Mission &

Points of unity

MISSION

Tenants Union of Brattleboro (TUB) is a member-run, anti-capitalist, democratic collective organizing the tenant class throughout Brattleboro and its outlying towns. Through education, direct action, and coalition building, we are working to dismantle the current tenant-landlord paradigm and place power back into the hands of the tenants.

We believe change is only effectively enacted through the people who need it most.
Join us in our fight for safe, secure, and dignified housing for all.

POINTS OF UNITY

As one small group in the larger struggle for the empowerment of all working class people, we are directed by a specific set of core beliefs. TUB expects all members to uphold these standards and hold their peers accountable to them.

Housing is a human right, not a Privilege or a commodity

Too often housing is treated as a means for hoarding and accumulating personal wealth, instead of a vital necessity for everyone. Nobody should be left unhoused while homes sit vacant in the name of profit. As the gap between rental prices and renter’s incomes grow around the globe, we intend to fight to make housing accessible for all.

Housing is an intersectional issue

We fight to center the voices and experiences of all marginalized people, both within our organization and throughout our community. Access to housing is much harder for people in communities that our society systemically oppresses. Our group is explicitly anti-racist, anti-capitalist, and opposed to all forms of gender-, age-, and ability-based discrimination and bigotry.

The relationship between tenants and landlords is fundamentally inequitable

Landlords profit off of the labor of their tenants, while simultaneously cutting corners to avoid costs. We, the renters, are treated like stocks instead of people. For this reason, we do not accept landlords into our organization. This union aims to build tenant power and class solidarity, keep landlords in check, and hold them accountable to their renters.

We are an organization of and for the working class

As power consolidates more and more in the hands of the owner class, solidarity between workers’ groups becomes increasingly important. We understand that a strong and active labor movement is a necessary step on our path to collective power. We stand with labor unions (with the explicit exclusion of police unions and other coercive organizations) and all forms of working class struggle both in the workplace and at home.

We believe in a diversity of tactics

Transforming the power dynamics between landlords and tenants is our primary goal. Achieving this will require relationships with current power structures as well as direct action campaigns, ranging from pushing for legislative reforms to grassroots public-protests. We support a diversity of tactics, and aim to empower tenants to organize within their own communities.

Abolish the police

Inequitable systemic power structures are upheld and enforced through state violence. From the criminalization of poverty and homelessness to the reproduction of systemic racism, and the ways those work together, housing is one of innumerable structures through which people are oppressed and disenfranchised by the law and its violent enforcement by police.

In housing disputes, we understand that interactions with the police may not always be avoidable, but we generally do not encourage engagement with cops. We believe in strategies based in community organizing and mutual aid.

We work in solidarity with other groups in the area towards efforts to defund, de-militarize, and abolish the police.