also something that the UAW during apartheid has a history of engaging in.
Now, these, especially, are definitely politically touchy subjects, but these are also conversations that workers across the world are having. Even if this wasn’t something that we specifically passed on the floor at our Constitutional Convention, I think it’s important that the warmakers, the billionaires, and the politicians do know that this is not a conversation that workers are afraid to have together across sectors, that this is something that we’re discussing.
However, what we were able to do at this Constitutional Convention was modify the UAW Constitution. As Jay said, this is the law now to prohibit any investment, current or in the future, in Israel bonds. So what we did was we modified just one language of the Constitution, just to prohibit investment of our dues money in Israel bonds. I think that this was important for a lot of reasons, but especially as Jay said, we work so hard in this country for every single dollar that we earn. It’s already hard enough to get people in other parts of the country to unionize simply because every dollar that you earn in this country right now could be going to food, water, shelter. Things are so expensive right now.
When you remind people in your union that not only do those dues you pay into fight your bosses and go out on strike and go out and fight for higher wages and better conditions, but you also have a say in what that money is invested in. That is really important, and there’s just all over the world, and all over this country right now, people are saying that they don’t want their hard-earned money invested in war. They don’t want their hard-earned money invested in genocide, and particularly, I couldn’t even imagine what it must be like to be a union member in Dearborn or one of these plants and work so hard every single day and know that no matter what, even a portion of your dollars is going to support the murder of possibly your own family members abroad. I mean, that’s just really, really horrible, and now we no longer have our members in that position.
Sharmini Peries
Jay, I was wondering whether you could speak to the Local 600. How did you prepare? How long has this struggle been going on? You know, who did you work with in order to bring it to fruition the way you have?
Jay Makled
Well, Local 600 has a long history of social justice, and this isn’t our first. We were part of the apartheid with Nelson Mandela, and when Nelson Mandela was freed, one of the first places he came was to Local 600. And we have a hall here, and it’s our history hall of the great history of Local 600, of our past battles and our successes. You will see a photograph of Nelson Mandela in our hallway, celebrating just that. Local 600 has a proud history of being able to stand up for social justice and economic justice for our members in the community, and whether they’re unionized or not, we still have an obligation to fight for all working-class people.
Now, as far as being able to prepare for it, we demanded a ceasefire long before, and we stood up, and we were very vocal about it, and we took a stance on that. A lot of local unions did, and it took some time for other local unions to get on board because anybody who had spoken out against the genocide, it seemed like there was retaliation against. If you’re looking at any type of A-lister stars, they were losing contracts or movies or whatever the case may be. But we took the stance here at Local 600 that we weren’t going to support a genocide and that we demanded a ceasefire. We have a long history and tradition of it.
When this resolution came to the floor, and our membership voted, our top leadership stood up, and then I looked behind me, and we saw a sea of our delegates, 40 of them, and it made me proud because our local, again, stood on the right side of history, of making sure that our money wasn’t going to go towards genocide. We’re very proud of that, extremely proud of that. So as far as preparing for it, we’ve been talking about it. It’s fresh in our community.
There are people in our communities, in our community here, who have lost entire families. My wife, she works with people who have lost loved ones, and they’ve been told at their worksite that your dad has just passed away because they dropped a bomb in Lebanon, in southern Lebanon, or even seeing some of the genocidal videos on YouTube and going on and on. I could not imagine— we can’t imagine from a local standpoint, our dues dollars being used for something that’s just so horrific.
So I’m very proud of this local and what we stand for. Our leadership is amazing. Our membership is amazing, and our delegation that went to the convention they’re amazing. So we all stood up in solidarity for this resolution, and we applaud Olga and the entire region for standing up for this and bringing it to the floor, because we were definitely in support of it.
Sharmini Peries
Jay, thank you. I know this is emotional for you and your family, and I appreciate you sharing this because one of the things that we can do in this interview and in covering this is really give people the inspiration to work in whatever union or association that they’re part of and bring this kind of struggle forward in your workplace. So, Olga, I’m wondering whether you could speak to that, because as a legal worker, you were well equipped to actually study the passage, the path that can be taken in order to bring a resolution like this that’s going to have a great impact in terms of the constitutional changes. These are permanent. They, I understand, will have to reissue a Constitution at the end of this amendment process. Could you speak to that?
Olga Karounos
Yeah, so I think that I also just want to add that there are absolutely graduate student workers and legal service workers who are fighting really hard in their own communities for divestment. But none of this is an issue, as we’re even seeing in this conversation, that is not divided by sectors. If it were not for this, really, even the Constitutional Convention was just a really beautiful example of how we all in our different sectors can come together to make real, concrete change for our communities.
So there were— what’s very cool about, again, the UAW convention was that every single local union across the country had the opportunity to submit proposed amendments and resolutions to this Constitutional Convention, where delegates who were again elected by their membership— and I do just want to say, I think one thing that made this really successful at the UAW is that the UAW already in their Constitution states that the membership is the highest authority in the union. The philosophy of the UAW is sort of the opposite of that of a government structure, where you vote for your president, and the president is at the top. I always tell my members that when I became an officer in the union, I actually took a step down. Their voices are more important than mine, and I work for them, not the other way around. I don’t give them the directives; they give me the directives.
And so our membership got together, and members of all these different locals all over the country in various different sectors, proposed amendments to the UAW constitution. One thing that was just really incredible to see, but it also was the work, and we don’t want to pretend that this was just some spontaneous moment, that in our caucus, the United All Workers for Democracy, as well as Labor for Palestine, UAW for Palestine, were working within their local unions and telling their leadership and telling their members, “This is not just a pipe dream. This is how our union is designed. We can actually change our Constitution in 2026 at the 39th Constitutional Convention.”
All over the country, delegates got together, rank-and-file union members got together, and submitted these proposals to the UAW Constitutional Convention. We had a whole book of them, and there were at least five resolutions across the country that were about divestment. Right when we saw that, we knew that not only had our organizing on the ground worked, but our organizing on the ground worked because this is a core issue that speaks to people, and because we wanted people to know that they have a say, that this is their union, this is their democracy, this is their constitution.
I think it was so fortuitous even having the opportunity to talk to and meet Jay while this vote was going on. I’m a legal service worker from Brooklyn, Jay works in auto manufacturing in Dearborn, Michigan, and I think the world wants us to think that we might not have a lot in common. Getting to meet Jay, getting to have a conversation about how important this was, not just to both our individual members on the ground, but our communities and our families and us making a commitment to each other that even though we had not organized on this before, that we were going to do this and bring this home for the members, for our communities, for our people. It’s just really a testament that you never give up, you keep fighting, you keep organizing, and that’s how these wins happen.
Sharmini Peries
Olga, this is a particular moment, though. While there are all these good and important features of the union, being a membership-driven union and so on, this moment has come and gone in the past, and it wasn’t seized the way it was this time. So what was unique about this campaign that led to this moment?
Olga Karounos
So I will also say that in everything that I’ve done in union organizing, I’ve been the VP of my shop for about four years. We walked out when ICE kidnapped one of our clients, and actually, in 2017, ended up physically assaulting one of our staff members. We lose more often than we win. That is just the truth of organizing for the good of the people. The system is not stacked in our favor. The system is stacked in the favors of the billionaires and those who profit off of harm. So we were not under any delusion that this was going to be easy.
What was different about this time? Some people might want to say that, and could probably say that, “Look, the war in the Middle East, the genocide in Gaza, has reached such an apex point that no one can stand by and close their eyes and pretend that we don’t have anything to do with this, or pretend that this is not even happening.” But another reason that this was so successful was because this was something that we had been discussing for so long, even before the mainstream public tide had shown this for what it really was.
If it were not for workers on the ground, people whose communities were sort of formed out of these conflicts, getting to speak truth to power, reminding everyone, the labor for UAW for Palestine started in 2004. The walkout in Detroit, in Jay’s shop, was in 1973. So there was never a guarantee that this time was going to be the time.
But I will say that it was truly a testament to the organizing on the ground, meeting the moment, and not being afraid to have these conversations and let people know that we really do have a say here and that you can walk out of this convention with another loss, which is okay, we’ve lost before, or this can be the time that we win. I think that this was not just the time that we won, but this was when the organizing, the conversations, everything was stacked in our favor for this to work, but that’s really all it takes. You keep fighting, you keep bringing up the issue, and eventually you will win.
Sharmini Peries
Jay, you work a lot with the administrative part of the union and the leadership. So what now? We have this resolution that’s passed, and constitutional changes will come about. What are the next steps in making sure that this is a reality?
Jay Makled
Well, we’ve just got to make sure that we follow through on it, but we’ve got to remember, though, this is law, and the membership voted on it. It was a win. We’re putting it in our Constitution, and the membership is the highest authority. So if somebody changes it or doesn’t follow through with it, they’re in violation of our constitution, which is governed by the people. So that, that could be problematic if it’s not followed, because again, it’s in the book now, and they have to follow it because it’s the people’s will, and that’s what we wanted. That’s what we voted on, and we were successful.
One point that I want to bring up is— and Olga hasn’t talked about it, and I didn’t know this until I actually spoke with her on the phone, and she could probably speak to it better than I can, but there was a point where they were all supposed to leave and they were supposed to get on a plane and go, right in the middle of this vote. I don’t know if you want to speak on it, Olga, but I mean, that was divine intervention. And for me, after I heard that, it was even more emotional for me, because if that isn’t God’s will, I don’t know what is.
Sharmini Peries
Olga, would you like to speak to that?
Olga Karounos
No, I actually felt really similar. There were so many things that, even though this was a long fight and I do want to give all of the credit to the organizers, and if anything, the fire instilled in all of us to make this happen. But I do agree with Jay that it really felt like there was a higher power on our side for this. And as maybe cheesy as that might sound, we were scheduled to leave. Our flight was going to take off, and we had already had so many kerfuffles with our flight cancellations. We were actually supposed to get there on Sunday. That flight was canceled. It was then put to Monday, and our union had already paid fines, and we didn’t want to have to extend possibly longer, getting out on Thursday.
So we almost had to leave the floor for this vote. Then Jake said how close this vote was, and we were just all emotionally torn. Like, what do we do? Do we stay? We had kind of started to walk out, like, all emotionally torn about what to do, and then all our little phones ping, and it says flight delayed two hours, and we run. I think I like threw my bag at some guy in the hallway, and I ran to the convention floor, and it was really unlike anything.
Even just, there was a moment when we were outside, that’s how Jay and I met. I think we were waiting in line for food, just talking to the right person, and I was just saying, “Man, I really hope that divest gets passed.” And Jay is obviously being very humble, and it’s like, “Oh, you know, me too.” And I’m like, “Well, it would be really…” And I think he mentioned he was from Local 600, and I’m like, “Well, Local 600 is Nelson Mandela’s union. Nelson Mandela is the person who said, if the Palestinian people are not free, none of us are free, and always held the torch for the rights of any single person who was under… who was vulnerable, you know, the weakest among us, right?”
If it wasn’t for that conversation, and if it wasn’t for our flights being delayed, so many things really happened to make this a reality. But I think that’s also, you know, what is it when they say when preparation meets luck, or luck meets preparation, everything lined up for this to be a knockout in the park. And it really was just— it’s still just an incredible feeling. I still can’t exactly believe, and Jay’s right, all of the things that worked on our side. But if— it was hard work, but there was some divine intervention and luck there as well, for sure.
Sharmini Peries
Right. So what’s next? Earlier, you were telling me, off-camera, that the changes have already been made to the Constitution. Will there be a place where the Constitution will be reissued, or what are the next processes in realizing the resolution’s effects?
Olga Karounos
So we will see, right? Because it’s on our leadership to take the action. They’ve heard our mandate. It’s in the Constitution. That’s not a question. So it’s a mandate from the membership to the leadership to make this a reality, and a reality as soon as possible. So we workers are on the ground watching and waiting. We always hope to see in a union that your union leadership will uphold the rights of your members. But those of us who have been in a union long enough know that that’s not always how things work, and that’s why having militant members active on the ground ready to make sure that our bosses hear us, but just as well that our union leadership hears us, because at the end of the day, we do the work for our organization and our union leadership does the work for us.
Sharmini Peries
Right. Jay, let me ask you about the long road from South Africa’s anti-apartheid movement and the union’s role and involvement that’s been going on for obviously decades. Now we have an example of what’s possible in the union movement and lessons learned here for other unions to take up the struggle within their unions. So what can happen from your perspective? I mean, what is the domino effect that could be mobilized at this point?
Jay Makled
I feel like the domino effect is something to get a hard read on because once you make a change, you start making incremental changes, the outlasting change of that could be forever. Just to go back to a little bit of our history, when Walter Reuther stood with Martin Luther King for civil rights, that was highly unpopular during that time, but he chose to do so, and that’s leadership. Our union is made up of all different types of faith, people, men, women, and genders, and that’s what makes a union special and unique.
When you make these changes and for the right reasons, later on, you’ll read about it in the history books that this organization stood up for what was right. Even if it wasn’t popular at the time, these changes had huge effects. I just take it back to just when Martin Luther King was marching here in Detroit with Walter Reuther, locked arms in arms. To me, even though it wasn’t popular with the membership or even public opinion, we still make tough decisions because we’re leadership, we’re a union, and we’re made up of all these different types of walks of life. That’s what’s important, and that’s what we must continue to do.
The youth of our union is really driving a lot of this, which makes me really proud. I see it. I see it in my kids. I see it in the higher education community. I’m really proud to have all of them a part of this organization. They’re a huge factor in moving this resolution to its passage, and I just, I couldn’t be more proud of it. I think this will have long-term effects throughout, that we’re not gonna stand with those who are committing genocide. I do believe that our, and I believe in our leadership that we have that are going to continue to do the right things.
Sean has spoken out publicly about the genocide and a ceasefire, and that made me proud to hear him talk about this issue. Is it popular? No, it’s not. Is it right to stop the genocide and to stop the killing of innocent men, women, and children? It doesn’t matter where you’re from. I just know that it’s wrong and that I didn’t want, and we don’t want, our union dollars contributing to such atrocities.
The leadership sees that as well. I believe they’re going to continue to do the right thing. I do. It was a very democratic convention, and I couldn’t be more proud of the fact that I was involved in it, and I did my small part, and my local did a very big part in helping move this. But hats off to those in the higher education sector who really drove this thing home.
Sharmini Peries
All right, Olga, let me give you the last word here. First of all, congratulations to both of you and all the members of the union who supported this incredibly important resolution. On behalf of the world, we thank you because it is clear, both in the United States and elsewhere in the world, that the solidarity with the Palestinian people and what is happening to them is overwhelming. It’s a groundswell, and you have made it concrete within the Union. I hope that other unions take the lead from this and other institutions, universities, governments, and municipalities all take the lead from the big step you have taken, a giant step you have taken, and it materializes in a more profound way. So, Olga, let me give you the last word for having carried this resolution on the convention floor. Again, congratulations to you, too.
Olga Karounos
Thank you so much. I would just say that I hope that everyone remembers that an injury to one is an injury to all, that we are stronger together. We have so much more in common as fellow workers, no matter what sector we do, no matter what our background is, no matter where our family comes from, that every single one of us right now in America, whether you do, almost all of us, are only a paycheck or two away from not being able to afford our rent. The same people who don’t see the Palestinians or people in the Middle East as worthy of human life are the same people who don’t see us as Americans as worthy of having a living wage. These are issues that are all connected.
I want people to really come away with understanding that there’s real power in a union, that a union is a group of people who you don’t only break bread with and work together on common issues with, but those are your union brothers and sisters, your union comrades, your fellow workers who you get to have these frank conversations with. The same way when we work together to discuss whether or not we’re going on a strike, which can be very difficult and vulnerable, is the same way that you are able to, in a union, say to your union comrades, “That my family member— I just lost a family member in Gaza. My family still lives in Lebanon. I’m a refugee from the same crisis.”
When we remember that we have all so much more in common than we do apart, and if we start understanding that these injuries and these attacks on vulnerable people, we start treating them like picket lines. That BDS, if we understand that BDS is not just a moral call, but think about it as a picket line, that is a really powerful way to bring these sorts of victories home, not just for your families, for your loved ones, for the people of Palestine, but for your communities as well.
Sharmini Peries
Thank you, Olga.
Olga Karounos
Thank you so much, everyone. Jay, it was so great to see you again, and it was so nice to meet you again.
Jay Makled
Nice to see you again.
Sharmini Peries
Thank you, Jay.
Jay Makled
Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you for the opportunity.
Sharmini Peries
Thank you both for joining theAnalysis.news. Thank you. Bye-bye.
Rank-and-file delegates amended the UAW Constitution at the union’s 39th Constitutional Convention, requiring the union to divest from Israel Bonds…
theanalysis.newsMelbourne Symphony Wins Discrimination Case Over Gaza Comments
The pianist Jayson Gillham had sued the orchestra after it canceled his performance in the wake of comments he made against Israel’s war with Hamas.
…https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/12/arts/music/jayson-gillham-melbourne-symphony-orchestra-gaza.html?searchResultPosition=1
Jayson Gillham, wearing suit and tie, walks in a plaza outside a concrete building.
The classical pianist Jayson Gillham outside federal court in Melbourne, Australia, in May.Credit…Jay Kogler/AAP Image, via Reuters
Derrick Bryson Taylor.png
By Derrick Bryson Taylor
Published July 12, 2026
A concert pianist who sued the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra for abruptly canceling one of his performances in 2024 after he had spoken out against Israeli forces’ killing journalists in Gaza was not discriminated against, a judge in Australia ruled.
The pianist, Jayson Gillham, claimed in a lawsuit that the orchestra had violated the country’s Fair Work Act and his right not to be treated unfavorably in the workplace because of his political beliefs.
But the judge, Graeme Hill of the Federal Court of Australia, ruled on Friday that because Mr. Gillham was an independent contractor he was not protected under the workplace rights law. The orchestra, Justice Hill determined, had acted to protect its business and reputation when it canceled the performance by Mr. Gillham and issued statements to its patrons about the matter.
“The court finds that the M.S.O. would have taken the same actions if Mr. Gillham had expressed a political belief in support of Israel, or if Mr. Gillham had made statements on any other topic that had the same impact or anticipated impact on the M.S.O.’s business and reputation that Mr. Gillham’s actual remarks had,” a summary of the judgment said.
In a statement on Instagram on Friday, Mr. Gillham, who is British and Australian, said he was “very disappointed” by the court’s decision. “I believe artists should be free to speak with integrity,” he said. “This case was never just about me. My principles remain unchanged.”
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A spokeswoman for the orchestra said in a statement that it welcomed the judgment and that Mr. Gillham “should have sought the authorization of the M.S.O. before making the statements he made” from the stage.
The decision concludes an episode that began in August 2024, when Mr. Gillham announced during a solo recital in Melbourne that he would perform an unscheduled piece called “Witness.”
The piece, he said, was dedicated to journalists killed in Gaza, and had been composed by his friend Connor D’Netto.
Mr. Gillham told the audience that Israel was responsible for the deaths of more than 100 Palestinian journalists in the previous 10 months. “The killing of journalists is a war crime in international law, and it is done in an effort to prevent the documentation and broadcasting of war crimes to the world,” he said.
The war in Gaza began after Hamas-led terror attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, killed roughly 1,200 people in Israel. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, at least 207 Palestinian journalists have been killed in Gaza since the start of the war. Tens of thousands of other Palestinian civilians have also been killed.
The day after Mr. Gillham made his comments, the orchestra informed him that it was removing him from the lineup of a concert that was scheduled for a few days later.
In a letter to people who had attended Mr. Gillham’s recital, the organization said the pianist had made “unauthorized statements” that represented an “intrusion of personal political views.”
At the time, Mr. Gillham told The New York Times that the orchestra’s response had caught him by surprise, adding, “It felt like an overreaction.”
In the aftermath, artists, journalists and music fans in Australia denounced the orchestra for canceling Mr. Gillham’s performance and defended his right to free speech.
The orchestra later said it had erred in judgment.
“The M.S.O. acknowledges that an error was made in asking Jayson to step back from his performance,” it said in a statement, adding that it was working to reschedule his appearance. “While the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra maintains that a concert platform is not an appropriate stage for political comment, we acknowledge Jayson’s concerns for those in the Middle East and elsewhere.”
It is unclear if another performance was ever rescheduled.
After the cancellation, the orchestra’s musicians passed a vote of no confidence in the administration, and the organization announced that its managing director was departing.
Corrected on July 13, 2026: An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a journalism organization. It is the Committee to Protect Journalists, not the Committee to Project Journalists.
We acknowledge mistakes in our reporting with corrections. If you spot an error, please let us know at corrections@nytimes.com.Learn more.
Derrick Bryson Taylor is a Times reporter covering breaking news in culture and the arts.
The pianist Jayson Gillham had sued the orchestra after it canceled his performance in the wake of comments he made against Israel’s war with Hamas.
www.nytimes.comTeamsters & Their Struggles Today
https://laborfest.net/2026/event/teamsters-their-struggles-today/
July 30 @ 5:00 pm – 7:00 pm PDT
Zoom event
The Teamsters is one of the most powerful unions in the United States, but it is under assault by AI, union busting at Amazon and …massive closures at UPS.
At the same time, workers are fighting for democracy with a leadership that is aligning with the fascist Trump administration which is destroying the NLRB, OSHA and has terminated contracts for 700,000 Federal workers. How workers organize a fight to defend their jobs and fight for a democratic union will be the focus of this panel.
With:
John Palmer – International VP Teamsters
Eric Johnson – IBT Local 190 UPS Line Driver
Marianna Battiste – IBT Local 2010 Former Steward
Barry Anderson – IBT Local 856 Steward
The Teamsters is one of the most powerful unions in the United States, but it is under assault by AI, union busting at Amazon and massive closures at…
laborfest.netOakland school closure raises statewide questions over charter renewals
The decision could influence how hundreds of California charter schools are evaluated
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2026/07/19/oakland-school-closure-raises-statewide-questions-over-charter-renewals/
Molly Gibbs… is a Bay Area News Group reporter.webp
By MOLLY GIBBS | mgibbs@bayareanewsgroup.com | Bay Area News Group
PUBLISHED: July 19, 2026 at 4:00 AM PDT
A state decision that will force an Oakland charter school to shutter has raised questions about vague standards and left charter advocates concerned that it could have far-reaching implications.
Last week, the 18-year-old Oakland charter school Aspire Golden State College Preparatory Academy requested that the State Board of Education overturn the decisions by Oakland Unified School District and the Alameda County Office of Education to not renew its charter in the first state-level appeal since new charter school legislation, Assembly Bill 1505, passed in 2019.
But the state board voted to “take no action” on the appeal in a 7-2 vote, with one recusal and one abstention, exhausting Aspire GSP’s options for reversing the decision and avoiding closure without litigation — and leaving many charter school leaders across the state with even more questions.
The decision gives the first indication of how the board may treat similar appeals and could influence how hundreds of charter schools are evaluated as they face renewal in the coming years.
“This hearing today is about more than one school. It’s about the message this board sends to every charter school authorizer in California,” said the managing director of regulatory affairs at the California Charter School Association, Nicolas Watson, during the hearing of Aspire GSP’s appeal. “The question today is new to this board and one for which there is no precedent: When is closing a middle track charter school in the best interest of students? Your decision will help define what that standard means for every future renewal.”
Oakland Unified School District’s board denied the charter’s petition for renewal in October in a 4-3 vote, determining that students would be served better in neighborhood schools. The district cited students’ declining math and English language arts proficiency and a drop-off in the number of graduates attending college — despite Oakland Unified Office of Charter Schools staff recommending renewal.
Oakland Unified used the California School Dashboard data to point to a “significant decline” in the charter’s math proficiency and “inconsistent” English language arts proficiency.
According to the dashboard data, Aspire GSP students were 92.6 points below the math standard in 2019 and 144.6 points below the standard in 2024, and students were 36.8 points below the English language arts standard in 2019 and 69.8 points below the standard in 2024.
But Aspire GSP countered that the district’s decision relied on a narrow interpretation of academic performance data and selectively compared the school to other schools that would make Aspire GSP seem weaker. Advocates argued that among socioeconomically disadvantaged youth — 95% of the school’s student population — the charter school actually outperformed Oakland Unified in 5 of 6 metrics, including English Language Arts test scores, English learner progress, college or career readiness, chronic absenteeism and graduation rate.
Under AB 1505, charter school performance is evaluated using the California School Dashboard, which displays the performance of local schools and student groups across a variety of metrics, including academic performance, graduation rates, chronic absenteeism and English learner progress.
The new legislation splits charter schools into three “tiers” — high-performing schools, which are generally streamlined for renewal; low-performing schools, which are generally not renewed; and middle-performing schools, which may be renewed or denied renewal. Local school boards must provide evidence showing the school has failed to make academic progress and that closing the school is in the “best interest of pupils.”
Aspire GSP is one of 916 “middle-performing” charter schools in California, which make up more than 75% of the state’s charter schools.
Former Gov. Jerry Brown criticized AB 1505’s heavy reliance on the California School Dashboard — which Brown helped create and launch in 2017 — as the primary basis for evaluating a charter school’s academic performance.
“This dashboard was to help teachers and families and parents make better decisions and was intended to help schools and help the kids,” Brown said in a phone interview. “Not act as a form of capital punishment. … That’s a complete abuse of the dashboard and totally against what was intended by its authors.”
Brown said the dashboard’s explicit design was to ensure that no single data point can fully capture a school’s impact on students.
“This is an organic institution that has grown up in Oakland, is supported by hundreds of parents and kids, and to abolish it like that, it’s a disgrace. It’s a real tragedy,” Brown said. “A key element in the public school system is charter schools. Both the charters and regular districts should work together in honest and creative competition.”
Upon denial by Oakland Unified, Aspire GSP appealed the decision to the Alameda County Board of Education, which upheld Oakland Unified’s decision in a 5-2 vote.
Running out of options, Aspire GSP turned to the State Board of Education to overturn both denials. But AB 1505 also significantly shifted charter oversight and renewal authority to local school districts, curtailing the power of the State Board of Education to only be able to overturn a local district or county board denial if it finds that local boards “abused their discretion” in denying a charter renewal.
State board members, facing a narrow legal scope and a lack of guidance on how to determine students’ best interests, ultimately voted to take no action on Aspire GSP’s appeal.
“How do we know what’s in the best interest of students? Because that’s at the heart of the criteria for not renewing a charter school,” said board member Sharon Olken. “And at the same time … we have a narrow lane of jurisdiction and one that maybe doesn’t sit well with me.”
“I think we need to raise the questions for those who will be thinking about this down the road about the need for clarification of what really does constitute a fair, open, transparent, evidence-based process,” state board President Linda Darling-Hammond said.
Daniel Soleimani, general counsel for Aspire Public Schools, which operates 32 schools, said the company is considering a lawsuit against Oakland Unified to reverse the decision and hopefully provide guidance for other charter schools that could soon face a similar fate.
“Many other charter schools have reached out to us, very concerned,” Soleimani said. “They don’t know what to do to prepare for renewal. Some of them had actually called in and said, ‘There’s no way for us to predict if we’re going to be renewed or not based on this law.’”
Myrna Castrejόn, president and CEO of the California Charter Schools Association, argued in a letter to the state board members earlier this month that the statutory requirement that closure of a school be “in the best interest of pupils” lacks specific guidance or a statewide precedent.
“This appeal presents an important statewide policy question that extends far beyond a single school,” Castrejόn wrote. “Across California, we are seeing an increasing number of non-renewal decisions involving middle-track charter schools. In many of these cases, local authorizers have interpreted the required finding that ‘closure is in the best interest of pupils’ so broadly that it risks becoming little more than a restatement of the authorizer’s concerns about the school itself.”
Created in 2008, Aspire GSP serves about 403 students in East Oakland in grades 6-12. Many of those students spoke out in support of the charter school at last week’s State Board of Education meeting.
“At GSP, teachers and staff don’t just support our academics; they support us as a whole person. For many students in East Oakland, access to opportunities and supported communities can change the trajectory of our lives,” Michelle Hernandez, a recent graduate of Aspire GSP, said at the meeting. “When decision makers close schools like GSP, it sends a message to students that spaces where we find belonging, encouragement and opportunities can be taken away at any moment.”
Aspire GSP will not reopen in the fall, and families will now have to find a new school for their children, Soleimani said. He said if the charter school decides to pursue litigation, it could be a “multiyear fight.”
Aspire Golden State College Preparatory Academy requested the State Board of Education overturn two levels of denial of its charter renewal in a…
www.eastbaytimes.comNo Blood In Our Sugar! From Negros To Crockett & The ILWU Battle At The C&H Fangul Owned Refinery
LAUSD deadline looms to make painful cuts after county says board actions ‘erode confidence’
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-17/lausd-budget-cuts-county-takeover-deadline
The L.A. skyline reflected in the window of the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters. …
The L.A. skyline reflected in the window of the Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters downtown. (Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
Los Angeles Times reporter Howard Blume
By Howard Blume
Staff Writer
July 17, 2026 8:25 AM PT
Los Angeles Unified faces an Aug. 7 deadline to rewrite its $20.6-billion budget or risk county takeover, with officials warning of looming insolvency and massive deficits.
Union leaders dispute the crisis; district officials promise normality when schools open.
In less than three weeks Los Angeles school officials must show, under state law, how they will carry out the steepest budget cuts in a generation after county education authorities concluded they lack confidence in district leadership to prevent bankruptcy.
The options are painful and stand to dramatically downsize the nation’s second-largest school district, which is facing a multibillion-dollar projected deficit. Employee furlough days, campus closures, job reductions and thousands of layoffs are among the looming cuts — actions the school board has largely postponed until July 1, 2027.
Instructions from the Los Angeles County Office of Education require L.A. Unified to detail specifically how it will carry out the future cuts; otherwise the county superintendent will appoint a trustee with authority to veto spending decisions. If the district were to become insolvent, then an appointed administrator would take all power away from Supt. Andrés E. Chait and the Board of Education — an action without precedent in LAUSD and a rarity among the nation’s largest school systems.
The warnings have sent shock waves through the district and angered employee unions.
Parents and employees in online forums expressed a range of views, including disbelief, hand-wringing and I-told-you-so — with a wide distribution for blame.
District officials have been virtually silent about the directives from the county office, often referred to as LACOE.
“We have discussed this matter” with the county office “and appreciate their ongoing partnership and guidance and will work with the LACOE to ensure compliance with their requirements,” district officials said in a statement.
They said they were assured that busting the Aug. 7 deadline would not lead to immediate consequences — provided they are working to address concerns: “We will remain in conversation with LACOE to ensure our financial plan remains responsible, transparent, and aligned with our long-term commitments.”
Within the jargon and legalese of a seven-page letter, county education office Supt. Debra Duardo essentially rebuked district budget decisions and the “fiscal stability plan” that the school board had approved June 16 and sent to the county for review.
The county rejected the plan, saying it lacked specificity and necessitates “an elevated level of fiscal oversight.” Among a list of eight acute budget issues, the July 2 letter faulted the L.A. Unified Board of Education for:
Approving costly labor contracts exemplifying “mismanagement of the collective bargaining process.”
A failure to carry out earlier approved budget cuts that “erodes confidence.”
Raiding funds from a health benefits trust against “its own staff’s fiscal advice.”
As a result of these and other district actions, Duardo said, L.A. Unified faces a cash shortfall of $231 million by November 2027, increasing to a $3.5-billion deficit by June 30, 2029.
Two of the seven school board members asked to comment on the situation responded to The Times.
Board member Tanya Ortiz Franklin said she understands the county’s position.
“I think they’re right to be concerned that our plan won’t come to fruition,” said Franklin, who opposed dipping into the retiree benefits fund. She also accepts the county’s analysis of the labor agreements, which all seven board members approved — but said employees deserve to be paid more even though additional future layoffs would be one outcome of the increased compensation.
Board member Kelly Gonez also defended the new contracts, which averted an April strike. She said L.A. Unified is not getting enough credit for previous major budget reductions — to central office staffing, for example — that it has made. The financial effects of declining enrollment, she added, were exacerbated by the Trump administration‘s immigration enforcement policies.
Andrés Chait selected to lead LAUSD three days after Carvalho’s resignation
Newly appointed Supt. Chait — who will give his first “state of the district” address on Tuesday — said in a statement that parents would see nothing out of the ordinary when schools open in the fall.
Under the district plan sent to the county, that’s largely accurate: The major cuts are pushed into next year, with the hope that higher state funding will arrive in time to moderate the cutbacks.
Union objections
Gloria Martinez, the new president of United Teachers Los Angeles, called for revenue increases at the ballot box, raising some property taxes and for Gov. Gavin Newsom to release more funding for schools statewide.
“Labor contracts are not the issue,” Martinez said. “For far too long, it has been expected that school districts balance their budgets on the backs of students and teachers, when in reality school funding is determined at the state level.”
Max Arias, executive director of Local 99 of Service Employees International Union, focused on past projected shortfalls that did not result in catastrophe.
“For decades, dire predictions of financial collapse at LAUSD have been used to justify denying dedicated school workers the wages and resources they deserve,” said Arias, whose unions represents the largest number of nonteaching workers. “Those predictions have repeatedly failed to materialize.
“It is deeply inhumane, and outright union busting, for the County Office of Education to scapegoat the front-line school workers whose collective bargaining agreements have only begun to lift them out of poverty.”
In principle at least, L.A. Unified’s already adopted plan calls for more than 6,000 job reductions, slashing up to $500 million per year in extra services for schools with the greatest needs and seven unpaid furlough days for each worker.
But the lack of detail in the plan raised county concerns in part because $231 million in spending cuts from the previous stabilization plan “remained unexecuted and unidentified,” Duardo wrote.
“It is easy to put numbers on paper,” said professor Jon Fullerton, executive director of the USC EdPolicy Hub. “The question is whether the reduction numbers are realistic and whether the district will act when the time comes to put specifics behind them. Given that last year’s fiscal stabilization plan was not implemented — according to the county — it is not unreasonable to be skeptical that this year’s more draconian plan will not be implemented either.”
L.A. Unified’s revised plan must identify “the exact actions, responsible departments, timelines and measurable performance metrics for executing each proposed expenditure reduction or revenue enhancement,” Duardo’s letter said.
The district also must state “who is accountable for execution, and the specific milestones that will mark successful completion. Generalized or unsupported action items will not be sufficient.”
What caused the LAUSD budget crisis?
L.A. Unified avoided layoffs for several years because it fared especially well in receiving pandemic relief funds and then had trouble spending all the money, amassing billions of dollars in reserve, edging above $6.4 billion on June 30, 2024, in a year with a total budget of $18.8 billion. These reserves prompted outrage from union leaders, who wanted these funds quickly applied to higher wages and new hires.
But much of the one-time funding did ultimately go to increasing salaries, maintaining and expanding health benefits and hiring ongoing staff. Meanwhile, district enrollment — the basis for most funding — declined steadily, with especially steep drops during the pandemic school closures and since the start of the federal immigration crackdown.
“The District has not adjusted staffing levels to match these declines,” Duardo wrote.
Also hurting the district is the cost of sexual misconduct settlements, a factor affecting public agencies up and down the state. The Board of Education authorized the sale of $750 million in bonds to settle hundreds of cases dating back decades.
By 2025, with the huge reserves eroding, the county required a first fiscal stabilization plan, which included significant layoffs. But earlier this year the district backed down from hundreds of the planned layoffs under union pressure.
How union contracts affected the budget
The teachers union contract approved in June adds more than 450 positions, including attendance counselors, psychiatric social workers, school psychologists and other counselors.
Separately, the largest union for nonteachers won expanded hours for its workers, which allowed many part-time employees to qualify for the first time for health benefits for themselves and family members.
The county did not question the value of the employees or their need for higher income and health benefits, it simply challenged the district’s ability to afford them.
Before the school board’s June approval of the new labor contracts, Duardo issued “express written warnings” that the “agreements were not affordable,” she recounted in her letter.
The board’s vote “has made certain the District’s structural deficits continue,” it said.
Based on current tax revenues, increased state funding is expected over the next two years, but that is unlikely to solve all the district’s budget problems.
“It’s serious,” Franklin said. “We have to cut $3.5 billion over the next three years. Some people would say that’s fearmongering. That’s not true.”
L.A. Unified must detail steep budget cuts or face a county takeover after officials warned that school board decisions ‘erode confidence.’
www.latimes.comWas Francoism Fascist?
https://www.counterfire.org/article/was-francoism-fascist/
Chris Bambery
17 July 2026
The terror carried out by Franco and his supporters during the Spanish Civil War and beyond can be characterised only as fascist, finds Chris Bambery
After his …victory in the Spanish Civil War in April 1939, General Francisco Franco ruled the country via a ruthless dictatorship until his death in November 1975.
The question I want to ask is whether that dictatorship was fascist or not. For a long time I would have answered no but as my reading about the Spanish Civil War intensified I would now answer yes. Let me explain why.
I have argued, in line with Trotsky, that fascism creates a mass movement independent of the state, based in the middle class. In moments of acute crisis where the forces of the state no longer seem able to contain working class unrest, the ruling class turns to fascism. As Trotsky said:
“The big bourgeoisie likes fascism as little as a man with aching molars likes to have his teeth pulled.”
Elsewhere, I have written:
“i) fascism is the product of capitalism in crisis, ii) it differs from other forms of pro-capitalist government in that it has at its core a petty bourgeoisie mass movement, iii) it aims to destroy working class organisation by dividing it against itself.”
The Spanish Civil War began with a military revolt, and the military was crucial to Franco’s victory. The military is a key part of the state, so the Nationalist forces did not represent a force independent of the state.
But Trotsky also wrote:
“Fascism is not merely a system of reprisals, of brutal force, and of police terror. Fascism is a peculiar governmental system based on the uprooting of all elements of proletarian democracy with bourgeois society… To this end the physical annihilation of the most revolutionary sections of the workers does not suffice. It is also necessary to smash independent and voluntary organisations, to demolish all the defensive bulwarks of the proletariat, and to uproot whatever has been achieved during three quarters of a century by Social Democracy and the trade unions.”
This describes exactly what Franco achieved in Spain.
The Spanish Civil War saw the right launch a genocidal campaign of extermination, which they called a crusade, against all those who they saw as enemies of the patria, the nation: leftists of all shades, liberals, Catalan and Basque nationalists, freemasons and trade unionists.
The army of General Francisco Franco played a key role in this, but behind the lines the killings were in the main carried out by members of Spain’s fascist party, the Falange.
Emilio Mola, another general, planned the military uprising and commanded the fascist forces in the north of Spain, but would suffer because of the failure of the planned uprisings in the great cities of Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia and Bilbao. The large areas of northern Spain supported the uprising and joined in without very much resistance. That did not stop Mola ordering his men to implement terror, killing anyone suspected of having voted for the government or for being vegetarians, naturists or champions of Esperanto. Teachers were another target. From the beginning, Mola saw the civil war as a crusade against the ‘Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik’ conspiracy, telling Italian fascist officers fighting alongside him that he would welcome the wholesale destruction of the industrial working class. Like many veterans of the long and bitter colonial war in Morocco, Mola, like Franco, viewed the working class in the same colonial way he viewed Moroccans.
In the south, Gonzalo Queipo de Llano took control of the uprising in Seville, elbowing his way to the top. He would become famous for his rants on the radio promising death to a long list of those supposedly conspiring to destroy Spain. His list would include US President Roosevelt, supposedly controlled by Jews. His forces, aided by squads of Falangists, carried out mass killings in the towns and villages of the south, where landless labourers backed the Republic. Aristocrats joined in with glee. Queipo himself loved killing, and raped and sexually assaulted female prisoners. He also despised those who rose above him, Franco above all, ensuring he would be sidelined as the dictator gathered power into his hands.
Paul Preston in his book, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, puts the number executed by the Nationalists at between 150,000 and 200,000: many still lying in unmarked mass graves, many brutally tortured prior to being shot. The wives of those killed had their children forcibly removed to be given to Nationalist families in which to be brought up.
The right simply claimed Paul was a red, a rojo. Others said he was breaking the ‘Pact of Silence’, agreed between the former Francoists who oversaw the transition to parliamentary democracy and the Socialist and Communist opposition. Along with an amnesty for all of Franco’s torturers and executioners, they agreed to put the events of 1936-1939 and the subsequent dictatorship behind them.
It was also claimed that Paul ignored victims of terror in the zone controlled by the Republicans, those who remained loyal to the elected government of Spain, which the generals wanted to overthrow. Preston did not in fact do so, but did point out that the numbers of those executed in the loyalist zone was far smaller, 50,000, and that the Republican government deplored the killings and, as it asserted its authority after the effective collapse of the state subsequent to the military rising, acted to halt them. In contrast, Franco and the Nationalist authorities encouraged the killings, handing over much of the rearguard to the tender mercies of Spain’s fascist party, the Falange. Their final victory would be followed by a further wave of executions, which continued, albeit on a much smaller scale, until the bitter end.
Franco’s dictatorship used a wide array of savage tactics to dehumanise, persecute, terrorise, and silence the enemy, including forced exile, labour camps, torture, and rape. Their goal was to eradicate all of Spain’s supposed enemies, actors in the ‘Judeo-Masonic-Bolshevik’ conspiracy: leftists, republicans, liberals and Catalan and Basque nationalists. The Catalans were denounced by the Falange as being Jews.
General Mola declared the strategy early in the war, on 19 July 1936, when he said in a speech: ‘It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery eliminating without scruples of hesitation all those who do not think as we do.’[i]
Franco, in a speech following his 19 May 1939 victory parade through captured Madrid, justified the continued need for repression by pointing to the continuing and necessary struggle against the Jews, stating:
‘The Victory would be wasted if we did not stay on the alert and maintain the concerns of the heroic days, if we left eternal dissidents, the embittered, the egoists, the defenders of liberal economics free to act … Let us have no illusions: we cannot extinguish in one day the Jewish spirit that facilitated the alliance of big capital with Marxism, that knows all about deals with the anti-Spanish revolution. That spirit still flutters in many hearts.’[ii]
The three central figures in the dictatorship which emerged spread the myth that Spain faced a ‘Jewish-Freemason-Bolshevik’ conspiracy. Franco, the man who ruled Spain from his victory in March 1939 until his death in November 1975; his brother-in-law and Interior then Foreign Minister until his dismissal in September 1942, Ramón Serrano Suñer, and the man who would become Franco’s chosen successor, Admiral Luis Carrero Blanco (best remembered now for his assassination by the Basque terror group ETA in December 1973).
After the Second World War, both Franco and Carrero Blanco had to try to tone down their public statements attacking Jews and Freemasons, as the dictatorship tried to draw a curtain over its enthusiastic support for Hitler and, as the Cold War gathered strength, became an ally of the United States. But it was a façade. Neihter could stop making such hideous statements and both wrote articles (and Franco even scripted a film) under pseudonyms attacking Jews and Freemasons. Old fascists couldn’t change their stripes.
Serrano Suñer was very close to the Falange and was Franco’s foreign minister from 1940-1942 visiting Germany where he met Hitler, Himmler and Ribbentrop. He also met Mussolini. Serrano Suñer was fervently pro-Axis. While Spain did not join Germany and Italy at war it provided ports, re-fuelling, weather reports and much more for German U Boats, which also utilised a German tracking base in the Canary Islands. When Germany invaded Russia, Serrano Suñer was the driving force in organising 45,000 Falangist volunteers into the Blue Division which fought in the St. Petersburg theatre.
It’s often said Franco was no fascist. That may be, but he and the others in this book shared the genocidal impulse of Hitler and the Nazis. The Falange would be incorporated into the National Movement under him, along with monarchists of different hues, but they were central to the terror, and central to the regime, until it became clear Germany was going to be defeated. Nonetheless, the Falange remained the force Franco would turn to whenever he felt threatened, right up to the end.
Until the Popular Front, and alliance of liberals and the left, won the February 1936 general election, the Falange was a fairly marginal force. The dominant force on the right was the CEDA “Confederación Española de Derechas Autónomas” (Spanish Confederation of Autonomous Rights) which adopted some of the trappings of the Nazis, but was a parliamentary party – albeit a nasty one.
In the months between the general elections – the next was in July 1936, it began haemorrhaging support to its right, mainly to the Falange. Virtually the whole of its youth wing went over to the Blueshirts. The Falange began a campaign of terror, targeting leftists and attacking a supposedly Jewish owned department store.
Thus, the Falange became a mass party in the final few months prior to the Civil War, but one which was relatively under-developed.
The Falange had lost its key leader, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, who had been in jail when the army uprising began, and who was executed in Alicante jail. Other important figures were in the Republican zone. So the party was essentially leaderless.
After the Civil War began the Falange grew significantly once more as it was given a free hand to kill en masse.
This made it easy for Franco to carry out a manoeuvre whereby the Falange was incorporated into the Movimiento Nacional (National Movement) along with the Carlists and CEDA. In many accounts this signalled the end of the Falange, but this was not the case.
The Falangists were Franco’s most loyal supporters. He himself did not trust the Carlists, knowing they felt betrayed because he did not recognise their claimant to the Spanish crown or the former CEDA politicians because he saw them as verging on being liberals. So, in moments of crisis, right up to the very end, it was the Falangists who he rallied in his support.
When Franco’s forces advanced into Catalonia, capturing Lleida in April 1938, the Falange were let loose:
“… repression in the Lleida region was indiscriminate and resolute, and was carried out by the military authorities in co-operation with the Falangists and local right-wingers. Dozens of non-combatants were executed merely on the grounds that they were perceived as sympathetic towards the Republican cause. Certain extremely violent acts were perpetrated against women from the Pallares region.”
Conxita Mir puts the number executed in the Lleida region after trial by Military Courts at 558 with another 148 Republicans executed without trial, while 169 political prisoners were simply murdered.[iii]
This was repeated when the rest of Catalonia fell at the beginning of 1939. The use of the Catalan language, called by the Francoists “the language of dogs,” was banned in public. Catalan pre-names names were banned, as were all Catalan newspapers and publications. All Catalan cultural institutions – theatres, dance groups, choral societies and literary societies – were banned. That remained the case until Franco’s death.
The Catalan novelist, Manuel Váquez Montalban (who would be arrested and tortured by Franco’s secret police) wrote about Barcelona under occupation:
“Cripples, beggars, stub end tobacco sellers, charlatans, street singers, organ grinders, rag-and-bone men, uniformed Falangists marching to their epic songs… flags in the wind… Fascist commandoes, who shaved their heads to their scalp and forced repressive fear, estraperlo (black market), white bread and blonde tobacco sellers and ‘Idea’ cigarettes. Military priests who led punitive processions and urged the mob on to chants like: ‘What shall we do with the Protestants? Throw them into the sea.’”[iv]
The success of the far right in spreading the pernicious myth of a ‘Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik’ conspiracy drew on old Catholic traditions, stretching back to the expulsion of Muslims and Jews in 1492, when the last Muslim kingdom of Grenada was conquered. But its propogandists quickly picked up and spread the current version issuing from Berlin.
The entire Spanish right, from open fascists to the officer corps, the Catholic hierarchy and most of the priesthood, and the monarchists, were infected by Nazi ideas and by Nazi methods. When World War II began, Franco would declare Spain neutral, but after Hitler’s occupation of Scandinavia, the Low Countries and France, changed that to ‘non-belligerence’, supporting Germany and Italy in every way short of joining in the fighting.
The truth was that after the civil war, Spain was in no position to join the war and Hitler could not afford to supply it with the material that would have required, or accede to Franco’s price, swathes of North Africa. But Franco did send the fascist Blue Division to fight in Russia.
What Paul Preston also shows is that subsequent efforts to pretend Spain helped save Jews from across Europe were a barefaced lie. The regime handed over the census it took of its own Jewish population to the SS commander, Heinrich Himmler. It imposed fines and taxes on them, and made it clear they were not part of Franco’s new order. When Franco occupied Tangiers, until then a French possession, the Falange ran amok, attacking its Jewish population and forcing them to flee. The regime also tried to stop Jewish refugees (including Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jews, the descendants of those expelled from the Kingdom of Spain in 1492, many of whom had Spanish passports) entering Spain and, when they relented to a degree, allowed those with papers only the right to cross the country to a port from which they could depart. Those without papers were interned.
All the time the press and radio were issuing antisemitic statements given to them by the German embassy or lifted from ‘The Protocols of Zion’. Post-war Holocaust denial was the rule of the day.
In July 1936, the Nationalist generals hoped for a quick victory. That did not happen. Instead they faced four years of civil war. They won that not just by conventional means by unleashing mass terror in which the Falange was central. The Nationalist camp and the state they constructed was infected by that; it was genocidal, far more so than Mussolini’s Italy and only less so than Nazi Germany because it did not have the military and economic power Hitler could deploy.
Franco’s state quacked like a Nazi duck and waddled like one. The genocide it carried out qualifies it as a fascist movement. It’s worth recalling, before someone quotes Trotsky at me, that in Fascism: What it Is and How to Fight it, that he describes the dictatorship of General Pilduski in Poland as fascist. It very much resembled Franco’s dictatorship but killed far fewer of its opponents.
The scale of what was unleashed in Spain by the July 1936 military uprising proves to me that it was fascist.
Before you go
The ongoing genocide in Gaza, Starmer’s austerity and the danger of a resurgent far right demonstrate the urgent need for socialist organisation and ideas. Counterfire has been central to the Palestine revolt and we are committed to building mass, united movements of resistance. Become a member today and join the fightback.
[i] Paul Preston, Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain (London, Harper Collins 2023), P212
[ii] Paul Preston, Architects of Terror: Paranoia, Conspiracy and Anti-Semitism in Franco’s Spain (London, Harper Collins 2023), P27-28
[iii] Conxita Mir, The Francoist Repression in the Catalan Countries, Catalan Historical Review, 1: 133-147 (2008), P143
[iv] Manuel Váquez Montalban, Barcelonas, (London, Verso, 1992), P143
Chris Bambery
Chris Bambery is an author, political activist and commentator, and a supporter of Rise, the radical left wing coalition in Scotland. His books include A People's History of Scotland and The Second World War: A Marxist Analysis.
The terror carried out by Franco and his supporters during the Spanish Civil War and beyond can be characterised only as fascist, finds Chris Bambery…
www.counterfire.orgTulsa premiere of the documentary, “Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie” on Thursday, Aug. 20.
https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1461665055994338&set=a.483144210513099
Woody Guthrie Center
Join the Woody Guthrie Center, Circle Cinema, the …Oklahoma Jewish Film Festival and the The Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art for the Tulsa premiere of the documentary, “Dust Bowls and Jewish Souls: Another Side of Woody Guthrie” on Thursday, Aug. 20.
This compelling documentary explores an often-overlooked chapter of Woody Guthrie’s life and legacy, examining the profound influence of Jewish culture, faith, and community on the iconic folk singer’s worldview, music and activism. Through archival footage, interviews, and historical insight, the film reveals Guthrie’s relationship with his Jewish in-laws and the relationships that helped shape some of his most enduring beliefs about justice, equality and human dignity.
A pre-show reception with live music performed by Jesse Aycock will begin at 6 p.m., with the screening beginning at 7 p.m. Following the screening, guests will have the opportunity to hear from the documentary director, Steven Pressman, as he and Cady Shaw, Senior Director of the Woody Guthrie Center, engage in a Q&A session discussing the film’s themes and Woody Guthrie’s lasting relevance.
Attendees will receive free admission to the center or the SMMJA when they present their ticket stub at the front desk.
Don’t miss this unique opportunity to discover another side of one of America’s most influential voices. Get tickets today:
Join the Woody Guthrie Center, Circle Cinema, the Oklahoma Jewish Film Festival and the Sherwin Miller Museum of Jewish Art for the Tulsa premiere of…
woodyguthriecenter.orgAugustus Wood On Class Struggle In Black Atlanta
Watch the full interview on YouTube: Capitalism & Class Struggle In Black Atlanta With Gus Wood Dr. Augustus Wood is a professor of labor and African…
capitalismraceanddemocracy.orgTrump DOJ’s Top ‘Antifa’ Prosecutor Marched With Crowd on Jan. 6
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/exclusive-trump-dojs-top-antifa-prosecutor-marched-with-crowd-on-jan-6
Exclusive: Trump DOJ’s Top ‘Antifa’ Prosecutor Marched With Crowd on Jan. 6
It was not known publicly …that a federal prosecutor marched to the Capitol on Jan. 6. He was appointed this year to run a national task force targeting alleged left-wing political violence.
josh-kovensky_mpgyad.jpg
by Josh Kovensky
07.15.26 | 5:37 pm
On Jan. 6, 2021, a man approached the Capitol who looked like many others in the crowd that day: white, with a Trump 2020 hat on and a shirt marking his service to the country in Afghanistan.
But this one was different. Brian W. Lynch was months into a new job as a federal prosecutor in Maryland when he attended the march on the Capitol. Yet, somehow, Lynch’s presence at the Capitol that fateful day has not been publicly reported until now, more than five years later. In the meantime, Lynch remained at DOJ and, under the second Trump administration, received a big promotion: He’s now running a national task force to prosecute left-wing political violence.
A DOJ official confirmed to TPM that Lynch “was present but never entered the capitol, left the grounds after a brief period, and did not commit and was never accused of any violation of law.”
The prosecutor, Brian W. Lynch, did not return TPM’s requests for comment.
Michael Romano, who was a deputy chief in the DOJ’s since-disbanded Capitol Siege Section, described Jan. 6 to TPM as an act of massive political violence. He told TPM that he had never heard of anything like a federal prosecutor having been present at the march and continuing to work and be promoted years on.
“People were trying to stop the certification of the electoral college vote on January 6th,” he said. “They were trying to stop the peaceful transfer of power between one presidential administration and the next.”
In the images, Lynch is wearing a Trump 2020 baseball hat. He has on a black shirt emblazoned with a map of Afghanistan that reads, “Afghanistan 2012-2013.” A LinkedIn profile for Lynch that was removed after an earlier TPM story about himsaid that he deployed to Afghanistan from 2012 to 2013 as part of a legal assistance program.
One image that the DOJ confirmed to be of Lynch shows him in front of a green crane. Romano told TPM that it is “definitely in the restricted area,” and that “the boundaries were streets. Anyone that close to the building was inside the restricted area.”
Lynch stands on the Capitol grounds on Jan. 6 while wearing a star-spangled mask. (Obtained by TPM)
In March, Lynch became co-director of Joint Task Force Vanguard, which DOJ has described as central to its effort to prosecute alleged left-wing political violence cases, including last month’s indictment of 15 anti-ICE protesters in Minneapolis. Lynch reports to Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general currently serving as acting attorney general while the Senate considers his nomination to the permanent position.
Lynch’s presence at the march on Jan. 6 puts him at the center of the highest-profile example of political violence in the U.S. this century and the first break in the country’s streak of peaceful transfers of power since the country’s founding. After more than a month of trying to overturn his loss in the 2020 election through legal wrangling, pressure on state legislatures and pressure on the courts, President Donald Trump directed his supporters to march on Congress as members voted to certify Joe Biden’s victory. The march culminated in hours of spectacular violence in which rioters broke down barricades, assaulted law enforcement officers, and stormed into the heart of the Capitol, forcing members of Congress to flee.
There’s no evidence that Lynch entered the Capitol building itself or that he engaged in violence.
Romano, the Jan. 6 prosecutor, described the scale of the task facing DOJ as “huge.”
“We knew that there had been thousands of people, um, who entered the Capitol and should not have, and who took part in disrupting the certification of the Electoral College that day,” he said. “And so we had the task of identifying as many of those people as possible.”
Romano added that charges largely depended on the person’s conduct that day – limited investigative and prosecutorial resources went to those who committed acts of violence or who made it deeper into the Capitol. Those strayed into restricted areas were often overlooked out of resource constraints.
“We took a lot of care and a lot of deliberation to really assess what people did and whether there was good evidence that they understood they were doing something wrong or something illegal before we charged,” he said.
The attack on Congress prompted widespread condemnation, led to Trump’s second impeachment, and resulted in the largest investigation in the DOJ’s history.
Several people that TPM spoke with expressed disbelief that Lynch was not identified during the Jan. 6 investigation. The DOJ assigned hundreds of prosecutors and FBI agents from across the country to pore through footage and identify the rioters; a small army of online sleuths dedicated their lives to tracking down the identities of the people who breached the Capitol that day. More than 1,500 people were arrested in the course of the probe; several law enforcement officials and military personnel were identified and prosecuted over their involvement. The FBI said in 2023 that it revoked the security clearances of three agents in relation to the attack.
Through all of that, Lynch does not appear to have ever been identified.
In his final report, Special Counsel Jack Smith described Trump’s coup attempt as an effort “to defeat a federal government function foundational to the United States’ democratic process.” After Trump won the 2024 election, he pardoned nearly all of the rioters and commuted the sentences of a small few.
When the Capitol insurrection took place, Lynch was serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in the District of Maryland. He had moved there in November 2020 after spending years as a state prosecutor in Cleveland and, before then, in Ohio’s Wayne County. In Maryland, Lynch prosecuted violent crime, weapons, and drug cases. He was three months into his tenure as a federal prosecutor when he appeared in a Trump 2020 hat among the crowd on Jan. 6.
TPM reviewed a video of people marching down Pennsylvania Avenue on Jan. 6. It briefly shows a man resembling Lynch; several former colleagues of Lynch’s told TPM that they recognized him as the man in screenshots of the video that TPM shared with them.
By 2022, Lynch had changed offices to DOJ headquarters for a position in what’s now known as the Violent Crime and Racketeering Section. There, he took charge of organized crime cases in Ohio and in Minnesota, where he lived for a time, and became a presence in the criminal division of the U.S. Attorney’s Office.
Lynch (right) at a press conference in Minneapolis in June announcing the indictment of 15 anti-ICE protesters.
TPM first reported last month that the DOJ created Joint Task Force Vanguard to pursue political violence cases across the country. That, a DOJ official told TPM, means implementing National Security Presidential Memorandum 7. Issued after the killing of Charlie Kirk, NSPM-7 directs federal law enforcement to treat “anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and anti-Christianity” as indicators of political violence.
Lynch appeared at a press conference in Minneapolis last month announcing the new conspiracy indictment brought against 15 anti-ICE protesters who took part in demonstrations against the Trump administration’s surge of federal immigration enforcement into the city. The indictment dubbed the group “Antifa.” Though he did not speak there, he was quoted in a DOJ press release saying that Vanguard’s purpose is “to counter groups that use violence and the threat of violence to achieve political ends.”
“Acts of political violence are priority matters for federal law enforcement and will be zealously investigated and prosecuted,” he said.
On Jan. 6, 2021, a man approached the Capitol who looked like…
talkingpointsmemo.comThousands of Google workers demand layoff protections amid AI boom in petition to CEO
The petition to Sundar Pichai, the CEO, included more than 4,500 signatures and included calls for buyout options
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/16/google-workers-layoff-protections-ai
…
Sanya Mansoor
Thu 16 Jul 2026 18.22 EDT
Google workers on Thursday delivered a petition calling for layoff protections as tech giants continue to slash their workforces while pouring billions into AI.
“Make no mistake: this is a company that is enjoying massive, unprecedented success,” Parul Koul, Google software engineer and AlphabetWorkers Union president, said outside the company’s California headquarters after delivering the petition to the office of the CEO, Sundar Pichai’. Koul pointed to Google’s $4tn valuation, which has quadrupled over the last six years: “These layoffs and cuts are not difficult decisions, but simply profit being put over the people that make this company run.”
The petition, which was led by the union and includes more than 4,500 signatures, calls for guaranteed severance, buyouts before mandatory layoffs in all product areas and the option to take severance as extended paid leave. Union members are also asking to end performance ratings they say are based on achieving quotas rather than merit.
Google did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Upon delivering the petition, workers were “greeted with closed doors and no response for the most part”, Koul said. They left the petition with a staff member in Pichai’s office, who committed to delivering it to the CEO, she added. “This petition is the largest piece of employee feedback that Google has received about job security,” she said.
At Thursday’s press conference, workers called out Alphabet’s mass layoffs in 2023, which drew shouts of “shame” from the crowd. Workers also chanted: “Google, Google you can’t hide, we can see your greedy side.”
The petition comes as big tech companies thin their ranks, with some explicitly citing AI as a reason.
The annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference in Sun ValleyMeta CEO Mark Zuckerberg attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, U.S., July 9, 2026. REUTERS_Brendan McDermid.webp
Meta used AI to tag workers who took leave to be laid off, lawsuit claims
Google has been cutting its workforce in recent months as it ramps up its AI spend. Google Cloud quietly laid off some employees about two months ago, according to Business Insider. And last summer, the company eliminated more than one-third of its managers overseeing small teams, according to an audio recording obtained by CNBC. In the company’s latest earnings call, Anat Ashkenazi ,Alphabet’s chief financial officer, called AI a “key investment area”, in which the company plans to continue hiring and boost marketing support.
Google did not comment on whether AI has played a role in its layoffs, but the CEO of the company’s DeepMind division previously told Wired that companies trying to replace developers with AI “have a lack of imagination”.
Employees across Silicon Valley are attempting to shield themselves from the effects of the AI boom, whether in their companies’ hiring and firing or spending. The day before the petition went public, dozens of Meta employees sued the social media giant for allegedly using artificial intelligence tools to tag workers for mass layoffs. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, conducted a workforce reduction of about 8,000 employees earlier this year. The workers allege that those AI tools targeted them after they asked for protected or maternity leave or disability accommodation.
Meta disputed the allegations; a spokesperson wrote in a statement, “These claims lack merit and are not based on facts.”
UCSF Health launches AI incubator to develop health-care tools
A 2024 survey of 2,300 nurses conducted by National Nurses United — which is affiliated with the union that represents nurses at UCSF Health — found that 60% of respondents did not trust that their “employer will implement …A.I. with patient safety as the first priority.”
https://www.sfexaminer.com/news/public-health/ucsf-health-launches-ai-project-to-develop-health-care-tools/article_4676b873-040f-4086-881c-dc22bd8cc536.html
By Natalia Gurevich | Examiner staff writer 5 hrs ago
UCSF Health has launched a new AI incubator to create a collaboration between companies developing this technology and health care experts to improve patient care tools.
Mike Kai Chen © 2021 The New York Time Company
UCSF Health is launching a new collaboration between artificial-intelligence companies and clinicians in an effort to enhance the implementation of the tools in health care settings.
The UCSF Health Converge incubator will bring in a small handful of companies each year to work alongside experts at UCSF Health on ways to use AI technology to improve patient care beyond hospital and clinic visits, and improve workflow and operations in clinical settings, according to an announcement by UCSF Health officials on Wednesday.
“We think there's a lot of potential to make the work better within health care through using more technology, and AI really represents a potential to do that in a way that we don't think that our current tools do,” Suresh Gunasekaran, the president and CEO of UCSF Health, told The Examiner on Wednesday. “We really were focused on how could we connect with patients better, make receiving care easier.”
In recent years, health-care workers have criticized the early adoption of certain AI tools, with their complaints including concerns about the technology creating errors in patient care and that the increased use of such tools could reduce the number of skilled human workers available to assist patients.
A 2024 survey of 2,300 nurses conducted by National Nurses United — which is affiliated with the union that represents nurses at UCSF Health — found that 60% of respondents did not trust that their “employer will implement A.I. with patient safety as the first priority.”
Half of respondents reported that their employers used some sort of algorithmic tool to measure patients’ levels of illness in digital health records, and a large majority of that half found those assessments to be inaccurate.
Those and other concerns are the kinds of obstacles the new UCSF incubator aims to address, Gunasekaran said, by bringing together the companies and health-care workers early on in the development process.
“You really have a lot of control over how the product gets designed,” he said. “The technology comes in at an early phase; our entire care team, our entire administrative team, including various different staff members from different departments, will work on the project together with the selected vendor.”
Gunasekaran said that despite industry concerns that adoption of such technology will have a negative impact on labor, UCSF Health aims to continue to invest in its workforce, with plans to hire hundreds more staff members in the next year.
“I think we invest in labor significantly,” he said. “I think we also want our labor to have the best training and the best tools.”
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The incubator is a partnership between UCSF Health, Bay Area venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital. The amount of money that will be invested depends on the companies selected, Gunasekaran said. Applications currently are open, and the initiative aims to bring on two to three companies before the end of the year.
The focus will initially be on developing products dedicated to two main areas: supporting patients beyond hospital or clinic visits, and improving care delivery inside hospitals and clinics, according to Wednesday’s statement. Those priorities were determined through conversations with staff about the improvements they would like to see, but that won’t prohibit UCSF Health from considering other areas as well.
Different departments will be asked to participate in the incubator depending on the tool being developed.
“We want folks that are close to the technology that's being developed to be the ones that participate, but we haven't reached out yet,” he said. “We will do that based on who's selected.”
The companies involved will be on a one-year timeline, with multiple progress benchmarks. Once that time is up, UCSF Health is not obligated to adopt whatever tool is developed.
“We are hopefully excited about the tool, and hopefully it’s delivering value,” Gunasekaran said. “But we would evaluate it at the end of the process, just like we'd evaluate any software against all of our standards.”
This isn't the first time that UCSF Health has investigated potential uses for AI. Development of Versa, its own version of ChatGPT for nurses, began in 2024 as an internal tool for administrative questions, such as finding out more information about employee health benefits or parental leave.
Last year, UCSF received $5 million from longtime donors Kathy Chiao and Ken Hao for the Impact Monitoring Platform for AI in Clinical Care project, whose goal is to develop a tool that will assess the “safety and efficacy of AI technologies as they are adopted” in clinical care.
These types of initiatives will be separate from the incubator, Gunasekaran said.
“We will continue to evaluate technology solutions in general,” he said. “This is just one aspect of it.”
The project will be a collaboration between companies and health care workers.
www.sfexaminer.comThe AFL-CIO “Solidarity Center” & Why Is Trump Funding It?
https://laborfest.net/2026/event/the-afl-cio-solidarity-center-why-is-trump-funding-it/
Thursday July 16 @ 4:00 pm pst/6 pm cst/7pm est
LEPAIO Panel
The need for international workers solidarity is critical for …workers in the US and around the world. The AFL-CIO international operations is through the Solidarity Center which is nearly totally funded by the National Endowment For Democracy NED. The recent Trump Republican budget provided with for over $300 million to the NED and the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center will receive $71 million for it’s operations around the world. The Labor Education Project For AFL-CIO International Operations LEPAIO has opposed the AFL-CIO funding of it’s international operations and at the recent Labor Notes convention passed out a statement about the US government funding of the Solidarity Center.
At this panel there will be a report on what happened at the Labor Notes meeting and why the issue of international solidarity and the AFL-CIO was left out. While there were panels on international labor solidarity, the issue and role of the AFL-CIO was not addressed.
The AFL-CIO’s Solidarity Center’s operations was also not addressed. There will also be a report on building international solidarity with the Colombian GM workers who have had an encampment at the Bogota embassy for over 15 years. This struggle has been ignored by the Solidarity Center which has an office in Bogota.
Speakers:
Kim Scipes – Author on “Developing Country Workers: Solidarity or Sabotage?” –Professor Emeritus Westville Campus of Purdue University Northwest
Frank Hammer – Retired UAW 909 President GM
Steve Zeltzer – WorkWeek, Member of NG & CWA Local 39521
Sponsored by Labor Education Project On The AFL-CIO International Operation
https://aflcio-int.education
UC Workers Rally Outside Regents Meeting To Protest Staffing Levels, Profiteering & Against Telescope
https://youtu.be/wnpGlnTGkZo
UCSF Workers and unionists rallied outside the UC regents meeting at the UCSF Mission Bay campus to protest the health, safety and staffing conditions at …UCSF Parnassus emergency rooms.
After speaking to the UC regents they rallied outside the Regents meeting and reported on the continuing healthcare emergency because of the lack of staffing. This has been a continuing crisis for years and the unionshave had numerous protests over the same issues many times.
Additional Media:
UCSF Healthcare Workers Speak Out At Parnassus Hospital About 200 Layoffs & Union Busting
https://youtu.be/RLUDPdMB3D0
CWA UPTE & CNA Workers Protest Layoffs & UC's War On Workers & Community At UCSF Parnassus Hospital
https://youtu.be/Oc-GHRVHpq8
UC Bosses & Regents Union Busting Drive Against UCSF Oakland Children's Hospital Unions & Workers
https://youtu.be/anpQQP9Wl7M
UCSF NUHW Oakland Children’s Hospital Healthcare Workers Fight Union Busting UC Bosses & Regents
https://youtu.be/fqQesx98d1Y
Children’s Hospital Oakland workers to launch strike vote at May Day rally against UCSF pay cut plan
https://home.nuhw.org/2025/04/30/thursday-childrens-hospital-oakland-workers-to-launch-strike-vote-at-may-day-rally-against-ucsf-pay-cut-plan/
No More Kaiser Suicides! NUHW Members Strike Kaiser Management's Attack On Staffing & Compensation
https://youtu.be/A9x_Dzm2EFQ
Kaiser, Don't Deny Patients need access to timely and consistent mental health services
https://nuhw.org/kaiser-dont-deny/kaiser-strike/
MLK Day Strike By NUHW Kaiser Mental Healthcare Workers To Stop Systemic Racism & To Provide Care
https://youtu.be/c-be9pAQAQs
Production 0f Labor Project
www.labormedia.net
UCSF Workers and unionists rallied outside the UC regents meeting a…
youtu.beUCSF CNA SEIU CIR & UPTE CWA Healthcare Workers Protest Dangerous Conditions At UC Regents Meeting
UCSF healthcare workers protested the dangerous healthcare conditions at UCSF hospitals during the UC Regents meeting held at the Mission Bay campus on July 15, 2026. They reported that …these conditions were harming the care for patients and also causing stress and other problems for the workers.
The SEIU CIR interns and resident, CNA nurses and UPTE CWA UC union members participated. Workers reported that California governor Newsom has refused to speak out about these issues although he is an ex-officio member of the Board Regents.
Speakers also spoke up to call for the shutdown of the Hawaii telescope.
Additional Media:
UCSF Healthcare Workers Speak Out At Parnassus Hospital About 200 Layoffs & Union Busting
https://youtu.be/0SOx6MqByoE
CWA UPTE & CNA Workers Protest Layoffs & UC's War On Workers & Community At UCSF Parnassus Hospital
https://youtu.be/Oc-GHRVHpq8
UC Bosses & Regents Union Busting Drive Against UCSF Oakland Children's Hospital Unions & Workers
https://youtu.be/anpQQP9Wl7M
UCSF NUHW Oakland Children’s Hospital Healthcare Workers Fight Union Busting UC Bosses & Regents
https://youtu.be/fqQesx98d1Y
Children’s Hospital Oakland workers to launch strike vote at May Day rally against UCSF pay cut plan
https://home.nuhw.org/2025/04/30/thursday-childrens-hospital-oakland-workers-to-launch-strike-vote-at-may-day-rally-against-ucsf-pay-cut-plan/
No More Kaiser Suicides! NUHW Members Strike Kaiser Management's Attack On Staffing & Compensation
https://youtu.be/A9x_Dzm2EFQ
Kaiser, Don't Deny Patients need access to timely and consistent mental health services
https://nuhw.org/kaiser-dont-deny/kaiser-strike/
MLK Day Strike By NUHW Kaiser Mental Healthcare Workers To Stop Systemic Racism & To Provide Care
https://youtu.be/c-be9pAQAQs
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
UCSF healthcare workers protested the dangerous healthcare conditions at UCSF hospitals during the UC Regents meeting held at the Mission Bay campus on July 15, 2026. They reported that these conditions were harming the care for patients and also causing stress and other problems for the workers.
The SEIU CIR interns and resident, CNA nurses and UPTE CWA UC union members participated. Workers reported that California governor Newsom has refused to speak out about these issues although he is an ex-officio member of the Board Regents.
Speakers also spoke up to call for the shutdown of the Hawaii telescope.
Additional Media:
UCSF Healthcare Workers Speak Out At Parnassus Hospital About 200 Layoffs & Union Busting
https://youtu.be/0SOx6MqByoE
CWA UPTE & CNA Workers Protest Layoffs & UC's War On Workers & Community At UCSF Parnassus Hospital
https://youtu.be/Oc-GHRVHpq8
UC Bosses & Regents Union Busting Drive Against UCSF Oakland Children's Hospital Unions & Workers
https://youtu.be/anpQQP9Wl7M
UCSF NUHW Oakland Children’s Hospital Healthcare Workers Fight Union Busting UC Bosses & Regents
https://youtu.be/fqQesx98d1Y
Children’s Hospital Oakland workers to launch strike vote at May Day rally against UCSF pay cut plan
https://home.nuhw.org/2025/04/30/thursday-childrens-hospital-oakland-workers-to-launch-strike-vote-at-may-day-rally-against-ucsf-pay-cut-plan/
No More Kaiser Suicides! NUHW Members Strike Kaiser Management's Attack On Staffing & Compensation
https://youtu.be/A9x_Dzm2EFQ
Kaiser, Don't Deny Patients need access to timely and consistent mental health services
https://nuhw.org/kaiser-dont-deny/kaiser-strike/
MLK Day Strike By NUHW Kaiser Mental Healthcare Workers To Stop Systemic Racism & To Provide Care
https://youtu.be/c-be9pAQAQs
Production of Labor Video Project
www.labormedia.net
The Rise of Fascism, Racism & General Strikes https://laborfest.net/2026/event/the-rise-of-fascism-racism-general-strikes/ July 12 @ 7:00 pm – 9:00…
www.labormedia.net
