EARNCon 2022

The Executive Directors’ Strategy Meeting is an opportunity for leaders from the network to strengthen relationships; learn about their peers’ work; learn about EPI’s projects and plans for EARN; and strategize together on how we can drive progressive economic and racial justice policymaking at the state and local level.

In this session, participants will use CPS data to perform analyses in statistical software packages Stata and R.

During this plenary, speakers will welcome EARN groups to the conference and set the stage for what is to come. Panelists will discuss the history of the labor movement in Cleveland and draw parallels between unionization campaigns in Ohio and the rest of the country.

This session will feature workers sharing their motivations and strategies for organizing new unions in public services, health care, and other frontline occupations, while illustrating opportunities to expand state and local policies that advance worker power.

This session will inform conference attendees of the policies, strategies, and actions advocated for during the March on Washington and the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and then to use these social policy requests as a metric to determine which policies were implemented, which have yet to be realized, and what this means for racial economic justice. 

This session will provide an overview of how app-based companies’ well-funded attempts to erode state and local employment and labor laws pose threats to basic worker rights across the country.

Speakers Danielle Alvarado, Fair Work Center Teri Castillo, San Antonio City Council District 5 Terri Gerstein, Harvard Labor and Worklife Program and Economic Policy Institute LiJia Gong, Local Progress Mazahir Salih, Center for Worker Justice of Eastern Iowa   Session Description This session will provide an overview of all of the different ways (even when […]

The plenary will educate conference attendees about the history of Black, Latinx and AAPI workers’ involvement in labor unions and labor organizing and the important role labor unions can play in proactively advancing racial and gender equity in the labor market.

Our discussion will highlight ways to view the intersection of economic and public health outcomes, and how these perspectives can be brought together to design better policy in a post-COVID America.

This session aims to inform EARNCON attendees about strategies that policymakers and advocates are using to advance pro-worker policymaking and supporting the labor movement at the state and local level, with an emphasis on states with anti-labor policies in place, such as “Right-to-Work” laws.

This session, led in coordination with the National Women's Law Center, will address the ways in which work toward income security, worker justice, and economic justice is deeply intertwined with the fight for abortion access, particularly for Black and Brown women.

In this session, EPI experts will lead a discussion among researchers, public sector union representatives, and EARN groups talking to lawmakers and community leaders, to figure out what is happening beneath the headline numbers; how it’s affecting public services; what lawmakers and advocates can do about it; and what it all means with the threat of recession and austerity looming.

In this session, panelists will highlight how to build a successful advocacy plan by forming partnerships that lead to an effective "inside" and "outside" strategy to challenge longstanding austerity approaches, expand working families' power over the state budget by enacting progressive tax reform, and to win dramatic investments in working-class communities.

This session will explore state and local opportunities to help ensure that federally funded projects benefit workers and their communities, deliver on equity, job quality, and climate goals, and build worker power.

This session will explore the use of the Race Class Narrative with organizers from Ohio, describe key lessons from narrative research, and will discuss how to develop an effective narrative strategy in your locality to push for pro-worker policies.

This session will focus on three examples of victories that combine good paying jobs, racial equity, and tackling climate change.

In this session, panelists will discuss unemployment insurance (UI) developments at the state and federal levels and explain why UI reform is a racial equity imperative.

This session will bring together our Earn in the South partners to share their efforts and exchange strategies about how to lower barriers to employment and income raised by involvement in the criminal justice system.

Join this session to discuss the state-level strategies that have worked and the immigrant-led workplace organizing that is happening in states around the country.

This session will focus on what states can do to build a better care system, inclusive of child care, paid leave, and long-term care provisions including nursing facilities home and community-based services.