Jerome Scott was a labor organizer in the auto plants of Detroit in the 1960s-’70s, and a member of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers. As a community organizer, popular educator and author in the South since the 1970s, he was a founding member and former director of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty & Genocide in Atlanta, GA. He has been active with the National Planning Committee of the U.S. Social Forum, Grassroots Global Justice and other organizations, including the League of Revolutionaries for a New America. He is author/co-author of numerous chapters and articles on race, class, movement building and the revolutionary process, and is a contributing editor to four popular education toolkits including The Roots of Terror and Today’s Globalization.

Stacy Davis Gates is the president of the Chicago Teachers Union and the executive vice president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers. Before her election as president in 2022, Davis Gates had served as vice president and as political and legislative director. In the Fall 2019, she helped to lead a 15-day strike and to negotiate an historic contract that provides for smaller class sizes, ensures a nurse and social worker in every Chicago public school, secures sanctuary protections for immigrant families, and supports students and families experiencing homelessness. In 2017, Ms. Davis Gates was elected Chair of United Working Families, an independent political organization by and for working-class people and our movements. She also serves as a board member for the Action Center on Race & the Economy (ACRE). Currently she is on leave from teaching high school social studies, which she did for more than a decade.

Chris Smalls is co-founder of Amazon Labor Union, the independent worker-led union that won a union vote at Amazon’s Staten Island JFK8 warehouse in April 2021. He had worked for Amazon from 2015 through March 2020, when the company fired him for leading a walkout to protest lack of health and safety protections for workers in the deadly early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Susan DeCarava is president of the NewsGuild of New York, Local 31003 CWA. She began working for the NewsGuild of New York in December 2008 as a Local Representative, after serving two years as unit chair at the Writers Guild of America, East. At the Writers Guild, she organized against an anti-union campaign, fought to increase wages and eliminate pay inequity between the administrative and professional staff, and preserved paid sick leave. As one of the Guild’s longest-serving local representatives, she worked with members across the Local to achieve strong contracts and to address issues including wage suppression, hostile work environments, access to professional training, career advancement, affordable employer-sponsored health care, and increasing diversity in the newsroom.