2025 Week 38 - Weekly Update

[chima (Harpreet Chima)]

2025 Week 38 Weekly Update

If you have questions about any of these action items, please schedule a quick zoom meeting with a member of the Steering Committee here. We were elected to help Members achieve the goals they voted for, so please don’t hesitate to book a meeting!

Recap

Tenant Union

The Madison Community Tenant Association has finally formed a small organizing committee. Tenants are reaching out to Code Enforcement to deal with their primary issue - it is a pretty clear code violation and safety risk; however, if Code Enforcement falls through or is slow to act, we need to be prepared to help tenants escalate tactics.

Know Your Rights Forum

@chima

We had a forum to renew our focus on the Know Your Rights work in San Joaquin County. The primary takeaway was the urgent need to proactively organize for a potential confrontation with authorities like ICE, rather than waiting for a reactive response. There was concern that a lack of preparation will put people at risk, especially energetic youth, that may engage in unsafe and unproductive activity. And that we needed a mass organized approached that would allow for some level of security and discipline.

There was a general consensus that we needed to increase collaboration between the various groups & community leaders and build a support network through widespread outreach in places like grocery stores, schools, parks, and engaging faith leaders and other groups. All while avoiding replicating the opaque top-down nature of current efforts.

With ICE funding increasing in October, there’s little reason to continue to delay working on this.

BDS Research

We started our research into how a successful BDS campaign locally could impact cities/towns in San Joaquin County. We still have some more research to do; there are some next steps in the thread below.

@chima

Thanks @ckposadas for working on this with me! We found the links for investments for Stockton and Manteca; looks like a few BDS companies are on there. And partial information for Tracy and Lodi. Looks like we will have to PRA for vendor info.

Events This Week

Working Meeting: Know Your Rights: Tuesday September 16 @ 6:00PM - 7:30PM (Calendar)
Tenant Union Outreach: Wednesday September 17 @ 6:00PM - 7:00PM (Calendar)
Working Meeting: Introducing Coworkers to the Union: Friday, September 19 @ 7:00PM - 8:00PM (Calendar)

Rallly Scheduling

Please use these links to fill in your availability for events you are interested in. We will try to finalize dates by Sunday night the week of the event.

Sept 22-28

• New Member Orientation: Rallly.WCU
• BDS Research Meeting: Rallly.WCU

Tenant Union

As stated above, we have one building that is moving towards becoming more solidly organized. We are returning to another building where progress has stalled on Wednesday 6-7pm (Calendar). Here, progress has stalled, and we may have to encourage tenants to take steps beyond writing a letter.

I believe Tenants would feel more comfortable escalating actions if a wider number of WCU Members are able to show up during these meetings, so it’s clear there are more than 3-4 of us there to support them.

Action Items

Tenant Union Canvassing Script
We are drafting a script for initiating conversations and collecting contact information. @ckposadas and @SeanHun are already working on a draft - leave edits/comments in the thread or Google Doc: Creating Canvassing Script

Creating a flyer for Civil Code § 1942.5 - Protecting tenants from landlord retaliation
One of the main push backs we get from tenants is fear of landlord retaliation if they file a complaint. However, they have some level of protection in the form of Civil Code § 1942.5. However, we need that information condensed to a one-page flyer. You can start working on it here.

Know Your Rights

@chima

In terms of the nuts and bolts of what needs to be done moving forward with KYR/ICE response, we’re going to start meeting every week during working meetings to figure that out. The next one is Tuesday September 16 @ 6:00 pm - 7:30 pm.

Events

Working Meeting: Know Your Rights: Tuesday September 16 @ 6:00PM - 7:30PM (Calendar)

Accompaniment Support

Message from Floricel Liborio:

Good afternoon, families of the community.

My check-in with ICE is approaching in a few days!!! My children and I would like to count on your presence and prayers.

Many thanks.

Workplace Organizing

Organizing Toolkit: Introducing Coworkers to the Union

The goal of this toolkit is to help explain the basics of a union to coworkers for workers trying to organize their workplace. We have had this on the back burner for a bit! It would be good to get some intro version done. You can see our current progress, or continue working on this on your own, by going here.

Events

Working Meeting: Introducing Your Coworkers to the Union: Friday, September 19 @ 7:00PM - 8:00PM (Calendar)

Organizing Toolkit: Winning ICE Raid Preparedness Training at Work

The goal of this toolkit is to help connect potential organizers with WCU so we can get them started with a (potentially) simple demand: training on how to respond to an ICE raid at work. You can check it out here.

We voted not to make this public yet, but it’s available for members to share with people they know directly.

BDS in the Central Valley

San Joaquin County City/Town BDS Investment Information

As stated above, we have already started making progress on the research. Below is what we still need to work on:

@chima

The plan moving forward is:

• Make a full BDS list
• Request all information (listed below) from all cities; even if publicly available right now, it is in PDF format. We can request excels that they might already have back end access to.
• Compile preliminary data from the PDFs we do have, make a social media post, ask people to sign up to help us further or to get updates in order to better gauge interest in this.

Port of Stockton BDS Messaging

The second phase of this is to look into who is on the Port of Stockton Commission and develop messaging around them that connects their local oligarch status to our labor and union work. If you would like to get started ahead of time, please use this Google Doc.

Events

If you would like to join the working meeting for the City/Town level research, please fill out this rallly link so we can pick a day for next week: BDS Research Meeting: Rallly.WCU

Again, if you have questions about any of these action items, please schedule a quick zoom meeting with a member of the Steering Committee here. We were elected to help Members achieve the goals they voted for, so please don’t hesitate to book a meeting!

And if you are not yet a member of Working Class Unity, and any of this interests you, please become a member!