Bay Area Talks with Robert Ovetz December 2025

Quite pleased to be offering a workshop on workers' inquiry and recent inquiries into the cafe and non-profit sectors in the Bay Area this December with my comrade Robert Ovetz. Join us!

EVENTS SCHEDULE

• San Fransciso: Sunday, December 7 at Time TBD as part of the Howard Zinn Book Fair: Using Workers’ Inquiry to Organize and Fight the Boss (Workshop)

• Oakland: Tuesday, December 9 at 6:00PM—East Bay DSA Office: Using Workers’ Inquiry to Organize and Fight the Boss (Workshop). Please RSVP Here.

EVENT DESCRIPTION

Using Workers’ Inquiry to Organize and Fight the Boss

Café, nonprofit, and public and private sector workers across the United States are on the move—refusing current regimes of work, fighting bosses and organizing unions, speaking about their working lives and demanding workplace democracy. Our workshop will examine two recent workers inquires with café and nonprofit workers in the US. Robert Ovetz will recount his inquiry into the nonprofit industry in his forthcoming Rebels for the System: NGOs, Capitalism and the Labor Movement (Haymarket, 2026). Kevin Van Meter will report on his recently coauthored “Class Composition in the Café Sector” (Notes from Below, 2025) and speak about his forthcoming Reading Struggles: Working-Class Self-Activity from Detroit to Turin and Back Again (AK Press).

In this workshop participants will have the opportunity to practice a workers’ inquiry to understand the position of their work in the current capitalist economy to develop new tactics and strategies to build our power. The workshop teaches how workers’ inquiry can help circulate workers’ struggles and build working-class power to take on fascism.

Robert Ovetz is a senior lecturer at a Bay Area university who teaches Political Science and Labor Relations. He also writes about the workers movement for Dollars & Sense magazine.

Kevin Van Meter is an author, instructor of labor education, and union organizer.

Robert and Kevin are two of the co-editors of Real World Labor (Dollars & Sense, 2024)