Workers and Environmentalists in Solidarity: Lessons from Social Movements in Latin America

A Teach-in Lecture and Discussion in Support of DSA’s PRO Act Campaign

To solve our climate and economic crises, we need a Green New Deal. To win a Green New Deal, we need mass worker power. To build mass worker power, we need to pass the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act.

Throughout the Spring of 2021, the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) highest priority has been to pass the PRO Act, which would strengthen unions, the power of the working class to organize on the job, and our collective capacity to win a just transition for a green economy for all. This campaign is an opportunity to organize around a common mission: to end the climate catastrophe, powerlessness on the job, and social, racial, and environmental injustice through an emboldened and militant working class movement united across differences. Labor militancy won the original New Deal; if we pass the PRO Act, it will position us to win a transformative Green New Deal.

Join the Prince George’s County DSA Branch for a teach-in lecture and interactive discussion on uniting the worker and environmentalist movements, both in the PRO Act campaign and in long-term efforts to build people power for enabling a Green New Deal through a just transition. We will learn from the stories of social movements in Latin America uniting people of different backgrounds, such the Landless Peasant Movement in Bolivia, and discuss how we can use lessons from these movements to build solidarity between environmentalists and organized labor at a local level here in Prince George’s County and the state of Maryland.

The most effective attacks on the climate movement pit it against the labor movement and jobs, but we don’t have to choose. Uniting the two can take on corporate power and the fossil fuel industry’s divide-and-conquer tactics. Workers AND the world, unite!

This event requires pre-registration. RSVP here for the Zoom link.

Everyone is welcome. This presentation is free and open to the public.

About the speaker: Nicole Fabricant is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminal Justice at Towson University. Her research work as a cultural anthropologist focuses on the cultural politics of resource wars in Latin America and the US. She is also an activist and organizer involved in several efforts in the Baltimore area, including: Black Butterfly Collective, South Baltimore Community Land Trust, Zero Waste Campaign, Toxic Tours, and Black Yield Institute.