Democrats on the Seattle City Council launched an attack on renters’ rights in May of this year. Councilmember Cathy Moore introduced legislation to repeal part of the city’s ethics laws, in order to prepare the ground for an all-out attack on the renters rights victories won by Kshama Sawant’s socialist City Council office. The proposed ordinance would have rewritten the ethics code to allow landlord council members like Maritza Rivera and Mark Solomon to vote to repeal renters’ rights despite the obvious conflict of interest.
Workers Strike Back fought back against this attack and was able to defeat it. Councilmember Cathy Moore, a thoroughly pro-corporate and anti-worker Democrat, not only withdrew the bill, she also resigned from the City Council. This was a major victory for Workers Strike Back and its co-founder, Kshama Sawant. It was the second such defeat for city council Democrats in their attacks on Sawant’s past victories. The first was an attempt to undermine
Seattle’s historic minimum wage law last year. Both times, Kshama and Workers Strike Back defeated City Council Democrats by building a movement that exposed what they were attempting to do.
The Seattle Times was outraged by our movement’s victory for working people, but was nonetheless forced to note the scorecard: “It’s Kshama Sawant — 2, Seattle City Council — nil.”
Kshama Sawant served on the Seattle City Council for a decade, where she led movements to win a series of historic victories, including some of the strongest renter protections in the country. She led the 15 Now movement that made Seattle the first major city in the nation to win a $15 minimum wage, now the highest minimum wage in the country at $20.76. She also led the Tax Amazon movement and harnessed the pressure from the George Floyd movement to win a tax on large corporations like Amazon to fund hundreds of millions of dollars for affordable housing.
Renters’ rights at stake
The stakes are high for working people in Seattle where housing costs are through the roof. The average cost of renting an apartment is over $2,100, while the median cost of a house is $898,000. Meanwhile, corporate landlords are making massive profits, and the software company RealPage is being sued for helping them collude to artificially inflate rental prices.
Democrats and the corporate landlords are determined to go after the renters’ rights victories led by Kshama’s socialist city council office. They are infuriated by how much she won for renters. It is a long list that includes a cap on late rent fees at $10 a month, six month’s notice for rent increases, a ban on winter evictions, a ban on school-year evictions of children and public school workers, and economic evictions assistance, which forces landlords to pay renters three-month’s rent if they’re forced to move due to a 10%+ increase in the rent.
Workers Strike Back recognized that we would have to build a strong movement in order to defeat the powerful real estate lobby, and we took a militant approach to the fight from the beginning. One key aspect of a militant approach is knowing who our enemies are and who our allies are. The majority of the City Council is heavily backed by corporate landlords who donate hundreds of thousands to their campaigns. They were, and still are, determined to undermine renters rights laws because renters’ interests fundamentally clash with their donors’ interests. Like in any fight, working people should expect big business and their two parties to oppose us, but they often give dishonest reasons for doing so, such as saying in this case that they were merely changing the ethics code to be more consistent with other cities’ ethics codes. They will hide behind calls for “civility,” as they did in this attempt to gut renters’ rights. While there is nothing civil about attacking the meager existing protections that renters have, they call on us to be “civil,” because we criticized them in chambers and chanted in defence of renters rights.
Building any real pressure against the political establishment requires a movement. The corporate landlords have millions of dollars to throw around and they cannot be taken on by individual renters. A movement approach is required from workers and renters, including mobilizing for civil disobedience. Building a strong movement like this requires organization and an understanding of class dynamics and the history of past working class struggles. It is this understanding that has allowed Kshama Sawant and Workers Strike Back to win victory after victory for the working class.
Our movement made use of the City Council public comment period, an allotted time to address Councilmembers typically limited to one minute per person. When WSB and renters go to public comment, we use every second of that limited time to expose what the political establishment and big business are attempting to do. Rather than talking “nice” and accepting their technocratic explanations for this proposed change to the ethics law, we explained how it was a vicious attack on working people motivated by their attempts to undermine renters rights. We pointed to their loyalty to the real estate lobby and painted a picture of the real estate donors who spent hundreds of thousands to put their preferred candidates into office.
Building movements to defend renters’ rights
After the legislation was announced Workers Strike Back mobilized week after week to both the City Council’s committee meetings and full council meetings. Our movement to defend renters’ rights grew in size each week until over 100 people packed the city chambers for the final committee meeting.
We built political pressure in every possible way, including in City Council chambers. WSB members led chants of “When renters rights are under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back!” and “Who do the landlords love? Cathy Moore! Who do the landlords pay? Cathy Moore! Who needs to be thrown out? Cathy Moore!” We led similar chants for the other councilmembers who were backed by real estate money.
WSB members made sure that councilmembers understood that continuing to support the rewrite of the ethics law would put their political careers at risk. This is crucial if we are able to defend against attacks like these or go on the offensive to win real gains for working people. Because under capitalism, the vast majority of politicians ruthlessly represent the billionaires and corporate landlords. To stop them from doing so in any given instance, we need to build strong enough movements to expose these politicians in front of the wider working class and ensure there is a real political price for them to pay if they go ahead.
WSB members pushed back every time Council President Sarah Nelson attempted to shut us down. For example, when she tried to take away public comment from speakers we chanted “Let him/her speak” until she relented and gave the speaker their full time. When Nelson said “don’t clap”, we clapped louder. When she said “no chanting”, we chanted longer. When she accused us of breaking public comment rules, we pointed out the huge irony that the City Council showed no such loyalty to their own rules which they were attempting to repeal.
In meeting after meeting, the City Council could not handle the pressure and retreated to a zoom room to escape from our movement.
Each time the Councilmembers slunk out of the room, WSB members took over the council chambers and turned it into a public meeting. Kshama stood up in front to talk about strategy for our movement, to announce the next monthly WSB meeting, appeal for people to become WSB members, and to talk about next steps in the fight.
This politically clear and militant approach is how our movement once again defeated the City Council.
Next steps to build movements for offensive wins
The way Kshama won renters rights victories and the way Workers Strike Back defeated these attacks by the Democrats were one and the same. WSB built strong movements of working people to fight relentlessly for our interests against big business and its political representatives. In the absence of movements, both Democrats and Republicans will carry out attack after attack on working people, because they do the bidding of big business and the corporate landlords. We should be clear that this defeat will not stop Seattle Democrats from future attacks on renters’ rights. And they’ve already indicated they intend to have another go at our renters rights victories. When they do, WSB will again go all out to defeat them.
It’s not for nothing that Seattle real estate lobbyist Jamie Durkan once said “every dollar being spent by the real estate lobby was wasted because of Sawant’s ‘army’.”
We need our militant, movement-based approach to spread nationally, which is why we launched Workers Strike Back. Working people need to organize independently of both parties of big business if we are to challenge the rotten status quo. And we need a new party of, by, and for working people that will organize strikes, protests, and civil disobedience.
Become a member of Workers Strike Back today to join our fight and help prepare the ground to build a new party.
Workers Strike Back is supporting Kshama Sawant’s campaign for U.S. Congress campaign which is fighting for rent control, for free healthcare for all by taxing the rich, and for an end to the genocide in Gaza. Millions of people support these demands, but in order to win we need thousands of working people to join our movement.