Dear John,
Here are just a few upcoming projects for the month of April. You can keep up to date with what Phoenix DSA has planned on our Facebook page, website, or twitter.
Restaurant Worker Organizing
Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, restaurants, bars and other hospitality services have shuttered, suddenly throwing an entire section of the working class into unemployment. As an industry that has thrived on denying workers basic protections and benefits, precarity and lack of organization have been the norm and have made restaurant workers especially vulnerable.
The restaurant industry as we know it is over. Most of these establishments will not reopen. Whenever this crisis subsides, the question is how the industry will re-emerge: will it be a worse version of what has existed, or can it be remade to be more favorable to workers?
Suddenly an industry that has been notoriously difficult to organize has a common objective reality where all service workers are in the same situation at the same time. There are the direct, material needs of restaurant workers right now that require attention, but there’s almost certainly no way that the existing “safety net” can provide for workers as it is. This will entail a political fight for relief and also a longer term project for restaurant workers to organize and fight for power over the industry that cannot run without them.
Trader Joe's Worker Organizing
If you or anyone you know is an Essential Worker at Trader Joe’s and is experiencing unsafe working conditions, please share and fill this out! If you are a customer who shops at Trader Joe’s, please show your support and share this survey with any Trader Joe workers. A group of volunteer organizers are ready to help organize and support Trader Joe’s essential workers - let’s all support these workers who deserve safe working conditions and hazard pay!
Socialist Night School
Join DSA in reading through Lenin's classic, "The State and Revolution." This session we'll cover chapters 3 and 4, but
you can find the full text online here. Liberals, anarchists, reformists, and Marxists disagree about the class nature of the state. In this work Lenin presents a comprehensive analysis of the state. He finds it necessary to smash the capitalist state, and that the new, proletarian "semi-state" will, from its inception, begin to wither away. We highly recommend reading up through chapter 4 beforehand, but everyone is welcome even if you haven't had the time! We always start with a short presentation summarizing the material and putting it into context. This event will be held virtually, by zoom call, on
Apr 16 at 06:30 PM. Register in advance for this meeting:
https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tZ0kd-CorzIro5uw73fP15fCPJBFRzRNYQ
Donate to Phoenix DSA!
Phoenix DSA needs your help to fund our organizing work! We have active campaigns to win Medicare for All and elect Bernie Sanders for President, with canvasses, tables, and town halls happening basically every week, and also monthly political education seminars to deepen our understanding of socialist politics. We also organize around actions like Abolish ICE and Climate Strike marches, bringing our socialist messaging and analysis to these issues.
DID YOU KNOW: That if you are a member of Phoenix DSA and you pay monthly rather than annual dues, the chapter gets a portion of those dues kicked back to us. Please consider switching to monthly dues so that we can share this money!
In solidarity,
DSA Phoenix
