Aisha Mansour, Palestinian Youth Movement
Peter Olney, Organizing Director ILWU (retired)
Sam Levens, Inland Boatmen's Union
Gifford Hartman, Labor Studies Laney College
Building power for workers always involves building their agency and commitment. Such power is enhanced by a sophisticated understanding of production systems and logistics supply chains. This workshop will bring to bear the experiences of veteran organizers to identify choke points and key points of leverage that can enable workers to win. Historically, workers have used that power to stop arms from being sent to warzones, such as in 1981 when ILWU militants refused to send bomb parts to El Salvador or recently when millions of Italian workers and students went on strike, in solidarity with Gaza, to prevent weapons from being shipped to Israel.
Ansel Schmidt, Felix Thomson, Raghav Goyal, Reilly Gardine
Four Highland Hospital workers and SEIU members will share firsthand accounts of grassroots organizing at Alameda County’s largest public hospital. From leading a system-wide campaign to divest from weapons manufacturers, to organizing “Know Your Rights” trainings in response to ICE threats, to building cross-departmental networks that can - and did - defend from external attacks on the workforce, these workers are demonstrating how to transform their workplace through collective action. Their efforts offer a powerful example of how workers can build organization and solidarity on the job - even in difficult conditions.
Kevin Van Meter and Robert Ovetz
Café, nonprofit, and public and private sector workers across the United States are on the move—refusing current regimes of work, fighting bosses and organizing unions, speaking about their working lives and demanding workplace democracy. Our workshop will examine two recent workers inquires with café and nonprofit workers in the US. Robert Ovetz will recount his inquiry into the nonprofit industry in his forthcoming Rebels for the System: NGOs, Capitalism and the Labor Movement (Haymarket, 2026). Kevin Van Meter will report on his recently coauthored “Class Composition in the Café Sector” (Notes from Below, 2025) and speak about his forthcoming Reading Struggles: Working-Class Self-Activity from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (AK Press). In this workshop participants will have the opportunity to practice a workers’ inquiry to understand the position of their work in the current capitalist economy to develop new tactics and strategies to build our power. The workshop teaches how workers’ inquiry can help circulate workers’ struggles and build working-class power to take on fascism.
Charmaine Chua, Lara Kiswani, Samer Araabi
Palestinian trade unions have called on workers everywhere to unite to end Zionist supremacy and ethnic cleansing by halting the sale and funding of arms to Israel immediately. While the global response has not been sufficient to stop the current genocide in Gaza, certain tactical interventions have demonstrated that international labor is capable of achieving meaningful advancements in BDS (boycott, divestment, and sanctions). This discussion will examine concrete examples of long-haul labor organizing that have significantly impeded Israel's ability to engage in indiscriminate war, including successful Bay Area campaigns on divestment and blockades against Israeli shipping companies, and how these campaigns are instructive for guiding the labor movement as a force against Zionism and occupation moving forward.
Sasha Coleman, Aryn Far, Marc Lispi, Blanca Missé
Under the Trump administration, we are witnessing a coordinated assault on public education at every level — from K-12 schools to colleges and universities. Budget cuts, book bans, attacks on curriculum, targeting of critical thought, going after undocumented students and families — this is all part of a broader authoritarian agenda to suppress dissent and impose a racist, reactionary ideology. From the defunding of public schools, to the attacks on unions, to the erosion of tenure and academic freedom in higher education, this offensive is designed to weaken working class access to education and criminalize dissent of any form. Against these attacks, the response cannot be fragmented. Now more than ever, we need unity across the entire education sector: students, teachers, staff, parents, and faculty must organize collectively, from elementary classrooms to graduate programs, to defend our communities from these attacks, and fight for a free, inclusive, and quality education for all. Our struggles are interconnected, and only together can we fight back.
Mary Anne Trasciatti
In this session I propose to explore the connection between civil liberties and collective action, as presented in my recently published book, Elizabeth Gurley Fynn: The Rebel Girl, Democracy, and Revolution (Rutgers UP). As a socialist, then a Wobbly/syndicalist, and then a Communist, Flynn organized workers into unions, led strikes, championed women’s rights, supported anti-imperialist movements around the globe, protested deportations, advocated for prison reform, and fought for Black liberation. Through all these campaigns, she was an ardent and active defender of the right to hold and express one’s political views and to associate with like-minded people in pursuit of economic, social, and political change. Rather than a matter of individual rights, Flynn’s understanding of civil liberties was inseparable from her socialism, a position that caused her to be expelled from the ACLU, an organization that she helped found. She believed that freedom of speech, press, assembly, and the right to a fair trial by jury are necessary for democracy in a capitalist state where material resources are unevenly distributed. The only way to remedy the imbalance between “haves” and “have nots” is collective action by the latter, and collective action is impossible without civil liberties. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn belongs at the heart of labor and civil liberties history: her life is a wellspring of inspiration for contemporary activists who wish to fight supremacy in all its nefarious forms.
