How to Use the BDS Toolkit for Trade Union Organizers
This toolkit is intended to be shared with trusted union members and organizers in working to end their workplaces’s or employer’s complicity in Israeli apartheid and genocide, and working towards building power in solidarity with Palestinian liberation within a North American context.
We strongly encourage anyone using this toolkit to ensure they are a member of a union or established labor formation and use your union power to end complicity. If you aren’t sure which union to join or need support starting a union and are based in the U.S., check out the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee website and resources here: https://workerorganizing.org/. If you are in Canada, you can look through a list of affiliates with the Canadian Labour Council that can be contacted directly, or get in touch to get help getting into a union.
If you are a worker in the U.S., we recognize that the path to formal unionization can be difficult given the current state of the National Relations Labor Board and the current administration's attacks on labor. While the infrastructure and institutional power of an established union gives great benefit and stronger impact to your campaign, we encourage non-union workers who don’t see the formal path to unionization as viable to take up alternative modes of power building in the workplace outside of the traditional union route. Many worker formations have already done this in the U.S., such as building coalitions of workers’ assemblies like Southern Workers Assembly or worker-led mutual aid networks and worker centers, such as Make the Road New York. Remember, even without a formal union, concerted activity is protected under the National Labor Relation Act (NLRA) - you have the right to organize with your co-workers to address work-related issues.
This toolkit is a developing resource, so please get in touch for updated versions or for any needed campaign guidance. Also share with us any effective organizing practices that can enrich this toolkit.
We can support organizing for Palestine within your union or workplace by:
- Connecting you with the largest coalition of Palestinian civil society, including Palestinian trade unions.
- Connecting you with other trade union partners and organizers who have successfully pursued BDS campaigns globally (including in Europe, Africa, South America, etc.)
- Strategizing with you on the most effective way to organize and build campaigns in your workplace or union.
- Offering advice on intersectional coalition building.
- Helping coordinate actions with partner organizations.
- Uplifting your organizing on social media.
- Working with you to turn your research and workplace mapping into a strategic campaign.
- Note: Clear goals and good research is the foundation of any successful campaign but goals and research alone are not a campaign. Campaigns involve strategy, pressure tactics, coalition building, media, etc. We can work with you to develop a campaign strategy!
If you want support with your workplace or union campaign, please reach out to the BDS North America Trade Union Organizer at [email protected].
Why We Organize for Palestine in Our Workplace
The Palestinian labor movement, almost entirely represented in the BDS movement, is united in calling on workers globally to support the Palestinian struggle for freedom, justice and equality.
As is commonly said in the labor movement, an injury to one is an injury to all. Israel’s ongoing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza with the complicity of western powers has hastened the onslaught of a “might makes right” era that threatens humanity and working people at large. This has manifested itself in the collapse of respect for international law, human rights and workers’ rights.
Today, the Palestinian struggle for justice is at the heart of the battle against a world order of “might makes right” that is being imposed by the U.S-Israel genocidal axis and enabled by European colonial powers. As Israel’s wars of aggression against the peoples of the West-Asia/Arab region expand from Lebanon to Syria and from Yemen to Iran, and as the US threatens the peoples of Cuba, Greenland, Venezuela, among others, it is clear that hardly anyone is safe from this might-makes-right descent to the abyss. Simultaneously, Israel is continuing its genocide in Gaza and accelerating its brutal ethnic cleansing, annexation, settler violence, and violence against our prisoners in the West Bank. This affects us all and therefore should unite us all. The struggle for justice in Palestine is inseparable from the global struggle against systemic racism, exploitation, climate devastation and all forms of oppression.
The consensus in the Palestinian Labor Movement calls for:
Upholding all Palestinian rights as stipulated in international law – at a minimum an end to the military occupation and apartheid as well as respecting the right of Palestinian refugees to return and to reparations;
Ending direct and indirect complicity in Israel's regime of genocide, apartheid and military occupation.
Solidarity begins with ending complicity.
As Palestinian trade unions have written repeatedly, “Israel is only able to continue its livestreamed genocide against Palestinians, including daily massacres, burning our children, men and women alive, or starving and thirsting them to death, due to the ongoing complicity of states, companies and institutions around the world.”
As union members in North America and especially in the U.S. - the number one partner in Israel’s crimes - we have a moral, legal, and financial obligation to end complicity in grave human rights violations and international crimes, including genocide and apartheid.
As trade unionists and workers in North America, we have an obligation to support the calls from the Palestinian people for boycotts and divestment in solidarity with their struggle for freedom, and to most immediately cohere and coordinate our organizing efforts in order to advance a comprehensive arms embargo demand.
Why an arms embargo demand?
As Palestinians continue to face a U.S.-armed Israeli genocide and occupation, a comprehensive military embargo on Israel is the most important urgent demand to organize around in the United States and broader North America. Major labor unions across the U.S. and Canada now adopt a military embargo position, reflecting the majority of the public supporting this demand. A June 2026 Pew public opinion poll shows that 65% of Canadians and 60% of Americans hold negative views of Israel.
It is now our task as workers connected to institutional power to bring this demand into being by: pressuring our unions to:
Adopt a public military embargo position that is reflective of the support among the rank and file,
Act on that position by ending complicity through ending contracts or activities that directly or indirectly support Israel’s atrocity crimes, and
Adopt ethical procurement policies and, where applicable, ethical investment policies that exclude corporations implicated in grave human rights violations anywhere, including in Palestine.
The U.S. is the primary supplier of Israel’s arms and military funding, making the U.S. labor movement uniquely positioned to mobilize pressure towards enacting a comprehensive military embargo.
Endless militarism and coordinated assaults on Palestinian workers heavily impact working people in North America. In both Canada and the U.S., our public and private sector pension funds are investing billions of dollars of our hard-earned savings in weapons, high-tech (including militarized Artificial Intelligence), security, and surveillance companies complicit in the killing and oppression Palestinian workers.
Aside from the large and unconditional military funding Israel receives from U.S. taxpayers, the U.S. has also spent tens of billions of US taxpayer dollars since October 2023 to wage military actions primarily on behalf Israel or at its behest. Some credible estimates put the cost of the US war on Iran, to fulfill Netanyahu’s 40-year-old dream, at more than $100B at the time of writing, excluding indirect costs. A prominent Harvard expert on war budgeting expects the total cost of that war alone to reach at least one trillion dollars. Trump is asking for half a trillion dollars more for the Pentagon, at a time when many working families cannot afford their energy, transportation, health, education and grocery bills.
As workers who bear the brunt of global systems of violence, we must reject hyper-militarization and fight for an end to working people’s resources being funneled into endless wars. And that starts with a comprehensive military embargo against apartheid Israel.
What Does Workplace Complicity Look Like?
Note: it is important to distinguish your union’s complicity from your employer’s complicity. For example, your employer might be complicit in Israel’s occupation, apartheid and genocide of Palestinians via business dealings or contracts with companies that are invested in or partnering with the Israeli government or military (such as auto manufacturing companies contracting with Israel to provide auto parts used for military, prison, and police purposes). This then becomes a question of how to use your union as a vehicle (via contract negotiations, resolutions, amendment adaptations, etc.) to pressure your employer to cut contracts with complicit companies. If your union is complicit (such as having pension funds or bonds invested in or partnering with the Israeli government or state-owned enterprises, for example in the form of Israel bonds, or in companies that are enabling Israel’s genocide), then it becomes a matter of pressuring your union leadership to divest from such complicit investments and to pass robust ethical investment resolutions at the local and national level. How to pass a resolution is covered in another section of this toolkit.
