Trump’s CFPB Is Opening the Gates for Fintech and Crypto

By Veronica Riccobene

04.22.2025

 JACOBIN

Steering the country toward another potential financial crisis, the Trump administration has moved to completely gut the federal regulatory agency tasked with reining in financial institutions.

Steering the country toward another potential financial crisis, the Trump administration has moved to completely gut the federal regulatory agency tasked with reining in the very financial institutions currently making the president’s allies rich.

The president’s attacks on the government’s financial regulator are a stunning about-face from 2016, when Trump first campaigned on reinstating tough banking regulations.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) was established in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse to protect Americans from abusive lending practices, supervise new financial products, and shore up the nation’s economic system.

During the Biden administration, the CFPB cracked down on junk fees, expanded its scope to include fintech and digital payments, investigated crypto firms for fraud and money laundering, and refunded more than $21 billion to defrauded consumers.

But last week, CFPB acting director Russell Vought announced the agency would be “shifting resources away from enforcement and supervision” and “deprioritizing” certain regulatory work it believes should be left to the states. The administration also tried to lay off nearly 90 percent of the CFPB’s staff, but was put on hold by a federal judge who said she was “deeply concerned” about the plan to summarily fire 1,500 of the bureau’s employees.

Trump is following in former president Bill Clinton’s footsteps, who first moved to substantially deregulate Wall Street in 1999. That year, Clinton passed the Financial Services Modernization Act, which allowed banks to integrate their services, invest in each other, and consolidate. Clinton also overturned the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that prohibited banks from combining their commercial and investment banking activities. The result made big banks even bigger and may have helped cause the 2008 financial collapse.

Last week’s memo goes even further, spelling out the agency’s plans to refocus regulatory efforts on “depository institutions” like banks, “as opposed to non-depository institutions” like fintech and cryptocurrency firms.

This is welcome news for the cryptocurrency industry, which poured hundreds of millions of dollars into Trump’s candidacy and inaugural celebrations. That includes some of Trump’s most powerful tech allies, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and Gemini CEO Tyler Winklevoss, who both had Securities and Exchange Commission lawsuits against their crypto trading platforms dropped by the Trump administration and have openly cheered on the dismantling of the CFPB.

“The CFPB is unconstitutional on the face of it. And even if it wasn’t, it should be deleted as we already have [the Department of Justice] to prosecute fraud, and many other financial services regulators. It’s an activist organization that has done enormous harm to the country,” Armstrong wrote on Twitter/X in February.


This comes even as financial regulators warn that the explosion of crypto in traditional financial markets and government reserves could cause a financial collapse.

Other non-depository institutions tagged for deprioritization in Vought’s memo include online payment and lending platforms. With nearly 40 percent market share in the digital payment processing industry, PayPal stands to substantially benefit from deregulation — especially since it has been fined millions for bad behavior by the CFPB. The company donated $250,000 to Trump’s inauguration, and its biggest backers, Vanguard Group and BlackRock, bought large positions in Trump’s media company last fall.

Venture capitalist and billionaire Trump donor Marc Andreessen, whose investment firm infamously bankrolled the failed fintech firm Synapse, recently told podcaster Joe Rogan the CFPB “terrorizes . . . anyone who wants to do anything new in financial services.” But the United States has already seen the terror that can be unleashed when the financial industry is left to its own devices. Now that the CFPB has been kneecapped, and industry-backed members of Congress refuse to regulate crypto and fintech, 2008 doesn’t feel so far away.

You can subscribe to David Sirota’s investigative journalism project, the Lever, here.

Contributors
Veronica Riccobene is a producer based in Washington, DC. She has experience in live television, long form and vertical video, as well as reporting.

HEDGEFUND HORROR

What Happens When Private Equity Owns Your Kid’s Day Care

By Hailey Huget

04.22.2025 

 JACOBIN

When my toddler’s day care started turning parents away at the door due to staffing shortages, I learned it was owned by private equity — which maximizes enrollment to squeeze profit out of childcare and now owns eight of the 11 largest US day care companies.

A KinderCare Learning Center in Pembroke Pines, Florida, on September 14, 2024. 

(Eva Marie Uzcategui / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Afew months ago, I was chatting with the mom of a toddler who is the same age as my daughter. As tends to happen when parents of young kids get together, the subject of childcare came up. She relayed that she was happy with their current situation — a nanny share with a few other families — and that it was a welcome change from the day care center they had used previously. One day at their former day care, they showed up at the door and were told to leave: the day care center didn’t have enough staff for the day and was at capacity with kids.

My mouth fell open. “You were turned away at the door? For services you paid for? On a day you were supposed to be at work?”

“Yup, that’s exactly what happened,” she said. I relayed that while there were problems with our day care situation — it was expensive, of course, among other things — thankfully nothing like that had occurred in the nine months we’d been there.

I went home later feeling like we had dodged a bullet. My partner and I had looked at that same day care her family had used, even putting in an application, but we ultimately chose a different one. I may have been patting myself on the back a bit, thinking that our intuition about that place had been right. Turns out the joke was on us.

The history of day care is like the history of oysters: once for poor people, now a luxury commodity. Day cares were originally charity programs, designed to help poor and working-class mothers who worked in urban industrial centers. During World War II, the US government opened the first government-sponsored childcare, intended to encourage more women to enter the workforce and support the war effort. It was short-lived, ending as soon as the war stopped. It wasn’t until the 1970s, when more middle-class and upper-class women began entering the workforce, that momentum began to build around creating universal, nationally funded childcare programs through the Comprehensive Child Development Act. Richard Nixon vetoed that bill in 1972, stopping the effort in its tracks.The history of day care is like the history of oysters: once for poor people, now a luxury commodity.

The lack of a universal childcare program has left a patchwork of nonprofit and for-profit services, of varying quality and increasing unaffordability, to fill the void. In the last two decades, private equity started making major moves into the sector. Today eight out of the eleven largest day care companies in the United States are owned by private equity.

There were a number of warning signs before the day I showed up with my toddler and was turned away at the door. A few weeks before, we got a message in the app that the day care used to communicate with families that said they’d be shortening their hours for the coming week because of a staffing problem. It was inconvenient but felt like nothing major: a temporary issue with understaffing that would soon pass.

But the hours were shortened again the following week. And the week after that.

Then the “at capacity” messages started coming. The first one arrived at 10:20 a.m. on a Thursday: “Unfortunately, we have reached capacity for children today and will be unable to accommodate any more children.”

The second one came the very next day, even earlier in the morning: at 8:57 a.m. The center was so short-staffed that if one or two teachers were out for the day, even due to planned vacation, it would have to turn kids away.The on-site manager let slip that new kids would be starting soon in our daughter’s class.

The message was clear: the earlier you get your kid in the door, the more likely you are to have a spot that day. For the next couple weeks, parents began showing up earlier and earlier to drop off their children, the small parking lot swarming with cars by 8:30 a.m.


One day my daughter slept in a little late and we got there at 8:45. Too late. One of the managers met me at the door, looking panicked. “I’m so sorry, we have been so busy that we haven’t been able to send a message in the app. We are at capacity for the day.”

One of the primary ways that private equity is able to squeeze profit out of childcare — a historically unprofitable institution — is by maximizing enrollment. The more kids you enroll, the more tuition money comes in. And if you have just enough low-paid teachers to ensure you’re in compliance with state-mandated ratios, you can keep labor costs down. Private equity–owned day care centers also try to lower operational costs by, for example, “shifting daily cleaning responsibilities from outside companies to teachers” and reducing “the number of sheets of paper per day” they give to kids. With this model, private equity–owned day cares are able to turn profits of 15 to 20 percent.

While families struggle to afford tuition and day cares struggle to retain their low-paid and overworked staff, the CEOs of these companies are cleaning up: the CEO of KinderCare, one of the largest childcare chains, made $2 million last year. Executives at KinderCare are also paid in equity or stock options, where those stock options “accrue depending on how much money the company returns to their private equity owners, Switzerland-based Partners Group.”

Our day care’s staffing issues persisted for months. Like other families, we found this totally unsustainable — my partner and I have full-time jobs, which is why we needed a day care in the first place. When the day care couldn’t accommodate us, we had to use vacation days to take time off work, and when we couldn’t do that, we had to triage our time so that we kept only our most essential meetings and bumped everything else to other days, making those other days chaotically busy. Of course, it messed up our daughter’s routine as well. All of this prompted us to start investigating other childcare options.

But the moment that really broke us happened when my husband was speaking with the day care’s on-site manager: she let slip that new kids would be starting soon in our daughter’s class.

Despite everything that was going on, and despite the fact that the center was barely able to comply with the state ratio of one caregiver for six children (some other states maintain ratios of one to four), they were continuing to enroll more children. It was absurd. The only thing I could think to compare it to was an airline, systematically overbooking the plane.All the places we had toured and all the ones that came recommended were, it turns out, owned by private equity firms as well.

I was shocked that any day care would function like this, so I started some frantic, rage-induced research. I learned that our day care is one of many “day care brands” owned by the Learning Care Group. Learning Care Group is, in turn, owned by a private equity firm called American Securities. American Securities owns many companies, including: Conair, which makes small appliances like hair dryers; FleetPride, a parts distributor for the trucking industry; and the Aspen Group, a “leading multi-vertical retail healthcare support organization providing business support services to consumer healthcare brands” (huh?). I quickly got the impression that charting all of these businesses and their interrelationships would make 30 Rock’s satirical GE org chart look quaint.

Then I looked into other day cares in town. All the places we had toured and all the ones that came recommended were, it turns out, owned by private equity firms as well. The only places we had heard of that didn’t appear to be owned by private equity were church-run day cares that were only open for half the day and closed all summer. There’s no way that would work for us.

Despite everything I’ve said so far, I think it is possible for a child to be safely cared for in a day care that is owned by private equity. At least I hope this is true, as our daughter started at a new day care recently, and it is, of course, owned by private equity. The facilities seem nicer, and their current ratio of students to teachers is better. We get a small tuition discount because it’s associated with my partner’s employer, so the total cost is not too much more than our old, unacceptably chaotic day care.

But private equity companies have a playbook: buy a business, run it into the ground, extract maximum profits, and flee the scene. They are responsible for the bankruptcies of many popular restaurant and retail chains: Toys “R” Us, Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Bed Bath & Beyond — the list goes on and on. They’re responsible for elder care facilities imploding and closing down. Knowing this leads me to wonder how much longer my daughter’s new day care will be an acceptable place to send her for eight hours a day. It’s very possible — even likely — that it’s a decent place only because we are experiencing it in the early stages of the private equity takeover. And its implosion wouldn’t just be an inconvenience to us as parents: consistency in who provides childcare is critical for her and other kids’ development.

Is there any hope in this state of affairs? Of course, crisis always presents opportunities. As private equity vacuums up more childcare centers, and as conditions deteriorate, it may provide the fuel we need to see mass unionization in the sector. And if parents can unite with childcare providers to support their demands — such as for better pay and better staffing ratios — together they could become a major bloc that could take on the shadowy forces of capital ruining childcare provision. (Right now, this possibility seems more likely than the US government passing a universal childcare bill.)

While many of us know on an abstract level that private equity is bad, we don’t really understand how it shows up in our daily lives. Most parents I’ve spoken to in my town have no idea that their child’s day care is almost certainly owned by private equity. Part of how private equity gets away with running their playbook again and again, in various industries, is by hiding in the shadows. Maybe if more families start to draw connections between issues they experience with childcare on a day-to-day basis and private equity’s takeover of the sector, we can lay the groundwork for the system-wide changes we all desperately need.

Contributor
Hailey Huget is a labor organizer who lives in North Carolina with her partner, toddler, and dog.

Making Steel for Offshore Wind Turbines, Now With Union Labor

By Benjamin Y. Fong

04.20.2025

JACOBIN

In a slow month for large-unit elections, the United Steelworkers won a key victory at JSW Steel, which manufactures components for offshore wind turbines. Despite their green, ethical self-portrayal, the union says JSW fought them hard.

The United Steelworkers headquarters in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on April 7, 2024. (Justin Merriman / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

In this monthly roundup on “large-unit labor elections,” Benjamin Y. Fong from the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University will recap all National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) elections of 250 or more voters tallied in the previous month, in this case for March 2025. See the February 2025 roundup here.


It’s the center’s belief that if the labor movement in the United States is to be rebuilt, it is going to be through experimentation with new strategies and tactics that push against the constraints of labor law and through large-unit organizing in the hundreds and thousands. The latter concern will be at issue in this series.

Given the outsize importance of large-unit labor elections in the overall composition of the labor movement, there’s a good argument to be made that the overall trajectory of organized labor can be gleaned from an analysis of such elections.

The homepage of JSW Steel USA’s website features wind turbines and the tagline “Sustainable steel for a stronger tomorrow.” They also brag that they have “the most energy-efficient and lowest carbon-emitting method of steelmaking” and are “sowing seeds for a greener future.” For their greening efforts, they’ve received $43.5 million from the Department of Energy to improve their Mingo Junction, Ohio, facility, which produces steel slabs used in offshore wind construction.

This same facility recently unionized after a 117–105 victory in its NLRB election tallied on March 7, leading to 248 new members for the United Steel, Paper and Forestry, Rubber, Manufacturing, Energy, Allied & Industrial and Service Workers International Union (USW). Despite the green, ethical image portrayed on its website, the union says JSW has fought the union by hiring an outside attorney and union-busting consultants, holding “union education” meetings, and even firing three union supporters the Monday after the votes were counted. Union supporters say they have been harassed and threatened throughout; one recently received text messages from anti-union people that “we’re gonna kick your ass in the parking lot.” Management also allowed anti-union graffiti throughout the plant. One of those messages was “Get cancer and DIE yes voters.”

This is the third election that USW has run at the Mingo Junction facility; the previous one was lost by one vote. Since then, there’s been some significant turnover but the same complaints, even after management changes and promises to improve the working conditions at the plant. This last election campaign really only kicked off a few months ago, but much like the United Auto Workers’ win at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga, this effort was years in the making.

According to Director of Organizing Maria Somma, USW has been focused on building its organizing capacity to take on more large industrial campaigns like the one at JSW. Somma cited a number of other recent, large-scale wins, including approximately 12,000 new USW members across three units — faculty, staff, and graduate workers — at the University of Pittsburgh, as well as 800 workers at Bobcat’s farm and construction equipment manufacturing plant in Bismarck, North Dakota, 1,500 workers at the Blue Bird Corporation’s bus manufacturing facility in Fort Valley, Georgia, and 600 miners on the Iron Range in Minnesota.

She stressed that “there’s a big difference between organizing a large industrial shop and organizing in the service sector.” Given the threats of relocating industrial plants, as well as the physical intimidation that workers can face in an organizing drive, helping workers take this step requires a lot of one-on-one conversations. Nevertheless, Somma feels like USW is well-positioned “to help workers feel and harness their own power” and to continue winning large shops.
A Dearth of Large Elections

This monthly roundup is devoted to all NLRB representation elections of 250 or more eligible voters. There was a noticeable dearth of such elections this past month. At 248 voters, USW’s win at JSW Steel was the largest single-union representation election win of the month. Time will tell whether this is an anomaly or representative of a cooling of organizing efforts given current political developments at the federal level.

Total NLRB elections and total NLRB elections of 250+ eligible voters in the last four Marches

Unfortunately it was also a month of mostly large-unit losses, and it was unusually one with no large-unit elections in either academia or health care. SEIU 32BJ’s win at Prospect Airport Services was the largest representation election win of the month, but it was a two-union election, victories which are generally not promoted. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ win at Lamb Weston was the largest election win of the month, but it was a decertification election.

NLRB elections of 248+ eligible voters in March 2025

It’s possible that we’ll see more decertification elections as employers are emboldened by the Trump administration. Teamsters Local 839, which represents workers at the Lamb Weston facility, challenged the employer’s decertification petition, as eighty workers whose names were on the decertification petition claim that they signed no such document. Still the NLRB ran the election anyway, which the union won handily.

The local’s secretary-treasurer, Russell Shjerven, said that given the current political environment, “I do think companies are going to be a lot more cutthroat. Look at a place like Lamb Weston, which has so many plants, and so many are nonunion. They would rather just have a nonunion facility.” Still, he thinks that the current assault on unions might backfire and stir up new interest in seeking union protections:


I live in the reddest, most pro-Trump congressional district in the state of Washington. But the people around here really want to see the union environment thrive. . . . Hopefully the attack on workers wakes more people up to say, “Hey, we need protection, and we need to make sure that we have someone fighting for us and that we work under a good contract.”

Contributor
Benjamin Y. Fong is associate director of the Center for Work and Democracy at Arizona State University. He has a Substack focusing on labor and logistics called On the Seams.

Balancing Union Support and Worker Control

BOOK REVIEW
By Jaz Brisack

04.19.2025

JACOBIN

To capture the surging pro-union spirit across the United States, unions must be prepared to support worker-led organizing without attempting to control it, writes former Starbucks rank-and-file organizer Jaz Brisack.

Starbucks workers strike outside a Starbucks coffee shop on November 17, 2022, in Brooklyn, New York. (Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images)


Review of We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing Is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big by Eric Blanc (University of California Press, 2025).


This review is part of a series of reviews of Eric Blanc’s We Are the Union. You can read additional reviews in the series here and here. You can read an outline of Blanc’s argument in the book here.

There is no doubt that the “worker-to-worker organizing” model outlined by Eric Blanc in his new book, We Are the Union, is key to union organizing success. Since 2018, my organizing mentor Richard Bensinger, the former AFL-CIO organizing director who has since helped workers organize at companies ranging from Starbucks to Canada Goose, has been kicking off Inside Organizer School trainings by declaring that there are two components to every successful campaign: a strong, representative organizing committee within the workplace; and a hammer — the leverage to force a company to recognize workers’ right to organize. Blanc’s book provides a deep dive into aspects of the former: how workers can take the lead on building vibrant and dynamic union campaigns at their workplaces.

Blanc writes, “Three things in particular define the new model: 1) Workers have a decisive say on strategy, and 2) Workers begin organizing before receiving guidance from a parent union, and/or 3) Workers train and guide other workers in organizing methods.” At times, this definition seems not only expansive but also paradoxical, encompassing everything from the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)–affiliated Burgerville campaign in the Pacific Northwest to the new leadership of the United Auto Workers (UAW), who came to power through the efforts of a reform movement within the union. The terminology folds in just about every iteration of the recent labor upsurge, despite the significant differences between unions, campaigns, and approaches.

My own experiences as a union organizer — both as an external staff organizer on campaigns as varied as Tesla and Ben & Jerry’s, and as a salt at Starbucks, where I got a job as a barista to help start a union drive — have underscored the crucial importance of worker leadership, local autonomy, and harnessing the camaraderie of the workplace in order to withstand fierce union-busting campaigns. They have also highlighted the need for principled and strategic unions prepared to support worker-led organizing without attempting to control it, while helping win the right to organize through mobilizing the rest of the labor movement and the public around the fight.

Blanc’s book uses case studies to illustrate what worker-to-worker organizing can look like in different contexts and with varied levels of union support. At Colectivo Coffee, workers interviewed unions and found that the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers would give them the backing to pursue their goal of organizing the entire company; at Burgerville, IWW members got jobs to help kick off a union campaign, then ended up filing for union elections and winning a first contract after other workers pushed to change tactics.

Blanc vividly captures what workers are seeking through unionizing. From Chipotle to Starbucks to Tesla, workers see unions as a path to improving their lives, transforming dead-end and alienating jobs into something better, and making the world a better place. Further, many workers who are passionate about issues ranging from trans liberation to a free Palestine to racial justice see the labor movement as a force that — unlike corporate virtue-signalers or government and nonprofit actors — brings all of these issues together, unites people around class and mobilizes against those responsible for systemic injustices, and is accountable to workers.

In Buffalo, I worked with data analysts at Tesla who wanted to unionize the company’s autopilot division. They were interested in organizing for many reasons, from the fact that they were so monitored (down to the keystroke) that it was often impossible to both meet productivity demands and take a bathroom break, to concerns about CEO Elon Musk’s increasing hostility toward trans workers and other marginalized groups. In choosing a union, they wanted an institution that would devote itself to fighting, while also providing them with the local autonomy that would ensure that Tesla workers were the ones making decisions about campaign and bargaining strategy and that the union did not become a “third party.”

As I write in my forthcoming book, Get on the Job and Organize: The Making of a New Labor Movement, the organizing committee was able to withstand Musk’s retaliatory union-busting actions, including the firing of almost forty workers the day after the campaign went public. But the campaign was stifled by top union leaders who were more interested in questions of credit, control, and jurisdiction than in supporting worker organizing. The new union that took over the campaign didn’t allow the workers to continue self-organizing.The question of balancing institutional support with worker control is a fundamental one for worker-to-worker organizing.

Up to that point, the organizing committee’s internal operations — from managing the union Slack channel to running meetings to deciding on talking points for press conferences — were incredibly democratic and vibrant: workers were having organizing conversations at birthday parties and video game sessions, and coworkers were joining the union as a way to make friends in their often-alienating workplace. Had the labor movement truly embraced worker-to-worker organizing at Tesla, there would likely be a union fighting back against Musk’s actions from within his own company.

Blanc devotes the longest and most detailed case study in his book to Starbucks Workers United, the campaign that I helped launch by getting a job at a Buffalo café, recruiting a team of fellow salts, and coordinating our means of holding organizing conversations, moving the campaign as quickly as possible as we began approaching workplace leaders. His analysis of the campaign gets many things right, from the way that we tried to build camaraderie in the workplace to the original scale of the campaign (building union density in the coffee industry in Upstate New York) to the unforeseen nature of the campaign’s exponential growth in the winter of 2021–22.

Other details are less accurate. For example, we didn’t choose to “come out as salts” to our coworkers but were instead outed by union staffers trying to seize control of the campaign. Blanc takes many of the union staffers’ statements at face value, which obscures the more complicated nature of the campaign. In the end, we did not “end up having a union that trusted the workers enough to fund a campaign without trying to control it,” in the words of one of the Workers United staff Blanc quotes.

The question of balancing institutional support with worker control is a fundamental one for worker-to-worker organizing, and Starbucks Workers United is a case study both in how to achieve grassroots empowerment at scale and how unions are often threatened by that very empowerment.

Keeping David From Becoming Goliath

Unions’ approach to organizing often varies greatly by region or by local. We could not have launched the Starbucks campaign without the support of Workers United in Upstate New York and Vermont, where union leader Gary Bonadonna Jr gave us the necessary resources and support to run an experimental, industry-wide campaign without stifling the creativity, spontaneity, and freedom that the campaign needed to thrive.

As the campaign grew, however, the top leadership of Workers United and then of its parent union, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), were unable to stop themselves from trying to gain control, to the detriment of the campaign. It demonized organizers, both workers and staff, who advocated for consumer boycotts, changes to bargaining strategy, or other deviations from what became the union’s official position. It simply didn’t understand that the union’s independence was a strength, both from the standpoint of organizing new workers and in terms of public messaging.

At a national gathering of Starbucks worker leaders in early 2023, a prominent Workers United leader told the rank-and-file members that “David vs. Goliath” made for a nice story. But, she continued, to be effective, you needed to fight Goliath with Goliath. Ignoring the fallacies of this argument (this biblical match-up led to Goliath’s defeat), it also underscores the extent to which union leadership often tries to squelch the individuality and chaotic nature of worker organizing in the interest of control and centralization

.

A woman holds up a sign as she joins Starbucks workers and other protesters at a rally against union-busting tactics outside a Starbucks in Great Neck, New York, on August 15, 2022. (Thomas A. Ferrara / Newsday RM via Getty Images)

Workers should not have to battle on two fronts to win the right to organize: employer opposition is more than enough of an obstacle. Unions must become better at giving worker-organizers and the unorthodox staff members who support them more freedom to run campaigns, while also committing to the pressure campaigns that will help win first contracts and curb corporate union busting. The very boycotts that Blanc notes helped bring Starbucks back to the bargaining table — the Cornell student activism that caused the university to kick Starbucks off campus and the Palestine solidarity movement that boycotted Starbucks after the company retaliated against the union for standing with Palestine — were met with hostility from the union’s top leadership. In order to scale the Starbucks Workers United model, we need unions that aren’t afraid of true worker power.

Throughout the book, Blanc mentions some of the limitations of the worker-to-worker model, which he writes “will almost always translate into a less tightly run ship.” Salting — the practice of getting a job to help launch a union campaign — can help resolve some of these contradictions. The greatest threat to any organizing campaign is employer opposition: many companies react quickly, by firing workers in retaliation for organizing in an effort to squash the drive before it has a chance to take hold. Speed is critically important in helping campaigns overcome the company’s reaction: historically, staff-intensive approaches like house-call blitzes have helped build organizing committees quickly, to limit the time that a company has to prepare their union-busting onslaught.

On just about every campaign I’ve ever worked on, workers had previously discussed organizing before getting in touch with a union. Sometimes there were prior attempts; often the idea was dismissed as unrealistic. Salting can help provide the needed urgency to turn a conversation into action and to move a campaign quickly.

The role of a salt is often a background one: mapping the workplace and identifying workplace leaders who can carry the campaign to victory, building relationships, and having organizing conversations that make coworkers believe organizing is possible. In other words, a salt can provide a spark that ignites interest that was already present in the workplace. Salting helps overcome corporate union-busting by increasing the likelihood that the campaign can stay underground until workers are ready to quickly begin building an organizing committee. Salting is an invaluable tactic that works across sectors and industries and that can be used to scale campaigns and help ensure victories.

While “autonomous salts” — motivated individuals who decide to take jobs in order to organize but aren’t connected with a union already — have helped kick off many organizing campaigns, undertaking this endeavor without the backing of a committed and strategic union can lead to stagnation and a lack of effectiveness. Choosing an achievable target, joining or recruiting a salt team, and receiving training on effective organizing (from sequencing campaigns to holding organizing conversations) all boost a salt’s chances of organizing their workplace.

Worker-to-worker organizing works best when workers are in collaboration with experienced organizers who can both weigh in with helpful advice and give workers the freedom to make independent decisions, like Richard Bensinger and Adam Obernauer at the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union (RWDSU). Thus Blanc’s recommendation that a “young person looking to change the world” should be “getting a job at Amazon to help unionize it” is a good one. However, that person might be better served by looking beyond Amazon and identifying which unions offer the best support and training to salts and worker-organizers, including by committing to a genuine plan to bring the hammer down on the targeted corporation and win the right to organize.

Labor Law to the Rescue

In the book’s final chapters, Blanc credits several factors with helping propel the explosion of worker organizing. He writes that digital tools like Zoom and other online platforms have made it easier for workers and organizers to connect across geographies, explores the progressive attitudes of young workers he surveys, and analyzes government policies that helped create a tight labor market during the pandemic as well as the Biden administration’s attitudes toward labor.

Blanc is certainly correct that reactionaries in government can make it much more difficult to organize. However, when it comes to finding the hammer and forcing companies to respect the right to organize, the Biden administration didn’t provide magic leverage to bring Starbucks (or anyone else) to the bargaining table.

Blanc praises Jennifer Abruzzo and the Biden National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) for allowing store-by-store elections at Starbucks (consistent with decades of legal precedent), increasing workplace access for worker-organizers during nonworking times, and advocating for stronger enforcement of the law. As someone who organized during their tenure, however, I saw many instances where the board allowed companies to get away with egregious actions. Abruzzo declined to pursue many unfair labor practices, including Musk’s mass firing of Buffalo Tesla workers. The regional director of the NLRB in Buffalo — who happened to be married to a corporate-side lawyer — consistently sided with companies, delaying Starbucks stores from filing for elections and declaring nearly a quarter of the bargaining unit at a local grocery store “management” despite all evidence to the contrary.

A Barnes & Noble bookstore in New York, on February 8, 2024. (Angus Mordant / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Despite his praise for Abruzzo and the board, Blanc correctly acknowledges that even the best-case scenario of an extremely labor-friendly NLRB would still lack the enforcement power to hold companies accountable, due to the extremely weak nature of US labor law. As Donald Trump’s NLRB and its new general counsel reverse what gains labor did make during the previous administration, looking beyond the board for leverage is more important than ever. As we’ve seen recently, companies from Starbucks to Barnes & Noble have proved to be susceptible to boycotts and other pressure campaigns, thanks largely to the public’s growing support for unions. Underscoring this point, Ben & Jerry’s set aside its past anti-union practices and agreed to voluntarily recognize the workers’ union — “Scoopers United” — because the company realized its customer base supported labor and that its social-justice marketing strategy was incompatible with union busting.

Like Blanc, I believe that the labor movement is the only way to meaningfully challenge the rising authoritarian and fascist tendencies within our government, our workplaces, and our society, and to create a more just, equitable, and free world. Blanc’s book, with its wealth of examples and worker voices, contains many crucial lessons that we can carry into this struggle — from the big picture, like encouraging unions to take risks and support organizing efforts that may not result in immediate contract victories but that have the potential to reshape the narrative around union organizing, to the smaller details, like the nuts-and-bolts of avoiding common campaign pitfalls. Few lessons could be more important in this moment.

Contributor
Jaz Brisack is the author of Get on the Job and Organize: Standing Up for a Better Workplace and a Better World. They are a cofounder of the Inside Organizer School, which trains workers to unionize, and a founding member of Starbucks Workers United.

Canada’s Oil Habit Is Wrecking Its Future

By Niko Block

04.22.2025
JACOBIN

Canada’s climate plans are a PR front for a carbon-export economy: its oil sands are distorting the economy and derailing any hope for transition. The country’s upcoming election reveals how far leaders are from reversing course.

Steam rises from the Syncrude Canada Ltd. upgrader plant in this aerial photograph taken above the Athabasca oil sands near Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, on September 10, 2018. (Ben Nelms / Bloomberg via Getty Images)


Commentators are treating Canada’s current federal election as a case study in the “Trump effect.” Until a few weeks ago, the Conservative Party dominated the polls — thanks in part to Pierre Poilievre, whose churlish mimicry of MAGA rhetoric included claims of a nonexistent immigrant crime wave and accusations that every part of government is broken. But after Donald Trump mused provocatively about annexing Canada and imposed new tariffs on Canadian goods, voters have swung overwhelmingly toward the Liberal Party.

Under Mark Carney, the Liberals are trying to position themselves as moderate yet assertive defenders of Canadian national interests. Carney has scored points by rapidly imposing retaliatory tariffs on some US-made cars, and signaling an interest in strengthening ties to Europe. Meanwhile, support for the social democratic New Democratic Party (NDP) — a partner in the last Liberal-led minority government — has collapsed so dramatically that polls project them to win as little as 1 or 2 percent of the seats in parliament.

The panicked retreat to the center is clearly a response to Trump’s belligerence. But this election also highlights the visionlessness of Canadian economic policy. Both the Liberals and the NDP have long pledged to make Canada less dependent on fossil fuels, especially the catastrophically polluting Alberta oil sands. Now, they also want to reduce dependence on American imports. Yet neither party has offered a serious account of how these goals might be realized. Instead of detailed platforms, they’ve relied on platitudes about tax cuts and job creation.

Ottawa’s aversion to risk on industrial policy appears stronger than ever — despite growing pressure for change. Over the past twenty-odd years, Canadian governments have occasionally expressed real interest in a green transition, but their capacity to deliver was constrained by the North American Free Trade Agreement’s (NAFTA) limits on state support for renewables. In the meantime, the oil and gas sector has only grown in size and political clout. Since NAFTA’s renegotiation under Trump’s first term, some policy space has opened up. But the oil-driven price shock of the past few years has made governments more nervous than ever about restraining fossil fuel production. The ironic result is that policymakers now have more room to act — but less will to do so.
A Resource Curse With Canadian Characteristics

Our current circumstance presents a new variation of a long-standing problem: weak manufacturing capacity and a deep reliance on resource extraction. In some respects, this resembles the resource curse — the pattern in which resource-rich countries underinvest in other sectors — but with distinct Canadian characteristics.

From the mid to late twentieth century, Canada moved away from primary product dependency and developed a modest manufacturing base for higher-value finished products, though much of it was built with the backing of US capital. Since 2000, however, much of that progress has been reversed by the rise of Canada’s export-oriented carbon sector. As a result, Canadian policymakers now confront a double bind: diminished capacity in innovative industries and heavy reliance on fossil fuel production, especially in Alberta and Saskatchewan.

To understand how we got here, it helps to take a long view. In the nineteenth century, colonial economists like John Rae broke from London’s free-trade consensus and argued that industrialization in British North America required protectionist policies. The problem of industrializing the frontier was also central for Edward Gibbon Wakefield, who suggested that Canadian manufacturing would fail so long as settlers could claim cheap land of their own — an idea that Karl Marx highlighted in his discussion of dispossession and proletarianization.Canadian policymakers now confront a double bind: diminished capacity in innovative industries and heavy reliance on fossil fuel production.

Federal leaders took some of Rae’s advice but none of Wakefield’s. Beginning in the 1870s, they implemented a protectionist plan and aggressively promoted the Western settlement under what became known as the “National Policy.” This strategy led to the flourishing of resource extraction in mining, lumber, and coal, alongside petroleum from the Sarnia area in southwestern Ontario, which has some of the oldest commercial oil wells in the world. By the 1920s, political economists Harold Innis and W. A. Mackintosh had formulated the “staples thesis” — the idea that Canada’s economy, class structure, and political culture were shaped by its dependence on exporting raw materials like fish, fur, lumber, and minerals, rather than developing domestic industries.
Escaping the Staples Trap

At the same time, American industry began to establish a network of branch plants in Canada: oil refining and petrochemical production in Sarnia, aluminum production in Quebec, and a vast automotive industry in Ontario. These industries would grow substantially during and after World War II, as Canadian economic policy moved away from the settler orientation of the National Policy and toward a form of Keynesian industrial capitalism.

By the 1960s and ’70s, however, concerns emerged that the strategy of welcoming foreign direct investment had been too successful: US capitalists owned many of Canada’s high-value industries. At the same time, the strategy had failed to modernize the economy overall, with the bulk of Canadian exports still consisting of raw materials.

The school of “new Canadian political economy” began to theorize this problem, arguing that Canada shared more in common with underdeveloped countries in Latin America than the industrial superpowers powers of Britain and the United States. Kari Polanyi Levitt, drawing on these parallels, described Canada as the “the world’s richest underdeveloped country.” Similarly, Innis’s student Mel Watkins warned that free trade could lock countries like Canada into a growth-inhibiting “staples trap.” In 1969, Watkins joined the Waffle, a left-nationalist faction within the NDP, whose manifesto lamented that “Canada has been reduced to a resource base and consumer market within the American Empire” — part of a broader discourse surveyed by Leigh Phillips.

Though the Waffle was on the fringes of Canadian politics — and was soon effectively expelled from the NDP — its concerns about the subordination of Canadian industry were shared by the government of Pierre Trudeau. In the 1970s, Trudeau would respond to the recommendations of a 1968 commission chaired by Watkins by creating the Canadian Development Corporation and establishing a foreign investment review board. These measures were part of a broader effort to “Canadianize” the economy. While US foreign investment did not decline substantially, the interventionist approach succeeded in diversifying Canada’s manufacturing base. Publicly owned corporations, R&D programs, and growing access to the US market all contributed to this process.

The result was a robust expansion in Canada’s higher value-added sectors: automobiles, aerospace, machinery, electronics, and consumer products. Whereas primary products — agriculture, energy, mining, and forestry — represented more than 60 percent of exports in the 1970s, that share had dropped to 43 percent by the end of the century.
Getting Trapped Again

But this progress was short-lived. After 2000, the rising price of oil reversed it entirely. As Jim Stanford (a student of Watkins) has argued, rising prices pushed up the value of the Canadian dollar (CAD), making other manufactured goods less competitive in international markets.

Several earlier developments generated these vulnerabilities. One was the deep entrenchment of trade liberalization following the 1994 implementation of NAFTA. Whereas a low CAD had once supported domestic industry, the new dynamic worked in the opposite direction. Relatedly, many of the manufacturing support programs designed in the 1970s were dismantled over the subsequent two decades.While Denmark responded to the oil shock of the 1970s by investing in what was then the long-shot prospect of wind power, Canada bet on another long shot: the oil sands.

More importantly, postwar industrial policies never aimed to move Canada decisively away from primary products. Instead, they sought to promote exports in general — and policies that promoted fossil fuels proved to be the most resilient and effective. While Denmark responded to the oil shock of the 1970s by investing in what was then the long-shot prospect of wind power, Canada bet on another long shot: the Alberta oil sands. Half a century later, both gambles have paid off.

At first, extracting petroleum from the heavy bitumen was so expensive that Alberta’s government-led research initiatives failed to attract the 50 percent industry support required by the policy. In response, the province broke its own rules and unilaterally funded the R&D, eventually developing the energy-intensive technique of steam-assisted gravity drainage, which made large-scale oil sands development commercially viable.

As the industry scaled up, it reshaped Canadian manufacturing. Like any oil-exporting country, Canada saw its currency appreciate alongside global oil prices. The rise of the CAD was driven not just by direct demand for Canadian oil, but also by soaring profits in the oil sector — already among the highest in the country — which attracted foreign investment into Canadian equities. The first figure below shows oil exports as a percentage of total exports alongside the value of the CAD in USD. They are clearly linked, but both are largely determined by global oil prices: rising demand from China after 2000 pushed prices upward, the 2008 global financial crisis brought them down, they rebounded, and then fell again after 2014 due to a global oil glut.

Source: Statistics Canada and FRED.

The damaging effects of this dynamic soon became apparent. As early as 2013 — when prices were booming — Stanford and his coresearchers observed that for every dollar increase in petroleum exports, exports in all other goods fell by $8.50. In other words, oil export growth, because of its tight link to currency appreciation and profit flows, came at the expense of Canada’s broader trade balance. Consequently, the non-fossil manufacturing didn’t just shrink in relative terms — it declined in absolute terms, with job losses across all provinces far outweighing the jobs created in the oil patch.

The second figure provides another view of these outsize impacts, charting the steep decline in non-fossil manufacturing as a share of GDP after 2000, alongside the growth of a bottom-feeding oil and coal sector. (Tellingly, while Canada has reduced domestic coal consumption, it continues to extract coal at scale — exporting approximately 80 percent of it.  

Source: Statistics Canada and FRED.

Suffering more than a generic resource curse, Canada has given itself a case of “Dutch disease,” whereby a country’s resource economy directly undermines its manufacturing base. As Stanford puts it, since 2000, Canada has experienced a “resource-led deindustrialization” and what amounts to a “qualitative step backward” in its economic development.
Fueling the Problem

This is all to say nothing of the damage the oil sands are doing to the planet, the scale of which is difficult to fathom. The industry has long acknowledged that a barrel of Albertan oil is more polluting than conventional oil, but its own estimates consistently understate the problem. One mind-bending study published last year in Science found that total emissions from the oil sands appear to be 19 to 63 times larger than the industry-reported values.

Yet despite years of warning from the scientific community, Ottawa has no plan to mitigate this catastrophe. On the contrary, a recent analysis estimates that the federal government handed the industry over $7.3 billion in 2023 alone. That’s on top of the billions already spent over the years — including $34 billion to complete the Trans Mountain pipeline, which came online two years ago.One mind-bending study published last year in Science found that total emissions from the oil sands appear to be 19 to 63 times larger than the industry-reported values.

Throughout his time in office, Justin Trudeau often claimed — with a telling look of uncertainty in his eyes — that support for the industry was part of a necessary long game. “You can’t make a choice between what’s good for the environment and what’s good for the economy. We can’t shut down the oil sands tomorrow. We need to phase them out,” he would say. The implication was always the same: that these policies were needed to win over Western voters (which he never did), or that oil sands revenues were necessary to finance a green transition (a claim that is untrue in many respects). His centerpiece policy was a carbon tax — modest, progressively redistributive, and increasingly unpopular thanks in part to Poilievre’s shrill and relentless attacks in parliament. Carney has already scrapped the tax, a move that has helped to sideline the Conservatives.

Trudeau also failed to pair the carbon tax with meaningful efforts to expand regional rail, reduce automotive dependency, or promote renewable electricity production in Alberta and Saskatchewan. This meant that Conservative complaints about paying more for gas have had an intuitive resonance for some voters — especially since the price bump that began in 2020.

As Douglas Macdonald argues, a key structural obstacle is that Canadian provinces — like American states — control energy policy. Alberta and Saskatchewan have used this jurisdiction to successfully undermine multiple federal initiatives in recent decades. If Ottawa wants to make any real progress, the next federal government will need to do more than articulate a vision for transition; it will have to find a way to override the industry-aligned provincial governments in the West.

As noted, the demise of NAFTA has opened unique opportunities for progress on the climate front. Whereas provisions for investor-state dispute settlement once limited Canadian governments’ ability to pursue green industrial policies, Ottawa’s reluctant break from Washington has at least created some space for industrial sovereignty.

But to exercise that sovereignty effectively, the next government will need to unravel past mistakes and advance a far more ambitious plan than anything currently on offer. Carney may understand climate change better than most politicians, but his platform offers little more than token incentives for home energy efficiency and a vague reference to UK-style “carbon contracts for difference” — with no explanation of how they’ll be coordinated with provinces.

We have every reason to doubt, then, that the next government will outperform the last on climate policy. The NDP, meanwhile, will enter the next parliament significantly diminished — the just deserts of a party that has drifted away from its base and, at the urging of lawyers and consultants, made itself almost indistinguishable from the Liberals. If the party wants to survive, its next leaders will need to embrace a vision of aggressive retooling and ambitious market intervention — the kind already outlined in hundreds of high-quality white papers by progressive policy analysts. Only then will they be able to present a credible enough alternative to prod the next government into action.

Contributor
Niko Block is a PhD candidate in political science at York University and a member of Independent Jewish Voices. He has written for the Guardian, Jacobin, the New Internationalist, Canadian Dimension, and covered news in the West Bank for Palestine Monitor.

As a Muslim, I believe inclusion means everyone

(RNS) — A group of Muslim parents in Maryland says a school curriculum about inclusion violates their religious rights. The Supreme Court will hear their case — Mahmoud v. Taylor — this week.

A person walks past as construction scaffolding is in place at the Supreme Court, Tuesday, April 1, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Rahmat Gul)

Opinion
Ani Zonneveld
April 21, 2025


(RNS) — In 2023, out of the blue, there was an eruption of protests from parents about public school curricula in Montgomery County, Maryland; in Glendale, California (a suburb of Los Angeles); and in Detroit. They were protesting the inclusive nature of the public school curricula, which depicted same-sex parents and a rainbow puppy — a curriculum that also included a hijab-wearing Muslim girl dancing.

In the case of Detroit and Montgomery, the demonstrations were championed by conservative Muslim parents. In Montgomery, Muslim parents were bused in from local mosques by Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), protesting at the Montgomery County Public School headquarters over the district’s no-opt-out policy concerning LGBTQ+ inclusive storybooks.

In a few weeks, the Supreme Court will hear Tamer Mahmoud vs Thomas W. Taylor, a case first filed in the fall of 2023 , in which a group of parents claimed that the inclusive curriculum impinged on the parents’ religious right in how their children are raised and, to quote a parent, that they “go against the values we are instilling in my child at home.”

As an organization, Muslims for Progressive Values is an ardent advocate for respect and inclusion. The inclusive curriculum normalizes the diversity of our humanity — it was designed to help counter hate toward LGBTQ+ and Muslim children, who have experienced taunts and bullying.

The curriculum includes depictions of Muslims, too, like the hijab-wearing girl dancing joyfully. That, too, is a form of inclusion. To argue that inclusion should end with Muslims but not extend to other identities is not only hypocritical, but dangerous. If we say that depictions of LGBTQ+ people are harmful to children, why would we not then say the same of hijabis?

True inclusion means everyone, or it means nothing.

Arguing as a Muslim, the idea that these inclusive curricula impinge on one’s religious rights has no basis in Islam. The Quran encourages engagement with beliefs that differ from one’s own. It promotes dialogue between individuals with diverse perspectives, rooted in respect, reason and wisdom — as emphasized in Surah An-Nahl 16:125.

Discourse is, in fact, encouraged to strengthen faith and bolster critical thinking. Depicting Islam as inherently intolerant is not only inaccurate, but also dangerous in fueling more prejudice.

An amicus brief MPV is contributing to, along with Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, highlights that the curriculum used by Montgomery County Public Schools instructs teachers to affirm students’ religious beliefs when objections arise, while also emphasizing the importance of respecting differing views. This approach is consistent with Islamic values, which support respectful dialogue without coercion and uphold the dignity of individual belief.

As an immigrant from Malaysia, let me share about the educational system there, where teaching and curriculum are fragmented, broken down by racial lines and language. The government funds Chinese schools for the Chinese students, Tamil schools for Indian students and government schools where the medium of teaching is in Malay — the national language — which Malay students attend. Such a school system has failed to create a cohesive society without prejudice.

If we allow one group’s belief to dictate public education, we open the door to every group demanding their own opt-outs, creating educational chaos. This is the danger of expanding the free exercise clause at the expense of the rights of all citizens in a secular society. The separation of religion and state is not only a founding principle, but a protective one, benefiting everyone.

On April 22, the Supreme Court will have the responsibility to chart the future of America. A decision in favor of Mahmoud will splinter our society into fragments of religious fiefdoms and lead to an abuse of opt-outs that will be unsustainable for a public school system that caters to diverse populations. A decision for Taylor will make us see the humanity of the other, even of those we disagree with.

America is badly in need of such common humanity, the kind that teaches us empathy over hatred and sees difference not as a threat but as a strength. I truly hope the Supreme Court will decide in favor of our shared humanity.

Ani Zonneveld is founder and president of Muslims for Progressive Values and an author of an upcoming book, “The Unlikely Social Justice Warrior: Making my Life Count as a Muslim Feminist,” with Lived Places Publishing. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)

Black LGBTQ Christians ask: Where is the Black church's prophetic voice on our rights?

(RNS) — 'I think most of the major Black denominations, in terms of its membership, is divided,' said Bishop Reginald Jackson, leader of mid-Atlantic African Methodist Episcopal churches.

The Rev. Don Abram, center left in gray suit behind podium, participates in the Collective of Queer Christian Leaders rally on Monday, April 14, 2025, in Washington, D.C. (RNS photo/Adelle M. Banks)

Adelle M. Banks
April 18, 2025


WASHINGTON (RNS) — The Rev. Don Abram stood outside the U.S. Capitol surrounded by a diverse group of clergy, some wearing rainbow-accented stoles and others holding signs calling for justice.

He joined them in what he saw as a double-pronged act of advocacy: opposing the Trump administration’s recent executive orders on gender and calling on Christian churches to become more inclusive of LGBTQ+ people.

Abram sees both approaches as necessary — and connected. The founder and CEO of Pride in the Pews, a group that trains Black congregational leaders to welcome LGBTQ+ people in their sanctuaries, hopes to see Black churches engage in public advocacy for LGBTQ+ rights in the same ways he’s seen those churches lend their voice to other social issues.

“The Black church has never just been about what’s in the four walls of the church,” he said in an interview before the rally held on the Monday (April 14) of Holy Week. “It has always leveraged a prophetic voice and banner in the public square. Our question is, why doesn’t that extend to LGBTQ+ rights as well?”

The Rev. Don Abram addresses the Harvard Affinity Celebration in May 2024. (Photo by Steve Lipofsky)

Abram, who describes himself as “a queer church boy from the south side of Chicago,” was one of several people at the rally with his 4-year-old organization. But Pride in the Pews was the only one of more than half a dozen groups at the rally, organized by the Collective of Queer Christian Leaders, whose focus was on the Black church.

While there has been growing acceptance of LGBTQ+ people among Black Protestants broadly — up more than 20 percentage points in two decades, according to Pew Research Center — the institutions of the Black church remain mostly either opposed or silent on the issue of same-sex marriage. None of the major historically Black denominations have taken an official stance affirming LGBTQ+ people.

In August, the African Methodist Episcopal Church rescinded a bill that would have removed a ban on same-sex marriage. Its rule book states “unions of any kind between persons of the same sex or gender are contrary to the will of God.”

Bishop Reginald Jackson, leader of the AME district that includes mid-Atlantic churches, said “our ban specifically addresses the issue of clergy” performing or participating in such weddings, and there’s nothing in the church’s rules that prevent participation of LGBTQ+ people, including married same-sex couples, within the denomination.

RELATED: The Black church has moved from essential to voluntary, says author Jason Shelton

“Historically, the Black church has always been considered on some issues conservative, but I think to be accurate, I think most of the major Black denominations, in terms of its membership, is divided,” said Jackson in an interview. “It’s split, which is one of the reasons why no definitive position has been taken. I’m not sure how much longer that can continue, but that’s where we are now.”

The Rev. Jennifer Leath. (Courtesy photo)

When the AME Council of Bishops critiqued some early executive orders of the new Trump administration but not the ones on gender, the Rev. Jennifer Leath, an AME minister and associate professor of Black religion at Queen’s University in Ontario, observed what she saw as an inconsistency in its statement. Their response was “conveniently silent on Trump’s executive order ‘creating a policy recognizing only two genders,’” said Leath, who describes herself as “quare,” referring to both her sexual identity and her focus on being a “Black queer womanist” scholar. She expressed her views in a commentary in the AME Church’s The Christian Recorder.

Jackson acknowledged that Leath, who supported the creation of the denomination’s Sexual Ethics Discernment Committee in 2021, was correct about the omission but said the AME bishops could continue to discuss such matters at upcoming meetings.

The Rev. Darryl Gray, director general of social justice for the Progressive National Baptist Convention, the historically Black denomination with which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was affiliated, said his religious group does not discriminate but has not taken an affirmative position about LGBTQ+ people.

“It is not an issue that has come to the floor in any of our regions or our national convention, and because it hasn’t come to the floor, it’s an issue that has not been discussed openly,” he said.

Pew Research Center found the percentage of Black Protestants who say homosexuality should be accepted in society shifted from 39% in 2007 to 51% in 2014 to 61% in 2023-24. Their support for same-sex marriage has increased from 40% in 2014 to 56% in 2023-24. University of Texas at Arlington scholar Jason Shelton credits President Obama’s 2012 endorsement of same-sex marriage as a catalyst for some of the greater openness to LGBTQ+ people by Black Christians.

“The laity began to move before that, but it took some jumps with President Obama’s declaration, but clergy have not moved nearly the same way since,” Shelton, author of “The Contemporary Black Church: The New Dynamics of African American Religion,” told Religion News Service.

As acceptance has begun to grow with laity, there have been new attitudes and actions in Black church circles over the last decade.

The Rev. Willie Dwayne Francois III, president of the Black Church Center for Justice and Equality, said Black churches have diverse points of view on these issues, but his organization is encouraging them to consider concerns about diversity, equity and inclusion as a way to fight for civil rights for all, including “queer/trans siblings.”

The Rev. Danielle Dufoe preaches at Riverside Baptist Church on March 30, 2025, during the closing worship service of the Alliance of Baptists’ annual gathering in Washington, D.C. (RNS photo/Adelle M. Banks)

Francois was one of a group of Black pastors that in 2023 ordained the Rev. Danielle Dufoe, who has been hailed as the first transgender woman to graduate from a historically Black theological institution, at the church Francois was leading at the time in New Jersey.

Francois said his denomination, the PNBC, did not make a statement at the time: “It was basically perceived as a local pastor doing the work in the local context.” Abram, of Pride in the Pews, said some Baptist denominations “do not require churches affiliated with them to adopt similar positions” to national stances.

Dufoe, who is a minister to homeless youth in New Jersey, said in an interview that she appreciates the welcome she has received from some, even as she learns of instances where trans people have been kicked out of congregations or where churches required them to be buried in clothing they would not have chosen.

“Historically lesbian and gay folks have been able to enjoy a certain amount of anonymity,” she said of people inside and outside of the church. “Trans folks tend to be very noticeable, and because they are more noticeable, tend to be castigated in public.”

Tre’vell Anderson. (Photo by Ray Love Jr.)

She points to the Rev. Brandon Thomas Crowley, author of “Queering Black Churches: Dismantling Heteronormativity in African American Congregations,” as an “exceptional” example of someone who has supported trans people in his work as pastor of Myrtle Street Baptist Church outside Boston.

Crowley, a Black queer man, told RNS in an interview of how he supported “one of our members who was assigned female at birth” through the process of claiming his transgender status. The pastor prayed for him as he went through transition-related procedures, rebaptized him “to affirm his name and who he was,” and bought him a new suit.

Other LGBTQ+ people have felt the need to find their spiritual spaces outside the walls of Black churches they considered to be judgmental.

When gospel musician Kirk Franklin came through Los Angeles on tour a couple of years ago, podcaster Tre’vell Anderson, a Black trans person who describes themselves as “Christian-ish,” decided to split the cost of a private suite with 20 mostly LGBTQ+ friends rather than join the general audience.

“I want to be able to relish in the wondrousness that is this music, without having to potentially worry about a church mother mad at the way I’m giving my praise,” they told RNS. “We were able to have this wonderful time where we could listen to this music that we all grew up on.”

Even as some Black LGBTQ+ Christians have drifted away from traditional Black churches, there are clergy who are being trained to try to prevent such departures. Abram said Pride in the Pews is trying to move congregations from antagonism against LGBTQ+ people through the “murky middle” to advocacy.

People attend a Gospel Drag Brunch hosted by Pride in the Pews at Bronzeville Winery on July 7, 2024, in Chicago. (Photo courtesy Pride in the Pews)

The Rev. Anika Wilson-Brown, lead pastor of Union Temple Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., said her congregation has become more intentional about its stance affirming LGBTQ+ members. Her church, which is independent after previously being affiliated with a historically Black Baptist denomination, has received a grant from Pride in the Pews that helped it assess the needs of those congregants and launch ministries to support them.

She used a sermon to apologize to those who were hurt by other clergy, who may have heard in churches that “their very existence is an abomination” — and received messages since from some who said her words “healed something within them.”

And some members marched in a Pride parade last month.

“We’ve even done workshops and classes with leaders in talking about the differences between your sexual identity, your gender, your orientation, your sexual interests,” she said. “So breaking down that information and being able to teach and provide that real-time instruction and also put spirituality and religion alongside that has made us evolve greatly.”


This story has been updated.

RELATED: Documentary on Black millennials depicts wide range of religion, rebellion

Auctioning the Buddha's relics is perpetuating colonial violence

(RNS) — For the Buddhists who deposited these relics — as for Buddhists today — the gems, bone and ash all belong to the Buddha and shouldn’t just be sold to the highest bidder.

“Buddha Relics” displays gems and bone relics at Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum. (Image courtesy Asian Civilisations Museum, Singapore)

Opinion
Conan Cheong and Ashley Thompson
April 22, 2025

(RNS) — On May 6, just days before Buddhists around the world celebrate the holiday of Vesak, Sotheby’s Hong Kong will put relics of the Buddha — what Sotheby’s calls the “Piprahwa Gems of the Historical Buddha”— on the auction block.

The relics were found buried in a stupa, or funerary monument, in Piprahwa, in present-day Uttar Pradesh, India, in 1898. According to an inscription carved into one of the reliquaries, the stupa contained the remains of the Buddha himself.

As the first credible find of the Buddha’s relics in modern times, they immediately captured the attention of Buddhist scholars and devotees alike.

In the Sotheby’s catalog, the auction house distinguishes the “gems” on sale from the bone fragments and ash found inside. Buyers are invited to appreciate the relics for their material value and fine workmanship. The art market presentation cleanses the “gems” of their inherent association with human remains, while still celebrating their sacred nature to enhance market value. The estimated cost is “upon request,” per Sotheby’s.

For the Buddhists who deposited them — as for Buddhists today — the gems, and his bone and ash, all belong to the Buddha and shouldn’t just be sold to the highest bidder. And as researchers of Buddhist material culture engaged with current global debates around restitution, we see this sale as perpetuating colonial violence.

Back in 1898, British landowner William Claxton Peppé ordered the desecration of the stupa on his colonial Indian estate and found the relics inside the reliquaries. He separated them into two distinct sets: bone and ash in one, gems and precious objects in the other.


The Piprahwa Stupa in India. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Creative Commons)

The British Crown, which ruled over colonial India from 1858 to 1947, claimed Peppé’s finds under the 1878 Indian Treasure Trove Act and distributed the spoils accordingly. The bone and ash went to King Chulalongkorn of Siam in Thailand, a portion of the “gems” went to the colonial museum in Calcutta, and the remaining “gems” went back to Peppé. The gems claimed by Peppé are now being sold by his descendants through Sotheby’s.

We live in a day of increased demand for provenance, or the documented history of ownership of artworks. Sotheby’s buyers are reassured by the claim to legal ownership clearly set out in the catalog, which reads, “Property from the descendants of William Claxton Peppé.”

Do the legal terms established by colonial powers hold today? Is “consent” even a viable concept for colonized peoples? Where are the ethics in this case, where the coercion inherent in colonial contexts ultimately engenders the artful commodification of materials which are of the highest sacred value for vast populations of religious practitioners?

The repatriation of cultural objects wrongfully acquired by European powers from South and Southeast Asia and Africa during the colonial era lies at the heart of today’s movement for an ethical reboot of the art market. In our view, colonial legacies of violence are perpetuated in this sale.
RELATED: Buddhist group says Army Corps’ Everglades project violates religious freedom

The Sotheby’s auction raises other pressing ethical questions. Can human remains be legally traded in our day, who defines what constitutes “human remains,” and how?

The inscribed reliquary found in the Piprahwa stupa is a baseline for considering these questions. Esteemed Indologist Harry Falk authoritatively read the inscription as: “This enshrinement of the corporeal remnants (sharira) of the Buddha [of the Shakyas], the Lord, (is to the credit) of the [Shakya] brothers of the ‘highly famous,’ together with their sisters, with their sons and wives.”


Part of the collection of gems and bone relics from the Piprahwa Stupa in India. (Courtesy photo)

What does this mean? The relics deposited in the stupa by members of the Buddha’s family clan, the Shakya, were considered the sharira of the Buddha. Sharira, often imperfectly translated as “relics,” refers broadly to all remains of the Buddha’s body. There is no categorical difference between “bones and ash” and “gems and stones” here — both are “sharira.”

In the fifth century, the philosopher Buddhaghosa described how the sharira of the Buddha “found in the remains of the Buddha’s cremation fire were of three types —’like jasmine buds, like washed pearls, and like [nuggets] of gold’” (as quoted and translated by John Strong in his 2004 book “Relics of the Buddha”).


The slippage between bone and gem here is not rhetorical; it is a real identification. Buddhists today still look for such gemlike sharira in the cremation pyre of acknowledged masters. For the vast majority of Buddhist practitioners, sharira are not inanimate objects: They are imbued with the living presence of the Buddha or Buddhist masters, who have not truly died, but have reached Awakening.

Some of the contents of the Piprahwa reliquaries may also have been donations made during stupa renovation campaigns or other holy celebrations. Donors make such offerings intending for them to remain in the presence of the Buddha’s remains, effectively melding with them. The relic-offerings are meant to ensure donors’ well-being in this and future lives.

Bringing Buddhist perspectives from the Piprahwa case into the global conversation about transforming arts sector practices, could sharira be seen as “belongings”?

Jordan Wilson, Musqueam Cultural Education Resource Centre curator, in 2015 coined the term “belongings” to reframe cultural “artifacts” in museums and private collections as the personal belongings of the Canadian First Nations communities whose ancestors made them. These communities have maintained intangible connections with these belongings, including knowledge of their power and of how to care for them.

Sharira are belongings in more ways than one. They are belongings of the Buddha, and they are belongings of those worshippers seeking through donation to assimilate their own bodies with that of the Buddha. They have always belonged to Buddhist communities.

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As curator at Singapore’s Asian Civilisations Museum until 2023, one of the authors of this op-ed was responsible for borrowing the Piprahwa relics for the exhibition “Body & Spirit: The Human Body in Thought and Practice (2022-23).” On the last day the relics were on display, people came to meditate in their presence. Over the last six years, the Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the National Museum of Korea in Seoul, the Rubin Museum of Himalayan Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York have also hosted these relics.

The Peppés, who couriered the relics in person to the Asian Civilisations Museum, repeatedly shared their motivation for the exhibit: to make the relics publicly accessible, particularly somewhere like Singapore with a substantial population of practicing Buddhists. Accordingly, the ACM did not charge visitors ticket fees. Which is why the news of this sale came as a shock to us.

While the Peppé family said its wish was to share this sacred heritage with Buddhists worldwide, putting it up for auction makes their museum collaborations look like market strategy.

(Conan Cheong is a specialist of Southeast Asian Buddhist art. Ashley Thompson is the Hiram W. Woodward Chair of Southeast Asian Art at SOAS University of London. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of RNS.)