by Isaac Wagnitz

Staff at North Thurston Public Schools (NTPS) are looking at layoffs after the school board decided on a reduction in force (RIF), as part of their plan to address a significant budget shortfall in the district.

According to The Olympian, the district is currently facing a $10 million shortfall. The layoffs were first proposed at a school board meeting on April 28th, but were tabled due to substantial opposition from organized labor and present community members. At a subsequent meeting on May 7th, the board decided to follow through with the RIF. Initially the board had been at an impasse, but board member Michelle Gipson ultimately cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the layoffs. Members Sarah Tracy and Gretchen Maliska also supported the RIF, while Esperanza Badillo-Diiorio and Jeff Line cast their votes in opposition.

Works In Progress spoke with two NTPS staff about the current situation: Jeff Berland, a special education teacher in the district, and another employee who declined to be named due to concerns about retaliation who will be referred to hereafter as E for Educator. Berland and E discussed the background and impacts of the RIF, as well as steps moving forward.

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Fragments of a Working-Class Queer History

by Coco N. Spirator

Historically, the fights for queer liberation and for working-class power are seen as completely separate struggles, with completely independent demands. Yet, most queers in the United States are, and always have been, working class. Additionally, queer people also make up the most economically marginalized members of the working class. In reality, the history of queer struggle is often about tangible day-to-day concerns: work, living, housing, policing and access to healthcare. In other words, working-class issues. This oversight is particularly dangerous right now, as attacks on trans existence have become a central pillar of the right-wing movement.

What follows is a small collection of scenes from the history of queer struggle that demonstrate how the material realities of class and race informed those struggles. Although these movements rarely utilized many working class slogans, it was these day-to-day realities that brought people together into larger fights for queer liberation, and affected the kinds of movements they built. Unfortunately, these concerns were just as often also the basis of class divisions that would tear those movements apart again and again. There are important lessons to be learned here.

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Noticings: A Column About Public Space and Design — The City’s Back Door

by V Lane Hoy

During a seminar on the subject of public art in the late 1990s, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche outlined how a renovation of Jackson Square Park in New York City’s West Village introduced a new gate around the park’s perimeter. The New York City Parks Department entrusted a community group with keys to close the gate at night and prevent houseless people from taking refuge there. This was but one of the ways the underfunded parks department offloaded maintenance tasks they weren’t able to accomplish in-house due to ongoing budget cuts initiated in the late 1960s. Deutsche uncovers one of the assumptions embedded within that decision: ”People without homes are not residents of the neighborhood and are therefore not part of the public. Rather, homeless people are intruders in public space.”

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Prison Reformism: The Molding of Docile Prisoners

by Tomas Afeworki

In the not so distant past, many recognized the inhumane, militaristic oppression that was embedded into the fabric of the prison slavery system.

This recognition produced political awareness about the social, economic and cultural impacts of poverty. That awareness influenced many of us to radically defy this unjust status quo.

Read Article

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Staff at North Thurston Public Schools (NTPS) are looking at layoffs after the school board decided on a reduction in force (RIF), as part of their plan to address a significant budget shortfall in the district.

According to The Olympian, the district is currently facing a $10 million shortfall. The layoffs were first proposed at a school board meeting on April 28th, but were tabled due to substantial opposition from organized labor and present community members. At a subsequent meeting on May 7th, the board decided to follow through with the RIF. Initially the board had been at an impasse, but board member Michelle Gipson ultimately cast the tie-breaking vote in favor of the layoffs. Members Sarah Tracy and Gretchen Maliska also supported the RIF, while Esperanza Badillo-Diiorio and Jeff Line cast their votes in opposition.

Works In Progress spoke with two NTPS staff about the current situation: Jeff Berland, a special education teacher in the district, and another employee who declined to be named due to concerns about retaliation who will be referred to hereafter as E for Educator. Berland and E discussed the background and impacts of the RIF, as well as steps moving forward.

E stated that the origins of the crisis at North Thurston ultimately reflect larger historical trends. They mentioned that school districts in general are often not very transparent about finances, and that the public only scrutinizes them during shortfalls or levy requests. However, the main issue lies in how public schools in Washington are funded. E pointed out that in spite of the contention that sometimes surrounds local school levy elections, Washington schools are primarily supported by the state government, supplemented with some federal funding. According to this primer from USAFacts, North Thurston recieves less than 30% of its overall funding from local levies. This creates a situation where, even when local levies pass, shortfalls in state and federal budgets can still allow public schools to not meet their operating costs. With an ongoing state budget crisis, and a federal administration that is openly hostile to public education, NTPS was vulnerable despite having won a levy in the last local election. Works In Progress also reported on a similar situation which arose recently with Shelton Public Schools.

North Thurston Superintendent Troy Oliver was quick to place blame on the state Legislature, as well as falling enrollments (down 178 this year, and projected to fall another 117 next). Berland expressed basic agreement, emphasizing that the state has continually failed to meet the paramount duty in its own constitution to fully fund public education. At the same time, he added that the Legislature can only do so much as long as its hands are tied by Washington’s highly regressive revenue system, which is overly dependent on sales and property taxes. “The Millionaires Tax is a step in the right direction, but we’re not seeing that money yet,” Berland said. E attributed some of the drop in enrollment to administrators who are too eager to divert students with academic or attendance issues into GED programs outside their usual school. “This removes ‘problems’ from the building, but also they don’t have to count them as dropouts,” E said.

They went on to say that the district may also be neglecting to take advantage of some revenue sources that are actually available. They stated that some special-education activities are reimbursable under Medicaid, but that the district is not seeking those reimbursements. E cited documents on the current and forecasted NTPS budgets, which for unclear reasons show $0.00 under certain revenue sources. “Does that mean we were getting money from those sources, but now we aren’t? And if not, why is that?” they asked. E also pointed out that the district employs a full-time grant-writer, yet is nonetheless facing a serious budget shortfall.

The impacts of that shortfall will be felt immediately by students, their family and community, and currently employed staff. The most visible and reported impact will be the loss of 8 of the district’s 11 mental health social workers. E said these staff members assist students by doing crisis-intervention work. They connect students and their families with other support resources in the community. E said that the social workers had also done a great deal of work helping families whose children were afraid to come to school because of federal immigration enforcement activity. The loss of these staff and the stability that they provide will have severely negative effects on the students they serve, in some cases immediately. Berland added: “I’ve seen students who are already starting to check out because they know that support isn’t going to be there for them next year. Their learning is already suffering.”

The district is also using “attrition” to try to close the budget gap, that is, not hiring replacements for retired staff. Altogether, 21 provisional educators (those not yet on a permanent employment basis with the district) are not having their contracts renewed. Two physical therapists who serve students in the district are also being laid off. Additionally, a supervisor position was eliminated which provided direct support to custodial staff throughout the district. A custodial employee who was reached for comment said that position was crucial for their logistics, by managing supply orders and coordinating substitute coverage. “He [the supervisor who was cut] was also the only person actually working the same hours as us, so we could call someone if there was an emergency past 3pm when the rest of the district goes home. Basically we will be without dedicated support in the evenings from August on.”

While the district has not yet announced the intention to make any further cuts, E said staff are still nervous about the possibility of more to come. They pointed out that even laid-off staff still cost the district, since NTPS will have to contribute to their unemployment benefits until they find new work, so the RIF may do less to close the budget gap than advertised. When asked what supporters of students and educators could do to help, Berland and E said that regrettably there is not much the public can do at the moment now that the cuts have gone through, and emphasized the need for long-term changes to ensure that crises like this do not arise in the future.

E talked about the need for members of the public to educate themselves about how school districts operate and fund themselves. They emphasized the need for deeper, more consistent collaboration and communication between communities and school districts as the norm, not just at times of crisis. They also stated that communities must demand greater transparency from district leadership, and push for more opportunities for the public to voice their concerns directly to boards and administrators. They went on to say that, as long as schools are dependent on levies,[1] “yes” campaigns need to do a better job of making clear what communities gain from fully-funded schools.

Berland focused on the need for constant public pressure on the Legislature to reform the state’s revenue system, so that Washington can truly fulfill its paramount duty to fund education in the long term. He also spoke of the need for a wider shift in public perception, away from schools as just being a government expenditure, and toward them being a resource worth investing in for our collective future. He said that if people need to consider economic figures to get onboard with this, “even the most conservative studies find that every dollar invested in early learning brings at least four dollars in returns down the road; some go as high as 16.”

Berland also suggested that school districts need to stop spending so much money on expensive technologies that do not improve the quality of instruction. “Every student has a Chromebook now, which costs a lot of money, but their learning outcomes aren’t any better. We’re just giving them another screen to be addicted to.” A recent Jacobin article describes how, in a generation raised on screens at home and at school, even students at prestigious universities lack basic reading comprehension. Finally, Berland emphasized the need for school administrators who will seek out and listen to input from educators and students, and be fierce advocates on their behalf. “We need to see more of that ‘servant leadership’ people talk about.”

The crisis at NTPS calls attention on the one hand to the need for better collaboration between school leadership, the communities they serve, and the staff who carry out the work; and on the other hand, to the need to drastically reform education funding, and Washington’s revenue system as a whole. Neither goal will be possible without strong, coordinated efforts by a well-organized coalition of students and their families, educators and their labor allies, and all those invested in the future of their communities. Until Washington can implement a more equitable and sustainable model for funding public education, situations like the one in North Thurston are likely to become more common.

During a seminar on the subject of public art in the late 1990s, art historian Rosalyn Deutsche outlined how a renovation of Jackson Square Park in New York City’s West Village introduced a new gate around the park’s perimeter. The New York City Parks Department entrusted a community group with keys to close the gate at night and prevent houseless people from taking refuge there. This was but one of the ways the underfunded parks department offloaded maintenance tasks they weren’t able to accomplish in-house due to ongoing budget cuts initiated in the late 1960s. Deutsche uncovers one of the assumptions embedded within that decision: ”People without homes are not residents of the neighborhood and are therefore not part of the public. Rather, homeless people are intruders in public space.”

These assumptions, Deutsche notes, are never consensus-based and are instead established through specious discursive processes that take their own logic and values for granted by framing them as neutral, self-evident, or simple common sense. And in this case, they also cast a distinction around who (and, by extension, what behavior) is legitimate inside society and what lies outside that figurative, and sometimes also quite literal, boundary.

Humanist geographer Yi-Fu Tuan has theorized about the spatial articulations of figurative framings of cities: insides, outsides, fronts, backs, lefts, and rights. Tuan writes:

Many buildings have clearly demarcated front and back regions. People may work in the same building and yet experience different worlds because their unequal status propels them into different circulatory routes and work areas. Maintenance men and janitors enter through service doors at the back and move along the “guts” of the building, while executives and their secretaries enter by the front door and move through the spacious lobby and well-lit passageways to their brightly furnished offices. A middle-class residence typically presents an attractive front to impress and welcome social adults, and an unprepossessing rear for the use of people of low status such as delivery men and children.

I am reminded of a classmate from graduate school who worked by night as a DJ. They similarly conceptually mapped the front stage / front door and the back stage / back door onto waking life and night life and, by symbolic extension, the productive city and the illicit city. We find another version of this binary in the lyrics of blues musicians who sing about the “back door man,” the stealthy guy using the back door to get in and out of the house of the woman with whom he’s having an affair. In Howlin’ Wolf’s rendition, he sings, “When everybody’s sound asleep / I’m somewhere making my midnight creep.” Here, too, the back door suggests stigma in the form of someone up to no good, and also, curiously, gives the sense that those who use the back door might be having a little more fun than the front-door types. Or, if not fun, that they may desire something different than just a simple longing to be the type who uses the front door. To put it in slightly more neutral terms, something else can be created amidst the banal fact of exclusion.

In Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African American Slang, interdisciplinary artist Clarence Major writes about the connection between the denial of front-door access African Americans experienced during and after slavery when working in the homes of wealthy white people. Slang expressions like the “back door man” began to act as “a secret tongue,” a language that maintained “its own center of gravity, integrity, and shape.”

In an interview in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Fred Moten spoke about this something else that can emerge within the experience of oppression. He identifies one of the pedagogical practices used in the Mississippi Freedom Schools that were developed during the Freedom Summer of 1964 in response to racist voter suppression laws. A prompt invited students to take inventory of not just what they wanted to see transformed in their communities, but also what they cherished and wanted preserved. Moten describes what made this approach stand out: “There’s a way of thinking about what was going on in Mississippi in 1964 that would be predicated on the notion that the last question you would ever consider to be relevant for people in that situation, for black folks in Mississippi in 1964, is what do they have that they want to keep?”

The philosophy behind that question embedded in the curriculum, Moten goes on to say, “presupposes…(a) that they’ve got something that they want to keep, and (b) that not only do those people who were fucking them over not have everything, but that part of what we want to do is to organize ourselves around the principle that we don’t want everything they have.”

I observed a related pattern while working overnights at The People’s House, a low-barrier homeless shelter that at the time was hosted in the basement of the First Christian Church in downtown Olympia. While we were grateful for the church’s and the surrounding neighborhood’s willingness to host the shelter—which was no small feat after an arduous process of permit rejections and community meetings where residents often took anti-homeless stances—the church basement proved a less-than-ideal setting. The physical environment, with its long hallways, labyrinthian dormitories, and low ceilings, was difficult to traverse for many of the elderly and disabled residents, who rightfully made their frustrations known.

Yet after residents finally secured housing, some would keep coming back to hang out at the shelter, even though, during their tenure living there, they were desperate to get out and into their own place.

One former resident continued to come by regularly, often helping the overnight staff mop the floors in the morning after the residents had left for the day (the permit for the shelter was granted with the condition that it had to close during “business hours”). On one of those mornings, I asked him how it felt to have his new apartment, my tone cheery, expecting a moment of celebration. But, in his endearing Boomhauer-like mumble, he said, “Yeah, it’s alright… kind of lonely though. Everybody’s just in their apartments all day.”

For all the dysfunction within that run-down environment, something in the culture that grew out of the motley crew of residents and staff met a real social need that became evident only after residents transitioned into permanent housing and would return to visit, notably restless with boredom and isolation.

So there is this tension between the real suffering that occurs when some are rendered to the outskirts, the alleyways, the proverbial and actual back doors of buildings and cities, and also the possibility that there might be something meaningful that subjugation reveals, something that those using the front door can’t always see and maybe wouldn’t understand anyway.

• Dembart, Lee. 1975. “Parks Agency Plight Epitomizes the City’s.” New York Times, October 23. https://www.nytimes.com/1975/10/23/archives/parks-agency-plight-epitomizes-the-citys.html.

• Deutche, Rosalyn. 2021. “The Question of ‘Public Space’.” In Public Space Reader, edited by Miodrag Mitrašinović and Vikas Mehta. Routledge.

• Devi, Debra. 2012. “The Language of the Blues: Back Door Man.” American Blues Scene. https://www.americanbluesscene.com/2012/07/the-language-blues-back-door-man.

• Harney, Stefano, and Fred Moten. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Autonomedia.

• Major, Clarence, ed. 1994. Juba to Jive: A Dictionary of African-American Slang. Puffin.

• Tuan, Yi Fu. 1977. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press.

Originally published in Freedom Socialist newspaper, Vol. 47, No. 3, June-July 2026 socialism.com

In February, Burger King began spying on worker “friendliness” using an AI headset called “Patty” in an attempt to make the technology seem more human (and less threatening) by giving it a name. The device listens in on the employees’ conversation and creates a friendliness score. Phrases Patty looks for include “please” and “thank you,” which management sees as a way to “promote hospitality” among workers.

Burger King president Tom Curtis isn’t the only one supersizing the dystopian landscape of worker surveillance. Billionaire Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Meta would be adding new tracking software on US-based employees’ computers, recording actions like keystrokes and mouse activity. This form of oversight will have a widespread impact on workers across industries.

While Patty will coerce a friendly facade from overworked employees, Meta’s tracking data will train AI models to locate and terminate “inefficient” employees. CNBC reported in late April that over 92,000 tech workers have been laid off in 2026 so far.

Tracking surveillance first started gaining popularity in 2020 and 2021 as Covid-19 forced many people to work from home. Out of the office, bosses needed new tricks to monitor workers and Amazon implemented technology to detect when employee’s home computers went idle. Innovative in appearance, these tactics are the modern equivalent of managers spying on workers from office windows high above the shop floor.

Labor’s response to these forms of monitoring have varied. The pandemic led some unions to implement provisions in their contracts that require employers to notify workers about the use of automated management and surveillance tools. Some workers have won access to their employer’s collected data.

Invasive scrutiny and Big Brother tactics will only dehumanize workers, not increase production. And considering the amount of wage theft and massive bonuses management profits from every day, it is time the cameras are turned back on them. Instead of waiting for the next “innovation” to strip away their rights, workers can “have it their way” by organizing together and fighting back.

In the not so distant past, many recognized the inhumane, militaristic oppression that was embedded into the fabric of the prison slavery system.

This recognition produced political awareness about the social, economic and cultural impacts of poverty. That awareness influenced many of us to radically defy this unjust status quo.

In this movement’s heyday, heroes like George Jackson exposed the new slave labor system in pursuit of revolutionary changes. A unified front of Black, White, Red, Yellow and Brown organic intellectuals fostered ideas for true change.

The uprising in Attica demonstrated the power and potential of the movement. That fact was not lost upon FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and Democratic congressman Richard H. Ichord. So they created the House Internal Security Committee (HISC). Through this committee, they implemented secret programs that targeted the intellectuals, co-opted plans, and created splits to neutralize and isolate the prison revolutionary movement. This was also referred to as the Prison Activist Surveillance Program.

The idea was simple: to create reformist counterinsurgency. Using the word “reform” as camouflage, prisons created an internal manual. From this emerged the “Prison Level System” and creation of minimum, medium, and maximum facilities. It was a major win for prison corporations and their desire to expand. More physical structures had to be built. This unsurprisingly coincided with a 500 percent increase in the prison population that took place between 1970 up until the 2000’s. This phenomena is often referred to as mass incarceration.

The genius of this counterinsurgency campaign was that it had hardcore revolutionaries unwittingly advocating for a reformist agenda that split the movement. The prisoners movement has not yet recovered. Rebuilding the movement is difficult because these reforms successfully quelled revolutionary impulses in favor of developing a prison population that is at present largely docile, untrained, and uneducated.

They can buy products after begging their family for money. They are fed. They are given modern comforts like TV, candy, food packages, property packages, and access to prescription drugs.

Everyday I see Brothas standing in line for pills awaiting drugs to help them conceal their problems. They turn into zombies.

The cancerous food served in the cafeteria fattens the pockets of corporations while taxpayers foot the the bill. There is no dish washer so food trays are dipped in chemicals that cause internal health problems.

It is now hard to see the silent killer as it is not readily identifiable. Until of course, you fight to get out of prison then you see how unaccommodating the prison becomes, and how treacherous the the courts are to the constitution. One’s rights become nonexistent.

Having seen all this, it’s amazing that we have Brothas and Sistas who overcame the odds to get out of prison but are politically brainwashed by reformist ideology without even knowing the origin of such programs.

Is it shocking that virtually every prison program that has been created financially benefits prison corporations. To further enslave more of the population a bill has to be signed to allocate more funding, under the guise of “educational help programs” or “diversity programs.”

We are faced with a startling problem as our societal defects go unaddressed and the effects of oppressive capitalism go unchecked.

I do see a solution. The effects of J Edgar Hoover and democratic congressman Richard H. Ichord’s mirage of reform also left a weak spot, an Achilles heel, if you will.

We are in prime position, mingling with judges, lawyers, and politicians, who depend on us. LEGAL CLINICS that provide legal assistance can easily be formed, likeminded souls can be galvanized, we can strategize to get more people out of prison. The opportunities are there and it can be profitable (that discussion is for another article). Rebuilding the revolutionary prisoners movement and the formation of legal clinics in solidarity will crumble the new slavery system once and for all.

But this requires decolonization of the mind. We have to address the fact that we have been conditioned - brainwashed even - by our oppressor into believing that the only way we can rise is by oppressing each other. This cycle has kept us financially broke and generationally enslaved.

We should be quick to remember the best way to subdue an enemy is without lifting a finger. We can have political power. It is up to us to muster the inner will to use it for JUSTICE.

Tomas S. Afeworki is a Pan-Afriqan illustrator and human rights activist focused on the social and political protection of the diaspora. Through grassroots organizations, community celebrations and legislative summits, he aims to unify a coalition for freedom and is inspired by Nelson Mandela’s quote, “There is no easy walk to freedom anywhere.”

Afeworki maintains that he has been wrongfully convicted and incarcerated for a crime he did not commit and is actively fighting for his freedom.

Following in the steps of leaders that inspire his purpose like Nelson Mandela, George Jackson, and Assata Shakur, he seeks justice for himself and his fellow bothers and sisters that have been victimized by a corrupt judicial system.

To learn more about Tomas S. Afeworki and support his exoneration please visit: www.FreeTomas.com

Historically, the fights for queer liberation and for working-class power are seen as completely separate struggles, with completely independent demands. Yet, most queers in the United States are, and always have been, working class. Additionally, queer people also make up the most economically marginalized members of the working class. In reality, the history of queer struggle is often about tangible day-to-day concerns: work, living, housing, policing and access to healthcare. In other words, working-class issues. This oversight is particularly dangerous right now, as attacks on trans existence have become a central pillar of the right-wing movement.

What follows is a small collection of scenes from the history of queer struggle that demonstrate how the material realities of class and race informed those struggles. Although these movements rarely utilized many working class slogans, it was these day-to-day realities that brought people together into larger fights for queer liberation, and affected the kinds of movements they built. Unfortunately, these concerns were just as often also the basis of class divisions that would tear those movements apart again and again. There are important lessons to be learned here.

Queer Work in the Early 1900s

At the turn of the 20th century, there was a mass migration of people into urban centers. That migration of people cultivated a social and economic landscape centered around industrial and service work. Queer people tended to congregate around certain jobs: retail sales, marketing, fashion, and performance, such as the popular female-impersonators in vaudeville shows. Historian Allan Bérubé refers to many of these jobs as “Queer Work”: work that was associated, often negatively, with gay and gender nonconforming people. It is usually work that crosses gender expectations, and is often sex-segregated. It is also usually some of the lowest paid work.

An example of work that crossed gender expectations was hospitality work on luxury ocean liners. Typically seen as women’s work, hospitality work on certain cruise ships were staffed entirely by men. According to a former employee, stewards often referred to themselves as Queens, and “when there [weren’t] any passengers around, all the stewards called each other by girls’ names.” The Marine Cooks and Stewards Union, which represented these workers, was initially whites-only. In a matter of just a few years, it would become a proud beacon of mixed-race, queer militant unionism. It would integrate during the historic 1934 Longshore workers’ strike – the result of agitation by Black workers, many of them communists. The new Black union members then immediately pushed for desegregation of the industry through the union. The membership’s new shared sense of solidarity and militancy also brought about more rank-and-file democracy within the union, and a number of gay men were quickly voted into leadership. When attacked by more conservative unions, they proudly proclaimed their solidarity: “It’s anti-union to red-bait, race-bait or queer-bait.”

Queer Living in the Post-War City

Queer neighborhoods, as typically conceived, began in major urban centers after World War II. Many queers, due to race, poverty, or gender non-conformity, increasingly found themselves only able to live in small, neglected corners of the city, usually the vice districts. This was particularly true for those who did not or could not stay closeted. These were neglected areas with some of the lowest rents and least discriminatory landlords. These areas became centers of illegal work that many queers had to partake in to survive. These neighborhoods were rigidly policed, the boundaries were strictly enforced, and police pay-offs were an expectation

There was a neighborhood politics that developed around this. In the queer Central City of San Francisco, gay organizations fought to attract federal grants into the neighborhood, sometimes in alliance and sometimes in competition with neighboring minority neighborhoods. Later, some gay organizations would begin to take on the issue of police violence, through watchdog and know-your-rights campaigns. One of the most interesting organizations to come out of this time was Vanguard, which sought its membership in street youth, including young street queens, and was an active force in what became the Compton’s Cafeteria Riots in 1966. These neighborhood politics of safety can have a dark side as well. By the late 90s,, some gay and lesbian communities would support gentrification and increased policing efforts in historical gay neighborhoods, directly harming the younger, poorer, and less white queers who also lived there.

Gay Liberation & Division

When Leslie Feinberg asked Sylvia Rivera why she fought back in the Stonewall riots, Rivera simply answered, “We were fighting for our lives.” The 1969 Stonewall riots, like the Compton’s Cafeteria riot years before, sprung from the margins: street queens, hustlers, trans men, homeless youth and others. They were among the most deeply criminalized, policed and kept out of the formal labor market. It even spread to the women’s prison in the same neighborhood, where generations of gay women and gender nonconforming people were housed. In contrast to the largely respectability focused Homophile movement that proceeded it, the Gay Liberation Movement which emerged from Stonewall was revolutionary, solidaristic, and anti-assimilationist.

Still, as the movement grew, the class and racial divides within the queer community would soon split it. In 1973, homosexuality was depathologized and abortion was legalized. The particular demands of the poorer, more criminalized parts of the movement would come to be seen as a threat. That same year, trans people were pushed out of the Gay Liberation and the Women’s movement. The most famous incident happened during the Christopher Street Liberation Day Rally, when a number of activists tried keep Rivera from speaking. In response, she famously stole the microphone, ran out on stage, and gave them a piece of her mind.

The Beginnings of Queer Labor

At about the same time, queer organizations were beginning to form direct alliances with labor unions. This would develop over the years into unions taking on queer issues, such as anti-discrimination policies in the workplace, and helping to halt the wave of anti-gay legislation spearheaded by purity warrior Anita Bryant’s moral panic over gay teachers.

One of the most spectacular examples of gay/labor solidarity was The Coors Beer boycott, which ran from 1966 through the late 90s. It was started by Latino organizations in Colorado and then taken up by the Teamsters around 1974. The San Francisco gay community soon joined. Coors Beer was known for firing gay workers, as well as conducting lie detector tests during hiring. The Coors family themselves were arch-conservatives on a campaign to change American politics and it was this political fight that would carry the boycott long after the unions dropped out. Gay organizations would directly flier gay bars to convince owners and patrons to join the boycott. The San Francisco gay community would stay as the backbone of the boycott until the 90s, when the company finally made a number of concessions to gay and other minority causes.

ACT UP and Access to Healthcare

Access to healthcare has been another critical part of queer struggle. In 1987, when the direct action group ACT UP launched, it immediately set its focus on getting access to AIDS treatments. ACT UP’s first actions targeted Wall Street over price gouging on the only available treatment at the time: AZT. The actions worked and the price came down. Later ACT UP targeted the FDA to speed up its drug trial process and to open up trials to more people. They campaigned against the use of placebos in AIDS trials, as well as the sexist and racist scope of current AIDS diagnostic criteria. The group also began needle exchange programs to stop the spread among drug users. In the early 2000s, ACT UP expanded their fight and campaigned for universal healthcare.

Working-Class Queer Struggle Today

The queer movement of the last two decades relied primarily on a strategy of visibility and social acceptance, putting the material realities of the majority working-class queer people to the side. This has left trans people completely unguarded when the right-wing began attacking the trans population at those most basic levels of survival (i.e., access to restrooms, healthcare, and government documents).

But, there seems to be rumblings of a renewed, working-class queer movement. Trans participation in the labor movement has exploded in recent years. Two stand-out examples includet he Starbucks Workers United campaign, and Real You Electrolysis Workers United. There have been continued protests over hospitals ending gender-affirming care for youth. Queer support organizations in Seattle are currently pushing the city to declare a state of emergency, in order to unlock funds and support the wave of trans people migrating to the city from hostile states, to say nothing of the countless, mutual aid efforts already helping new arrivals.

New working-class queer fights are encouraging. But if there is anything to take from the longer history of queer struggle, it is that any movement that wants to last and make real, liberatory gains will have to take seriously the material needs of those it is fighting for, not just visibility. That means standing in solidarity with and fighting for the demands of the least privileged parts of that movement. Without that deep solidarity, the movement risks becoming a way to build new oppressions.

Commissioner Tye Menser is seeking to remove elected commissioners from the appeals process, despite unanimous opposition from the Planning Commission.

By Ronda Larson Kramer

The Thurston County Board of County Commissioners (the Board) recently postponed its vote for a second time on a proposal that would remove the Board from the county’s land-use appeals process. The proposal by Board Chair Tye Menser has faced staunch opposition from environmental groups and the county’s own advisory committee.

In July 2025, the Thurston County Planning Commission — a 10-person advisory committee appointed by the Board — voted 10-0 against the proposal after hearing testimony from conservation groups and members of the public overwhelmingly opposed to it. Opponents argue it would remove residents’ only practical avenue to appeal erroneous land use decisions by the county.

The only person to submit comments in support was Heather Burgess, a land-use attorney whose clients include mine owners and developers of large housing projects.

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Privacy Services and Activism

Silver Bullet, or Snake Oil?

by Robb Ott, Technology and Surveillance in Dystopia Desk

We exist in an era where the state is leveraging surveillance and technology to engage in an intensifying campaign against activists, protestors, and any others who oppose them. Last September, the office of the President signed an executive order declaring “Antifa” a terrorist organization. The fact that Antifa it not an actually existing organization has not stopped White House officials from using the refrain over the past few months. Several activists across different states are currently facing federal charges with the common theme of “conspiracy” or “terrorism” charges being put forth against the defendants. The stakes for standing up for change are higher than ever and the stakes for remaining silent are immense. With cloud and communication services being deeply integrated into the daily lives of most people who do not think twice about using them. Those fighting for change for the better must utilize a higher standard of security than they would otherwise, but is this enough?

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Analyzing Timberland Regional Library’s 2018 Capital Facilities Proposal

Timberland Regional Library’s cost-cutting measures that reduce staffing and library access connect back to a proposal rejected in 2018.

by Caelen McQuilken

To better understand the developing story at Timberland Regional Library (TRL), Works in Progress looks back to 2018, when the TRL administration released its Capital Facilities Proposal (CFP), a long-term strategic plan that addressed funding, service models, and staffing.

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Fight Like an Animal: Revolutionary Biology in Defense of Life by Arnold Schroder

Arnold Schroder’s new book describes a scientific paradigm for social change which will appeal to veteran activists and armchair intellectuals alike.

by Reed Ingalls

Imagine you, dear reader, are an activist out on the street protesting against the activities of some nefarious corporation, police department, government office or what have you. Or maybe you don’t need to imagine.

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🗞️ Thank you for the continued support! We are currently in the process of fundraising for a printed issue of Works in Progress — to be part of this effort please consider making a one time, monthly or yearly donation here.

by Whitney Bowerman

Following the recent news of plans of closure for The Jungle, a look back at its history and what steps can be taken for a proper transition for those most affected.

In early May, the City of Olympia announced it would begin a regional effort to close The Jungle encampment, in coordination with the City of Lacey and Thurston County. A regional encampment transition planning team has been assembled, including representatives from the City of Olympia, the City of Lacey, Thurston County, Interfaith Works, Family Support Center, Olympic Health & Recovery Services, and Intercity Transit. The closure is expected to take 18 months to 2 years or more.

For a moment, this seemed like it might be different — not a sweep, not a clearing, but a genuine attempt to do the right thing.

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Shelton Wins Its Fight For Pride

by Matt Hilton

Shelton Pride Proclamation approved due to community turnout and reconsideration by Shelton City Council.

A Pride Month proclamation in Shelton initially failed on a tied 3-3 vote before being approved. A large community turnout pushed City Council to reconsider. More than 180 community members showed up to the revote, with 56 people giving public comment primarily in support. The final vote passed 5-2.

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End US Aggression Against Cuba!

by Peter Bohmer

The Trump administration is committed to overthrowing the Cuban government and its political economic structure. What can be done to stop it?

On May 1, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing additional sanctions on Cuba. Trump said, “We will be taking it [Cuba] over almost immediately.” These continued threats follow the Trump administration’s April 14 directive to the Pentagon to “ramp up preparations for possible military action against Cuba.” In response to Trump’s threats to take over the country, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said, “No aggressor, no matter how powerful, will find surrender in Cuba, … he will find a people determined to defend sovereignty and independence in every inch of our country.”

Trump told reporters that “we may stop by Cuba after we’ve finished with this” (referring to war against Iran). This followed a January 29 Executive Order calling Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat to US national security.” Trump announced a blockade of oil to Cuba and stiff tariffs for any country delivering oil. The two main suppliers had been Mexico and Venezuela. They and other nations have stopped shipping oil to Cuba except one big shipment by Russia in late March.

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Sharpening Conjunctures

Taking a technical term and turning it into a multi tool for everyday carry.

by Carl Eugene Stroud

It doesn’t matter what the goal is, there’s not much point in only anticipating ideal scenarios. This is why the concept of “conjuncture” is helpful, for strategizing and getting a lay of the land. Analyzing the conjuncture is about starting from the here and now because it’s important to look at things in context, paying attention to the situation at hand, accounting for the when and the where. But it’s also true that, as a term, conjuncture needs to be demystified to make it a tool that more people feel comfortable picking up and using.

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In early May, the City of Olympia announced it would begin a regional effort to close The Jungle encampment, in coordination with the City of Lacey and Thurston County. A regional encampment transition planning team has been assembled, including representatives from the City of Olympia, the City of Lacey, Thurston County, Interfaith Works, Family Support Center, Olympic Health & Recovery Services, and Intercity Transit. The closure is expected to take 18 months to 2 years or more.

For a moment, this seemed like it might be different — not a sweep, not a clearing, but a genuine attempt to do the right thing.

And then the City of Olympia announced the By Names List. It would open May 18 and close May 28. Ten days to collect the names of every single person living at The Jungle. After the list closes, no one can be added. Those on the list must check in with the City weekly and cannot leave the camp for any reason, or they lose their place. This compressed timeline was driven in part by pressure from the Washington State Department of Commerce, which controls the Encampment Resolution Program (ERP) funding the City needs to make the closure work.

The gap between the stated intention — a thoughtful, compassionate regional closure — and the reality of a 10-day list with weekly check-in requirements is significant.

As of May 28 approximately 250 people had signed up on the By Names List. Some outreach workers speculate there may be 300 to 350 people who live part or full time in The Jungle.

What The Jungle Is

The Jungle covers roughly 20 acres between Martin Way and Pacific Avenue in Olympia, visible to every driver passing by on I-5. What was once a densely wooded area is now a landscape of blue tarps, tents, makeshift structures, and the accumulated debris of years of human habitation without the necessary infrastructure or services.

The encampment grew organically, beginning around 2007 when it was barely noticeable under the thick tree cover. Prior to 2010 the site was so densely wooded that a person could easily get lost wandering the trails that wound through it. A handful of campsites existed in those early years — quiet, largely invisible to the outside world. Over time, through a combination of Olympia’s broader homelessness crisis, the displacement of residents from other encampments, and the simple reality that The Jungle became known as a place where people would be left alone, the population grew.

In 2021, the City of Olympia made a notable decision: rather than simply clearing the camp, it purchased two of the parcels comprising The Jungle, totaling 6.75 acres, for $237,000, effectively acknowledging the encampment’s existence and choosing to manage it rather than repurpose it. The remaining parcels are privately owned. The City has the option to purchase them at a current market value of $3 million (subject to appraisal), but has not yet exercised it. That option expires at the end of June 2026. According to the June 2, 2026 consent calendar, the City Council is expected to take this opportunity to purchase for three more years at a cost of $80,000 a year.

The majority of people living in The Jungle are from Olympia, Lacey, Tumwater, and other parts of Thurston County. They are, by and large, local people who have ended up in the most extreme expression of homelessness our region has to offer.

How It Got This Big

The Jungle did not grow in a vacuum. Its expansion is directly tied to the pattern of encampment clearings that has characterized Olympia’s homelessness response for the past decade.

Olympia has closed more than 14 encampments in recent years under the Encampment Resolution Program. Each time a camp is cleared, residents are theoretically connected with housing and services. In practice, a significant number end up somewhere else — and for many, that somewhere has been The Jungle.

The most recent example is the Percival Creek Canyon encampment, whose 16-month closure was completed in October as part of the City’s “One Community” plan. Many of the Canyon’s residents successfully transitioned into housing ahead of the closure. But at the final clearing, approximately 25 individuals were left with nowhere to go, and at least some ended up at The Jungle. In April, WSDOT cleared another section of Percival Creek, displacing 16 more people, including a family with four children under the age of 13. Again, with nowhere to go.

This pattern — clearing one camp and watching its displaced residents appear at another — is one of the most consistent yet least discussed themes in Thurston County’s homelessness history. It is the humanitarian equivalent of whack-a-mole. People are still unhoused. They are simply unhoused somewhere less visible, at least until The Jungle became so visible that it could no longer be ignored.

Who Lives There and Why

From the outside, The Jungle is often characterized purely by its problems - and those problems are very real. Violent assaults, sexual assaults, and murders have occurred there on multiple occasions. The violence is a genuine safety crisis for the people who live there, who are overwhelmingly the primary victims of it.

But The Jungle is also a community — complex, imperfect, and real. Many residents take pride in their space and seek connection with the broader community when given the opportunity.

Like many in the unhoused community, Jungle residents live with the constant weight of stigma — the perception that they are dangerous, lazy, or responsible for their own circumstances. Research consistently shows that this stigma around homelessness is not only painful but also functionally damaging: it reduces motivation to seek housing, reduces trust in services, and makes the idea of re-entering mainstream society feel increasingly impossible. Some residents have lived at The Jungle for years and rarely leave its borders — not because they are unwilling to engage with the world, but because the world has made them feel deeply unwelcome.

The requirement by the City of Olympia that By Names List members check in weekly and not leave camp, or lose their housing plan, reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of how homelessness actually works. People move. People disappear for thirty days because they caught a warrant violation and the Department of Corrections holds you for exactly that long. People leave to visit family, seek medical care, or simply survive. A housing process that penalizes the normal rhythms of unsheltered life is a process designed around administrative convenience, not around the people it is supposed to serve.

The Department of Commerce’s Role

The City of Olympia did not arrive at a 10-day By Names List window on its own. The Washington State Department of Commerce, which administers the Encampment Resolution Program and controls the funding the City needs to close The Jungle, exerted significant pressure on the City that no new people be allowed to enter the encampment. Faced with that pressure and dependent on ERP funding to house the residents of The Jungle, the City felt it had little choice but to restrict encampment entry. The 10-day list was the result.

The concern driving Commerce’s pressure is the so-called magnet effect — the fear that allowing new entries or keeping the list open will draw more people to The Jungle seeking housing. It is a politically understandable concern. It is not, however, supported by research. What research consistently shows is that encampments grow when other encampments are cleared with nowhere for people to go — which is, again, exactly what has been happening in Thurston County for over a decade.

More significantly, Commerce’s administrative approach appears to conflict directly with the legislative proviso that created and funds the ERP program. The proviso language — the actual law passed by the Washington State Legislature — requires that housing be identified for everyone living on a site and offered to them before an encampment is cleared. It further specifies that housing must be a “meaningful improvement over the individual’s current living situation” and “well-matched to an individual’s assessed needs.”

A By Names List closed 10 days after it opens — months or years before the actual camp closure — cannot fulfill those requirements for people who arrive at The Jungle after May 28. The Legislature said house everyone. Commerce’s administrative pressure has produced a list that covers only those present and available during a narrow 10-day window who additionally manage to check in every single week for the next 18+ months without leaving camp. Those are not the same thing.

This gap between what the Legislature intended and what Commerce is implementing is not a minor procedural disagreement. It is a question of whether the most vulnerable residents of The Jungle will have individualized housing plans when the tents come down, or whether they will be the next generation of people who fall through the cracks once again.

What Closure Will Actually Require

The City of Olympia and its regional partners have stated a commitment to closing The Jungle safely and compassionately. That language is right. The question is whether the systems and resources exist to back it up.

At a January City Council meeting, speaker after speaker urged that encampment residents be meaningfully involved in the planning. “The residents of The Jungle know what they need,” said one advocate. “If Olympia and Lacey want to help, please talk directly with them, not around them.” Council Member Kelly Green voiced support for this principle, acknowledging that any durable solution must involve the people actually living at the site.

In the May 19 City Council meeting, Mayor Dontae Payne acknowledged feeling caught between residents and advocates who wanted everyone to receive appropriate services and community members who wanted The Jungle gone yesterday. That is an honest and difficult position to be in. But the answer to that tension cannot be a compressed, inadequate process that predictably produces the same outcomes as every prior clearing.

Getting people housed is hard. Keeping people housed is harder. The Jungle’s population includes a high concentration of people with serious mental illness, substance use disorders, trauma histories, and years or decades of unsheltered homelessness. These are not people who just need an apartment key. They need sustained, high-quality wraparound support: ongoing case management, mental health care, addiction treatment, peer support, and genuine community connection. Services that meet them where they are, not where we would like them to be.

Thurston County’s homeless services system has significant gaps in its ability to provide that sustained support. Too many people are connected with housing and then left to navigate a complex system largely alone. When placements — and they do fail, regularly — there is often no safety net. And when that happens, where do people go? They go somewhere. They have always gone somewhere. Often, that somewhere has been The Jungle. What happens when The Jungle no longer remains?

The Question Left Unanswered

The closure of The Jungle is the right thing to do. The site is unsafe. It lacks the infrastructure to support human life with any dignity. Its residents deserve better.

But closing The Jungle without honestly examining why people end up there — and why they bounce back out of housing — will not solve homelessness in Thurston County. It will produce a headline and, eventually, a new encampment somewhere less visible.

Will the City and its partners look honestly at the gaps in the current system? Will they ask why people cycle back to the streets and fund real answers to those questions? Will they involve Jungle residents as genuine partners? Will they allocate sustained resources — not just for the closure, but for the years of support that successful housing retention requires? And will the Department of Commerce examine whether its own administrative rules are actually consistent with the legislative mandate that created the ERP? Will the goal of genuinely housing everyone at The Jungle, not just those who were available during a 10-day window in May 2026 be actualized?

These are not hostile questions. They are the necessary ones. The measure of success will not be the day the last tent comes down. It will be where the people who lived in those tents are sleeping five years from now.

The Jungle has existed for nearly two decades. Closing it is the beginning of the work — not the end of it.

On May 1, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order authorizing additional sanctions on Cuba. Trump said, “We will be taking it [Cuba] over almost immediately.” These continued threats follow the Trump administration’s April 14 directive to the Pentagon to “ramp up preparations for possible military action against Cuba.” In response to Trump’s threats to take over the country, Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel said, “No aggressor, no matter how powerful, will find surrender in Cuba, … he will find a people determined to defend sovereignty and independence in every inch of our country.”

Trump told reporters that “we may stop by Cuba after we’ve finished with this” (referring to war against Iran). This followed a January 29 Executive Order calling Cuba “an unusual and extraordinary threat to US national security.” Trump announced a blockade of oil to Cuba and stiff tariffs for any country delivering oil. The two main suppliers had been Mexico and Venezuela. They and other nations have stopped shipping oil to Cuba except one big shipment by Russia in late March.

Even more recently, the U.S. has been flying military jets over Cuba, with continued CIA involvement. This harkens back to when the CIA orchestrated the Bay of Pigs invasion, a failed coup in 1961 to overthrow the Cuban Government led by Fidel Castro. The CIA attempted, unsuccessfully, to assassinate Castro over a hundred times. Additionally, they have long sponsored Cuban exiles to commit acts of terror against a sovereign state.

To further escalate matters, on May 21, the U.S. (In)Justice Department issued an arrest warrant for the arrest of 95-year-old Raul Castro. President of Cuba from 2008-2018, Raul was a commander in the Cuban revolution with his brother Fidel, and head of the Cuban military for 50 years. As a leader of the Communist Party, Raul has been charged with fabricated and unjust claims. This warrant is a potential pretext for a special forces operation in Cuba that would likely include an abduction or killing of Castro.

The U.S., while threatening Cuba with an invasion, targeted assassinations, and/or bombing, is already conducting an act of war by this blockade. This represents both a continuation of the 66-year-old U.S. embargo of Cuba, and a further tightening and escalation. There is an increased U.S. military presence in the Caribbean, including the aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Nimitz, and the U.S. continues to occupy a naval base at Guantanamo on Cuban soil.

The lack of Cuban access to oil is causing increased blackouts, often as long as 20 hours a day. Growing food and water shortages accompany worsening conditions in the healthcare system. The Trump administration’s objective is to cause enough hardship and suffering for the Cuban people that they revolt against their government and cause its collapse. It is an inhumane, illegal, and immoral strategy. It is also unlikely to succeed as the Cuban state retains legitimacy, especially against the U.S. as a rallying cry. Likewise, there is limited opposition within the Cuban military and the Communist Party against the leadership. Yet a military attack by the U.S. continues to be a serious possibility. Let us not let it happen!

Why?

The Cuban Revolution led by Fidel overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista on January 1, 1959. In the spring of 1960, President Eisenhower signed an order calling for the overthrow of the Cuban government which has been the U.S. policy for most of the last 66 years.

From the 1960’s through the 1980’s, Cuba’s economic system was “the threat of a good example”, to the U.S. ruling class. The threat of a good example implied that Cuba, by meeting the needs of its people, would inspire anti-capitalist revolutions across the Global South. Cuba made major land reforms that nationalized U.S. owned property such as the sugar mills, mines, and hotels. Fidel Castro and the Cuban Revolution were popular throughout the Americas for standing up to the U.S., for their universal health and educational system, their internationalism, and for their support of revolutionary movements.

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-1991, Cuba has had serious economic problems. A major cause has been their inability to export sufficiently to cover their import needs. Beginning in the 1990s, tourism became a major earner of foreign exchange, but tourism declined substantially during the COVID pandemic and has not recovered. Cuba has overinvested in hotels. Venezuela, after Hugo Chavez’s presidential victory in 1998, exchanged oil for Cuban doctors, medicine and advisers in agriculture and security. This partially replaced Soviet support.

Under President Obama, there was a loosening of the embargo, including restoring diplomatic relations and permitting some tourism, trade, and remittances. Trump, in his first term, reversed this. He attempted to weaken Cuba’s economy by declaring it a country supporting terrorism which further restricted Cuba’s access to credit and global finance. Economic hardship has led many Cubans to emigrate. Cuba’s population currently stands at 10.9 million people. This represents a decline of 1.5 million people in the last six years. Infant mortality more than doubled between 2018 and 2025.

The U.S. embargo/sanctions have been the major cause of Cuba’s major economic problems although not the only one. Cuba has not developed an economy where the standard of living increases steadily, nor is there sufficient food production. Its development of organic agriculture beginning in the special period in the early 1990’s is impressive but has not ended Cuba’s reliance on food imports. In most sectors, productivity growth has been slow. Top-down central planning is a problem. Increasing reliance on private markets has not helped. More worker control of enterprises would help as would participatory economic planning.

Although Cuba no longer poses the threat of a good example, its “crime” continues to be its independence from the U.S. empire; its refusal to accept U.S. determination of its economy and politics. U.S. domination of Latin America has shaped much of U.S. policy beginning with the 1824 Monroe doctrine. Trump’s National Security Strategy document of December 2025 makes this explicit. One of the Trump administration’s motives in invading Venezuela on January 3, 2026, was as a step towards the attack on Cuba and to cut off Cuba’s Venezuelan oil supply.

Cuba Today: Crisis and Support

A major problem for Cuba is earning enough foreign exchange to purchase oil as it only produces one third of their energy needs. Gasoline is selling at $40 a gallon. Cuba is responding by major increases in renewable energy, receiving higher numbers of solar panels and batteries from China. Solar energy now produces one fourth of Cuba’s energy needs and is growing but is not a short-term solution.

In Cuba’s struggle against the U.S., Cuba has support from most governments around the world and their people. The last UN vote saw 165 countries cast their votes opposing the U.S. embargo of Cuba. Only seven countries voted in favor of the embargo. Mexico has recently sent over 800 tons of aid, mainly food and medical equipment. This support is important but it is neither sufficient to significantly reduce the economic hardships facing the Cuban people nor stop the U.S. commitment to overthrow the Cuban government.

Even though approval ratings for the Cuban Communist Party and its leadership have declined, especially among younger people, there is little support for a U.S. led coup d’état and/or for a government led by right wing Cuban exiles. Unlike Venezuela, there are not leaders in the Communist Party or in the Cuban military who are likely to support an overthrow of the current leadership and structure. The U.S. may kidnap or assassinate Cuban leaders (a war crime) but that is unlikely to lead to a U.S. puppet regime. A U.S. invasion and bombing would create further economic misery and deaths, but would be met by mass resistance from the military and population. The Trump administration’s inability to secure a military victory in Iran could make them reluctant to directly attack Cuba, although threats continue daily.

During the Spanish Civil War in the 1930’s, brigades from over 50 countries went to support the Spanish Republic and the Spanish left against fascism. In the U.S., almost 3000 joined the Abraham Lincoln brigade. They didn’t stop Franco’s victory in Spain but raised global awareness of fascism’s threat to the world. Such solidarity is needed again for Cuba.

Solidarity with Cuba means with their government and people and organizations. We should not only oppose U.S. aggression against Cuba and the Cuban people, but critically support the Cuban government led by the Cuban Communist Party. Their history both domestically and internationally merits solidarity. There continues to be a commitment to provide a social safety net to the entire population despite the scarcity of goods and energy.

What Can We Do?

As mentioned, Cuba was dealing with an economic crisis even before the tightening of the embargo in January. Threatening high tariffs on countries selling oil to Cuba is new. The ongoing embargo of Cuba for 66 years has been a bipartisan strategy. An important demand that is necessary for the recuperation of the Cuban Economy is to end all aspects of the U.S. sanctions/embargo/blockade —no restrictions on trade, on credit and financial flows, on tourism, and for diplomatic relations with Cuba (i.e. respect for Cuban sovereignty). Also, no sanctions on other nations for normal relations with Cuba!

Like the majority opposition here to the U.S.-Israeli War against Iran, our task is to turn passive opposition against war with Cuba into active opposition. A poll by YouGov, released May 6, found 64 percent of Americans oppose the US going to war against Cuba, while 15 percent support it and 21 percent are unsure.

Locally and nationally, we need a larger more powerful anti-war movement that opposes U.S. attacks on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific Ocean, on Iran, on Cuba, on Venezuela and other nations. One path forward could be to build on the existing infrastructure of the ongoing Palestine solidarity movement in the U.S. While continuing to oppose all aid to Israel and solidarity with Palestine, it could become a broader anti-war movement. This is necessary although not yet emerging on and off college campuses. Another possibility would be to build a mass organization that is anti-war and fights for equity and justice at home and abroad.

It is urgent that we raise the demand of no attack on Cuba and an end to the embargo in our communities, families, workplaces, unions, churches, schools and organizations, political parties and activism. This can include conversations, resolutions, lobbying Congress and making Cuban solidarity as part of forums, rallies, demonstrations, direct action, etc. It means connecting opposition to the war on Cuba to issues such as immigrant and economic justice in the U.S.

Stopping U.S. attacks on Cuba is difficult but possible. Opposition by other countries and global solidarity is necessary. Let us also build a strong enough opposition in the U.S. that those in power — whether Democrat or Republican — will understand it is in their interest to accept Cuban sovereignty and end all aspects of the attacks on Cuba.

Peter Bohmer has studied the Cuban revolution and been in solidarity with Cuba since the late 1960s. He has visited the island on five occasions including in 2001 when he was a visiting faculty at the University of Havana. He has taught about Cuba at The Evergreen State College and took students from The Evergreen State College to Cuba for eight weeks in 2004.

We exist in an era where the state is leveraging surveillance and technology to engage in an intensifying campaign against activists, protestors, and any others who oppose them. Last September, the office of the President signed an executive order declaring “Antifa” a terrorist organization. The fact that Antifa it not an actually existing organization has not stopped White House officials from using the refrain over the past few months. Several activists across different states are currently facing federal charges with the common theme of “conspiracy” or “terrorism” charges being put forth against the defendants. The stakes for standing up for change are higher than ever and the stakes for remaining silent are immense. With cloud and communication services being deeply integrated into the daily lives of most people who do not think twice about using them. Those fighting for change for the better must utilize a higher standard of security than they would otherwise, but is this enough?

Organizers can take steps to be safer. One option is to move away from services that actively surveil their users, such as Google, and move towards encrypted services, such as Signal or Proton Mail, which are allegedly more secure. Google has a long track record of violating the privacy of its users. For one, Google can automatically scan all Gmail and Drive content to feed into their AI models, although users who find the setting can manually opt out. Another piece of evidence includes a recent $68 million dollar settlement. That figure was reached after it was revealed that Google Assistant had been recording conversations of its users without users knowledge or consent.

Texts sent over standard services are highly susceptible to subpoenas from the state. Service providers can make surveillance simple for the authorities by tracing messages back to the person who owns the cellphone. Organizers often treat encrypted messaging services as though they were talismans of protection whose very presence ensures absolute safety. However, in the recent “Stop Cop City” trial, a defendant who provided a Proton mail account for their “Defend Atlanta Forest” contact information, still saw their identity unmasked. Does this mean that the service is inherently flawed? Do we need to stop working digitally entirely and instead pass paper notes written in lemon juice like Cold War spies?

The way forward is neither through absolute reliance on “privacy oriented tech services” nor complete abandonment of them. Instead, we must critically examine how we make use of these systems while recognizing their shortcomings. Even a note written in code, in lemon juice, on flash paper can be incriminating, if it is found by the wrong person.

In the aforementioned Stop Cop City case, the issue was not that the defendant’s Proton Mail account was hacked or that Proton’s administrators rolled over to requests and served their user up on a silver platter. Instead, this person was identified through the credit card they used to pay for their premium account subscription. Proton AG, the Swiss Company behind Proton Mail, was required by Swiss law to hand this information over to the Swiss state and the US government leveraged that compulsion to their advantage. There are many different payment options that could have averted this crisis: cryptocurrency, gift cards purchased with cash, sending cash to Proton directly (they allow this!) or by not signing up for a premium account in the first place! In this case, the encrypted service did not fail, the user’s method of engaging with the service did.

Activists who engage with any supposedly “secure” or “private” tech service need to critically evaluate the context in which they use it. The concept of Threat Analysis, used frequently in the cybersecurity world, can come in handy. One lists the possible negative outcomes, then starts working on imagining how these might be achieved by bad actors (called “threat vectors”), then lists the possible ways that one can mitigate these (”threat mitigations”), before finally deciding whether the risks outweighs the benefits of engaging with the service.

Let’s use activists who use encrypted messaging services to organize as an example. A potentially negative outcome includes messages falling into the hands of the state and subsequently used to prosecute said activist. Some possible threat vectors include, among other things, the phone itself being confiscated by law enforcement, the account being unlocked via biometrics without user consent (which is legal!), storage of app metadata (such as text in a notification) outside the app and accessed later, or the use of malware to circumvent app security. Threat mitigations for the aforementioned vectors might look something like this: not having the phone on one’s person when engaging in activism, avoiding biometric locks (such as FaceID) in favor of secure unique passwords, ensuring app settings are in line with best privacy practices, and regularly performing security updates and rebooting phones. The user can then decide how viable each of these mitigations are and whether they can be reliably implemented. Not all mitigations are practical for all use cases, and that is a perfectly acceptable place to land.

Every activist who utilizes technology as a tool has a responsibility to conduct a proper threat analysis before employing it in their own organizing practices. We cannot treat brands that promise privacy as a panacea on its own. Essentially, organizers should use the master’s tools to tear down the master’s house. But we should not do so overconfidently or without doing our due diligence.

The Thurston County Board of County Commissioners (the Board) recently postponed its vote for a second time on a proposal that would remove the Board from the county’s land-use appeals process. The proposal by Board Chair Tye Menser has faced staunch opposition from environmental groups and the county’s own advisory committee.

In July 2025, the Thurston County Planning Commission — a 10-person advisory committee appointed by the Board — voted 10-0 against the proposal after hearing testimony from conservation groups and members of the public overwhelmingly opposed to it. Opponents argue it would remove residents’ only practical avenue to appeal erroneous land use decisions by the county.

The only person to submit comments in support was Heather Burgess, a land-use attorney whose clients include mine owners and developers of large housing projects.

Commissioner Tye Menser — who said when he first ran for county commissioner that he sought the office to “promote fairness and justice for all our citizens” — remains steadfast in his support for the proposal, defending it in a May 31 candidate interview with Olympia Indivisible.

At issue is whether residents should continue to have access to an elected appeal body when challenging the county’s most consequential land-use decisions.

Under the current system, residents can appeal land-use decisions to the Board — for example, decisions allowing expansion of a gravel mine or conversion of forestland to a subdivision. Under Menser’s proposal, residents would instead have to file their appeals directly in superior court. Opponents say the combination of legal complexity, high costs, and judicial deference in superior court makes successful appeals far less likely.

“In Thurston County, one of the most important differences between an appeal to the Board and an appeal to Superior Court is the standard of review,” said Bryan Telegin, a land use attorney who recently helped residents in an appeal before the Board. “In court, the judge must give substantial deference to the hearing examiner’s decision. By contrast, the Board is not required to give deference to the hearing examiner’s decision. That makes the Board appeal process a much more meaningful opportunity for residents to obtain review of a land-use decision.”

Thurston County resident Lynn Fitz-Hugh, who is currently involved in an appeal to the Board, said, “The practical effect of this proposal is that many citizens will lose access to any meaningful appeal process. An appeal to superior court often requires legal representation and can cost tens of thousands of dollars. An appeal to the Board is far less expensive and can be pursued by residents without hiring an attorney. If appeals go directly to court, many communities facing controversial projects will have no realistic way to challenge a decision, regardless of its merits.”

At a May 19th Board work session, Menser described the current system as one in which hearing examiners apply code, commissioners apply politics, and judges again apply code. He argued that removing the Board from the appeals process would create a fairer system.

“The idea that hearing examiners, staff, and judges simply apply the code while commissioners apply politics is inaccurate,” said Brett Clubbe, a Thurston County resident who tried unsuccessfully to stop a hearing examiner from approving a septic system near his drinking-water well. “Every level of the system involves people making decisions based on their own personal biases. The difference is that county commissioners are directly accountable to the public. When land use decisions shape a community for generations, the people making those decisions should remain accountable to the public.”

The future of Menser’s proposal is uncertain. During the Board’s May 19 work session, Commissioner Emily Clouse spoke at length about her opposition to the proposal. During the Board’s business meeting later that day, Commissioner Carolina Mejia moved to postpone a vote. Commissioner Wayne Fournier supported the delay, stating that it would give the Board’s newest member, Rachel Grant, an opportunity to gain additional experience with the county’s land-use appeals process.

The motion to delay a vote passed 4-0, with Menser abstaining. Menser said he still supports the proposal. But he said he would prefer to move forward only if at least four commissioners vote in favor, because the proposal would be a significant change to the county’s land-use appeals process.

At least one member of the Planning Commission was disappointed the Board did not outright reject the proposal. At the May 20 meeting of the Planning Commission, commissioner Barry Halvorson said, “Why is your Planning Commission here making a recommendation? It’s 10 to zero and you’re not listening to us.”

A Pride Month proclamation in Shelton initially failed on a tied 3-3 vote before being approved. A large community turnout pushed City Council to reconsider. More than 180 community members showed up to the revote, with 56 people giving public comment primarily in support. The final vote passed 5-2.

History of Pride Proclamations in Shelton

Shelton’s first Pride Month proclamation was in June 2022. There was some public resistance to June 2023’s proclamation, but the 2024 and 2025 proclamations passed without controversy. This year’s proclamation drew a lot more public attention and was the most contested to date.

In April 2026, organizers for the Pride Month proclamation learned that Mayor Sharon Schirman and other council members may vote against the proclamation. This divided City Council meant organizers needed to seek out community sponsors for the proclamation ahead of the vote, ultimately securing 18 in support.

Initial Vote

During a May 12 in a study session, the City Council considered two proclamations, a celebration of the 250th Independence Day and a Pride Proclamation. The first passed without discussion. In discussion for the Pride Month proclamation, Mayor Schirman feared division saying, “Shelton is a small, close-knit community and I do not want proclamations to become a source of division among my neighbors” and Council Member George Blush agreed. Council Member Miguel Gutierrez pointed out the hypocrisy of both their statements.

Deputy Mayor Lyndsey Sapp likened the proclamation to promoting specific religions and lifestyle choices. Council Member Tom Gilmore shared how he wants everybody to feel safe in Shelton and shared this community has been marginalized recently. Council Member Eric Onisko spoke of the evolution of civil rights and that “people have a right to love who we love.”

Mayor Schirman questioned what the proclamation has to do with government. And Gutierrez responded, “It has everything to do with government, standing up for people’s equality.” The motion died in a 3-3 tie with Gutierrez, Onisko, and Gilmore in favor.

In response, Gutierrez shared “Half of us did not want to acknowledge the equality of LGBTQ+ people in this community… and I think that is very disturbing”. Blush responded by stating he had people contact him and say “This is something we don’t want in our community. That’s who we’re listening to,” and then downplayed the violence and threats the LGBTQ+ community.

Community Response

Gutierrez did not give up on this initiative. He let the organizers know he would call for a revote due to absence of council Member Melissa Stearns at the last meeting. The community came together with over 180 people attending the May 19 City Council meeting. Due to 56 people having signed up for public comment, Mayor Schirman suggested reduction in speaking time from 3 minutes to 2 minutes. The time reduction passed with Onisko, Gilmore, and Gutierrez opposed.

The City Council Chambers could not hold everyone who showed up, resulting in seats and a TV live-streaming the meeting being added outside the chamber. A large percentage of those who signed up for public comment made statements in favor of passing the proclamation, sharing many personal and heartfelt stories of what this proclamation means to them. To many, this proclamation meant safely being part of the community and being accepted for who they are.

Revote

After public comments the meeting continued, later unanimously passing a National Public Works Week proclamation. After it was approved Gutierrez added “Thank you to our public works employees for their hard work. If only we could do that for our LGBTQ+ community”.

Near the end of the meeting Gutierrez called for a revote for the Pride Month proclamation and shared “supporting equal rights for all sends a powerful message that Mason County is a welcoming place where everyone can thrive” and the proclamation has many safety and economic benefits for the community. Gilmore apologized for the “discrimination and violence [people experienced] and continue to experience … and I’m sorry you had to relive it here in front of us today”. Onisko shared how he is supporting this proclamation for his family and neighbors, stopping to admonish crowd member Jason Sapp, Deputy Mayor Lyndsey Sapp’s husband, who was shaking his head at him.

Blush had nothing to add to the discussion, and Sapp stood by her previous words. Mayor Schirman shared she has been name-called and threatened in the last week due to her vote and that in public comments there were “stories that I did not need to know.” She continued “It is not about me, it is about our community… If this makes our community feel better, I will not stop it.”

The motion passed 5-2 with Blush and Sapp voting nay. There was confusion initially whether it had passed as many in the crowd thought Stearns had voted nay and Schirman’s “pass” vote could be construed as an abstain. City Manager, Mark Ziegler, cleared up the confusion and the majority of the crowd cheered the passage.

Proclamation Reading

The vote was won, but the reasons supporters fought for the proclamation are not gone. In the week following the vote, members of the LGBTQ+ community shared there was an increase in hostility and threats online. These reactions show the reason why Pride Month recognition is important: visibility and support are meaningful when a community feels targeted and unwelcome.

On June 2, the Pride Month proclamation was read by Gutierrez to another large turnout of the community. Far fewer people had public comment, with some in favor and some opposed to the proclamation. Mayor Schirman and Deputy Mayor Sapp were not present for this meeting. After the proclamation was read, applause lasted roughly 15 seconds, reflecting the crowd’s relief and celebration after months of work.

Shelton Pride Events

The passage of the proclamation is welcome as Shelton will host many Pride Month events throughout June culminating in “Pride at the Park” June 26 5-8 p.m. at Kneeland Park in Shelton.

To better understand the developing story at Timberland Regional Library (TRL), Works in Progress looks back to 2018, when the TRL administration released its Capital Facilities Proposal (CFP), a long-term strategic plan that addressed funding, service models, and staffing.

The CFP included major staffing reductions and the closure of a third of the system’s branches. This was met with strong community pushback across all five counties TRL serves, and the Board of Trustees ultimately voted to dissolve the proposal. Today, some library staff and former trustee Brenda Hirschi question whether the administration’s response to the 2026 budget shortfall of $3.8 million is a way to implement the scrapped 2018 proposal.

Many of the cost-cutting proposals to address the shortfall are similar to those described in the CFP. For example, the CFP is the first place TRL formally proposed the Expanded Access Hours (EAH) model (then referred to as “Open+”), according to TRL Public Information Officer Chris Chrzan. In the EAH model, a library building is unstaffed and patrons enter using an access card. In 2018 and now in 2026, the administration has proposed replacing staffed library hours with EAH to reduce costs.

TRL administrators have also pointed to the connections between the CFP and the 2026 shortfall. In a Microsoft Teams conversation on Feb. 9, 2026, obtained through an open records request and publicly shared by a Reddit user, Operations Director Brenda Lane and Finance Administrator Paige Preston discussed the CFP. Preston wrote (presumably referring to the Board of Trustees), “I get it though, they’re trying to turn this whole thing into another CFP debacle.” Lane responded, “They certainly are. And if we are not smart about it, it will go the same way.”

For these reasons, the CFP warrants a closer look. Here, Works in Progress analyzes the document and explores what the public can learn from it.

Breaking Down the CFP

The CFP is a 98-page document with eight sections. The information falls into three main categories: data about TRL, research about different library models, and proposals for changes within the system.

Proposals for system changes focused on shifting library and staffing models. Most of the alternative library models in the CFP require fewer staff. For example, the proposal highlighted the “LibraryExpress,” a “coffee-stand style service point” where patrons could pick up and return books and park to use free WiFi. The stand, staffed by one or two library assistants, would not have its own book collection; patrons could browse books recently returned to the stand.

Under the CFP’s proposed staffing plan, library assistants would “provide the backbone of coverage in all library models,” while librarians, who are paid more because they are required to have a Master of Library and Information Sciences degree, would shift to serving multiple branches within a geographic area instead of single branch.

The proposal put forward two new staffing metrics: one librarian FTE (i.e., full-time hours, which could mean two half-time librarians, etc.) per population of 10,000 and two staff (including librarians and library assistants) on the floor per 20 borrowers per hour. For rural branches that often have fewer than 20 borrowers per hour, this metric would mean staffing the library with only one librarian at a time instead of two, which was not TRL policy at the time the proposal was released.

The CFP also included changes to the branches. Out of 27 branches, the CFP would have closed and vacated 11 branches and reduced staffed hours at six others. Six library “hubs” in high population areas would absorb some staff, materials, and patrons from the closed branches.

In Grays Harbor County, for example, the CFP would have closed four out of eight TRL branches: Amanda Park, Hoquiam, Montesano, and Oakville. The staff from these branches would be reassigned to mobile services at the Aberdeen or Elma branches. Meanwhile, the proposal would have switched the Westport and McCleary branches to EAH and reduced staffed hours there.

Implied but not fully stated in the CFP is that staff would be laid off under these proposals. The proposal stated that overall goals included reducing staffing costs, and the reorganization of branches and shifts to staffing models aimed to reduce the number of staff needed to run the library system. The CFP did not, however, provide specific numbers for how many staff would have been laid off.

Lessons from the CFP

TRL has long presented models like EAH as ways to save money and reach more patrons. But the fallout from the CFP and the response to the 2026 budget shortfall show that 1) neither of these presumed outcomes are necessarily true, and 2) these models are being used to replace staffed library buildings — it’s not the models themselves but their implementation that poses a threat to library access.

Installing systems for EAH, which require things like extensive security camera networks and new locks and key card readers, is expensive. In Dec. 2018, The Daily World obtained documents that showed the CFP would have introduced new costs roughly equal to the money that would have been saved through staffing and branch reductions.

If used as additions to staffed library buildings, services like book lockers, bookmobiles, and EAH could truly expand library services and “reach more people,” as the CFP’s introduction claims. But the 16 pages of the CFP that proposed vacating and consolidating library branches led to deep community mistrust of models like EAH. Even though the proposal was scrapped, since 2018, most branches that provide EAH have also seen reductions in open, staffed hours.

In the Nov. 28, 2018 board meeting where the trustees voted down the CFP, they also voted to authorize Open+ (now called EAH) for a one-year testing period at the Winlock and McCleary branches. However, when one trustee later proposed steps towards implementing LibraryExpress and more mobile library services, other Trustees pushed back, seeing this as tantamount to approving much of proposal that had just been voted down. In the years since this meeting, TRL has expanded the EA program to twelve total branches and plans to continue. EA hours didn’t continue at the Winlock branch due to lack of public interest in the plan, according to Chrzan.

Former TRL trustee Nicolette Oliver recently addressed the use of EAH in the March 25, 2026 board meeting. “It hurts my heart as someone who voted for Expanded Access Hours,” she said. She described that EAH was supposed to be an addition to regular staffed hours that would allow people like working parents to better utilize library services, not a replacement for library staff. “I did not vote for Expanded Access in the way it is today,” she said.

The use of EAH to replace staffed hours has increased in response to the budget shortfall. As of May 19, 13 of TRL’s 29 branches have reduced their open staffed hours; four of those branches saw reductions of 10-16 hours per week.

As the fight to protect libraries achieves major victories like pausing most of the involuntary layoffs, it is crucial to continue monitoring the strategies the TRL administration uses to push policies through. With each library’s loss of staffed hours comes a loss in the life changing impacts library services make for patrons, but the story doesn’t end there. As community push back against the CFP shows, grassroots action strongly shapes the present and future of our libraries.

Caelen McQuilkin is a reporter from the high desert of eastern California who has loved the green of Olympia since moving here in August. They love reporting as a way to build connections while reflecting a place’s complex picture.

It doesn’t matter what the goal is, there’s not much point in only anticipating ideal scenarios. This is why the concept of “conjuncture” is helpful, for strategizing and getting a lay of the land. Analyzing the conjuncture is about starting from the here and now because it’s important to look at things in context, paying attention to the situation at hand, accounting for the when and the where. But it’s also true that, as a term, conjuncture needs to be demystified to make it a tool that more people feel comfortable picking up and using.

To begin with, a conjuncture is singular, like a moment. It usually refers to now, what’s sometimes called current events. This brings us to the first potential confusion: not all moments are created equal. They’re not even all the same size.

Does a conjuncture last a year, a month, a decade? Are we talking about historical periods or more like different administrations?

Even obvious examples of current or recent time periods, like the Trump era and COVID, are still blurry around the edges. The details around the beginning and end need to be as clear as possible to make the concept sharp enough to be useful.

In addition to the temporal meaning, conjunctures are also intersections. Like with the Spanish “coyuntura,” which can mean joint as well as circumstance, the concept of conjuncture refers to the interaction of different forces. It’s the node where the joining takes place, a pivot point around which things move, an instance of connection.

Dialogue and relationship building are examples of the positive, constructive side of conjunctures, but not all interactions are positive. Conjunctures are also characterized by the divisions between different camps and the limited positions that are available at a given time.

For example, the labor organizing and community response to the budget cuts at Timberland Regional Library point to a conjunctural conflict that’s still unfolding, and nationally, the battle line between the MAGA coalition and the anti-Trump movement has effects around the world.

These lines are never completely static; they’re constantly being blurred, erased, and redrawn. This means a conjuncture is also like a choke point, a narrowing of the road where not everything will fit. Having an approaching point of no return makes it clear what to do first and what can wait for another time.

Elections tend to produce this funneling effect, as do union votes, contract negotiations, and strikes. This is also true of natural disasters, economic crises, and mass protests. Any of these could be key moments when important questions are asked, and the way you answer depends entirely on where you find yourself in the squeeze.

Decision-making itself is related to the conjuncture, meaning conjunctures aren’t always mountains to climb or walls to scale; they’re also doors to walk through. But this requires a lot of commitment and determination not to get distracted and disillusioned along the way. So, a conjuncture is also something to resist and remain unchanged by.

This is exactly why organizing around a shared program is so important. Continuity across conjunctures is the basis for solidarity as a force for change. Like with the tenants organizing in Tacoma, conjunctures are full of possibilities that give meaning to the slogan “together we can change things.”

Of course, doomerism is also conjunctural. The idea that everything is futile, and there’s nothing we can do; the short-sightedness that tells us to only look out for ourselves; the narrow-mindedness that makes us think that only local changes are possible. Frustrating limitations, dead-ends, and burn-out cycles are experienced in a distinct way at every conjuncture, and there are a lot of different possible reactions someone might have.

So finally, we have to consider the individual agency and free association involved in accumulating force at the current conjuncture because it’s this same force that will be used to shape future conjunctures.

Who are the key players, the trusted leaders, the active parties, the relevant voices? Which forces are gaining strength, which proposals are convincing, which ideas are influential?

The answers to these questions have a shelf life because conjunctures are momentary and conditional, not structural or ideal. Our sense of the conjuncture needs regular sharpening to cut through the noise and get down to what’s most important. Nevertheless, like the community breakfast that’s been defending the Olympia Planned Parenthood for years, it’s always possible to create continuity. That’s the only way to ensure the values, practices, and organizations that we support will survive this conjuncture and have an influence on the future.

Imagine you, dear reader, are an activist out on the street protesting against the activities of some nefarious corporation, police department, government office or what have you. Or maybe you don’t need to imagine.

So, in this story you and your fellow militants have made all kinds of clever picket signs, banners, maybe even a giant puppet or two, and are now staged outside the headquarters of this organization, trying to convince the people inside the building to stop doing evil, and the other people outside to join you in your righteous crusade. “This is a moral movement,” you say. “Once these wrongdoers see how much harm they are causing they will knock it off!” Well, you keep protesting. Weeks go by, and then months. Years. “Maybe they just need to feel more pressure,” you think. “Maybe we just need more bodies on the line.” But, as is often the case, numbers dwindle, public interest fades, morale deflates. And all the while business continues — impassively, profitably, destructively — as usual.

In our scenario, maybe you, being an intelligent and critical sort of person, have the nagging feeling: “This isn’t working. Why? It would work on me if I were in a position of power. Surely, the people in power are like me, deep down. What gives?” Usually, what gives is you, and, like you, this is where most people give up and go home. But what if, just this once, you didn’t give up? What if you kept asking why?

The human drive to avoid cognitive dissonance makes us deny the possibility that maybe everyone doesn’t see the world in the same way as we do; the thought, “Maybe we really are that different, deep down”. If this were true, if people really struggled to understand each other not just because of their ideas, but because of their instincts, what would this do to our politics? In such a world, is there still a place for liberty and equality? This is the hard problem which Arnold Schroder’s recent book, Fight Like an Animal: Revolutionary Biology in Defense of Life (May 2026, Severed Branches Press), takes as its starting point.

A veteran of the radical environmental movement, Schroder has spent most of his life’s energy defending the living world: sitting for weeks up in trees, barricading streets and train tracks, occupying construction sites, filing legal appeals and training countless ordinary people in taking direct action. I first met him in 2014, when he taught my friends and I how to sit on a giant metal tripod, blocking the flow of dozens of notoriously explosive oil trains through the heart of downtown Seattle. For about a decade we (and I expect more than a few Works in Progress readers) were part of a movement in the Pacific Northwest to stop oil and coal exports along the West Coast in the name of fighting climate change. Although we had many small victories, in the wake of the defeat at Standing Rock, Schroder and I both came to the same conclusion: that despite our greatest efforts, we had failed.

The profundity of this failure was underscored to us both by the apocalyptic conditions of the summer of 2017: record breaking heatwaves; a demagogue in the White House; fascist gangs roaming the streets; unprecedented forest fires consuming thousands of acres; smoke blanketing the entire West Coast, confining those who could shelter to the indoors and killing those who couldn’t; the sun a bloody smear, half-visible in the sky at midday. This was the first summer of what we have come to fatalistically call, “fire season”. Global tipping points, we felt, had finally been crossed. There was no going back. As Schroder writes, “it felt like being trapped in heavy-handed screenwriting.” To complete the melodramatic activist arc, Schroder was taken out of the movement — itself in severe decline — by a series of life-threatening illnesses. Rather than giving up completely, Schroder began a podcast (also named, “Fight Like an Animal”). Other radical theorists have their prison diaries; Schroder has his kidney-failure-cancer-COVID podcast.

Now in book form, Fight Like an Animal distills Schroder’s many years of experience, research, writing, and recording into a concise and accessible volume, full of hand-drawn visual aids, real-world examples, and fictional scenarios to help readers digest its core ideas. While the book is worth at least a few readings cover to cover, if I had to describe it to someone in a single sentence it could perhaps be boiled down to the insight that, “we need to understand politics less in terms of the explicit logic of various arguments or worldviews, and begin to pay far more attention to what is happening in people’s bodies when they say what they do.” Understanding ourselves as political animals first allows us, Schroder contends, to step out of denial and fear and into a more bold, curious, and scientific attitude. But in order to do so, we also have to deal with some intellectual skeletons hidden in the closet.

Fight Like an Animal is grounded in a critique of the long-standing “nature/nurture” problem, a false-dichotomy which has impeded science and produced a ghoulish parade of cruel, wrong, and downright disgusting social ideologies. Instead of fighting back, the liberal response has simply been to take biology off the table. But whichever side takes the stand, the dichotomy wins. This is what makes it false. Instead of knowledge, what is produced are self-referential stories about human nature. Such stories often say more about the people telling them than about humans in general. After all, human nature is perhaps best defined by its diversity of behaviors and personalities, not any one person’s narrow idea of what, in their opinion, people should be like. Organisms are not robots controlled by genes, but we are not completely socially-constructed blank slates either. The environment, the society, the individual, and the body are not really separate things at all. What, then, asks Fight Like an Animal, are our bodies really doing when we say the world is like this or like that, and what does this mean for political practice?

Making extensive use of the latest in psychology, anthropology, and animal biology, the book synthesizes ideas for activists and armchair intellectuals alike to experiment with. To take one example, in psychology, one behavioral trait, “openness”, influences our political outlook to the extent that it is a much better predictor of voting behavior than class or race. Openness is itself linked to an even more fundamental biology — a biology defined by a spectrum of fear, friendliness, intelligence, and reactive aggression which appears throughout the animal kingdom. It doesn’t take a biologist to know that authoritarianism is about fear, compensation, and control. But how many people will recognize that the opposite is true as well? Freedom and equality have a biology. They depend on an animal’s innate empathy and openness, from fish, frogs, and chimpanzees to humans. If we want to survive and build a free and sustainable society, it follows that we need others to be open to radical changes even if they are not innately inclined to be. This implies a change in strategy, not just style: organizing needs to help people feel unafraid, together, in our bodies, and in the face of a world which profits by keeping us terrified of everything and everyone. What kinds of movements, what kinds of actions, what kinds of conditions would this take?

While some readers of Fight Like an Animal may be disappointed that it doesn’t have all the answers ready-made and pre-packaged, they are still likely to come away with a more scientifically-informed perspective on social change and some shiny new conceptual tools to experiment with. Some might even come away feeling, like I did, a little bit more hopeful.

It is said that change requires acceptance. And in our case, to change the world we have to accept the painful conclusion that nearly everything that we have tried until now seems to have failed. Any excuse we could come up with — social conditions were against us; the bad guys had more guns and more money; people fell for the same old propaganda again; that one really annoying person derailed all the organizing conversations — is just that, an excuse. This book challenges its readers to stop making excuses and instead do the hard thing: to choose between a “paradigm of action that avoids confronting the unbearable, and one that is born from this very confrontation” To do so we must confront the most frightening foe of them all: our reality, as we find it, not as we want it to be. Only then can we really hope to change it.

Today we begin our yearly commemoration and celebration of the queer and trans struggle for liberation that has existed for decades and continues to persist in the face of mounting systemic pressure.

We remember the working-class queer revolutionaries that threw the first bricks at Stonewall and dared to fight back against a state that criminalized their existence. Pride was a riot, a collective act of solidarity by the most marginalized: trans women of color, sex workers, the homeless, and the poor.

As we gather this June, let us honor their legacy by recognizing that true queer liberation cannot be achieved through market inclusion or legal reform alone, but only through the dismantling of the class structures that produce homophobia, transphobia, and material deprivation simultaneously.

Pride means solidarity across every axis of struggle: with striking workers, with tenants fighting eviction, with the undocumented, and the incarcerated. Because the liberation of queer people is inextricably linked to the liberation of all working people.

In love and solidarity,
Works in Progress

The First Pride Was A (Prison) Riot

by Felix Chrome

In recent years activists and scholars have done much important work to uplift the street queens who “threw the first brick at Stonewall,” and to reinsert the radical history of the Stonewall Riot into pride, far beyond rainbow jockstraps and vodka shots or the pride line from Gap. However, in this new popular retelling, many of us are still missing a huge facet of this story. In addition to being a multi-night series of riots, during which police were attacked in response to their violent provocations, in which gay revelers, drag queens, homeless youth, trans women, dykes, and many queers of all sorts, mostly unknown to us to this day, formed a beautiful mass to fight the cops who had long been agents of their degradation and destitution. Stonewall was also a riot inside the walls of a prison.

A block down Christopher Street from the historic Stonewall Inn, a mafia run gay bar that served as a gathering point for many gays in the Greenwich Village, stood the Women’s House of Detention. Until its demolition in 1973, the Women’s House of Detention was a women’s jail that operated much like Rikers does for men today, both as pretrial detention and where women would serve prison sentences. “The House of D” as it was familiarly called, also served as a point of queer gathering. At the heart of the gayborhood, women could often be seen calling up to their lovers through the barred windows, gathering outside waiting for their sisters to be released, or protesting in solidarity. The historical record shows that many of the women incarcerated inside the women’s house of detention were queer. Even as official documentation tries to elide this fact, the evidence is everywhere both in government surveys and first hand accounts.

In 1969 it was still common practice for the New York Police Department (NYPD) to arrest queer people for the crime of “impersonation” if they were not wearing three articles of clothing associated with their gender assigned at birth. While “crossdressing” was not technically illegal, this vague statute served as a loophole to criminalize trans expression, drag, butch presentation, and other facets of queerness. This meant that many people in the House of D were butches, bulldykes, or people we may today understand as transmasculine. Another common crime women were incarcerated for was prostitution, and many gay women turned to hustling, often working on the street where arrest risk was high as a means to support themselves after being disowned by family or barred from employment due to their lesbianism or gender non-conformity.

These factors meant that lesbians were already over represented in jail, there was also a queer culture in the House of D where life centered around familial structures women created with each other. Angela Davis, who was incarcerated there in 1970, writes, “homosexuality emerged as one of the centers around which life in the House of Detention revolved.” She goes on to state, “In an elemental way, this culture is one of resistance, but a resistance of desperation.” The families did not always include a sexual relationship but many women and girls who may not have identified as lesbian on the outside prior to being incarcerated forged romantic and sexual relationships behind bars — whether out of necessity or a paradoxical freedom found away from the compulsory heterosexuality of the outside. Davis describes being “bewildered and awed by the way in which the vast majority of the jail population had neatly organized itself into generations of families: mothers/wives, fathers/husbands, sons and daughters.” In addition to solving immediate problems and providing certain perks, Davis asserts, “the family system served as a defense against the fact of being no more than a number.” In this way the House of D stood as a central site of lesbian resistance in the village.

On the night that gays took to the streets — lighting a literal match in the movement for queer liberation as they tried to burn down Stonewall while cops cowered inside — the incarcerated queer women of the Women’s House of Detention responded in kind, in a remarkable act of solidarity behind bars, one that has gone largely untold.

Rita Mea Brown, author of the seminal lesbian novel Ruby Fruit Jungle, describes being out to dinner with a friend the night she encountered the riot, “I was in my early 20s, it was a very hot night, and Martha Shelley and I were walking through Sheridan Square in New York City. The cops, in a matter of seconds, pulled in front of this little bar — we all knew it was a men’s bar — and we heard this noise. The next thing we saw was cops flying out of the bar, then patrons came flying out of the bar. They were running out in their high heels. And we realized ‘Oh my god! It’s faggots in revolt! It’s heaven!’” She then goes on to say that night “at the Women’s House of Detention, the women heard the noises and started rioting inside the prison. All the windows were [open] because it was summer. The women burned mattresses and shoved them through the bars. This never got written up because all the accounts of that period were given by men.”

Another lesbian who was on the street that night shares a similar story, as described by historian Ryan Hugh, “Arcus Flynn was driving home late that night from her job as a nurse, wending through the streets around Washington Square when she noticed something strange: small points of light, flying through the sky. When she pulled over, she realized they were fires—little burning things being thrown from the windows of the House of D. As she got out of her car, she could hear them inside: dozens, maybe hundreds, of voices screaming, ‘Gay rights, gay rights, gay rights!’ That, she would later tell interviewers, was how she first realized Stonewall was happening.”

Rita Mea Brown is right that this fact was completely absent from news articles at the time and left out or unnoticed by many first hand accounts, mostly given by men, that have been committed to the record. The only indication of the women’s actions during the three days of rioting at Stonewall in an official report, is a story from the following weekend in the New York Amsterdam News, headlined “Women Held In Assault on Guard.” It describes a prison guard being attacked by eight girls who “threw her to the floor and tried to choke her” then “tried to take the officer’s keys which they had hoped to open the doors and gain their freedom.”

We can’t know for sure what instigated these actions or all the events inside of the House of D during the Stonewall riots but we know that above the riotous mass in the streets, there towered a building full of dykes and queers also fighting for their liberation. Scholar Polly Thistlethwaite writes of these women, “Lesbians may not have been roaming the Village streets in the numbers their gay and trans comrades were. But there were hundreds of dykes in the House of Detention for Women during the Stonewall Riots. The lesbians of Stonewall were arrested. They were in jail. They were not silenced or hidden or still. They were the nerve center of the Riots, the critical mass, the motor spiriting the resistance. They were shouting from the windows. They were raining fire onto the streets. They were floating sparks up into the sky.”

***

Much of this information and research shared in this article is owed to historian Ryan Hugh who wrote “Women’s House of Detention: Queer History of A Forgotten Prison.” Interviews and oral history work conducted by the Lesbian Herstory Archive has also provided crucial historical insight. If you are interested in learning more about the era, “The Stonewall Reader” edited by the New York Public Library contains many great essays and excerpts about Stonewall as well as the context leading to this moment and its lasting impact.

Organization Spotlight

This Pride, please consider giving a donation to the following organizations:

• Stonewall Youth

• Lavender Rights Project

• Pizza Klatch

• Lambert House

A block down Christopher Street from the historic Stonewall Inn, a mafia run gay bar that served as a gathering point for many gays in the Greenwich Village, stood the Women’s House of Detention. Until its demolition in 1973, the Women’s House of Detention was a women’s jail that operated much like Rikers does for men today, both as pretrial detention and where women would serve prison sentences. “The House of D” as it was familiarly called, also served as a point of queer gathering. At the heart of the gayborhood, women could often be seen calling up to their lovers through the barred windows, gathering outside waiting for their sisters to be released, or protesting in solidarity. The historical record shows that many of the women incarcerated inside the women’s house of detention were queer. Even as official documentation tries to elide this fact, the evidence is everywhere both in government surveys and first hand accounts.

In 1969 it was still common practice for the New York Police Department (NYPD) to arrest queer people for the crime of “impersonation” if they were not wearing three articles of clothing associated with their gender assigned at birth. While “crossdressing” was not technically illegal, this vague statute served as a loophole to criminalize trans expression, drag, butch presentation, and other facets of queerness. This meant that many people in the House of D were butches, bulldykes, or people we may today understand as transmasculine. Another common crime women were incarcerated for was prostitution, and many gay women turned to hustling, often working on the street where arrest risk was high as a means to support themselves after being disowned by family or barred from employment due to their lesbianism or gender non-conformity.

These factors meant that lesbians were already over represented in jail, there was also a queer culture in the House of D where life centered around familial structures women created with each other. Angela Davis, who was incarcerated there in 1970, writes, “homosexuality emerged as one of the centers around which life in the House of Detention revolved.” She goes on to state, “In an elemental way, this culture is one of resistance, but a resistance of desperation.” The families did not always include a sexual relationship but many women and girls who may not have identified as lesbian on the outside prior to being incarcerated forged romantic and sexual relationships behind bars — whether out of necessity or a paradoxical freedom found away from the compulsory heterosexuality of the outside. Davis describes being “bewildered and awed by the way in which the vast majority of the jail population had neatly organized itself into generations of families: mothers/wives, fathers/husbands, sons and daughters.” In addition to solving immediate problems and providing certain perks, Davis asserts, “the family system served as a defense against the fact of being no more than a number.” In this way the House of D stood as a central site of lesbian resistance in the village.

On the night that gays took to the streets — lighting a literal match in the movement for queer liberation as they tried to burn down Stonewall while cops cowered inside — the incarcerated queer women of the Women’s House of Detention responded in kind, in a remarkable act of solidarity behind bars, one that has gone largely untold.

Rita Mea Brown, author of the seminal lesbian novel Ruby Fruit Jungle, describes being out to dinner with a friend the night she encountered the riot, “I was in my early 20s, it was a very hot night, and Martha Shelley and I were walking through Sheridan Square in New York City. The cops, in a matter of seconds, pulled in front of this little bar — we all knew it was a men’s bar — and we heard this noise. The next thing we saw was cops flying out of the bar, then patrons came flying out of the bar. They were running out in their high heels. And we realized ‘Oh my god! It’s faggots in revolt! It’s heaven!’” She then goes on to say that night “at the Women’s House of Detention, the women heard the noises and started rioting inside the prison. All the windows were [open] because it was summer. The women burned mattresses and shoved them through the bars. This never got written up because all the accounts of that period were given by men.”

Another lesbian who was on the street that night shares a similar story, as described by historian Ryan Hugh, “Arcus Flynn was driving home late that night from her job as a nurse, wending through the streets around Washington Square when she noticed something strange: small points of light, flying through the sky. When she pulled over, she realized they were fires—little burning things being thrown from the windows of the House of D. As she got out of her car, she could hear them inside: dozens, maybe hundreds, of voices screaming, ‘Gay rights, gay rights, gay rights!’ That, she would later tell interviewers, was how she first realized Stonewall was happening.”

Rita Mea Brown is right that this fact was completely absent from news articles at the time and left out or unnoticed by many first hand accounts, mostly given by men, that have been committed to the record. The only indication of the women’s actions during the three days of rioting at Stonewall in an official report, is a story from the following weekend in the New York Amsterdam News, headlined “Women Held In Assault on Guard.” It describes a prison guard being attacked by eight girls who “threw her to the floor and tried to choke her” then “tried to take the officer’s keys which they had hoped to open the doors and gain their freedom.”

We can’t know for sure what instigated these actions or all the events inside of the House of D during the Stonewall riots but we know that above the riotous mass in the streets, there towered a building full of dykes and queers also fighting for their liberation. Scholar Polly Thistlethwaite writes of these women, “Lesbians may not have been roaming the Village streets in the numbers their gay and trans comrades were. But there were hundreds of dykes in the House of Detention for Women during the Stonewall Riots. The lesbians of Stonewall were arrested. They were in jail. They were not silenced or hidden or still. They were the nerve center of the Riots, the critical mass, the motor spiriting the resistance. They were shouting from the windows. They were raining fire onto the streets. They were floating sparks up into the sky.”

Much of this information and research shared in this article is owed to historian Ryan Hugh who wrote “Women’s House of Detention: Queer History of A Forgotten Prison.” Interviews and oral history work conducted by the Lesbian Herstory Archive has also provided crucial historical insight. If you are interested in learning more about the era, “The Stonewall Reader” edited by the New York Public Library contains many great essays and excerpts about Stonewall as well as the context leading to this moment and its lasting impact.

Amalgamated Transit Union (ATU) Local 1765 is the latest public-sector union in our area to be embroiled in contentious negotiations with a recalcitrant employer. ATU 1765 represents transit drivers in Thurston, Grays Harbor, and Pacific Counties in western Washington. Their current contract negotiations with Grays Harbor Transit (GHT) have been ongoing since August of 2025, and drivers are feeling the pressure as management refuses to make a fair deal. Works in Progress sat down with ATU 1765 President Mark Neuville and Executive Board member Kenny Farver to discuss the situation.

According to Neuville, the union’s key concerns in Grays Harbor are around wages and scheduling. Under the current contract, new drivers with GHT start at $24 an hour and are often only given a part-time schedule. However, they are expected to be on-call 24/7, making it difficult for them to find supplemental employment or plan their lives. These conditions also hinder the recruitment of new drivers, aggravating GHT’s labor shortage and placing additional pressure on existing drivers. A convoluted system for assigning work shifts has also made it easier for management to engage in favoritism rather than following seniority.

Read Article Here

Growth Board Showdown: Bird Alliance vs. Thurston County Over Quarry Rezone

A more than 20-year effort to protect sensitive salmon habitat and one of the largest populations of Oregon spotted frogs in Washington entered a new phase in December, when Thurston County commissioners, by a vote of 4 to 1, approved an industrial rezone of approximately 270 acres in the Black River corridor, overriding a recommendation from the county’s Planning Commission to deny a rezone.

The change allows uses such as meat processing, pesticide distribution, fertilizer manufacturing, and landfills on land largely surrounded by a national wildlife refuge. South Sound Bird Alliance is now appealing the decision before the Growth Management Hearings Board.

Read Article Here

Tacoma Tenants Launch Fourth Union

Kenny is a self-proclaimed “hot head.” Living with mold, leaking windows and holes in the walls of his Newcastle Apartment haven’t done much to calm him down — then his landlord banned his cat, and he’s not the only one. “Everybody’s pissed, but I’ve got a certain righteous fury that’s downright biblical, man,” he said when speaking with the Seattle Worker. Kenny and the residents of the Newcastle Apartment Tenant Union (NTU) are banding together and demanding satisfaction. They are but one of four tenant unions that have launched in the last several months in Tacoma.

Unionized Tacoma tenants are following in the footsteps of New York Apartments Tenant Union (NYTU), Tacoma’s first tenant union, which launched December of last year. Newcastle Tenant Union, New York Apartments Tenant Union, and recently launched North Slope Tenant Union (NSTU) are a part of the same portfolio owned by absentee landlords Ann Linborn, Rob Hoover, and Candy Hoover. All together, these unions make up roughly 75% of tenants in Hoover-Linborn owned properties, and control $50,000 in monthly income to their landlords. For reference, the Hoovers own over $22 million dollars worth of property in Pierce County, a yacht, an art gallery, and a permanent residence in Huntington Beach, California. The cost of repairs is not beyond them.

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Our goal is to raise $7000 for the year to print a full sized quarterly newspaper. With a small one-time or monthly donation, you will make it possible for us to get started. Works in Progress is fiscally sponsored by a registered 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. Your donations are tax-deductible to the extent allowable by law.

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Works in Progress is an entirely volunteer run organization, we appreciate you so much for reading our monthly issues — soon to be biweekly online releases.

What Are We Invested In?

In the fall of 2024, a group of people in Olympia, WA reached out to city Council Member Clark Gilman. At this time it had already become apparent that there was a genocide happening against Palestinians in Gaza, carried out by the Israeli military and supported by U.S. tax dollars.

Soon after Israel’s full scale invasion of Gaza following October 7, 2023, activists gathered in Olympia to form an organization that soon took the name Palestine Action of South Sound (PASS), which calls for a permanent ceasefire, an end to the siege of Gaza — now nearing twenty years — and an end to Israeli occupation. PASS operates through committees, and it is the legislative committee that began to work with Gilman.

By the time the PASS legislative group had reached out to Gilman, some individuals within the committee had already filed a Public Records Request to learn what the City held in Israeli bonds or other holdings concerning Israel. The findings turned out negative. Nothing in the Public Records Request told us that the City had any holdings regarding Israel. We wanted to keep it that way.

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Olympia Community Defends Planned Parenthood

During the last decade, there have been intermittent protests and clinic defense for patients entering and exiting the Planned Parenthood on the corner of Legion and Adams in downtown Olympia. The protests have historically countered the presence of forced birthers who attempt to invoke fear, shame, and harass patients entering the clinic. Forced birthers are against abortion in all circumstances. They are a splinter of the national pro-life movement that has been mobilizing for decades to abolish and criminalize access to abortion legally in the United States.

In response to the overturning of Roe v. Wade in the summer of 2022, concerned community members sought to create a recurring third space on the sidewalk outside the clinic and build community. This space has been habitually gathering once a week since June 2022 to serve a free hot breakfast for all. The space is called the Anti-Fascist Community Alternative Breakfast, also known as ACAB Breakfast. It is in opposition to fascist ideologies, groups, and individuals.

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Savage Transformations: Book Review of The Jakarta Method

[ON RADIO]:… continued disturbances in Jakarta, but are advising U.S. citizens…

JOEL: Jakarta. Where is that, Middle East?

TOMMY: Doesn’t ring a bell. It’s definitely a country. Or maybe part of Asia?

SARAH: Being a part of Asia isn’t mutually exclusive with being a country, and in fact, [Jakarta] is the capital of Indonesia.

The prevailing tendency in the English speaking world is to reduce the Cold War into a boxing match between capitalism and communism (the plot of Rocky 4) or a story of two superpowers playing spy games in the shadows (the plot of Stranger Things season 3). The Jakarta Method by Vincent Bevins rectifies this misreading and shines light on the overlooked history of anticommunist bloodshed. In his 2020 debut, Bevins argues that the United States’ most significant Cold War victory took place in Indonesia roughly 60 years ago.

Regardless of postal address or education level, few North Americans could tell you anything substantial about Indonesia. Most do not know that Indonesia’s population exceeds 270 million. Or that it is home to more Muslims than any other country in the world. Due to its reputation as a desirable vacation spot, Bali has more name-recognition than the rest of Indonesia’s 17,000 islands combined. Why does the Southeast Asian archipelago cast such a small imprint? If Indonesia’s present does little to pique our interest, then Indonesia’s past does less. Our lack of awareness is by design.

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Stay tuned! Thursday May 14 12-1pm 89.3FM

Managing Editor, Arlo Dolven and a few Works in Progress staff writers will be hitting the air waves with Kim Dobson’s Parallel University on KAOS 89.3FM.