The following are lightly edited transcripts of presentations made in the griot oral tradition by abolitionist organizers on the first day of the network gathering in response to two questions: What dreams did our ancestors need to have to make this moment possible? What dreams do we have for the future?
Features presentations from the Oakland Anti Police-Terror Project, the Seattle Solidarity Budget, and Refund Raleigh. You will get a deep look at three different campaigns and organizations who have taken on the challenge of holding police accountable locally.
Anti Police-Terror Project, Oakland, CA
James: My name is James Burch. I'm the policy director for the Anti Police-Terror Project. I have a small baby on my lap with very pale skin and red hair. Their name is Justice and they use they/them pronouns. They're the youngest member of the Anti Police-Terror Project.
First, I'm just going to give a shout-out to Kellee. I met Kellee, I believe it might have been 2018 in Chicago at the PolicyLink Summit. When we talk about the length of time defunding has been going on, I remember early conversations about the early experiments with defund and the things that we'd been working on at that time. It's just really exciting to see people who are so steadfast in this work as you have been. Thank you for all you do and it's good to be here with you.
The campaign to Defund OPD is really a campaign that was, in my opinion, birthed out of frustration. For Oakland, the story really starts in 2009 when Oscar Grant was murdered. From that moment on, anytime the police murdered somebody, we would work to hold them accountable in the streets based on the way we know to get justice. After years of that, APTP had started thinking about how ineffective that messaging is to such a wide swath of the population. You can tell people #BlackLivesMatter until you're blue in the face, and so what is it going to mean to them?
You can see early in our existence and as we moved on, we tried to experiment with quantifying the police presence in other terms. When it came to 2014, 2015, some of our social media started talking about how much each officer who murdered a specific person got paid. The officer who murdered Yuvette Henderson was paid $350,000. Essentially, the city paid $350,000 to murder a Black woman. How does that message land? Or the officers who murdered Mario Woods in San Francisco, but were paid $850,000 for that year. How does that land? Or when we say your tax dollar is at work anytime somebody is murdered at hands of the state, to make us understand that it's a collective responsibility. It's our money being spent, we pay for these cops, and so what they do is on our hands, at least in some regard.
In 2016 when over a dozen officers within the Oakland Police Department and departments across the Bay Area were said to be implicated in the rape and sexual trafficking of a 16-year-old girl, Cat Brooks [one of APTP’s founders] basically said “how much does it cost to defund the whole thing?” at that point. Really that, for us ,was the beginning of exploring quantifying policing in this way: making it a budget issue and seeing if that could expand the number of people who we could reach with our narrative and with our story, because it's all about opening folks up and getting access to their heart space to get them to move, on the one hand. On the other hand, when fighting the state, it is a vicious weapon to be able to be ruthlessly accurate with data because they rely on being consistently inaccurate in their use of data.
In 2016, Defund OPD Invest in Community was formed. One of our first moves was to get in formation with the community-labor coalition called Refund Oakland that also focused on budget advocacy. It became Defund OPD, Refund Oakland. Refund Oakland is a bunch of Black and brown organizers, tenants' rights, housing rights, environmental justice, labor unions, all at the same table, and their narrative is that their money had been defunded. Since the 2007 and '08 recession they had been made promises by the City of Oakland that didn’t get fulfilled, and so that was their narrative. We attached to that narrative the fact that, from the passage of the '94 crime bill to present, there was a rapid expansion in police spending, which really created an opportunity to open communication about what policing costs, not in a vacuum, but in close connection with the very tangible services community and labor groups across the left were demanding.
Those are the formations that we've been fighting for, fighting with, and expanding with over the last seven years. Refund Oakland has become the Oakland Progressive Alliance, which is a much larger formation. Defund OPD has become the Defund the Police Coalition, which is a much larger formation. Really what that means is that our influence is spreading in the Bay Area. It just expands the number of credible messengers that we have that are able to deliver and preach the defund message amidst all of this counter-messaging that we find ourselves fighting back against.
A couple of the biggest learnings that I think are just relevant to share in this space, I know I'm limited on time, is one of the greatest challenges that we've faced along the way is Black council members who support a police state. I just want to speak explicitly to that. We as the Anti Police-Terror Project know that a lot of our supporters with the most time and energy are white folks, just to be super real. In addition to our Black base, we have a bunch of white folks who want to help. We have a bunch of allies who are trying to get in there. What would happen is we got into a lot of scenarios where those white allies would go to a council meeting and attack the Black council member who supports the police state and the optics were just terrible because then the council member would say, "Look at all these white people who don't know me, don't know where I'm from, attacking me." Then it's no longer about the real issues. It becomes a very surface-level fight about who's talking to who.
We just stopped attacking them and just continued to organize around them because we realized that we were making them relevant and we were giving them relevancy. We make way more media than any city council member. If you ask any random person in the city, they don't know who the city council members are but they know who the Anti Police-Terror Project is and they know a lot of y'all organizing groups. They know who you are too, that you make news, not them. Make your news and leave them in the dust and they'll struggle for funding. Eventually, the neoliberal machine will abandon them if they're proven to not be effective because they put Black people in that look like us to be able to marshal our communities. If it looks like they're not getting any respect in the Black community, then you watch how coldly the neoliberal machine just cuts them off from funding and watch them flounder until they fail.
Then, fighting back against local media is the last thing I want to bring up because it's been very important. We have gotten in the process of putting out so many press releases, press statements, making sure that there's no narrative that goes out with our point of view because, in that vacuum, the people who look like us, who are supposed to be us, will fill it, or the state will fill it. If we don’t put out a counter narrative, we give these “pretend left” outlets - the SF Chronicle is a good example - a free pass to just publish the mainstream angle because they’ll just say “we didn’t hear from you.” If you get a press release from us every time and then you don't publish it, then we have grounds to say something and then push the campaign against you. We've found that the local media outlets do not like being pressured as being misrepresenting or not representing what we're saying, but we also find that we need to keep that pressure on them forever. It takes a lot of energy. I think one of our greatest strengths as APTP is the comms team and the incredible volunteers who just consistently push out material to prevent the state from filling in those gaps.
Q&A
I have a question around the resources that already exist outside of the police contract, and how we square those resources with the need for things right now. The state, in the broadest sense of the term, has the ability to provide those things right now, despite what the police budget says, with the framing of invest and divest. I know part of Refund Oakland’s thing is that Oakland has a ton of money that they're wasting on corporations and banks and all this other stuff. Why don't they just invest that in housing now? I wonder how those two things talk to each other inside of this campaign. I think it's a challenge that I struggle with often in invest and divest streams that we can frame the police budget - which is bloated and they should be defunded - as, "Oh, that's $300 million that could go towards building new housing." We also know that there is $300 million even without the money from the police budget that they should be putting into the new housing regardless, and both of those things are important. I just wonder how those two things communicate inside of the coalition.
James: That's a great question. As Defund OPD, we always try to be consistent in communicating, one, that the city budget is not the only pot of money that's available. That's extremely relevant in some of the conversations we're having right now. If we're having a mental health conversation, the county holds a lot of our mental health funds. Alameda County does. If you put a lot of pressure on the city, they'll deflect to the county and so they need to be included in the conversation as well.
One of the things is making sure that we have a layered analysis and we really understand the money flows, we understand if the money's flowing from the state, the money's flowing from the county. Some money is flowing from the feds, but usually through those first two parties, and then the city has its budget. We're just clear on what we're targeting each person to do. "City council, you can do these things. We need you to do them."
We also make sure that our narrative does not pretend that the police budget is going to solve all of Oakland's problems. Our first goal was to cut the police budget by 50% or $150 million. That's not going to even start the process of housing all of the people that we need to and getting them connected to services and care. That money goes away very quickly. We need to do that and we need to be allocating those funds, but we also need to be making sure that that's what we're saying is the city's responsibility inside of a larger framework where other actors have responsibility as well.
How do you confront the media taking police statements and press releases as factual?
James: One thing that we've been fighting for since we started is to make sure that it's an open fight for access to data. The narrative since we started is the police are denying us this data because if we get all of the data, everyone will see what a sham it is and we'll start the process of getting our money back. In the Bay, they get their hand caught in the cookie jar because the numbers that the city puts out, they try to cook the books, they try to obfuscate what's truly coming out. Then, we're vicious, we say, "Oh, no, actually, it was this."
For instance, one of our comms folks, Daniel, a month ago was just looking through finance reports - because he's that guy, bless him - and saw in the finance report that there were $87 million of ARPA funds in one line in one table going straight to the police department. That hadn't been discussed anywhere. We flag it, we pressure City Council. Now if you google it, there's several news stories that are out. NBC covered it. It's an issue now, an issue that everybody has to deal with. That type of thing - getting folks who love data and plugging them in and making sure that they know how they can be valuable - and then having a comms team that can push this stuff out really makes it difficult for the state. Because we've got to remember, they're running a big scam. They're hiding millions of dollars everywhere. They're shoving it in their mattress, they're putting it under the pillow. They're doing everything they can to hide all of this money. All we need to do is just put a spotlight on it.
The more momentum you get, it's like a snowball going downhill, the more the media get excited. "Oh, wow. Oh, that's APTP." They come with these juicy scandals. "I'm going to make a name for myself reporting what they say. I'm going to take their press release seriously." If you become the credible messenger when it comes to data and the state and its misuse of data becomes something that is sensationalized, it's an incentive loop for the media and your followers to really invest in what you're putting out.
Seattle Solidarity Budget, Seattle, WA
[ed. This story was told in the form of a striptease, with Angélica modeling and then taking off T-shirts representing different phases of the struggle’s history and present]
Angélica Cházaro: Our story has many starting points. For today, we're starting with 1863 when the first Seattle City Council passed one of its first laws, Ordinance Number 5, which criminalized the presence of Indigenous people in our city. It called for the expulsion of the Duwamish people from their homelands. This resulted in the formation of a police force to enforce the so-called Indian ban, which officially organized into the Seattle Police Department on June 2nd, 1869.
People living in Seattle have been in resistance ever since, in ways big and small for the 153 years and 26 days that the Seattle Police Department has been around. Fast forward to 2010 when a cop with the same police department that formed to enforce the Indian ban murdered John T. Williams, a Native woodcarver, for the crime of crossing the street holding a scrap of wood and a pocket knife. Now, I'm going to shift to some scenes of resistance.
We start in 2012 when the leaders of King County announced they would be spending $210 million to build a state-of-the-art cage and court complex for our young people. This is the first scene of resistance that I see as laying some of the groundwork for our most recent ones in 2020 and beyond. For eight years, No New Youth Jail built a new common sense in Seattle that insisted that we didn't need any kids behind bars at all.
We had years of conversations, years of sit-ins, of blocking traffic, of blocking council and county meetings, of blocking the construction site, and of visioning how we could spend $210 million for a city where we could all thrive, where our children could thrive, and that was part of what laid the groundwork for 2020.
Scene two. In 2014, we took the fight 30 miles south of Seattle, staging a shutdown action at the immigration detention center in Tacoma. Since then, many of the same people who pushed for No New Youth Jail, have pushed to shut down the detention center that cages 1,500 immigrants today in that city and say, "Not one more deportation," because we know that a future with no cops is also a future with no borders.
Scene number three. I'm just going to keep going here. I had to do some laundry for this. In 2016, the city tried to sell us a new police precinct in the north end so we turned our attention to blocking the bunker. We managed to succeed in stopping that project, foreshadowing our police budget fights to come.
This finally brings me to scene four 2020, when the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked an uprising that marked a turning point for policing in Seattle. We had practiced fighting with abolition in our minds and in our hearts, and we were ready. Over to you, Trae.
Trae Wiley: A little bit about me. I'm Trae, I'm new to community organizing. When I say new, I was a concerned community member who came to the streets in 2020. It was actually March 29th, I believe, where we actually shut down I-5, which is a huge interstate in Seattle, if you've ever been. I don't know why I got in the freeway, I don't know. Now, I'm just thinking about it like, "Dang!" I was literally stopping traffic, but the biggest thing is that I was mad. I was mad about what I saw with George Floyd, who literally passed away three days after my birthday. I'm born on May 22nd. I was mad to hear about the stories of Breonna Taylor, but I was even more pissed to hear about what happened to Ahmaud Arbery. With all that energy, with all that passion, everything that I felt, I was able to go to the streets and I was in the first group of what later became CHOP [Capitol Hill Organized Protest zone]. With that, we continued to march on the streets and I was able to find a connection with other folks as well too.
Once the Seattle Police Department closed down CHOP, which was the area that we were blocking off from police, there were groups of folks that continued to march. There was the morning march folks. We had people marching every morning, we had people marching every evening, and then we had my crew that marched every Friday. Then we had direct-action folks that marched every single night. We continued to be in the streets, but a lot of us who were so new to being in the streets. For the most part of the time when we were down there protesting, we were talking about #BlackLivesMatter, justice for George Floyd, justice for Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. But what we weren't talking about was the demands. Eventually we were able to tap onto other community organizers who have already been in the game, like Nikkita Oliver, who were able to link us over to Angélica and also into Solidarity Budget and to push the demands. We were able to have conversations with one another talking about the three demands, which was defund SPD by 50%. I say 100%. Give that money back to the Black communities and drop all charges for the protestors.
Me and my friends were arrested for literally protesting for what they believed in. I really, really I'm so thankful to be able to be a part of that because we are able to continue to have the pressure because the biggest thing, and so many other folks have spoken about in this call, is that some folks are not necessarily seeing us out in the streets and they feel like we have lost the message. But we were able to keep in on there.
Angélica: Thank you. I have nothing else under this. I'm sorry, there's no Defund bra yet, so this part is over.
But yes, because we had the three demands and because we had folks like Trae who were on the streets relentlessly, the city leaders had no choice but to deal with us. Trae and her comrades gave them no choice by showing up at their houses for months, day and night, day and night.
Meanwhile, a coalition of housing, environmental, transit, and Indigenous sovereignty organizations had succeeded that same summer in June 2020 in winning a city tax on Amazon, which is headquartered here, under the name of Jumpstart. They created a plan for that tax money for housing, for transit, for Seattle's Green New Deal, and more.
Our very evil former mayor, Jenny Durkan, tried to play the tax organizers against the Defund SPD organizers, not realizing that we would refuse to turn on each other. She said, "Yes, let's do number two, invest in Black and Brown communities, but let's not take that money from the police. Let's leave the money with the police. Let's take the money from this new tax that-- Oh, look, I opposed, but now has been passed.” This move backfired on her because it was the impetus we needed to all come together and say, "Hell no." That was the seed that became Solidarity Budget, where we realized that divesting from policing systems and investing in Black community goes hand-in-hand with climate justice work, housing justice work, transportation justice, Indigenous sovereignty, all of it.
We know that the places in our city where inequality cuts most deeply, the places that are most disinvested in, are also the places most heavily policed. Working together as Solidarity Budget, we have now cut the police budget two years in a row from 409 million in 2020 to 355 million in 2021. Then we came back for another 10 million in 2022. We civilianized 911 dispatchers. We civilianized parking enforcement. We won 30 million for participatory budgeting and nearly 30 million for community organizations who are practicing with new ways of keeping each other safe. Our work is far from done, but we will not go back to working in silos.
Trae: As we conclude our presentation, our storytelling is we are continuing to build community with folks so that we don't have folks go ahead and go against each other. With this summer, we're doing the summer of solidarity where we're linking the defund fight to the House Our Neighbors fight for permanent social housing. We're linking the No New Amazon Warehouse in a BIPOC community fight: instead, that BIPOC community needs climate resilience hubs, and there's a campaign for that. That community needs the other things that were in Solidarity Budget that we did not get access to: transportation, food support, childcare, and more. To conclude our storytelling, we are continuing to amplify the work of divestment and refund, and we are continuing to just try to get resources for our folks and spread the message of all the good work that we're doing.
Q&A
I'd love to hear some lessons learned from you all about building solidarity. I think we do have a foundation, especially within prison abolition and criminal justice and immigrant rights groups, and we're continuing to grow that solidarity because of how intertwined the current system is and just like would love to hear any other lessons learned about solidarity building.
Angélica: I guess I would say a lot of it came really from going back to the first T-shirt now on the floor, with the “no new youth jail” work, going to all the different orgs who didn't necessarily think of themselves as abolitionist orgs and very slowly starting to have conversations, asking "Would you sign off on this demand?" I used to work as an immigration lawyer, so I had cred with the big immigrant rights orgs and would go to them basically outing myself as an abolitionist and saying, "Hey, I think this No New Youth Jail fight is our fight. Do y'all want to endorse?" Usually, the answer was a “no” for a couple years, maybe a few years. But then there were more and more signing on.
I think the other thing is making sure that we're centering folks who are at the sharpest point of the issue. Like here in Washington state, that looks like centering folks who are being transferred from prisons to immigration custody, most of whom got to prisons or jails through contact with local police or sheriffs across the state. We’re always thinking about our fight to stop the collaboration between ICE and our local state agencies. Yes, of course, I don't want the Department of Licensing cooperating with ICE, but it will be a much bigger win when we get the Department of Corrections to stop because if they're not transferring people who just finished a 30-year sentence to ICE custody, then we have won for everyone else. Again, it took years of work to get all of the local immigrant rights folks to see that and to fight for that, but we've gotten there by slowly having those conversations and refusing to have any starting point but abolition for those conversations.
You mentioned you were able to relocate traffic enforcement and some other civic infrastructure. I'm curious about your conversations and ability to engage with the unions and those folks who were shifting within the labor infrastructure and how y'all organized around that. Then you also mentioned being able to get funding for community-based organizations that were piloting different ways of figuring out safety within community. I'm curious if you could provide some examples of those and how you may have helped them to work through the county infrastructure because often it's that piece of contracting and trying to figure out who gets the money. I'm curious how y'all work through that.
Angélica: I'll start with the union stuff and then I'll hand it over to Trae for the second part about the community orgs. I didn't have a T-shirt for it but another thing we won was kicking the Seattle Police frat, the Seattle Police Officers Guild out of the MLK Labor Council, our local labor council. Part of the fight in the summer of 2020 was asking our labor allies, led by a bus driver who was a big part of the No New Youth Jail movement, to gather, bring in labor to kick SPOG out. That really opened up a lot more lines of conversation with labor than we used to have.
Then that meant, for example, that we were able to talk with the 911 dispatchers through the Labor Council, and found out from them that they didn't want to be under SPD. They said it's like a baker working for a plumber. We have nothing to do with each other. We are ready to go. We also had some places where we didn't succeed. There's something called community service officers here which are basically a group of folks working within SPD who just give out stuffed police horses at community events. Literally, that appears to be their only job. We wanted them gone altogether and if not at least out of the police department where they could maybe actually do some community service. But they did not want to go. They're still deeply inside SPD now, and now we're hearing that the department wants to give them more tasks like taking reports when someone steals your bike. I sort of regret not just pushing for them to be abolished altogether rather than have a just transition out of the police department because of how entrenched they've become. That was one learning for us: know when to engage and know when to say, actually, you've got to go.
With parking enforcement, the trickiness there was that the supervisors all wanted out of SPD, but they wanted to go to different parts of the city. Then it was a year-long negotiation of whether they should go to our new community safety center or to the Department of Transportation. They eventually ended up in SDOT. I think part of it has just been having the discussion about how police are not part of labor, which has then made it easier for us to talk to labor as our allies and have them open the doors for us.
Trae: I'll go ahead and take the second part of your question which I believe was how were we able to get money to community groups that we were able to defund. Part of that second demand that we had was to refund the Black communities. Obviously, that could be a little tricky to some. We thought, instead of continuing to give SPD more money to do racially sensitive training and whatever else, why don't we give it to the folks who are actually in the community that's doing the work? We were able to negotiate to get $10.4 million into a fund where it would go to community alternatives to policing. Folks that are actually doing the work, people who are underground in the community who are helping folks instead of incarcerating folks. There’s Rainer Beach Action Coalition and what they do is they set up a corner in South Seattle and they do de-escalation. They talk to folks, they engage with their community and their neighbors. Some of those folks go to Rainer Beach High School, which I graduated from, which is honestly one of the toughest inner high schools in the entire city. There’s a lot of fights, there’s a lot of illegal things that happen over there, but a lot of it goes to the conditions in which people live, where people are not able to pay their bills on time, where people are not able to buy even stuff for school. We were able to negotiate for those folks to get that money.
Angélica: 70 orgs applied, 30 got it. We originally had 10.4 million, but then we took 3 million more from SPD towards the end of the year, and then we got another 13 million this year. It's 13 million a year for 30 organizations and we know there's at least 40 that didn't get funded who had viable projects.
Trae: Some of these folks who did not get funded are not necessarily your traditional nonprofits. They're grassroots groups. They're folks who help with Indigenous folks. They're folks that are helping in the international district. Those folks weren't able to get the money. We're still trying to advocate for them to get that but we're able to at least get some money to folks who are doing on the ground work. That 10.4 million is not nearly enough when Seattle Police Department is sitting on an excess of 300 million. If we want it to be completely out, all the money needs to go to the community.
Refund Raleigh, Raleigh, NC
Ajamu: We're Ajamu, Sunny, Nique. To tell our story we decided to put it in the format of a letter to our future grandchildren in Raleigh. We'll get started.
Grandchild, the world we live in has been in a crisis for a long time. It did not end with me and it will not end with you. But this should not discourage you. You come from a people and tradition that fought to transform the society we live in.
When I was your age, my generation had the same rage and eagerness for change that you and your peers have. We want change and revolution immediately, not the next day, but right there in that moment. Grandchild, we quickly learned that that is not how the type of change we seek will take place. The change we seek will take a serious leverage of power. Let me share with you a story about a group that formed to build power against police violence by organizing with UE Local 150, the Raleigh City Workers Union in the early part of the 2020s.
Nique: In 2020 while we were facing a deadly pandemic, the whole world watched George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade, all Black people, murdered by the police. Millions took to the streets across the country, including here in Raleigh. But there were groups that were only interested in being in front of the camera and making demands that were disconnected from the community. Some thought if they posted a little Black square on social media, that would make a difference. But grandchild, that was not quite enough.
Sunny: The ruling class had given these professionalized activists careers to stand behind empty promises and weak reforms. These individualistic groups also had a narrow understanding of the causes of police violence and how to end it because the solutions were much bigger than the reforms they proposed at the time. Instead of linking police violence to the nature of racism and capitalism, they just throw out reforms like body cameras or bans on certain ways they could kill our loved ones. We refused to allow them to pacify us this way.
Ajamu: A group of us young people from Raleigh got together. As a generation of teens and young people defined by the murders of Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, and countless others, we had spent a lot of time protesting in the streets. We knew that we could trust each other to struggle together beyond the trigger moments. We were fearful that if our people did not organize beyond protests, the question of power would yet again be ignored and the powerful would co-opt our cries. You won't believe this, but Nike and Coca-Cola, and Pepsi used to make commercials off of our protests.
Nique: We wanted much more than commercial representation. We wanted to win what our communities deserve, real change that challenged the power structure and met the needs of our people. We knew that seeking this type of change required us to organize and strategize. We committed to do the tedious task of meeting for long hours at night, read and struggle with each other, knock doors, and have hard conversations.
We asked ourselves, how do we relate demands that are not rushed but include the community? How could we raise demands that not only felt good to us but were also crafted from a thorough understanding of the community's needs? We wanted to evolve the circumstances we had been fighting and fighting in since 2014 that were ruled by mass protests but a little change. We wanted to contest power.
Sunny: We began asking folks what they would want to do with $111 million to keep their community safe instead of that amount being given to Raleigh Police that year. People from Raleigh emphasized that they knew what would keep them safe, proposing that money could go to healthcare, jobs, education, gardens, parks, art centers, restorative justice resources, and addiction treatment programs.
On a late-night Zoom call - yes, grandchild, I have to be specific because that was back when not all phone calls were talking to people's faces in boxes on a screen - we were reading through the survey responses together, when one of our comrades said, "It's not just about defund, we want a whole refund," and that was our blooming.
Ajamu: We sought to connect the issue of police violence to the severity of economic injustices against the working class. We saw this connection as twofold, police brutalize and criminalize the working class to enforce their class position, and because the state used working people's tax dollars to fund policing rather than social welfare programs that would ensure the health and social well-being of our communities. These twisted priorities demonstrated the state's interest in maintaining social and economic control over working people rather than providing basic resources to all people.
Asking ourselves how we want to mobilize the masses of working people, we decided our attention must be focused on organizing workers at the point of production and service.
Nique: We believe that foundational to fighting economic justice, which we believe is one of the main causes of police violence, are strong unions and worker power. Strong member-led unions led to higher wages, better benefits, better working conditions, and safer communities. When workers organized to wield collective power to bargain and negotiate for good working conditions, our families and communities become safer. I know you know this now because nearly all jobs are unionized. Trust me, back then, it wasn't always like it is today.
Sunny: Building worker power was a part of our strategy, not only because we wanted safe and just working conditions, but because in the capitalist society we live in, worker power is one of our strongest political instruments. Workers are the power that makes society function. If workers stop working and demand change, society stops, and the politicians and capitalists who profit off our work must reckon with our demands. We didn't just believe this in theory, but also in practice.
Ajamu: As children of the era, we remembered when in 2006, the Raleigh sanitation workers went on strike, and the city was forced to raise their wages, implement safety policies, and institute a meet and confer policy with the mayor of the city. The city workers of Raleigh, those who pick up our garbage, who ensure we have clean water, who run and maintain our Parks and Rec system, the majority of whom were Black, were our closest allies in contending with the power of our city.
Nique: Today, you see how strikes happen all the time to force capitalists and politicians to listen to our demands. But in our day, it was unheard of for unions to go on strike in the South, much less for political causes. We learned that there was talk of an $8 million increase to the Raleigh Police Department, a $616 million budget allocation, the single largest departmental budget allocation in the city budget. Much of this budget increase was because of a starting salary wage increase of 12%, while the rest of the city workers got only 2%. We began canvassing city workers around this issue - the pay discrepancy between police and low-wage workers.
We agitated with the fact that a city worker's salary after five years is 20% less than the salary of a police officer after five years, and that was before the proposed 12% increase.
Sunny: At 5:00 AM, Refund Raleigh members would stand out as the sun started peeking from behind the buildings, and sanitation workers would speed in playing loud music that would often awake our own urges to dance even at the crack of dawn. We'd stand, flier in hand at the gate to their workplace. We'd ask, "Why does the City of Raleigh put more money in the pockets of police who have a history of brutality and not the workers that keep the city running?" City workers were angry about this proposed budget increase. In fact, one of our union leaders had been working as a sanitation worker for nearly eight years, and he still made less than a rookie police officer.
He'd been hospitalized for four weeks, but his job is still considered safer than a police officer's.
Nique: When we committed to working alongside them, we had to take responsibility for organizing the union meetings, bringing people into the union, and doing political education around the connection between the city budgets spending priorities and the mistreatment of low-wage city workers. It was a huge undertaking. The pandemic had demoralized workers that even union members wouldn't come to union meetings. Meeting by meeting, with every early morning conversation, we began to slowly gain momentum.
Finally, workers began speaking with us at City Council budget hearings, demanding better pay and treatment and standing with Refund Raleigh as we call for defunding our city's police and investing in us instead.
Sunny: City workers insisted on being recognized as the heartbeat of the city. Indeed, the city does run because of city workers. We believed that strong worker-led unionism was and is our most clear access to political power. If workers choose to collectively withhold their labor and bargain, the city will be forced to make changes to meet the union's demands.
Ajamu: The lesson here, grandchild, is to understand that our many struggles for social transformation should not be seen in isolation from each other. Look for the connections, and fight there.
