EARN’s Worker Power Project is focused on expanding the ability of working people to achieve racial, gender, and economic justice through organizing, collective bargaining, and state and local policies that protect workers’ rights to form or join unions. The project draws directly on EPI and EARN groups’ longstanding commitment to economic policies that work for working people while building new capacity to support worker organizing, create the collective, democratic power necessary to bring dignity to all work, achieve racial and gender equity across occupations and industries, and shape a new worker-centered economy for the future.
Key project strategies include:
- Winning state and local policy changes that build worker power and advance racial and gender justice: Advancing state or local policies that expand rights of workers—including those historically excluded from state or federal legal protections—to freely exercise the right to join together in a union, gain a voice on the job, and collectively bargain with employers;
- Building worker power research capacity and policy partnerships: Expanding the capacity of EARN groups to co-lead research and advocacy on state and local worker power policies, while developing or deepening on-the-ground partnerships among EARN groups, labor unions, worker centers, and other grassroots organizations.
- Developing robust, research-based worker justice narratives: Generating and widely distributing research reports, case studies, and other published products that tell coherent state, regional, and national stories about worker power and its importance, explain and assess the impact of state and local worker power policies, and shape public discourse on the economic and equity impacts of unions and the importance of expanding workers’ rights to form or join unions.
- Leveraging public investments to build worker power: Shaping implementation of state, local, and federal investments through policy and organizing campaigns that ensure public investments yield lasting community benefits including increased access to good union jobs; new pathways to unionization for Black, brown, and women workers; and durable long-term labor, community, and climate justice coalitions.
