

This is not a time for moderation in vision or spirit. It’s time to keep building and flexing our power, and Rising Tide is all in. We have a life long commitment to organizing and the movement — and the years ahead will prove pivotal.

This is not a time for moderation in vision or spirit. It’s time to keep building and flexing our power, and Rising Tide is all in. We have a life long commitment to organizing and the movement — and the years ahead will prove pivotal.
Worker power, immigrant rights, and racial justice must be at the heart of environmental and climate movements
As environmental and climate justice organizations, we declare our support for protests planned for International Workers Day (“May Day”), May 1st, 2017 and for workers who choose to participate by honoring the general strike.
International Workers’ Day was first established to commemorate the deaths of workers fighting for the 8-hour work day in Chicago in 1886. It has long been a day to uplift the struggles, honor the sacrifices, and celebrate the triumphs of working people across the world. The day has taken special significance in the U.S. since May 1st, 2006 when 1.5 million immigrants and their allies took to the streets to protest racist immigration policies.
Today, workers face unprecedented attacks on wages, benefits, workplace safety, and the right to organize free from fear and retaliation. But we know that we are all stronger when workers in our communities have safe, fair, and dignified employment with which they can support their families without fear of deportation or violence.
The effects of our fossil fuel economy fall first and worst on working class communities, communities of color, immigrants, and indigenous peoples who have not only contributed the least to climate disruption, but have the least resources to shoulder the burden of a transition to a new, climate-friendly economy. It is these frontline communities who are also at the forefront of change and whose solutions and leadership we most need.
As organizations working to transition our economy away from profit-seeking resource extraction toward ecological resilience and economic democracy, we know that worker power has to be at the heart of that transition.
We urgently need the wisdom and skills of millions of workers to transform our food, water, waste, transit, and energy systems in order to live within the finite resources of this planet that we call home. But the Trump agenda only promises jobs building more prison cells, border walls, bombs, and oil pipelines. Workers deserve not only fair wages, but work that makes our ecosystems and communities more resilient, not destroys them.
Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. No significant social change in this country has come without tremendous risk and sacrifice by ordinary people – from workers who walk off the job to water protectors facing down water cannons and attack dogs.
As environmental and climate justice organizations, we support workers who choose to walk off their jobs on May 1st because we know that the fight to protect land, water, air and soil is inseparable from the fight to protect the life and dignity of workers, migrants, and communities of color.
To workers participating in protests on May 1st, we say: “Thank you. You deserve better. And we’ve got your back.”
To that end, we join with unions and worker-led organizations throughout the country in asking that there be NO RETALIATION against any worker – union or non union – who exercises their rights by taking time off from work on May 1. Further, should workers face retaliation, we pledge our strong support for efforts to defend those workers.
To sign your organization onto letter and to specify what type of support you can pledge, click here.
AUTHORED BY
Climate Workers and Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project
SIGNED BY
350.org
350 Bay Area
350 Mass for a Better Future
350 Santa Barbara
Amazon Watch
AMP Creeks Council
Asian Pacific Environmental Network
Azul
Bay Area Justice Funders Network
Bay Area Labor Committee for Peace & Justice
Bay Area System Change Not Climate Change
Beyond Extreme Energy
Blue Heart
California Environmental Justice Alliance
Center for Economic Democracy
Center for Environmental Health
Center for Popular Democracy
Center on Race, Poverty & the Environment
Climate Justice Alliance
Climate Justice Project
Climate Workers
CODEPINK
CoFED
Corporate Accountability International
Diablo Rising Tide
Filipino / American Coalition for Environmental Solidarity (FACES)
Food Empowerment Project
Food First
Friends of Broward Detainees
Friends of the Earth
Fund for Democratic Communities
GAIA: Global Alliance for Incinerator Alternatives
Global Climate Convergence
Global Environmental Justice Project
Grassroots Global Justice
Greenbelt Climate Action Network
Greenpeace
Groundswell Fund
Industrial Workers of the World
Labor Network for Sustainability
Liberty Tree Foundation
Little Village Environmental Justice Organization
Missourians Organizing for Reform and Empowerment (MORE)
Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project
Movement Strategy Center
NAACP Portland Branch
National Economic and Social Rights Initiative
New Economy Coalition
New Jim Crow Movement – Vallejo
No Coal in Oakland
North Bay Organizing Project
Oakland Climate Action Coalition
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center
Oil Change International
People’s Action
People’s Climate Movement – Bay Area
PODER (People Organizing to Demand Environmental & Economic Rights)
Post Carbon Institute
Power Shift Network
Pesticide Action Network North America
Planting Justice
Popular Resistance
Railroad Workers United
Raizes Collective
Rainforest Action Network
Real Pickles
Right to the City Boston
Rising Tide North America
Rising Tide Sacramento
Sierra Club
Sierra Club Massachusetts Chapter
Sierra Club San Francisco Bay Chapter
Sonoma County Conservation Action
Students for a Just & Stable Future
Sunflower Alliance
SustainUS
The LEAP
Urban Habitat
U.S. Department of of Arts and Culture
U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives
U.S. Human Rights Network
This week, Rising Tiders from Portland and Seattle traveled to the Philippines on a solidarity mission to visit Indigenous communities in Mindanao on the frontlines of climate destruction, capitalism and imperialism.
They will be traveling in Kidapawan, currently in a state of calamity due to a crippling drought and the recent site of a massacre in which farmers and indigenous folk were fired upon after setting up a street blockade to demand that inaccessible government food rations be distributed.
And then traveling to Davao for two human rights conferences: the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines general assembly, and the International Conference on Peoples’ Rights in the Philippines.
As the group has said:
“We believe that joining our allies on this trip to the Philippines is the most important way we can show our solidarity with this People of Color led movement in the United States, and our allies in the Global South. In fact it is the thing we have been repeatedly asked to do by our BAYAN kasamas.”
Historically conditioned as a colonial experiment and geographically located in the rapidly changing climate of the Global South, the Philippines stands as a frontline nation against political and environmental repression. As international mining companies seek to drive communities off their ancestral mineral-rich land, the Philippine Armed Forces uses its monopoly on violence to enforce this destructive logic of capital accumulation, while escalating deforestation is wiping out ecosystems, poisoning water sources, and removing natural sources of carbon sequestration.
Meanwhile, though the country is hardly industrialized enough to be a major contributor to climate change, it bears some of the worst effects, such as increased risk from sea level rise and massive typhoons. Yet despite it all, the Filipino people rise up and resist. Now is the time for uncompromising solidarity with our allies in the Philippines fighting for their right to life, dignity, and a world in which we all can live.
Transnational solidarity is an important step in fighting the root causes of climate change. Furthermore, ensuring that our allies in the Philippines fighting for their right to life, dignity, and a world in which we all can live are given support and solidarity from the Global North.
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A demonstrator speaks about his encounter with attackers who shot five protesters near the Minneapolis Police 4th Precinct on Monday night.
Rising Tide North America Statement of Solidarity with Black Lives Matter Minneapolis
In response to last night’s shooting of five unarmed Black Lives Matters activists at the Justice for Jamar Clark Encampment in Minneapolis by masked white supremacists, Rising Tide North America issued the following statement:
“Rising Tide North America stands in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter community in Minneapolis, the protest encampment demanding justice for Jamar Clark and communities everywhere in the struggle for racial justice and against white racist violence, state sponsored or otherwise. We stand in solidarity with the right of communities to express their grief and rage, and to take action for justice.
We join the call for the release of the tapes of Jamar Clark’s murder. We condemn the extreme racist and violent rhetoric of white hate groups and individuals, leaders of both political parties, police officials and opinion-makers that target the movement for Black lives. In this moment, we particularly call on members of the climate justice movement to join the fight for racial justice and put their bodies on the line to confront white supremacy — both in the form of vigilante violence and in police departments.
Rising Tide North America is a continental network of climate justice groups and individuals committed to challenging the root causes of climate change. We stand for social, racial, environmental and climate justice. We can only address climate change by exposing the intersections between the oppression of humans, communities and the planet. In order to create a livable and just future, we work toward the empowerment of marginalized communities and the dismantling of the systems of oppression that keep us divided.
On this day, the anniversary of the non-indictment of Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, we still believe climate justice is inextricably linked with racial justice. We cannot have the one without the other. Our hearts and actions remain in this fight to create a just and climate stable world.”
Please donate here to support our friends and allies with Black Lives Matter Minneapolis.
Please sign the pledge to show up with Black Lives Matter and the movement for Black lives.
Read Rising Tide’s statement of solidarity with Ferguson.
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