A Blueprint for an Anti-imperialist United Front: The Case Study of NYC City Workers for Palestine
By: Jack L.
[Credit: Andres Kudacki via NYT]
For over 9 months, Israel has waged its genocidal assault on the people of Gaza. While Americans generally stand opposed, support for Israel is a bipartisan position in American politics, with both Democratic and Republican party leaders pledging their loyalty to Israel. The contradiction between American public opinion and the position of the American ruling class on Palestine has opened a window for organizing and mobilization on a mass scale around the independent politics of Palestinian solidarity.
Much of this organizing is unfolding along existing organizational and political lines. DSA and progressive non-profits have done much of their work through the Uncommitted Movement and have focused on a strategy of realigning the Democratic Party away from supporting Israel and towards a voting base of young progressives and Muslim/Middle Eastern diasporas. PSL, PYM and SJP have operated outside the bourgeois electoral system, doing much of their work under the “Shut It Down For Palestine” coalition and targeting corporations complicit in Israel’s war crimes with boycotts and direct actions, such as PYM’s “Mask off Maersk” campaign.
But new organizations are also emerging in response to the mass popular consciousness around Palestine and the needs working people are identifying in their workplaces, homes and broader communities. These new organizations are dynamic, politically diverse, grassroots, and militant. They hold an immense amount of promise and show us just what a united front for Palestinian liberation could look like.
There are a number of these new organizations worth studying (CUNY for Palestine and Writers Against the War on Gaza are two that spring to mind), but I want to present City Workers for Palestine, a group I’ve been organizing with, as a case study. City Workers for Palestine (CW4P) began in November 2023 with a conversation between organizers attending the “Shut It Down for Palestine” strategy meetings. The idea for an organization led by and for workers employed by the City of New York quickly blossomed into a group of dedicated organizers and an even larger group of activists ready to be mobilized into action.
Both the inner and outer layers of CW4P represent the diversity of city workers in New York City. Everyone involved has the same employer, but we work for different agencies, are members of different unions (and locals), and come from different political backgrounds. Some CW4P members are PSL members, some are DSA members, some are members of smaller communist/anarchist organizations, some are part of the Palestinian/Muslim/Middle Eastern diaspora and their related organizations, and some are unaffiliated with any such organization. This diversity is a real strength of CW4P, allowing the group to punch above its weight in terms of scale and quality of political intervention. Members bring their diverse perspectives to the group for discussion, these perspectives are synthesized into a coordinated plan of action, and members then spread out into their workplaces and union locals to execute on that plan.
CW4P’s tactics have been similarly diverse and widespread. Two of CW4P’s first events were rallies targeting Eric Adams, the Mayor of NYC and our boss, highlighting both his administration’s support for Israel and the ongoing slashing of public budgets. “Fund City Services, NOT Genocide” was a slogan used on one of the group’s original signs. Around this time, the group also put on a “wear your keffiyeh to work week” event, where city workers wore keffiyehs to their workplaces in an act of solidarity. Retaliation - harassment, doxxing and even firing of city workers (especially teachers) who displayed public support of Palestine - was becoming a major issue in the winter of 2023/2024, and CW4P began thinking about how the group could demonstrate support. Starting with informal conversations and resource sharing, today, the group has a subcommittee devoted to defending city workers from retaliation in the workplace.
In January 2024, a separate group of rank and file DC 37 members began a campaign for the divestment of the city’s largest pension fund (NYCERS) from Israeli securities. NYCERS has over $115 million invested in Israeli bonds and other corporations that profit from Israeli war crimes. After a few months, this campaign merged into CW4P and became one of the most active subcommittees of the group. The Divest Campaign runs monthly pickets at NYCERS board meetings, flyers city workers outside their workplaces, hosts organizing trainings for newer activists, and helps coordinate efforts to push for divestment within various DC 37 locals.
Beyond divestment, CW4P has helped members organize efforts to reform their union locals. CW4P members are joining existing reform efforts or helping cohere new ones, bringing new, militant membership to attempt the rejuvenation of often ossified union bureaucracies. Generally speaking, the goal is to democratize, politicize and reorganize unions from the ground up, creating more spaces for city workers to talk about politics and workplace issues and to make democratic decisions about what we can do together to address them. The tactics of these reform efforts have ranged from ceasefire and divestment motions at local delegate’s assemblies, to trainings and social events, to the molecular activity of conversations CW4P members are having with their coworkers every day. The increase in union reform activity since CW4P’s formation is proof that, while, on the one hand, political issues like Palestine do help bring workers into union struggles, on the other hand, these political interventions are maximally effective when accompanied by a broader strategy to build rank-and-file organization (on the basis of political, workplace and union interventions) that can contest power in the local. This latter point around the necessity of merging large-scale political work with more concrete workplace/local democracy work stands in contrast to an earlier high water mark of public sector labor activism: 2020, when city workers, radicalized around the George Floyd protests as well as COVID-19 lockdown/remote work policies, formed the now mostly-defunct DC 37 Progressives and City Workers for Justice. Whereas the former group was unable to capture the dynamism and energy of the George Floyd movement and became overly-focused on the short-lived and limited-scale remote work demand, the latter group failed to have an organized voice within the union hall or the workplace. Both groups were limited by the atomizing effect of the COVID-19 work from home era and were unable to develop and implement a strategy for meaningful collective action, a molecular-level requirement for effective socialist labor organizing.
In theory, what CW4P is doing through it’s merger of high-political and workplace/local-specific organizing is exactly the sort of organizing that DSA members ought to support as socialists in the labor movement: building up what Kim Moody calls, in his famous “Rank and File Strategy” pamphlet, “social movement unionism: a unionism that is democratic, acts like a movement and not just an institution, and reaches out to other working class and oppressed people to build a mass movement for change.” While NYC-DSA members are involved in CW4P and other similar reform efforts, the chapter is not institutionally involved. Despite being elected almost half a year ago, the Labor Working Group’s current elected leadership has not organized any spaces for rank-and-file organizers to strategize, problem-solve, and skill-share together, although it looks like this may change in the Fall, with some initial rank and file convenings being planned. If NYC-DSA wants to cohere socialists in the labor movement around a strategy for organizing new unions while democratizing, politicizing and rejuvenating existing ones, there is much work to be done. But at the same time, the task itself is relatively straightforward: making spaces to develop a socialist strategy for engaging in union struggles from the workplace to the union hall, to Palestine and beyond. This needs to happen both on the big picture level (e.g., Who are our targets? What are our goals? What's our program?) and the more molecular level (e.g., how to connect and coordinate with folks in our workplaces/local). Unfortunately, NYC-DSA is far from answering these questions and making space for systematic rank-and-file organizing.
All the while, CW4P marches forward. The group has just concluded its first election, picking delegates to represent the different subcommittees and make democratic decisions for the group as a whole. This new leadership body will be presented with some key strategic questions: How will CW4P continue to develop after an initial period of organic growth? Where will the group look to attract members, and how? When it began, the group adopted a “no electeds” policy towards CW4P-sponsored events to avoid cooptation by liberal politicians. Given this orientation, and the group’s natural focus on city politics, what is the group’s orientation towards the upcoming mayoral and council races? CW4P is already planning an intervention around the Adams’ administration proposed $225 million Cop City in Queens, but will additional demands be articulated in the year to come? What will the next steps be for existing campaigns like pension divestment and anti-workplace retaliation?
It is unclear what the future holds. However, the foundation laid by CW4P is strong: a healthy culture of democratic deliberation, respect for political pluralism and diversity of tactics, and a programmatic commitment to Palestinian liberation. Our work demonstrates what the foundation for broader united fronts could look like within the US labor left.
To learn more about CW4P, visit our website at nycw4p.org.