We, the GrowNYC Workers Collective, stand with the people of Palestine. We uphold the calls from Palestinian Trade Unionists to demand an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. We echo the calls of Palestinians and demand an end to the siege and blockade of Gaza, an end to the aggression in the West Bank, the immediate release of all Palestinian political prisoners, and an end to the occupation of Palestine, with the implementation of the right of return for all Palestinians living in exile. We reaffirm the Palestinian people’s right to self-determination.
We condemn the government of Israel’s ongoing 75 year long occupation, displacement, state violence, apartheid, and genocide committed with political and financial backing from the United States, funded by our taxpayer dollars.
We give enduring support for Palestinian workers against the infrastructure of occupation, siege, and blockade. We are laborers that address issues of sustainability, food access, and climate change. We condemn the Israeli occupation for withholding access to safe food, water, and electricity for the purpose of collective punishment and starvation of the 2.3 million people of Gaza. We recognize the particular destruction faced by Palestinian farmers, who have harvested culturally significant produce and stewarded the earth for generations. Palestinian people are now faced with soil contamination, water pollution, and devastated ecosystems that could render the land untenable for decades. We, the workers, strongly condemn the use of environmental degradation as a weapon, as it contradicts the principles of our work, which is committed to preserving livelihoods and land. Therefore, we call for efforts to adequately address these environmental injustices and work towards a sustainable and equitable future.
Thus far, we have been disappointed by GrowNYC’s response to the ongoing genocide.
We have received emails that have acknowledged synagogues but not mosques in a list of sensitive locations during a rise of anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic acts of violence. Communications about Palestine solidarity protests occurring near our sites have shown disproportionate assessments of threat, which impacts our ability to serve our communities. The censorship, erasure, and fear-mongering we have seen in these past months demonstrate the failures of an organization that strives to adhere to a DEI framework. We call on GrowNYC to actively recognize the legal right to protest in public spaces; these peaceful protests are not an excuse to actively increase NYPD presence in the public locations where so much of our work takes place. We, the workers, want more than just the optics of DEI, we want our workplace to uphold our promised standard.
We object to RWDSU President Stuart Applebaum’s pledge of unwavering support for Israel and its occupation forces. By refusing to acknowledge the decades of violence that contextualize the current moment, he fails to represent the voices of the labor movement. The GrowNYC Workers Collective organizes with a commitment to international solidarity, indigenous sovereignty, and social justice as set forth by Labor for Palestine. These are basic trade union principles that we will push RWDSU to uphold.
From NYC to Gaza, the GrowNYC Workers Collective believes that food security, indigenous sovereignty, and environmental justice are integral parts of our collective liberation.
Free Palestine!
The GrowNYC Workers Collective
