Category: Tactics

why expanding the map matters (Pt. 2)

There’s a popular trope in electoral organizing that involves a young field organizer, dropped into a turf which hasn’t seen a contested election in a while, who tries to bring the newest tactics in their ground game and is told by the county chair, “That’s not the way we do things around here*.” Spoiler: the young organizer does it her way despite the resistance of the entrenched party, and wins the election.

While we don’t have a federalized election process in this country, our elections, for organizing purposes, are still pretty much on a plug-and-play model. There are variations from one state to another–is there early voting? how hard or easy is it to vote by mail? is there same-day voter registration? But at the end of the day, there are  similar rules to follow from one place to the next. Both sides are competing for a fixed endpoint. Pro-worker electoral organizers may not get to set the rules of the election in one place or another, but we do know what they are–as government practices go, the rules for elections are transparent. As a result (while not advised), it is possible to win elections by dropping organizers into a place they don’t know well.

We get into problems, though, when we think we can win policy or worker organizing victories with this kind of plug-and-play thinking–especially when the reliance on plug-and-play means we don’t invest in places where sustaining work is harder. Organizing for policy victories–or organizing to build community support for workers who are taking actions to build power at work that could risk their jobs–both require the kinds of relationship building that plug-and-play organizing doesn’t prioritize.

Particularly when it comes to organizing in support of policy, it is imperative that local organizers understand the mechanics of how their government works–and the rules for how to affect legislation at the city or state level are rarely as clear as those that govern how elections are run. We have made a collective decision that, as a democracy, the state has to at least give the appearance that outsiders can win elections. We have not come to a similar collective conclusion about making the legislative process transparent.

In the last post, I talked about the need to invest in organizing ecosystems, not just individual organizations. As we think about what comes next, in the evolution of the labor movement and worker organizing, it is unlikely that we will see the exact replication on a wide scale of the functions that local unions and their internationals play in the movement. Let’s think about what a 501c5-style labor union can do, in addition to both representing current members and organizing new ones. Unions can make endorsements and spend money on electoral organizing within their membership base; can have a legal department that focuses on electoral law and legislative expertise, as well as labor and/or immigration law; can invest in a legislative director or team that is embedded in policy & legislative work focused at the state or city level; can have organizers that are responsible for building relationships with faith leaders and other community organizations with similar goals; and can have a communications department that is focused both on producing internal content for members and on producing issue-based content that targets the general public. Some unions also have affiliated PACs that can raise hard money from their members, which can be used to influence the general public in elections or can be contributed to candidates running for office. There are, to  my knowledge, no other kinds of organizations in our movement that have this kind of flexibility in combining organizing work with electoral & legislative advocacy–this is the kind of ecosystem, however, that we need to be thinking about, if we want to build deep support for organizations that want to win for workers.

What if every national funder, network or organization, when making their plans for expanding investment into worker organizing in a particular city or state asked themselves the following questions:

  • Does the ecosystem in this place provide legal support, that will both support individual workers in fights on the job and also support a broader strategy for changing the landscape through policy change or litigation?
  • Does the worker organization have a civic engagement strategy to build the habit of voting among its members, or a partnership with a local group that will help with that?
  • What partners in the region will be helping to drum up community support for this effort? If the organization plans to do this itself, is it adequately resourced to build relationships, or is this an add-on for an already-stressed worker organizer?
  • How will the word get out? Does the area have a local group that is focused on building relationships with the media and developing messages that resonate with the public?
  • Who is tasked with building relationships with not just elected officials, but their staff? Is this a part of the work that will be internal to the organization, or is there an outside consultant that can be hired, who knows how the target legislative body functions?

I’m not, of course, suggesting that any one organization is going to play all of these functions–but all of them are required, if we want to win. We need to do a better job of figuring out the support that worker organizations need, and providing it holistically, rather than opportunistically.

 

 

*if you’re in the mood for lots of cynical takes on the inside game of campaigns and party politics, I can’t recommend CampaignSick highly enough.

a not-entirely-scientific look at our movement in space (Pt. 1)

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As regular readers know, I recently rolled out a project to build a database of economic justice organizations in the US. It’s one of the things I’ve been curious about for a while–how good a job are we doing at building permanent, long-lasting infrastructure, in the face of increased attacks on traditional unions. As it turns out, we’ve got some real work to do to make sure that workers all over the US are able to build power for themselves and their families.

At this point, the database includes information on a total of 293 organizations, most of which are statewide or local groups–18 are national organizations or networks. When I set out to collect information on these groups, I built a list of organizations that are affiliated with national networks–organizations like the Center for Popular Democracy, the National Domestic Workers Alliance, Jobs with Justice, PICO, etc. There are a couple of reasons for that, but the most important one is that, in my experience, it’s much more likely for local base-building groups to be able to raise funding from national foundations if they are connected to a national network that helps to validate and broadcast their work outside their own city or region. I also think that local groups in a national network benefit from the resources of the national network–things like research departments that can provide corporate profiles, intensive legal work, and innovative policy campaigns can be hard for local organizations to sustain (though there are obviously exceptions). National networks can provide an important role of convening a set of local groups that are working on a similar issue and helping them create a fundraising strategy, as well as provide some share resources like communications, that make executing that strategy easier.

What I found, as you can see in the map above (as well as the chart below the directory itself) is that the broader economic justice movement has been just as challenged to fund sustained organizing in the South and parts of the Midwest as the traditional labor movement has. And I think that’s a problem, because what it demonstrates to me is that, as the country’s population has shifted into the Sunbelt, we haven’t created organizing opportunities that give workers there hope that progressive employment policy will someday come.

I was somewhat shocked to see, for example, that the City of Oakland, CA has more of these economic justice organizations (8) than the entire state of Florida (7). Or that America’s smallest state, Rhode Island, has as many groups fighting for better work as does the entire state of Alabama (2).

I’m not trying to take anything away from folks who are doing this organizing in Oakland or Providence–in fact, I’m sure they could use more resources and support too. But we’ve got to do better about adding resources to groups that are working in severely underfunded places, if we want to ever be able to win federal legislation that creates an even playing field for all workers in the arena of wages, or paid time off, or racial justice at work, or any of the many things we fight for daily.

And it clearly isn’t the fault of those organizers running national networks, who are rarely able to seed wholly-new organizing efforts in places that don’t already host it. The start up costs of creating a new organization in a new place will run hundreds of thousands of dollars per year–and the work isn’t going to pay off in victories in the first year. It isn’t easy to raise money to fund solid, consistent organizing work for the five years or more it can take to build a base of support and begin racking up organizing or legislative wins–and that can take even more time in places with unfriendly legislatures with few elected allies to champion work. Some of the national networks are connecting groups that do base-building or direct worker organizing (CPD, JwJ, NDWA, NDLON, ROC, etc.), while others are connecting groups that provide legal support or help advocate for policy changes (PICO, Gamaliel, IWJ, etc.). In the places where our movement has had the most success winning local and statewide victories, you can see a rich ecosystem of groups that help support each others’ campaigns. We should be figuring out how to expand the map with those rich ecosystems, not contract in the few places we’re already winning to send resources elsewhere.

I’ll be writing another post next week with some of my thoughts about what we can do to change this map–but I’m curious about yours, too. If you have thoughts that you want to share on this issue, leave them in the comments or shoot me an email at  kati (at) hacktheunion (dot) org. I’ll include them in next week’s post, too. And of course–I know there are a ton of amazing worker centers out there that aren’t necessarily connected to national networks, but are still doing needed and important work–so if you know of them, please add them to the directory (I’ll be working to do the same, myself).

*some notes on the map: I’m hoping to soon have a better one that you can dynamically click on, showing which actual organizations are represented here. The lack of clickability creates some representational problems on the map–for example, all of the organizations in GA (3) look right now like they’re in AL, and two TX groups look like they’re in Mexico. I did not display any of the 18 organizations listed as “national” in the database, which would have skewed the DC/NY numbers even more. In states where an organization has more than one office, I only used one of the cities to represent that entire organization.  This is also only the map of the mainland US–there are three groups in the directory that are located in HI & PR, which I couldn’t fit in this screenshot.

Will baristas bring a revolution in worker organizing?

In June of 2016, Starbucks baristas began to notice a change in the way their stores were being scheduled all across the US. More and more of them were working short-staffed, and it soon became apparent that the company had changed its scheduling algorithm to allow stores fewer hours, especially during peak times.

Worker leader Jaime Prater launched a Coworker.org petition calling on Starbucks to improve morale by re-staffing the stores, and in less than a month, that petition had reached 10,000 signatures, most of them from Starbucks workers. These workers (who were both front-line baristas and store managers) didn’t just leave signatures—many of them left substantial comments about their complaints: “As a store manager, it really hurts to write a schedule knowing that it’s going to feel understaffed,” or “Ive (sic) been a partner for over nine years, and this is the worst I have ever seen it. Lines to the door, drinks wrapping around the bar, and they just keep coming.”

Coworker.org organizers have been building relationships with thousands of baristas since they saw the launch of their first Starbucks-related petition back in August of 2014. That petition, which asked Starbucks to change their dress code to allow baristas to have visible tattoos, took off when a handful of baristas posted it to private Facebook groups. As Coworker staff saw the petitions signatures rising, they stepped in to help workers develop a press strategy that would move the campaign forward. “There is a sense that things move forward quickly online,” said Coworker co-founder Michelle Miller, “but that’s not true with this. We’re moving at a human scale—this is run by workers. We could have pushed things from the top, but we want workers to learn things on their own, and to lead the campaign.”

Tim Newman, a Coworker organizer told me, “We knew we would need press to win, so we had to find workers that would talk to the press. There was a committee, and people stepped up in their own ways and connected with each other.” The tattoo petition campaign was covered by national news outlets, and in October 2014, workers got their first taste of victory when Starbucks announced that they were changing the policy, and that workers who had tattoos on their arms would be able to wear short sleeves.

Coworker’s Starbucks network continued to grow over the next two years, as workers started petitions on wages, paid sick leave, and other dress code issues, and at this point, fully 10% of Starbucks employees have joined one or more of these campaigns. Coworker also started a curated email newsletter that directly reflects the experience of baristas inside the workplace—and connected the petitions on issues that had been started by baristas. When petitions are started on similar issues, staff will connect the petition generators to see if they want to work together, but “one worker might be in a better position to promote it, there are so many variables, it’s much more an art than a science,” says Miller.

As the traditional labor movement struggles to develop new models of organizing that reflect the way work has changed from the Twentieth Century, there are a few bright spots in figuring out new ways of building worker power that meet the needs of workers today, many of them being innovated by women- and people-of-color-led organizations. Coworker, along with organizations like the National Domestic Worker Alliance, the Restaurant Opportunities Center, the Taxi Workers’ Alliance, and my own employer, the National Guestworker Alliance, are pioneering new methods of building power for workers.

Baristas who work at the whim of a global corporation are emblematic of a much larger class of US workers that the labor movement has struggled to meaningfully engage with—those who have precarious employment, and often lack power in society—and as their numbers grow, their problems increasingly affect us all. For organizers who are used to building power through intensive one-on-one conversations conducted in workers’ kitchens, and who’ve fought to get back workers’ jobs after they were fired for organizing, the idea that real power can be built without a fight can seem like a stretch.

In discussing the challenges of their work, Coworker’s Miller says, “sometimes the momentum of workers inside the network is faster than we have the capacity to keep up with. If they are taking risks, we want to be able to support them to succeed—we don’t want people to try a bunch of things and fail at all of them.” Currently, Coworker has three staff—not nearly enough to support the 30,000 baristas who have signed petitions on their site, much less all the other workers who have started petitions there.

One important thing to keep in mind, as people develop pilots and experiments in the worker organizing space, is that platform unions will invariably not look exactly like traditional unions. Platform unions might, for example, be able to create some kind of grievance-like intervention—but it is more likely that platform unions will be successful at winning class-action grievances, than that they will have the resources to spend on winning hundreds of individual grievances in a year, as a typical union local might.

Coworker.org and many of the other worker centers and national organizations that are commonly categorized as “alt-labor” are primarily funded through grants from foundations—unlike the traditional labor movement, which has been almost exclusively funded by members’ dues. As online organizing takes more prominence in the work of economic justice organizers, platform unions will need to create new ways of generating the income needed to support their work.

Some potential business models for platform unions could involve creating certification mechanisms that are either worker- or employer-focused. For example—an employer might decide that it needs to find workers who are CPR-certified, or bilingual, or can change a tire quickly—and a platform union could create a pool of certified workers who have been tested and found to hold those skills. Similarly, a platform union could develop a checklist of approved policies, and certify a business as a good employer, to workers who are considering working there. In both of these cases, the cost of certification would be paid by the employer or business.

Another, as-yet-untested tool that platform unions might develop are data collection products, for collecting information about working conditions across stores inside a retail chain’s network, or across an entire industry. Coworker is interested in moving into this space, as is HourVoice, an employer-rating app recently launched in the Chicago area. It’s possible that, as workers become more comfortable with rating their employers online (and are confident about their privacy when doing so) that we’ll start to see class-action wage theft cases that are jointly brought by platform unions and a group of workers from a local, regional or national chain.

A dues model is possible, although in the absence of a collective bargaining agreement that provides greater value than the amount of the dues, it will be hard to make that mandatory. No one wants to pay more in dues to their union than they are getting in raises, every year. However, a platform union could also create a fee-for-service model that helps workers get training that helps them move up the career ladder, or into a new job classification—in the way that union Training & Upgrading Funds, or apprenticeship programs have historically done. One could imagine that a platform union might be able to access workforce development funds that help workers grow new skills.

It can be hard to imagine that an online network of low-wage workers, no matter how tightly linked by technology, is going to be able to replicate the financial stability of the kind that was built by payroll dues checkoff—or that foundations will be reliable sole funders for training and certification that ultimately may benefit commercial employment platforms like Uber or Task Rabbit, if those platforms don’t themselves have skin in the game.

This wouldn’t be an article about digital organizing and unions if it didn’t ask about the role of offline organizing—and while I am a firm advocate of the need for unions in general to beef up their online game, there’s no argument that a face to face conversation is better than a text-based one. One next step, for Coworker and other platform unions, will be to figure out what kinds of value can come from bringing together workers that might not work in the same industry, but exist in the same region, to brainstorm about tactics and just build relationships. One Coworker member—who launched a successful petition to raise wages at her local restaurant chain, after they announced they were reducing all the wait staff to $2.13/hour—pulled together a Labor Day picnic, to meet people in person. As platform unions become more mature, they will invariably have (at least in some cities) the ability to make offline connections. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that an asynchronous online connection is sometimes the best way of reaching someone—especially workers with disabilities, or those with significant parenting or elder care responsibilities, or who is holding down multiple jobs with insecure schedules.

What digitally-savvy worker organizations do have going for them, in the 21st century, is an increased ability to shame corporations, which are more sensitive to brand damage than ever before. Whereas 20th century union organizers had to rely on the nightly news and the daily paper to get their message out and worker struggles rarely became a national story, today’s worker organizations can make an impact by connecting people across the country in a matter of minutes or hours.

At this writing, Jaime Prater’s petition about Starbucks’ scheduling problems has over 17,000 signatures. On the strength of other baristas’ interest, Prater crowdsourced recommendations to the company about hours, pay and perhaps most importantly, making their workers feel valued. After making public and then emailing those recommendations to the company’s CEO, Prater got a return phone call from Howard Schultz himself. The scheduling problems haven’t been fixed yet—but they’ve certainly gotten the company’s attention.

Designing 21st century platform unions—part 1

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what parallels—if any—exist between platforms and unions, and whether there are lessons that can be learned from platform design, that could benefit worker organizers who are looking for new models. This is the first in a series of three planned posts on the topic. In referring to companies as platforms, I am specifically talking about internet-based businesses that provide some kind of a marketplace for different kinds of users (called here in shorthand “buyers” and “sellers”—though of course, on some platforms a user can be both a buyer and a seller) to meet and exchange something of value (money for goods or services, ideas, advice, etc.). In this series, company platforms can refer to sites like eBay or Craigslist, as well as Mechanical Turk, Uber or Etsy. This series should not be read as an endorsement of any of the company platforms or unions mentioned. For the analysis of platforms, I am indebted to the authors of _Platform Revolutions_, and to MIT’s Sloan School for their online course of the same name, as well as Simone Cicero’s work, including this recent article.

Unions and platforms—what overlaps?

One thing to keep in mind is that, at a pretty basic level, unions and platforms are both about disrupting power in an entrenched system. The point of a union is to decentralize power in a workplace, and to put more power in the hands of union members. The point of a platform is to decentralize power in an industry, and to put more power in the hands of users. Of course, both unions and platforms can be guilty of redistributing power in ways that are non-democratic, and sometimes power just gets moved to people who already, as a group, have status or influence in our society.

Let’s look at some of the qualities of a successful platform:

Discovers unused resources & puts them to work

Platforms that have achieved success have largely done so by tapping into markets for unused resources. Whether it’s Airbnb convincing people with an extra bedroom to rent it out occasionally, Etsy tapping into the desire for artists to sell their work to a national or global audience, or Josephine finding people who love to cook for others—successful platforms have figured out ways to sell things that largely weren’t sold **at scale** before.

Combines low cost of entry with a governance model that protects users.

The beauty of most platform businesses is that anyone with a device that connects to the internet can sign up for them, and there is not generally a high cost to staying on the platform. I might sell something on eBay only once a year—but my account stays active, without costing me anything. Because eBay employs a robust rating system, where both sellers and users rate each other, buyers can see that I’m an “honest” seller, even if I don’t sell frequently.

Uses network effects to grow (but needs rapid growth on both sides, early)

Platforms that grow best grow quickly. Uber isn’t worth much to me as a rider, if when I sign up there are too few drivers for me to ever get a ride. And it’s certainly not worth my time to drive for Uber if I have to wait for hours between ride requests, because not enough riders have joined. Uber and other successful ride-sharing companies have figured out that they need to concentrate on expansion of both sides of their user experience, and cannot merely open a new market with only riders signed up.

Immerses staff in data about users

Because platform business is by its nature conducted online, platform designers need to (and are able to) constantly immerse themselves in user data. Anecdotal information doesn’t cut it, when thousands of transactions are happening in an hour. And because it’s possible to “serve” different versions of a website to a segmented audience, it’s possible to run experiments on user engagement that track whether a new design will change the way users interact with the site.

Mono-homing versus multi-homing

The concept of mono-homing is one way that platform businesses seek to keep users on their platforms. Basically, mono-homing means “I have one home for this particular interaction or practice.’ It’s pretty easy to switch from one airline to another for different trips (ie–multi-homing)—so airlines have developed reward miles, to keep you ‘loyal’ to their particular airline (hence, mono-homing). Smart phone platforms have generally adopted this tactic—it’s hard to switch from an iOS device to an Android one, because you have to replace all your apps, and learn new methods of interacting with your phone. Other platform businesses have grown through multi-homing—there is no barrier to being a driver for both Instacart and Postmates, for example, or for customers to order food delivery through both GrubHub and Yelp Eats.

And some of the parallels, of a successful union:

Reduces information asymmetry between workers and bosses

An effective collective bargaining process has the great advantage of giving workers the same information that bosses have, about both the financial health of a company, and to some degree, the strategy the employer plans to employ to grow the business. Workers with more information have the advantage of being able to make better decisions—which might involve deciding to put more of their total compensation package into retirement savings, or to request skills training, to learn to use a new technology the company is implementing.

Has a high cost of entry, combined with a democratic governance model

For most US workers, the choice to join a union comes with peril. It can involve the risk of getting fired, or having to risk going without pay for some period of time to win a strike. In some parts of the country, bosses have successfully framed unions as a polarizing force, and potential members may face social pressure from friends or family if they join a union. And finally, the actual cost of dues (and sometimes, initiation fees) are much higher than in most other social movements. (The financial cost can, of course, be offset by gains made at the bargaining table.) Unions, at least in theory and often in practice, have a democratic governance model that allows for all dues-paying members to have a vote—usually outlined in bylaws that are ratified by members.

Uses network effects to grow value

There is a fairly clear relationship between the rate of union density in the US, and the level of income inequality: as union density has declined, inequality has increased. More union members in a particular industry in a particular market (say—hotel workers in Los Angeles) will inevitably push up wages in that industry, in that region, as they bargain better contracts. However, more union members will also cause anti-union employers to raise wages, as they seek to avoid unionization. In the best times in our history, unions have also leveraged their political power and social pressure to raise wages for millions of non-union workers through minimum wage legislative or ballot initiative campaigns.

Holds data as proprietary (sometimes even within organization)

Unions have not, historically, been great users of data either for member outreach or for making a public case for why they are necessary & socially useful organizations. While most unions are committed to meticulous upkeep of their seniority list, they do not tend to track as assiduously things like average wage rates, family size, number of member children who are able to successfully attend college, or other pieces of information that might be a boon to labor economists, academic researchers, or public policy makers. In addition, many unions hold tight their member contact lists (sometimes even restricting their own staff from being able to see them). The high cost of member acquisition forces unions into this defensive crouch—but the crouch itself can provide an additional barrier to fully serving members’ needs.

Mono-homing is the default

It’s difficult to belong to more than one union. Not impossible, of course—especially in the performing arts where recent years have seen the merger of SAG and AFTRA, acknowledging that many of their members were doing work in both film and TV. There is no institutional barrier in becoming a member of UNITE HERE as, say, a school cafeteria worker and a member of SEIU as a home health aide—but the high cost of dues may prohibit part-time low-paid workers from joining two unions, if the benefits largely accrue to full-time work in both cases.

What’s the market? (where the analogy fails, but we still have something to learn)

Unlike platforms, which mostly deal in single seller/single buyer transactions, unions are generally aggregating the selling power of a large group–in this case workers in one particular worksite or industry—to one particular buyer—the company for whom they work. That transaction is conducted through the collective bargaining agreement, and is enforced by a group of members (aka union stewards and officers) combined with paid staff (of both the union and the company).

However.

As the rate of US unionization has declined, employers have done more and more offloading of their employment to third parties. Many workers who seem identical to full-time employees on their face, are ineligible for traditional unionization because they are employed by temp agencies or other kinds of labor brokers.

For those of us who are interested in seeding new types of worker organization, or evolving some part of our current organization to be more platform-like, the next post in this series will look at how we can design them using best practices from platforms.

A List of Demands? Why “making it plain” is key for movement success.

In the course of my duties as a PhD student here at the University of Alabama, I have had to teach Public Administration. It is not a fun class; the books on the subject are often reactionary in ideology, the material itself is dry, and the specificities of government infrastructure is a bit much for my 200-level students to handle. As most undergrad political science majors do, they want to talk about elections. They want to talk about social movements. They want to talk about the exciting stuff that they see all the powerful people do on MSNBC or FOX or House of Cards.

In that sense, they are no different from their older counterparts. After all, no one is talking about the state legislative races that will determine most of the policies that affect American lives daily; rather we get 24-7 coverage of a presidential race that does not have its first primary contest for another nine months. Yet both groups of people should realize that activism and frontline politics is but one side of the coin; policy and administration is the other.

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The Occupy movement took off right as I was entering my PhD program. It was a sight to behold, and the way in which it transformed American political dialogue is something that we will be grappling with for a long time. It used to be that poverty and inequality were framed as personal failings, things that only a hard work ethic can fix. Now you have elected officials like U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) releasing plans for combatting poverty (horrible as they might be) and the same Barack Obama who chastised parents on the campaign trail in 2008 for “getting that cold Popeyes out for breakfast” to feed their children would introduce a program six years later (flawed as that was also) that would dedicate resources to young Black men in urban areas for education.

Yet amidst all the plans and the discussion, we have seen very little in the way of concrete measures aimed at redistributing wealth and closing inequalities. And if you peruse the website of the NYC General Assembly, the organization that kicked off the Occupy movement, it is hard to find anything in the realm of concrete demands. The closest that you will come is their Principles of Solidarity, which is less a list of demands than it is a loose statement of ideologies that underpin the movement. And good luck wading through the fifty documents under the Demands tag, which appear to be little more than minutes from a committee meeting.

As easy as it may be to pin this solely on Occupy, it is not limited to just them. The most concrete proposals to come out of the police slayings of Michael Brown and Eric Garner last summer are to fit every police officer with a body camera. That seems like a good idea until you remember that Eric Garner’s murder was captured on film, in addition to the fact that he was killed in broad daylight on a busy street corner in Staten Island. The rest of the demands from assorted groups are no less ephemeral than Occupy: truth and reconciliation commissions (typically done after any hope for justice is lost, since no one who has been involved in police brutality would ever forgo their right against self-incrimination), Congressional hearings into police abuse (to what end, no one is particularly sure), and more effective community oversight (with a civilian review board? a streamlined complaint system?). One list of demands even calls for President Obama’s administration to “develop, legislate, and enact” a “National Plan For Racial Justice”. Aside from the fact that the President cannot legislate anything, the details of such a plan are largely left to the imagination.

Given all this, it is little wonder why we have not seen any movement on these issues legislatively or administratively.

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The opposite side of that coin, of course, is the Fight For 15 movement. What are the demands of this movement? Well, it is right there in the title: fast-food workers are fighting for a minimum wage of $15 per hour, which would bring some of America’s most vulnerable members of the working class to a living wage in most areas of the country. While fast-food workers demanding such a wage would have been thought laughable just a few years ago, the movement has scored successes in Seattle and San Francisco, and Portland, OR has raised its minimum wage for city employees to $15 an hour. Even by those standards, the movement would have been considered one of the more successful ones initiated by the working class and their allied organizations (labor unions such as SEIU have greatly assisted in the Fight For 15 effort) in the last generation.

But it did not stop there. The 2014 elections saw minimum wage increases on the ballots in several states, and some of the ones that voted Yes may surprise you: Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota are on no one’s list of most labor-friendly political environments, and yet those states all voted to increase the minimum wage by substantial margins. In fact, the victories in these states were probably the only highlight in an election that saw Republicans win eleven more state legislative chambers and take back the U.S. Senate. The issue also featured prominently in the last dash to the polls in Chicago’s just-concluded mayoral election, where challenger and Cook County Commissioner Jesus “Chuy” Garcia has come out in favor of a $15 minimum wage for employees of the city’s public school system, which has been decimated by budget cuts and closings under Mayor Rahm Emanuel.

And as the movement’s day of national action on April 15th draws closer, it has become clear that this is a fight that will endure for quite some time.

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There are many factors that go into organizing on different issues, and I am not trying to make the case that there are tight parallels between organizing around law enforcement issues and doing the same with regards to the economy. But Occupy and the protests of police violence have failed to “make it plain” and give people something that they can take into their communities and begin mobilizing for social change. That has to change if we are to see the working class build enough power to dismantle the structures that holds progress back.

Robots vs. Apps: What’s an Organizer To Do?

When I started writing this blog, around this time last year, I wanted to get more folks in the economic justice community thinking about technology, and the ways it is changing work. Historically, the labor movement has been painted as a foe of technological change, and I didn’t (and still don’t) think that’s an accurate picture. But I also get that the rapid pace of technological change makes all but the most tech-savvy nervous, at times. And those times seem to be increasing.

In the intervening year, it feels to me as if this topic has gotten a lot more coverage in the mainstream, particularly when it comes to the apps of the sharing economy. There was a little worry, a year ago, about Uber and what it might do to the taxi industry–but there hadn’t been, yet, local government taking action against the company (or Lyft, or any of the other big ride-sharing apps). There was some concern about what AirBnB might mean for hotels, but there hadn’t yet been regulatory action pushing them to pay taxes, or to protect their users. It feels, now, like we are starting to have more of a conversation about the gig economy and what it means for workers today–and I’m happy to have played some very small role in that conversation.

But I’m also worried that we haven’t started yet having the bigger conversation, which to my mind is not about apps, but robots. I’m going to use the term “robot” here pretty broadly–basically meaning any mechanization of work that was formerly done by humans.

If you haven’t yet watched this video that was linked in this week’s newsletter, go do it.

Our movement can be great at reacting–and it’s easy to feel, in the light of so many challenges that face us RIGHT NOW that we don’t have bandwidth to think about what might happen in ten, fifteen or twenty years. But if we don’t, who will be worrying about the impact of widespread job displacement on workers of all kinds?

Next month, as my own celebration of the US’s Labor Day, I’m hosting a tweet chat about robots and work. Please join me–8 pm Eastern, Monday 9/1/14. #robotwork will be the hashtag.