Right to Organize and Expanded Protection Against Retaliation

Right to Organize and Expanded Protection Against Retaliation

This is the first in our Expanding Tenants’ Rights series, which explores options for legal changes that would benefit tenants and tenant organizers.

Lesson Objectives

01

Learners will understand the Right to Organize and Expanded Protection Against Retaliation.

Learners will understand the current situation of these rights in Texas and the possible forms these rights could take.

02

03

Learners will be able to connect these rights to their organizing.

Expanded Protection Against Retaliation

• When tenants organize or just exercise their rights as tenants, landlords lose power, money, or both. Many landlords respond to this with retaliation: enacting changes that materially harm the tenants targeted.
• Examples: increasing rent, taking away services, eviction or non-renewal of lease
• Tenants are able to organize most effectively if there are laws that protect them from landlord retaliation. These laws prevent tenants from being singled out by landlords without just cause.

Expanded Protection Against Retaliation

The current state of this right in Texas:

• Landlords are prohibited from retaliation against tenants for 6 months from the tenant’s first action that might lead to retaliation.
• The time limit on this protection severely undercuts its effectiveness and especially prevents long-term growth of tenant power.
• Retaliation is also very difficult to prove; in Texas, the responsibility falls on the tenant to prove that a given action is retaliation, rather than on the landlord to prove that the action is not retaliatory.

Expanded Protection Against Retaliation

Possible Changes Based on Example Laws:

• 24 states and Washington, D.C., have retaliation protections that go further than Texas’ laws do.
• The most obvious, immediate improvement to Texas retaliation laws would be to remove the 6-month time limit. Many states and municipalities have increased that window up to a year, while some lack a limit entirely.
• In most of the country where retaliation laws exist, they include an assumption of retaliation – this puts the responsibility on the landlord to prove that a given action wasn’t retaliatory.

One recent example of a successful campaign is the 2019 passing of New York State’s Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which increased retaliation protections and expanded the state limit on protections from 6 months to one year, among many other changes to tenant law. Samuel Stein writes how about this victory was won:

“Day in and day out, New Yorkers have been organizing at every scale, through informal community networks as well as through individual tenant associations. Those groups, along with many others — including smaller but no less longstanding or effective neighborhood-based organizations — have been organizing in buildings and pushing legislators for a very long time, and helped build up the movement infrastructure necessary to wage this legislative fight. Finally, and perhaps most obviously, this legislative victory could not be achieved without a change in the legislature. In the last statewide election cycle, New Yorkers organized to primary a slew of Democrats who were holding up rent law reforms and other items on the left legislative agenda. Their victories resulted in not just a functional Democratic majority in the state senate, but a group of reformers in office with strong allegiances to tenants and the tenant movement. Many of them had forsworn contributions from the real estate industry, and were thus harder for the landlord lobby to capture in an effort to block or water down the bill.”

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/06/new-york-housing-tenants-universal-rent-control

Right to Organize

• While renters have some protections from retaliation in Texas, there’s little else in the laws that supports the act of organizing, which is obviously crucial to tenant power.
• An affirmative right to organize specifically protects organizing under state or municipal law, and helps shifts the balance of power in the courts away from landlords.
• Often included within this right are several enumerated activities that tenants are protected in doing that are important parts of organizing.

Right to Organize

Possible Changes Based on Example Laws:

• There are fewer examples to draw from than with retaliation protection, but we can still look at a few states and municipalities where rights to organize have been codified into law.
• Seattle, Washington, D.C., and East Palo Alto, California all have added the right to organize to their municipal codes, and specified in their codes the protection of many organizing activities, like holding meetings, distributing pamphlets, and, crucially, organizing by non-tenants.
• Texans might find it valuable to consider gains won in Florida, which has a more limited right to organize for mobile home park residents

Right to Organize

Click the icon above for a transcript of the video

Watch the above video from 9:21 until the 11:10 mark.

Right to Organize

• In February 2022, Austin City Council unanimously passed a resolution directing the City Manager to prepare an amendment for consideration by City Council.

• The ordinance was presented later that year and was passed by October of 2022

• It ensures the right to organize, lays out exactly what landlords are barred from doing in violation of that right, and guarantees the ability for outside organizers to come to apartment complexes

References

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/06/new-york-housing-tenants-universal-rent-control

https://www.austintexas.gov/edims/document.cfm?id=375393

https://services.austintexas.gov/edims/document.cfm?id=395711

https://pod.link/1448414128/episode/9f552a535ba39841c5a81665bb2140f7

John Henneberger: The reason I particularly wanted to talk to you in this episode is there's been publicity in the last month or so about the Austin city council considering some expanded protections for tenants beyond what exists in current law. I know that the members of the city council often reach out to people who are members of BASTA and seek their advice and input on these types of things. And I know that you monitor what's going on at the city council and are often asked about these laws. Can you tell us what's cooking at Austin city hall? Shoshana Krieger: Yeah, so there are two exciting potential laws, which may be enacted, there were resolutions, which were, passed, unanimously, in February, directing city staff to create two ordinances. And both of these ordinances, would significantly change the rights of tenants in Austin. So the first one, which is related to what we were just talking about, which is all about organizing, would give tenants the right to organize in Austin. UT did a report, a couple of years ago, which, looked at different states and jurisdictions and what a right to organize could look like and proposed a model ordinance. And the model ordinance, which they had proposed would include the right of tenants to be able to knock on their neighbor's doors, to pass out flyers, to be able to invite an organizer from a nonprofit onto the property to be able to have meetings in common areas. And that organizers and tenants could engage in these activities without fear of the police being called, which is something which we definitely have seen.