I spent time in Chile in January, where a right-wing admirer of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, José Antonio Kast, was elected president by 58% in a December run-off, extending the wave of right-wingers elected in our hemisphere.

Kast, whose father was a Nazi in Germany, ousts the leftish government of Gabriel Boric, a leader of student protests in 2011–13 and a beneficiary of the militant estallido uprising of 2019–2020. Boric was elected in 2021 with high hopes for a new constitution — which was then rejected by the populace by 62% in 2022. (A new right-wing constitution was also rejected, by 56% in 2023.)

I chose Chile in part because of its historic attempt, 50 years ago, at an electoral road to socialism. I wanted to see what lessons could be learned. Socialist Party member Salvador Allende was elected president in 1970 with 36% of the vote (you could win with a plurality at that time), with the expressed goal of moving Chile to socialism.

I studied up, and particularly recommend “The Coup in Chile,” by Ralph Miliband, and the movies Machuca and Chile 1976. To go deeper, watch the three-part The Battle of Chile. I got contacts in the country through Labor Notes and through a DSA comrade with a Chileno background. I met with an American who had been a translator for Allende and had to flee the country when the military made its coup on September 11, 1973.

IMMIGRATION AND CRIME

Immigration and crime were big issues in this fall’s campaign. Right-wingers blame Venezuelan immigrants for everything. I asked a few comrades why the voters chose Kast over Boric’s coalition. Obvious factors are right-wing control of the media and the fact that voting is now mandatory, bringing in many low-information voters. Comrades were also critical of Boric for immediately modifying his goals and for not having a long-term plan that his supporters could explain to the people. It appears that government representatives did the usual politician thing of trying to make themselves look good rather than telling the truth.

For example, the new government wanted a pension reform that would do away with the privatization of the system that was initiated under Pinochet. It’s as if Social Security were turned over to private investors, with each individual having their own account. Instead, they got an increase in public pensions for the very poorest people but cemented in place private control of the pension investments — “for 30 years,” according to one comrade. Boric’s supporters tried to spin this as a victory.

Seeing insufficient results on this or on other concrete gains from the government, voters turned to the opposition, just as they turned away from Kamala Harris to Trump. My hope is that if Zohran Mamdani fails to win a piece of his agenda, he’ll say so and say why, calling out the villains that blocked it. People can tell when you’re putting a happy face on a defeat or a compromise.

STARBUCKS UNION

I saw one small bright spot: Chile’s Starbucks union, the first in the world and the only one to have a union contract.

Chilean Starbucks workers formed their union in 2009 and finally won a real contract in 2022. (In the U.S., workers at 550 stores finally brought Starbucks to the bargaining table in 2024 and in November last year they began a boycott and strike, in which more than 50 stores are now holding out, and some are walking out in short strikes, like seven stores that struck in Minneapolis for the ICE Out day January 23. Now 666 U.S. stores are unionized, but they still don’t have a contract.)

Asked the secret of his union’s unique success, past president Andres Giordano said, “This is not something that could be done in one or two years.” They did it through many ups and downs and without any full-time paid leaders.

Giordano started working at Starbucks while a student activist, in 2007, knowing nothing of unions. In 2009 he and others began the process to form a union, with only 16 of 2,500 workers officially on board. They recruited quickly, and Starbucks was obliged by Chilean law to negotiate — but “I imagine they imported their manual from the U.S.,” Giordano said, and management refused to bargain in any way. Between 2009 and 2012 Starbucks broke every single labor law, spelling out its illegal policies in internal documents. It is the most fined company in Chile, Giordano said.

MOTIVES FOR UNIONIZING

Meanwhile, workers were hurt by the 2009 financial crisis, with some stores closed down and heavy layoffs. Remaining workers were expected to work harder. Starbucks refused to give the usual annual cost-of-living raise that unionized workers expected. And in Giordano’s store in Santiago, rats were a big motivator. “We were required to clean up dead rats,” he said.

In 2011 a minority of workers struck, for 30 days. Union leaders held a noisy hunger strike for 12 days in front of Starbucks headquarters, twice putting padlocks on the doors (until the police showed up). They eventually had to call off the strike with no progress made. They got some help from government labor agencies. “They weren’t proactive but they didn’t like to see a multinational violating Chile’s laws,” Giordano said. “If it had been a mine, it might have been a different story.” (Copper is Chile’s number one export, and it is a big producer of lithium.)

But being right on the law went only so far. “We won our suits but not a contract,” Giordano said. Starbucks preferred to pay the fines.

At one point, Starbucks enlisted the help of a pro-employer union in Mexico, which sent a spy to learn the Chilean union’s strategy and report back to management.

In 2015 the union finally won a “contratito” — a little contract without a lot of content. Another change came when a Mexican holding company, ALSEA, took over management of Starbucks stores in much of Latin America. In 2021 Argentinian ALSEA managers — more used to dealing with unions — took over. In February 2022 the union signed a contract that extended the benefits of union membership, including raises, to new hires, a right that had not existed before.

CONTRACT GAINS

Twenty-six-year-old Romanett Belmar, a Starbucks veteran of nine years, is now the union’s president. I talked with her in a Santiago Starbucks that looked familiar. Signs said, “Pistachio returns” and “Reuse your cup and get 15% off.”

Belmar says that Starbucks in Chile now has 176 stores with usually ten workers per store. Of the 1800 workers nationally, two-thirds are in the union, and they make 40,000 pesos per month more than nonunion workers (about $44).

The contract clause she’s proudest of is the ability for customers to give tips electronically — credit cards are universal in Chile. Tips, she says, increased from 3,000 pesos a month to 30,000 a week ($3.30 to $33, and the store pays them in cash). The contract’s weakest point is that it allows Starbucks to hire all workers part-time.

Both Giordano and Belmar pointed out how Chilean labor law was somewhat helpful in their struggle and in securing workers’ rights — when the union enforced them. The opposite of the U.S., employers in Chile are literally not allowed to run an anti-union campaign against workers who are organizing. And tired baristas appreciate la ley de la silla (“the law of the chair”): every two hours, workers are entitled to a ten-minute break, sitting down. In Belmar’s eight-hour shift, she’s entitled to 50 minutes of break, including lunch.

But it was organizing that made the difference. Last year, they struck again, for 25 days.

In the end, Giordano says, it was patience and persistence that paid off. “I worked at Starbucks 15 years,” he said. “Antonio [the next president] worked there 18 years.”

[A version of the Starbucks portion of this article appears in Labor Notes.]

The Country Where Starbucks Workers Have a National Contract was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: A

In a digital discussion, a comrade brought up this article, entitled “The Teamsters have a MAGA problem. Here’s why,” on the current state of The International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) militancy and nativism, written by Luis Feliz Leon, with the suggestion that we ought to spend some time reflecting on it. This prompted a number of replies whose topics ranged as follows: making sense of the endorsement of current IBT president Sean O’Brian (SOB) by the reform caucus Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU), the general response to Trump by the U.S. labor movement, the role of labor staff in response to Trumpism/MAGA, the levels and positions of power within different unions, the role of workplace versus staff organizing, and strategic job placement.

Throughout all of these topics, there seemed to be agreement on a main point: We as DSA members need to engage in political reflection on the current status of the labor movement in light of the prominence of reactionary forces. This article is an attempt to set-up and illuminate this conversational space.

Where to start?

My initial response to this article was to ask about which part we needed to focus on. This was for two reasons. (1) The article covers a lot of territory, linking up current struggles to a multiplicity of past labor struggles with similar issues to descriptions of ICE activity to examples of current bottom up organizing under the Teamsters banner. There are lots of pieces to touch on, so what are the important ones? (2) Comrade Leon’s central thesis is clear but extremely broad, and composed of two points:

• Teamster Militancy paired with Political Nativism is a “strategy that destroys the very foundation of working-class power.”
• If we are to reject this strategy in order to build a class-wide labor movement, then we ought to build a culture of class solidarity within unions.

What socialist would disagree with the imposition to build political class solidarity against political nativism? Surely, then, we ought to take up the set of practical questions under this general imposition.

To take up Comrade Leon’s framework and generate more productive practical questions, I will here seek to explore the relationship of the Teamsters organizing efforts to our own here at Metro-Detroit DSA. I presuppose that, roughly and not absolutely, the Teamsters are Organizationally Militant without being Politically Militant and that our chapter of DSA is Politically Militant without being Organizationally Militant. Thus, there is a question of what each entity might learn from the other. What follows is an enumeration of sets of questions for (1) current and future Teamsters labor organizers in Detroit and (2) Metro-Detroit DSA members.

§ What should current and future labor organizers in Detroit do?

The section in Comrade Leon’s article entitled “Fit to Rule” picks out the aspects of TDU that are working, or not, and two strategic paths which are deemed unsatisfactory: romantic denunciation and narrow pragmatism. The former takes on ideological struggle without material struggle, and the latter material struggle without ideological struggle. The strategic path forward, he proposes, is rather to develop a “robust political education program geared towards developing the political consciousness of militant workers.” To which “TDU can play an important role in showing how it can be done.” The key strategy to a revival of the labor movement is to establish a base of labor militancy with a superstructural ideological militancy. The class war must be fought in the realm of ideas as well as material gains. We cannot have one without the other.

For current labor organizers, both rank-and-file and staff, there must be a widening of strategic scope to include this ideological struggle. We must do ideological mapping not only of favorability towards union efforts or contract issues but also towards broader political issues to gauge political orientation. Just as unions are not won through policing for purity, neither will a socialist orientation of rank-and-file workers be won through those same means. So, educative tactics and programs must be developed according to what moves the needle.

Following this line, what are the right questions to ask?

Ideological Mapping

We might stay with the same categories of sympathy to the cause, just with socialism as the object of sympathy rather than a union effort. But how will we distinguish levels? Additionally, it seems that we need to expand the types of antagonism since far more people will be antagonistic to socialist ideas and that we need to be effective with more types of people in the long-term. What types of antagonism to socialism are there?

Organizing Tactics

In order to have tactical organizing conversations, we ought to develop ladders of logical steps to connect the meaning of socialism with concrete, everyday struggles. This requires, also, that we have a more embodied, developed understanding of our own commitment to socialism. When a coworker expresses their exhaustion from but necessity of their job, how does your sympathy for their situation connect to a project for a better world? Most importantly, how can we express such a sentiment without ending up in a ‘heady’ conversation where socialism becomes an intangible concept? This will be another test of our own education. Do we know how to repeat the phrases we have been taught or do we understand the world at a deeper level such that we are able to pull others up with us?

Organizing Programs

What sorts of reading groups/lectures can be implemented into the organizing program? What free time does the rank-and-file have for this? Are there groups of people who already enjoy reading or are there better medium(s) that people are already attuned to? Are there experienced lecturers/teachers among the staff or rank-and-file?

Educative Interventions

Are educative interventions–like 1-on-1 dialogical investigations and popular education–part of the correct strategy for our current moment? How might the expansion of unions in the labor workforce itself operate as an educative mechanism? Are education programs currently feasible within specific unions?

§ What should Metro-Detroit DSA members do?

Although I am a fairly new member to the chapter, I have already noticed an in-effect lack of organizational militancy within MD-DSA. We are proud to have 1200 members on paper, about 100 members at monthly chapter meetings, and dispersed groups of 5–30 participating in any given committee. We need to learn from the Teamster’s Organizational Militancy, especially since we already have plenty of Ideological militancy in educative programming.

I say that this observation is in-effect as an organization because there are plenty of individual organizers within the chapter who are highly motivated, hardworking, and remarkably effective in their own right. The point here is not to begin directing blame but to find which questions help us bridge the gap.

When I was the chair of a Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter, I ran into this same organizational problem. A handful of activists were doing everything, some supporters attending and helping, and most of the base was disengaged. In an autopsy of my time leading the chapter, I found a major problem to be that my leadership was tailing the members. With the expectation that members would constitute the directing force of the chapter, I took the role of the steering committee (SC) to be the busy workers that carry out the commands of the membership. I and my fellow SC members quickly became overwhelmed with the amount of work it takes to simply maintain the operation of the chapter. Thus, our main goal became to preserve the chapter rather than to lead it.

The diagnosis of the problem is with the lack of clear authority within the organization. Who was responsible for what? The membership was looking to the steering committee for what the chapter ought to do and we were looking right back, with no one going anywhere.

This question of authority has broken out within the chapter in response to Trump’s war on Venezuela. On January 3rd, 2026, many members of MD-DSA flocked to the Slack channel for direction and leadership. Many discussions broke out about other organizations’ events and some finger pointing about who ought to be directing a unified Democratic Socialist effort. There was a lack of clarity of responsibility and, consequently, of authority. This brings us to the set of questions I think we need to face.

First, how should authority figure between leaders and members in MD-DSA? Are we avoiding the tailing problem in our leadership? Is there a hierarchy of authority among committees? How do we prioritize the work of the chapter among our commitments (if we do so at all)? What are the relationships between new and experienced members? Is there a generational pass-down of organizing knowledge occurring in the chapter?

Next, there must be a learning process in organizational tactics. What types of learning materials are made available to new members to transition them from a regular person interested in politics to an active organizer? Which habits of organizing are the basics to be taught to all members? What is our progression ladder of on the ground organizing skills?

Lastly, there must be a program to instill organizational militancy within the chapter. How can we instill a sense of responsibility towards the chapter in our members? (1) How are we to learn to be dutiful and responsible towards one another? Are members supposed to see their participation in DSA as a part of their own personhood? These are questions I welcome members to contemplate as we continue to grow MD-DSA as a whole. (2)

_______________________________________________________________

1. If members only participate when they want, their membership is contingent on their desires rather than their moral obligations. But this is not an easy distinction to make.
2. I hope that the reader encounters every question as individual considerations in their own right and not as rhetorical remarks to be skipped over.

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

“The Teamsters Have a MAGA Problem.” What should we do now? was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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

Armed conflict between states is the highest form of class warfare. In the case of two imperialist nations, the ruling classes of each nation are competing for the division of the world, using the working classes of both nations as expendable pawns. The victory of either one is a victory for imperialism writ large, and a loss for the working classes of both nations. A victory for the working class is achieved only through the defeat of both of their respective imperialist governments. This is the general logic behind the practice of revolutionary defeatism. But this does not apply to conflict between an imperialist nation and a non-imperialist nation. In that situation, victory for the non-imperialist nation is a victory for all working people everywhere, including for the working people of the imperialist nation. The latter situation is clearly what we are finding ourselves in with this conflict between the US and Venezuela.

There are endless debates and discussions that can be had over the state of Venezuelan society. One can make arguments either for or against it being a “socialist” state. One can argue all day over whether Maduro is a “dictator.” Both of those discussions are interesting, but are completely irrelevant to our practice as socialists in the United States. Since we live and struggle within the (albeit declining) global imperialist hegemon, our attitude towards armed conflict by our government must be one of total opposition. There is no righteous war that can be waged by the United States on behalf of capital, no prism or lens through which we can look at aggression on the part of our state as anything other than imperialist, full stop.

Over the coming hours, days, and weeks, our government (and in particular, the Republican Party) will attempt to portray the capture of Nicolas Maduro as liberating the Venezuelan people. We as socialists must be able to see through this, and loudly declare it as a lie. The only liberation that comes from imperialist war is the liberation of capital. In his address on January 3rd, just a few hours after Maduro’s capture, Trump confirmed that his administration’s intention was the direct occupation and control of Venezuela. As he has alluded to elsewhere, the immediate course of action of that administration will be to liberalize access to the Venezuelan oil reserves. Foreign investment, spearheaded of course by the US, will liberate Venezuelan oil from its captors, freeing it to be profited off of by capitalists. The imperialists will repeat ad nauseum that Venezuela’s oil is now in the hands of its people, but the only Venezuelans who will benefit from this are those willing to betray their country for profit.

Statements by prominent opposition figures make this trajectory unmistakably clear. Maria Corina Machado, who famously won the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize (which Trump hilariously took as a direct snub to himself), has openly declared her commitment to privatization and market liberalization should she be installed as leader. Her vision for Venezuela includes removing the state from the oil sector, opening markets, and privatizing national industries. While at this point, it seems that Trump is not interested in having her oversee the American occupation of Venezuela, these policies will undoubtedly be pushed by any administration that ends up in power in the country. These policies represent a wholesale reversal of efforts to assert national control over strategic resources — in effect, a reversal of the Bolivarian Revolution. This agenda is imperialism, distilled to its essence, and promises Venezuelan workers renewed exploitation and dependency on the US.

One wonders how newly inaugurated Zohran Mamdani will handle this situation. In 2020, Maduro was indicted in New York’s Southern District, and if he goes to New York for arraignment and eventual trial, Zohran and our comrades in the NYC chapter will be in a particularly difficult position. He said in his inauguration speech that he would “govern as a democratic socialist.” What does a democratic socialist do when an ostensibly leftist foreign head of state has been abducted by the federal government and is facing charges in the city they are governing? Will he use his position to protest against the actions of the Trump administration? Will he show solidarity with the people of Venezuela? I have faith that he will try and that his heart is with Venezuela, but he is already in a nearly impossible situation, only a couple days into his term.

The choice facing socialists is stark. We can either accept the narratives offered by imperial power — debating which foreign leaders deserve our sympathy — or we can remain committed to a materialist analysis that centers class struggle on a global scale. Opposition to US imperialism is the minimum requirement of socialist politics. The presidency, by its very nature, lends itself to personal dictatorship. Even the most hands-off of presidents (Coolidge and his ilk) still have near limitless power within easy reach. The presidency has gathered more and more power to itself over the past century, and the ideal of the separation of powers (already a fiction at our nation’s birth, but hidden under a veil of democratic norms and “good-faith” governance) has been rendered a comfortable, if quaint myth. The president can start a war on his own initiative (with 90 days to deliver Congress a fait accompli), can deploy troops on American soil, and can even abduct a foreign head of state.

Political power is ultimately a question of force, and who can exercise it. Therefore, if the presidency is now capable of wielding every form of direct state violence, what can he not do? What can Congress or the Supreme Court do but offer a sternly worded rebuttal? The solution to this is to finish Reconstruction: to demand full democratization of the state, the abolition of the imperial presidency, of the Supreme Court, and of the oligarchic Senate, and the empowerment of a new representative body, directly elected by the people, holding full legislative and executive power. This is the foundation of the Democratic Socialist Republic.

MJ is a member of the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America.

VIEWPOINT: Arrest of Maduro and Liberation of Capital was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Compared to liberals and progressives, socialists have a unique perspective about the purpose of electoral politics and winning elected office. We understand that the mass social change we want cannot be accomplished unless millions of ordinary people are moved to fight for their own liberation in the class war against bosses and billionaires. To that end, the socialists we elect have a historic role to play in bringing this about by operating primarily as organizers who bring workers into the struggle alongside them.

Within the modern left, most electoral endorsements have been viewed strictly as a commitment to support candidates throughout their campaign: to fundraise, build up their communications infrastructure, and develop a field program to knock thousands of doors and talk to voters. If our endorsed candidates win, the level of support we offered during the campaign immediately drops off after Election Day and we move on to the next campaign. Very rarely, if ever, do we devise a plan during the endorsement process for how they will operate once in office and what they should prioritize. We send them off on their own into completely hostile legislatures designed and controlled by two political parties completely beholden to capital and hope that they alone can beg and bargain for reforms on behalf of the working class.

Over the last half century this individualistic approach has ultimately been unsuccessful in winning gains for the working class or in getting our class organized to fight. As DSA becomes more adept at winning elections in the vacuum created by a pro-genocide Democratic Party, our modern task as socialists is to think of Election Day as a checkpoint rather than as the finish line. In practice, this means orienting our endorsed candidates and elected officials towards the primary goals of making more socialists, building socialist organization, and leading as spokespersons of our independent party.

At the 2023 Metro Detroit DSA Membership Convention, our chapter’s highest decision-making body, members voted to take the first steps in this direction by launching the Socialists in Office Committee (SIOC) as a body in which elected chapter leadership would coordinate our organizing work with our endorsed elected officials, also known as Socialists in Office (SIOs). The resolution and amendment we passed called for an organizing-focused purpose and vision for the SIOC that prioritized creating our own party-like infrastructure so we could recruit and train socialist candidates from within our own ranks, who would think of themselves primarily as organizers of the working class, rather than purely as legislators. It was also a move towards building a working-class movement outside of electoral work by using our SIOs’ offices to reach, educate, and organize their constituents into class struggle and self-activity. Unfortunately, very little has been done to see this through since then.

At our 2025 Convention, members passed an amendment to the SIO Committee consensus resolution that created a unique and experimental ‘Geographic Working Group’ as a space for rank-and-file DSA members residing within State Representative Dylan Wegela and Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib’s overlapping districts to regularly meet with and organize alongside them. Our SIOs are surrounded on a daily basis by politicians ranging from corporate Democrats to fascist Republicans who serve the same ruling class, so we imagined this group as the socialist antidote and support system. The idea was to experiment with a new concept of how to operate in office and carve a path towards our political independence. The amendment included the clause below, which initiated both this article and a verbal summary of it given by group members at the December 2025 General Meeting.

The Geographic Working Group will issue a report at both the six month (December 2025) and twelve month (June 2026) mark to:

• provide an update on progress towards our goals and explain any roadblocks to accomplishing them
• offer an analysis and critique to consider whether it should be replicated by future similar bodies or other SIO Committees around the country
• normalize open reporting on the progress of this and other unique experiments in the chapter — all of which can be expected to have misses and fails, which are acceptable so long as the lessons learned are defined and shared with membership similar to past electoral campaigns

Since Dylan Wegela was endorsed by the chapter while in office in 2024, he has been requesting help to launch bottom-up organizing projects in his district with support from Metro Detroit DSA members. Calling back to his experience of leading rank-and-file Arizona public school teachers in a statewide strike in 2018, this approach is meant to bring his constituents into permanent mobilization beyond a typical re-election campaign cycle. The idea was to put them in touch with socialist organizers and strategy, building towards a long-lasting base for socialist politics and worker self-organization in his district. Because of his limited staff capacity, this vision needed help from DSA members.

Dylan’s predominantly working class district (Garden City, Westland, Inkster, Romulus) is geographically distant from the main concentration of where chapter members live and is a 30–40-minute drive from Detroit and Hamtramck, the city where we hold our monthly General Meetings. In 2022, when the Electoral Committee declined to move Dylan’s endorsement request forward, to instead focus on Rashida, one of the main reasons was that just five dues-paying members lived in his district. Since membership bumps in response to both Trump’s re-election and Zohran’s primary win as well as intentional recruitment by both Dylan and this group, there are now 40 dues-paying members in his district.

We believed that if we did the work to create a regular, local, in-person meeting space within Dylan’s district and conducted careful outreach and onboarding, that many of the new members in the district would be more likely to show up and organize with a group located closer to them. Texting through the list of members in Dylan’s district produced around 10–15 onboarding calls. Almost everyone we talked to expressed some amount of demoralization over Trump’s reelection and a desire to build more local connections with socialists. Many felt compelled to finally get active because of Zohran’s primary victory in June. Throughout our meetings, we’ve also heard:

• Folks have been more likely to participate in DSA through this group since it’s very close to them and they get to meet their socialist neighbors. The group offers DSA members a way to connect with their neighbors and talk about shared concerns. The smaller group setting has been an easier way to interact with each other and start to build community and social connections.
• Folks have come into DSA already socialist-leaning and gone to their first DSA meeting but were overwhelmed with how much was going on. This group felt like an easier point of engagement with DSA.
• The group has felt like a welcoming space for DSA members to bring their friends and significant others.

As of the December 2025 General Meeting, the group has met eight times with an average attendance of around 12 people, usually composed of DSA members, non-DSA members brought along by members, and constituents that Dylan recruits through door-knocking, social media, or coffee hours. We meet in person every two weeks, and the Signal group chat that people are invited to after attending a meeting is at 33 members. Only six of those members had participated in DSA prior to joining this group and three people have been moved to join DSA through participation in it. Dylan joins every meeting, calling the group “a refreshing reminder that none of us are in the struggle alone,” and says, “We’re seeking to answer an essential question for our movement: Now that we hold office, how do we use it to organize the working class and grow our mass movement?”

The group’s meetings run for two hours and start with someone reiterating our political purpose (Dylan and Rashida need a mass movement behind them and this group can help develop socialist organizers and potential future socialist candidates to make that happen) and experimental concept (this is how SIOs should use their elected office). Each attendee then introduces themselves and shares why they’re a socialist or what brought them to the meeting, followed by a 30-minute political discussion based on a reading (distributed in advance) on basic socialist theory, organizational democracy, or electoral organizing strategy. These political discussions are based around easy-to-read, short Jacobin articles and have acted as a way to onboard new members and non-members alike who are new to socialism and organizing. They’ve also allowed us to talk about the broader goals of socialist organizing and our theory of social change beyond just supporting our SIOs.

We spend the rest of our meetings working on organizing plans, as a means to develop group members who have never organized into experienced leaders. Our projects are in various stages and led by different members:

• Collected signatures for the Michigan For The Many campaign, the three chapter-endorsed statewide ballot initiatives, including at the October No Kings rally in Livonia and the November Santa Land parade in Westland. Notably, none of the nonprofits leading the ballot initiatives had established a presence in this area. Signature collection at events has been used as a conversation opener to talk to people about socialism and DSA, give them one of our DSA palm cards, and try to recruit to our group.
• Started power mapping of Dylan’s district so we can learn about local political dynamics, as a counter to the typical “insider politics” preferred by establishment political operatives.
• Launched a public donation drive in response to the government shutdown and SNAP benefit suspension, to funnel donations to local food pantries.
• Planned a group budget for the year to fund food, drinks, and a private meeting space. The budget allows more transparency to the chapter for our plans and helped us to deliberate on our priorities, like meeting in person, every two weeks, at a quiet, private space with plenty of room to expand, and offering food to entice more folks to attend.
• Organizing tenants at a 300-unit apartment complex in Inkster. This was initiated by Dylan, with a town hall attended by 50 tenants, after he learned many of them were living in really bad conditions and did outreach to the whole building by mailing them surveys about it paid for with office funds. Organizing is temporarily on hold, due to political dynamics with Inkster City Council members who collaborated with Dylan on the event. They preferred to wait until the spring to do an outdoor community engagement event before building the tenant organizing group.
• Building towards a public event led by Dylan, Rashida, and Westland/Wayne and Dearborn teachers as a way to facilitate communication among multiple teacher unions and help DSA members in those unions to organize with their coworkers. SIOs, public school teachers, and local DSA members organizing together are some of the key components towards the long-term goal of establishing a local socialist political machine.

Group members have shared responsibilities for running the meetings, with some members facilitating our political discussion by preparing discussion questions beforehand and others taking turns to take notes and chair. Distributing the work teaches through experience, including experience in making group democratic decisions.

Diane, from Romulus, says the group is “investing our time and efforts directly in the communities we live in, building our grassroots movement while building our DSA chapter as a whole.” In October, Diane spent 19 days in the hospital. “This group stepped up to support me in my recovery, creating a GoFundMe. This is community in action,” said Diane, adding, “Being a part of this group made me see how change can take place in my own community and I have discovered my own voice in creating the changes I hope to see.”

We plan to continue expanding this group as a training ground to create more socialist organizers in an area where our chapter has not previously had an established presence. For workers to take over and transform society, we need to be everywhere we can to produce more organizers and force the hand of capital in legislatures and workplaces. Socialist organizers developed through this group can confidently go out into their neighborhoods, unions, and workplaces and lead other workers.

Socialist in Office: Training New Socialist Organizers in Dylan Wegela’s District was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It is hard to imagine the future. When I was a young hip hop head in Washington DC in the early 1990s it was inconceivable that icons Ice Cube, LL Cool J, and Ice T would join the police propaganda machine playing cops in mainstream movies and TV shows. What would Biggie think?

S. Trotter seems to ask this question in their piece Rappers Die Every Day B in Swords into Plowshares’ current exhibit Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires. Like Trotter, most of the artists in the show focus on the present and the past rather than that oh so hard to imagine future.

In the present, Mike Williams looks at billionaires’ appropriation of our neighborhoods, children, and very lives from the perspective of Greek and Roman sacrifice. His painting, One Hundred White Bulls, depicts “a symbolic herd of sacrifice” to remind us that we are the resources sacrificed to capitalist greed.

Next to Williams’ piece, Andrea Cardinal’s 26 Billion Dollars visualizes that greed by screen-printing Dan Gilbert’s estimated $26 billion net worth. The billion-dollar notes are a stark reminder that our sacrifices lead to unimaginable amounts of money for the rich.

Looking back to the past, Melanie Bruton’s When Memories Fade depicts a rain-swept fresh produce stand and asks us to consider what it feels like to lose your community. How does it feel when places that brought life feel ghostly? The piece brings to my mind the iconic drawing of “the shooter” by an unknown to me artist on Dequindre Cut. Created when the Cut was a hub of community creativity, today, The Shooter lives in a ghostly emptiness of iron railings, shipping container pop-ups, and surveillance cameras. If you close your eyes on the Cut, you can just about imagine the community of artists with spray cans, people hanging out drinking beer out of brown paper bags, music, relationships growing and failing, and conversations that never end. But the memories are fading as the denizens of the Cut have been moved out to make way for developers building condos funded by our tax dollars through tax increment financing (TIF).

Tax Increment Financing is a way that government “economic development” departments like the Downtown Development Authority and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation “capture” our taxes and redirect them to private businesses without our knowledge or oversight. TIF is not the same as tax abatements. Tax abatements, which developers also receive, are a direct reduction in taxes for a certain period. Tax captures actually take our property taxes and give them to developers to use to pay for their projects.

Dan Gilbert has received more than $618 million through TIF. Ian Matchett’s portrait of Gilbert as an empty suit ready to dump all we hold dear into a trash can counters the prevailing official narrative of Gilbert as a philanthropic billionaire who has brought Detroit back from the trash heap.

And it is so hard to counter this narrative. In the face of the overwhelming propaganda by the City, the media, and even in some cases Detroiters like ourselves, we have to remember that none of the so-called Detroit revival is for our benefit. Gilbert’s theft of the taxes we pay to the City has gone to develop Library Street — when we approved the millage to fund libraries. It has gone to build a glass skyscraper where the Hudson’s building used to be — when we continually ask the City Council to increase the funds for home repairs. It has been used to develop $1,755 a month studio apartments in the Book Tower while we plead for water affordability.

A Future Beyond Billionaires is more than libraries, home repairs, and water affordability. Arthur Rushin III asks us to look for What Lies Yonder? to contemplate whether freedom is in the stars. Not just the stars in the heavens but also the stars in our hearts, our minds, and our souls.

Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires is at Swords Into Plowshares Peace Center and Art Gallery, 33 E. Adams Street until December 20, 2025.

Gallery hours Fridays and Saturdays 1 to 6 p.m.

Political Discussion Thursday, December 11 at 6 p.m.

Artist Talk Friday, December 19 at 6 p.m.

Free Parking in the lot behind the gallery. Let the parking attendant know you are visiting the Gallery.

Jo Coutts is a member of Metro Detroit DSA.

Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Finland. Land of saunas. Happiest place on earth. One of the homes of Nordic Socialism.

Being half-Finnish from my father’s side, I’ve always wanted to visit Finland, and have been a bit jealous of my relatives fortunate enough to do so. I’ve got one benefit going for me, however, that my relatives don’t: I’m a member of DSA, and I’m curious to see how Finland’s brand of “Nordic socialism” works for their people.

As I started plotting out my places to visit in Helsinki this fall, I realized I was staying near the Socialist Democratic Party (SDP) national headquarters. The SDP is the largest party in Finland by membership, and is a driving force behind what is often called “Nordic socialism” and something all the nations of Northern Europe are famous for: Although they have not exactly dismantled Capitalism, they generally have a much stronger social safety net than countries like the United States, and have enacted many policies that socialists here would want to see. (Some of us may debate whether they are truly “Socialist,” but that debate is outside the scope of this article.)

I also came across a restaurant, Juttutupa, that was one of the oldest restaurants in Helsinki and was also a Socialist club. Lenin used to frequent Juttutupa before his return to the Soviet Union and it was right across the street from the SDP offices.

RIGHT-WING GOVERNMENT

Politically speaking, Finland is going through some struggles. The government since April 2023 is led by a right-wing coalition headed by the National Coalition Party, with Petteri Orpo serving as Prime Minister. Besides the National Coalition Party, this coalition consists of the Finns Party, the Swedish People’s Party of Finland, and the Christian Democrats.

Since coming into power the National Coalition Party has been trying to weaken labor unions with, for example, fining unions for organizing strikes deemed “illegal” as well as deregulating bargaining to make it easier to deviate from sectoral agreements. They also are attacking social programs for youth and the elderly with budget cuts. Finland is experiencing high unemployment, high inflation, and domestic slowdowns in industries such as construction. They also have an aging population, which affects the workforce. In conversations with everyday citizens, they are starting to see impact from the U.S. tariffs, resulting in more slowdown due to added inflation. The ultra-right-wing Finns Party has seen membership steeply decline since 2017 which saw an anti-immigration faction assume leadership, while conversely the SDP has become the largest political party in Finland.

Even through these tough economic times, the Finnish people seem very happy overall. In my conversations I found that people, regardless of party, have their main priority rooted in happiness and security for their fellow citizens, not just themselves. This was a theme that held true in my observations and experiences over eight days there.

Further, I found that Finland was much more diverse than I expected. They have a pretty robust population of Afghani immigrants, not to mention sizable Asian and Black populations. My first cab driver, Juma, had been in Finland with his family for about 15 years and was from Afghanistan. Upon hearing my accent, he said, “Oh, you’re American? You guys have a lot of problems.” We proceeded to talk about Trump and how the effect of right-wing American politics has spread globally.

COFFEE LOVERS

I like to pick a coffee shop when traveling and make it a “home base,” where I can do a once-over of my daily itinerary before I head out as well as getting some local flavors both literally and figuratively. The coffee shop I frequented was Afghani-owned and the staff was quite friendly. Finns drink more coffee per person than any other nation in the world. I had the luxury of four coffee shops within a two-minute walk from my Airbnb, not to mention thrift stores, record stores, bars, restaurants, and an optometrist! The neighborhood square also had built-in chess boards, pingpong tables, and a mini half-pipe, all for public use. Daily, the square was filled with people of all ages, from break dancers to lovers on a date, to dog walkers (lots of dog walkers!).

Monday, September 29 was the day I picked to make my visit to the SDP and to Juttutupa. I had a Metro Detroit DSA “solidarity pack” filled with buttons, flyers, and stickers to give them, and I was quite excited to ask them questions about their brand of socialism, what works (or may not) work for them.

The SDP office is in a pretty modern-looking office building, a part of the top floor. The main doors to the elevators and offices were locked, but an office worker from another company let me in the locked security door. My years of being a salesperson paid off, I guess. I must have looked professional!

I told the Office Manager, Malin, that I was with the Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America and I was there to drop off some “solidarity swag.” Once she knew my intentions she instantly opened up. (One big misconception is that the Finnish people aren’t friendly. They are. They’re just stoic. Huge difference).

Malin told me the last American visitor they had at their offices was Elizabeth Warren, a couple of years ago. Yes, they knew she wasn’t a socialist, but it was nice that she’s progressive enough to want change and respects the work the SDP and other organizations in Finland are doing.

The SDP fears that all the attacks the National Coalition Party is doing to labor and to social programs may take several election cycles to fix, even if the SDP wins the next election. A big takeaway I got is that the far right has lost momentum, and that the SDP has grown at the same time. However, the main reason the SDP has grown is by creating their mass movement through coalition, and then has recruited members through those coalitions. Then, they begin to educate their new members to their platforms after they’re in the door.

This definitely seems like a clear and logical approach that we — DSA — can use to create our own mass movement and increase our membership quickly. In my opinion, we cannot barrage our new members with various positions on socialist theory or positions on various hard-line stances immediately. I brought a potential new member to one of our chapter meetings in April, and sadly she won’t be back. She told me that she got stuck in the middle of an in-depth ideological discussion in one of the breakout groups. That was her first exposure to DSA. Maybe we weren’t going to be her cup of tea ultimately anyway, but a softer approach when someone enters our “big tent” may help us in the long run in gaining and retaining new members.

Conversely, the SDP is not joining other left coalition groups in protesting. The SDP is quite cognizant of their position as a leading party in the country and they do not want to lose favor with the general population or undecided voters. To that end, they seem to avoid association with groups that may be seen as “extreme” by the general population. Of course, DSA may be the type of group that might be shunned by the SDP in this way. But maybe for them it is a successful tactic, and has brought about many Socialist-inspired policies and made them more palatable to the general population.

And of course more radical influences are prominent and very visible in Finland as well. In fact, the day after the Global Sumud Flotilla was intercepted by Israeli forces, I happened upon a pro-Palestine protest that was formed by the group Rhythms of Resistance, which has a presence in many of the major cities in Western Europe.

The SDP is very excited and curious about the electricity Zohran Mamdani is bringing to our movement and to American politics in general, and hopefully more further left candidates and DSA members in particular can start replacing the liberal corporatists and centrists that seem to run the Democratic platforms in America. Malin was aware of the work Rashida Tlaib and AOC are doing, and I think Malin saw my grin get bigger as she mentioned our local comrade Rashida.

At that point, SDP National Chairman Antti Lindtman walked past, gave a kind nod, and walked into a meeting he was late for. Yes, Malin assured me that she would be giving him a MDDSA button!

Malin escorted me to “the wall” for a picture, which was a rose mural of the SDP logo. (When we get our own chapter office, we definitely need a wall mural of our chapter logo, for fun and inspiring photo ops!) She then gave me some SDP swag, and I was on my way.

I proceeded to Juttutupa for a traditional Finnish buffet. Even though it’s a known Socialist club, there were no Socialist activities displayed on their calendar, and their dance poster sadly was not a Dance Against Fascism.

NORDIC SOCIALISM?

Finland was indeed a magical place, and I intend on going back one day, especially in summer when there’s 20 hours of sunlight. However, the last topic of my discussion with Malin stuck with me: Why do socialist ideas seem to perform better in the Nordic nations? Scandinavians in general are joiners and organizers. For them, it really boils down to trust. They trust in their neighbors, in their government, and in their social programs. They trust that in the end they will be happier people, and they won’t let others’ views get in the way of that quest for happiness. Rashida said during her DSA convention speech this summer that “trust is built on human connection.”

That is what makes so much of American politics and life in the current climate pretty disheartening. That lack of trust. That lack of human connection. In my neighborhood, I see a house with a MAGA flag, and their next door neighbor has a Pride flag. Do you think that those neighbors trust each other? Do those neighbors have any sort of human connection with one another? How do we get back to trusting in our neighbors, our institutions, and our government?

I think it starts with us. It starts with empathy for our neighbors, and showing others that things don’t have to be the way they are. We are a new way forward, and a new path in re-establishing that trust in our life fabric. The more people we bring into our mass movement, the more of that life fabric we can create. It starts with us, and it starts with trust.

Social Democracy in Finland: Lessons for the Left? was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[Editor’s note: Detroit and Huron Valley DSAers fanned out across the metro area November 22 to support Starbucks workers — especially those on strike — in our biggest labor solidarity action since picketing with the Marathon Teamsters last year. DSAers picketed and leafleted at Starbucks in Ypsilanti, on 8 Mile, in Royal Oak, and on the East Side, with groups of comrades self-organizing to hold down the lines. The struck store in Ypsilanti has been completely closed since November 20, with management giving up on trying to reopen.

[As the national Starbucks strike continues, check DSA’s Labor Working group Slack for future actions.]

As the Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) unfair labor strike continues into its second week, hundreds more baristas from over 30 additional stores have joined the picket line nationwide. The Carpenter Road location in Ypsilanti is the first location in Michigan to officially join the strike, and more locations in Southeast Michigan are planning to join the strike in waves over the next few weeks.

“We’re going to have a bunch of stores around here also joining the fight,” noted Topanga Hass, a barista, strike captain, and bargaining delegate from Carpenter Road. Topanga has been helping to coordinate strategy.

SBWU is on strike demanding a fair first union contract and protesting more than 700 unresolved unfair labor practice charges. Damien, another strike captain, said at their location, “management has been kind of a nightmare. Lots of really direct as well as subtle ways with the different union-busting tactics, and just straight-up incompetence.”

$96 MILLION FOR CEO

This strike is in part attempting to address the fact that Starbucks has a higher CEO-to-worker pay gap than any other business in the S&P 500; baristas are demanding higher take-home pay. The median Starbucks worker makes $14,674 a year, while Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol was granted a $96 million pay package for 2024.

SBWU’s demands could be met with just the cost of a single day’s sales, but Starbucks claims that workers are adequately compensated when benefits are included. However, many baristas are scheduled just under the number of hours required to qualify for benefits. “I can’t save money. I’m not paying bills properly. It’s really hard,” said Angie, one of the striking baristas.

Besides unfair labor practices and low wages, the baristas at Carpenter Road are fighting for fairer scheduling. Isabella, a barista and shift supervisor, said, “We tend to have the issue of getting either less hours than what we want or more hours than we want.” This, paired with the fact that “a lot of [the baristas] are definitely overworked, and this store specifically has been really understaffed,” has led to high turnover.

Angie explained that many baristas have multiple jobs or are also students, and the inconsistent and unfair scheduling makes it unsustainable to stay at Starbucks: “They’ll hire people, have them put in their availability, and then schedule them outside their availability, so those people quit.” These scheduling issues have also led to constant short-staffing, where the baristas are “expected to have one person do the work of five people for very low pay…the newer people get overwhelmed by how much is going on and they quit.” When baristas have tried to resolve these issues directly with management, they are typically swept under the rug and ignored.

Many baristas want to draw attention to how many of their concerns also impact customers. Understaffing leads to longer wait times, but some problems could be even more dire. Angie said she has seen many baristas “being threatened for calling out sick, which happens a lot, which is a massive problem because by health regulations you can’t come in when you’re throwing up, when you have the flu. Some people were pressured to come in when they had Covid.”

Similarly, disabilities are not being handled appropriately, according to workers. Damien said, “At our store specifically, our previous manager, who just left, was making a lot of moves against individuals who were using their disability support and various accommodations. She was being incredibly harsh or downright demeaning regarding how those were implemented and made a point to absolutely put on blast the individuals who needed those accommodations, for no reason. It was very cruel.”

SCORCHED EARTH UNION BUSTER

The union has filed over 125 unfair labor practice charges, leading the National Labor Relations Board to declare that Starbucks “engaged in a scorched earth campaign and pattern of misconduct in response to union organizing at its stores across the United States.”

Still, the baristas at Carpenter Road and across Southeast Michigan are ready for the fight. The experience has led to a palpable feeling of solidarity. “Working with the union has been awesome. It’s been great to be a part of this and learn more about community building and being able to gather around with my fellow workers and being able to support them,” Damien said.

When asked what she wants the public to take away from the strike, Angie said she wanted everyone to realize that “the working class deserves better. Baristas deserve better. Everyone deserves to be paid better, better working conditions, and the union should be supported, always.”

To support the union and the baristas on strike, consider some of the following action items proposed by the baristas:

• Do not cross the picket line. Do not purchase coffee, gift cards, or any other product from Starbucks during the duration of the strike. Spread the message to friends and family; use social media to advertise your stand.
• Sign the No Contract, No Coffee pledge so that the baristas can demonstrate public support while in negotiations.
• Financially support SBWU baristas striking in Ypsilanti via GoFundMe.
• Join local actions, including pickets, sit-ins, and rallies. Stay tuned for Detroit DSA’s next support action.
• Stay up to date through social media (@sbworkersunited on social media and @carpenterroadswu on instagram for the Ypsilanti location).

Kristin Daniel is a member of Metro Detroit Democratic Socialists of America.

Brewed for Solidarity: DSA Starbucks Strike Support Gains Steam was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

[Editor’s Note: The final session of the Political Education Committee’s fall Organizing 101 series, “Always Be Organizing,” will be in Dearborn at 6:30 Thursday, November 20, followed by a social hour. You don’t need to have attended the first three sessions to attend the last! RSVP here.]

I’ve paid my $5 a month to DSA since about 2020, attending one General Meeting but always ending up finding one reason or another not to really get involved. After moving to Detroit this summer, I pulled up the Detroit DSA Events page and told myself it was time to stop sitting on the sidelines. I’d spent years agreeing with the principles, nodding along online, but I wanted to actually meet people and be part of the work.

Organizing 101 felt like a good first step — a way to connect what I believe with what I do.

At its heart, Organizing 101, based on the Labor Notes book Secrets of a Successful Organizer, is about connection. The series introduced the foundations of union organizing — how to move from appreciating the idea of a union to the practical, everyday skills we need to bring people together and build solidarity in our workplaces. Before Zoom calls and printing stickers, organizing begins with talking to your coworkers.

Session One, Beating Apathy, focused on moving from frustration to collaboration. How do you go from venting about work to building real momentum and solutions with your colleagues? We practiced early organizing conversations — asking good questions to uncover issues, and helping coworkers move from “this is just the way things are” to realizing they have permission to feel frustrated, to dream, and to hope for (and potentially help build) a better workplace.

The basics of being a good listener don’t change, but it’s always useful to have a refresher. The handout taught me our brains process thoughts four times faster than spoken speech, making it easy to fill in the gaps in someone’s story with our own assumptions. We practiced role-playing exercises to make sure we were slowing down enough to focus on what was really being said, and how to show you hear what someone’s saying.

Our leaders also walked us through the organizer’s bullseye — from the core group (the folks thinking about organizing even on their days off), to activists and then supporters, and how to identify the disengaged or those hostile to the campaign. It was helpful to visualize where different people might fall, and how to meet each of them where they are.

Session Two, Organizing Your Leadership Team, built on that foundation with a hands-on exercise. We were given quotes from conversations with five hotel employees and asked to identify which one might be a natural leader. There was a bit of logic and deduction involved — who did coworkers mention most often? Who already had everyone’s phone numbers? From there, we began to think about the logistics of our own workplaces: Who spends time together outside of work? How many departments and shifts are there?

Then we talked with those around us about examples in our own workplaces of times we might need to move fast and mobilize. Participants were open and vulnerable, sharing experiences from their workplaces and giving examples of grievances and goals.

In a small workplace, maybe you could reach everyone yourself — but it’s not exactly in the spirit of solidarity to carry that alone. True organizing means identifying and empowering others to lead alongside you, creating a network strong enough to mobilize everyone.

Session Three, Turning an Issue into a Campaign, featured Michigan State Representative Dylan Wegela, who shared lessons from his time organizing a statewide strike with teachers in Arizona. Moving from identifying issues, we then identified targets for the campaign (people who had the ability to change these things) and potential strategies. The strategy ideas were then put on a thermometer ranging from a relatively calm and cool idea like wearing red shirts on a Wednesday (the starting point for the Arizona campaign), to piping hot like a strike, or, in my favorite new phrase from the workshop, “Teacher January 6” (that one might have broken the thermometer).

My favorite part was an exercise where we were given five common workplace grievances he found with the teachers in Arizona, and participants brainstormed possible demands to address them. Afterward, we compared our ideas to the actual demands the teachers made in their campaign — out of the six demands the group had come up with, we’d accurately guessed half of them, most of which were solidified in the contract later.

Dylan’s reflections were honest and grounding — some campaigns succeed, and many don’t. It was inspiring to hear both his victories and his honesty. Not every campaign wins, but every one builds skills, connection, and courage — and that, too, is a victory.

Organizing 101: Jump-Starting Action Through Education was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By: Kristin Daniel

[Editors’ note: Kristin was part of Detroit DSA’s solidarity action Saturday, November 15, along with dozens of other DSA chapters across the country, to support Starbucks strikers. We leafleted five nonunion stores in metro Detroit to inform both baristas and customers about the workers’ strike for a union contract with decent pay and working conditions. Stay tuned to the Labor Working Group to find out about future actions next weekend.]

Standing on Woodward Avenue, trying to hold a poster that read “Solidarity with Starbucks Workers” in just the right way so the wind wouldn’t take it out of my hand, I smiled and waved along with my comrade, KC, as the first car turned in. As the car started to get into the line for the drive-through, the driver stopped and rolled her window down and asked what was going on.

“There’s a strike happening!” I answered, as KC stepped forward, handing the woman a small flier. We explained that Starbucks stores across the country were striking for a better contract, and that we were asking people to consider getting their coffee elsewhere for the duration of the strike.

“Hell yeah. I can absolutely go somewhere else today,” the woman responded, looking up from the flier. She exited the drive-through line, drove around the building, and honked and cheered as she turned back into the main road.

Although not every interaction for the rest of the day was as positive as the first, the community responded resoundingly positively. Some people in the drive-through line refused to roll their windows down, and others walking into the store took longer paths around the parking lot to avoid walking by us, but a truly surprising number of people were interested in hearing about the union.

Although many of the people that we spoke to had already paid for a mobile order and did not want to go through the process of cancelling, they enthusiastically said that they would not come back until after the strike was over. Those that had yet to put in an order were excited to chat through options for local coffee shops nearby after hearing about the strike.

In general, people seemed curious and willing to engage. Many had not heard about the strike and wanted to hear about the demands of the workers. One woman we spoke to told us that she was part of a union, and that her union had just won a new contract, so she was happy to help others do the same.

Cars driving by honked and waved when they saw us standing outside the shop. Over a dozen people decided to go somewhere else for the day, and even more pledged not to come back. We ran out of fliers in about an hour, and I headed home feeling more connected to my community, hopeful about the future, and confident that Starbucks workers would get the contract that they deserved.

In the past few years, labor unions have reached a level of popular support that they hadn’t seen since the 1960s, but many people still have a stereotypical view of labor unions as being only possible for certain types of jobs. As fewer Americans are employed in things like manufacturing, the image of what a union job can be also needs to change. The current strike action by Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) is not only an opportunity for workers to fight for their own dignity and a fair contract, but also a great opportunity to demonstrate to a receptive public that workers in different sectors can successfully organize and improve their material conditions.

If my experience is any indication, many people that are headed to Starbucks are people that would have little opportunity to engage with the labor movement otherwise. Many people simply didn’t know that Starbucks workers had a union, much less that Starbucks Workers United was on strike. By standing in solidarity with SBWU during this strike, socialists can engage more working class Americans who are already sympathetic and help convert popular support to tangible wins.

As someone who is newer to the chapter, getting involved was very easy. Simply join the Labor Working Group Slack to get updates from the DSA Starbucks solidarity committee and find an action that you are able to attend. As noted, the community has been largely receptive, so don’t be scared to come out and speak with your neighbors about how they can help!

To support Starbucks workers, commit to boycotting Starbucks for the duration of the strike by signing their No Contract, No Coffee pledge, or donate to the strike fund.

Detroit DSA Turns Out for Starbucks Strikers — And So Do Customers was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On November 5 Starbucks Workers United (SBWU) voted by 92% for an unfair labor practice strike. Their open-ended strike is set to kick off on Starbucks’ notorious Red Cup Day, November 13, where customers line up to receive a free reusable cup with the purchase of a holiday drink.

This limited edition plastic cup draws one of the company’s biggest annual sale days, which makes this day incredibly strategic for SBWU baristas who are demanding a fair contract to begin their open-ended strike.

No Detroit-area stores are among the unionized stores chosen to strike in the first wave, but keep an eye on DSA’s Slack for stores that may strike in the near future — and see below for the solidarity actions we are taking this weekend and beyond.

The strike announcement comes because of a stand-still at the bargaining table in December 2024. While there was some progress in the months prior, Starbucks denied SBWU’s demand for baristas’ pay to increase to $20/hour with a 1.5% increase yearly. Due to the union’s dismissal of Starbucks’ proposal, and the company’s lack of putting forth a serious negotiation, SBWU is preparing its biggest action yet.

Although SBWU didn’t disclose which stores are going on strike first, it did state that stores in at least 25 cities will be going out, with future locations potentially added in second and third waves. This isn’t SBWU’s first trip around the block either, with work-stoppage actions dating back to 2022. In the past, SBWU has mostly stuck to shorter strikes with a clear timeline of a few days or a couple of weeks. This year’s strike may be the longest in the union’s history.

POVERTY PAY AND UNDERSTAFFING

The top demands for unionized Starbucks baristas are better hours, higher pay, and a resolution to the hundreds of unfair labor practice charges the union has brought against Starbucks for union busting.

Topanga Hass, a barista in Ypsilanti said, “Our store has been planning for this strike since April…We’re so excited.” Topanga shed light on ongoing support from the community and how her store is well equipped for the long haul. From planning to grill on the picket line for striking workers and community members, to hosting trivia games and cornhole matches, they’re preparing to keep up the energy throughout the strike.

Topanga’s shop unionized in 2023, and she has been working there for around 1.5 years. She serves as a strike captain and her store’s bargaining delegate.

Two of the main concerns Topanga shared were rampant understaffing and being underpaid.

“Every single day for the next three weeks, we are understaffed for all of our peak times … and we just don’t have enough people to help with the demand,” said Topanga.

On November 6, Starbucks’ holiday drink launch, Topanga said, “I was getting messages from every store in the district that there were over 100 mobile orders in queue.” Due to short-staffing, baristas have to work multiple positions during their shift, while only being paid “$10/hour by the time taxes and everything else is taken out of [their] paycheck.”

Between hopping from station to station, and restocking whenever there is a (rare) opportunity, Topanga’s fitness app tracked 10 miles in a seven-hour shift. While her sneakers are wearing down from the constant pressure, she not only has to worry about getting costly new supportive shoes, but also ones that fit into the new CEO’s uniform mandate.

At the time of Brian Niccol’s appointment as CEO of Starbucks in September 2024, he released a “Back to Starbucks” campaign that listed everything from dress codes to requiring baristas to write a message on every single cup. This has been part of his mission to boost Starbucks’ sales and regular customers from the decline it had been experiencing for years. That decline resulted in part from an organic boycott that emerged when the company sued the union for its stance on the genocide in Palestine.

But Niccol can’t understand that the real divide between barista and customer has nothing to do with ink on cups. It’s a result of understaffing and chasing the bottom line.

“And that’s why I’ve been telling my coworkers that we need this contract so bad,” said Topanga.

DSA IS SBWU’S PARTNER

Over the past few months, DSA nationally has been organizing in partnership with SBWU to support the contract campaign. This collaboration came about not from a top-to-top relationship but as a reflection of the years of work DSA members across the country have done to support organizing Starbucks.

One major role DSA has played nationally is cohering support for workers among the public. Chapters across the country have undertaken crowd canvassing and actions outside nonunion stores, collecting thousands of pledge signatures to support a boycott, and raising awareness of the contract fight. Chapters have organized movie screenings to fundraise for the SBWU hardship fund and taken initiative on strike kitchens and pantries to feed striking workers.

To support Starbucks workers, sign their No Contract, No Coffee pledge to commit to boycotting Starbucks for the duration of the strike! You can donate to the strike fund here.

On Saturday morning, November 15, DSAers will be leafleting and talking with customers at several nonunion stores, as requested by SBWU. We’ll be informing them of the strike and boycott and convincing them to go elsewhere to get their joe. To get hooked up with one of these actions, see the Labor Working Group Slack.

Starbucks Baristas to Strike on Red Cup Day was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.