Jobs With Justice

JOBS WITH JUSTICE. The Jobs with Justice network dedicated itself to defining and advancing innovative forms of working-class solidarity since the late 1980s. First emerging as a union-community coalition, this network of local coalitions provided crucial support to some of the most important union organizing campaigns of the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, including the “Justice for Janitors” campaigns of the Service Employees International Union and the successful organizing campaign of the United Food and Commercial Workers at Smithfield Packing in North Carolina, a rare union win in the US South.

Jobs with Justice has sought to expand unionism beyond traditional, enterprise-based labor struggle. Its mission, as Executive Director Erica Smiley summarized, is “to agitate the labor movement, and workers’ movements writ large, around representing the interests of the entire working class.” By identifying corporate greed as the force behind a wide range of economic abuses, it built organizing and mobilizing campaigns in all kinds of sectors, including health care, education, and housing. Jobs with Justice survived through a highly anti-union political era by both adapting itself to the changing currents in the economy and society and by creating cutting-edge kinds of solidarity.

The coalition was founded by a group of progressive white union leaders and activists in 1987, largely through the efforts of Larry Cohen, then the Organizing Director at the Communications Workers of America. Many of these activists had been active in the struggles over racial justice and the Vietnam war in the 1960s and 1970s and later sought to build solidarity with workers in Central America during that region’s era of revolution and repression in the 1980s.

As US unions’ power declined in the Reagan era, leaders realized that their organizing and contract campaigns were destined to fail without support from community and political allies. Jobs with Justice stepped into the role of re-building those relationships, which were often strained due to the dormancy or conservatism of local AFL-CIO labor councils.

The Jobs with Justice coalition’s first major effort revolved around building a national campaign against Eastern Airlines. Led by the corporate raider Frank Lorenzo, the company’s union-busting reflected the increasingly aggressive techniques used by employers after the 1960s. In addition, the high-stakes financial speculation and workforce “streamlining” that shaped how Lorenzo ran the company foreshadowed the power of hedge funds and financial capital in twenty-first century capitalism and the working class struggles that have resisted it.

The coalition’s work was innovative in a variety of ways. In its early years, the focus on creating permanent coalitions, rather than short-term, issue-oriented alliances, distinguished it from ACORN and groups influenced by Saul Alinsky or the Midwest Academy model of community organizing. In the 1990s, it created its own “Workers’ Right’s Boards” to move beyond traditional forms of labor adjudication, which were rendered increasingly powerless by weakened labor laws. The Workers’ Rights Boards were community-based panels composed of local student, religious, and community groups, and they endeavored to identify and highlight local labor abuses to put public pressure on employers and politicians.

In the early 2000s, Jobs with Justice galvanized new forms of solidarity by mobilizing unionists to participate in direct action and civil disobedience in the name of protesting corporate globalization. The coalition experienced rapid growth during this wave of organizing against sweatshops and “free trade,” and it helped integrate and amplify the voices of workers of color in a movement often led by white, middle-class activists. The national Executive Director, Fred Azcarate, along with many local coalitions, collaborated to help bring workers to the World Social Forum in Brazil and helped create Grassroots Global Justice, an organization dedicated to building solidarities between low-income communities and communities fighting for racial justice with movements in the Global South. By the early 2000s, Jobs with Justice was an expanding network of more than forty local coalitions, a network of Student Labor Action Project groups at university campuses, and a growing national office. Much of the national work in this era was led by a younger, diverse group, many of them from working-class backgrounds and many with experience working with local unions, national progressive organizations, or the United States Student Association.

Jobs with Justice has since dedicated itself to identify strategic sectors for targeted organizing, with a focus on the most vulnerable workers. It helped create the Asia Wage Floor Alliance in 2005 to push for regional wage standards for production workers sourcing materials for transnational corporate retailers like Wal-Mart. It established a “Caring Across Generations” campaign for care workers in health care and related sectors. It expanded its immigrant worker organizing capacities and helped lead successful state-wide initiatives to raise state minimum wages. In 2012, it merged with American Rights at Work, an advocacy organization dedicated to passing a federal labor laws that protect workers from employer interference in organizing campaigns and elections.

After the merger, the network increasingly sought to apply collective bargaining standards and practices to economic relationships beyond the workplace. It helped organize indebted students to make demands on big banks. It supported campaigns organizing renters to make demands on corporate landlords, noting how some corporate landlords sought to evict renters despite how residents faced governmental “shelter in place” orders during the COVID-19 pandemic. While COVID-19 eviction moratoria helped protect some renters from eviction, the policies nevertheless kept working-class renters on the hook for accumulated rent payments. Jobs with Justice helped align renters, allies, and organizations to demand full rent forgiveness from corporate landlords, given the skyrocketing wealth the latter have accumulated in the wake of the 2008 Great Recession.

Larson, Eric, ed. Jobs with Justice: 25 Years, 25 Voices. Oakland: PM Press, 2013.

Larson, Eric. “Ode to the American Century: Ambivalent Americanism and the Founding of the Jobs with Justice Coalition.” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas. 12, 3 (Sept. 2015), pp. 53-74.

Smiley, Erica. “A Primer on 21st-Century Bargaining.” In Fine et al., eds. No One Size Fits All: Worker Organization, Policy, and Movement in a New Economic Age. (Champaign, IL: Labor and Employment Relations Association, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, School of Labor and Employment Relations, 2018), pp. 205-217.

Smiley, Erica. “Time to Tackle the Whole Squid: Confronting White Supremacy to Build Shared
Bargaining Power.” Class, Race, and Corporate Power 5, 2 (2017).

Smiley, Erica. “Crisis, Creativity, and a Labor Movement Revival.” New Labor Forum. 28, 3 (Sept. 2019), pp. 80-87.

Jobs with Justice Website. https://www.jwj.org