Andy Schaefer
Andy Schaefer
US Teamsters on the Frontlines!
US Teamsters on the Frontlines! was a July 16 2023 Freedom Road Socialist Organization/FightBack! webinar on the looming UPS strike.
Participants included Andy Schaefer Freedom Road Socialist Organization - San Jose .
FRSO/Tampa 5
20 activists and community members held a rally, June 9 2023, to demand dropping the charges against the Tampa 5, the five University of Southern Florida of protesters who were brutalized by police and wrongfully charged.
The community emphasized the threat of the bill, now law, that the Tampa 5 were protesting, warning, “Republicans, responsible for setting frightening new precedents with legislation attacking LGBT people, women, reproductive rights, and the undocumented, will not be merciful, and will use the HB 999 to silence all dissenting voices,” said Andy Schaefer, a member of the Silicon Valley Unemployed Committee.
Diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which HB 999 defunds by name, “assist colleges in increasing student and faculty diversity, which can apply to race and ethnicity, as well as sexual orientation, religion and socioeconomic status,” said Schaefer. David Delfim Almeida, a member of San Jose State University Students for a Democratic Society, described the treatment of the Tampa 5 as a “blatant attack on students and faculty of color.”
Jennifer Lin, speaking on behalf of Freedom Road Socialist Organization/FightBack! (FRSO), stated that First Amendment rights that the Tampa 5 were exercising “only exist on paper and are never fully granted to the people, especially not those fighting back against injustice.”
“The state is only heightening their attacks on us because they're actually afraid,” proclaimed Lin. “They're afraid of what we can do when we band together and fight.”[1]
Rally for reproductive rights
On the evening of the day of the SCOTUS decision overturning Roe v. Wade, June 24, about 400 people rallied at San José City Hall. The next day, Saturday, June 25 2022, about 2500 people gathered at San José City Hall to march through downtown.
The rally and march were led by members of Freedom Road Socialist Organization, along with New Students for a Democratic Society, Communist Party USA, Party for Socialism and Liberation, Democratic Socialists of America, and B.L.A.C.K. Outreach San Jose.
David Almeida from SDS spoke to the importance of Roe v. Wade to the LBGTQ community.
Andy Schaefer from FRSO spoke on the effects that this would have on poor and working-class women and other people with the ability to become pregnant, as well as women of oppressed nationalities such as Black and Chicana women.[2]