EARN network members are actively engaged on a wide range of issues affecting working families in their states and communities. They provide original research, data analysis, policy recommendations and substantive advice to state and local lawmakers, coalitions, issue campaigns, and allied advocates, organizers, and grassroots engagement organizations. The network also engages in cross-state work, taking on an issue of common interest in a manner that both uplifts the issue as a national concern, while allowing for the specific recommendations and approaches to be adapted to local cultural, political, and economic conditions.
Issues & Projects
Issues
Climate Justice
Global climate change is a potentially catastrophic problem that will disrupt people’s access to the basic elements of life–food, water, shelter, and health. Because greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are nearly always the result of economic activities, economic policy will play a key role in any effort to mitigate climate change. The size and imminence of the danger from climate change calls for using all potential levers of economic policy—at all levels of government—to reorient economic activity away from GHG emissions. This transition must be guided by principles of racial equity and economic justice that protect, support, and empower working people and highly impacted communities.
Public Services, Budgets, and Economic Development
Too often, states and cities pursue economic development strategies that amount to little more than tax giveaways to big corporations. Pushing back on this flawed approach, EARN groups design and promote smart economic development policies that invest in infrastructure, in people, and in the communities where opportunity is lacking.
Unions and Worker Power
Ensuring that workers can band together in a union is essential to protecting working people on the job and ensuring a vibrant middle class since the protections, rights, and wages that unions secure affect both union and nonunion workers alike.
Wages, Labor Standards, and Job Quality
Every American who wants to work should be able to get a good paying job. EARN groups advance policies to make more good jobs available, and ensure that all people have the resources they need to obtain secure employment. The vast majority of American households’ income comes from what workers receive in their paychecks – which is why wages are so important. Unfortunately, policy decisions at the federal and state levels have left wages stagnant for most U.S. workers for decades. EARN groups advance policies that will raise wages for all workers.
Worker, Racial, and Gender Justice
Discrimination and systemic racism and sexism have caused dramatic and persistent racial and gender inequality in virtually every measure of economic well-being. Improving economic conditions for all workers requires confronting the specific harms and challenges faced by women workers and communities of color.
Serious attempts to understand the gender wage gap should examine where our economy provides unequal opportunities for women at every point of their education, training, and career choices.
Projects
EARN in the Midwest
EARN in the Midwest promotes racial, gender, and economic justice. We aim to advance policies that address the needs of working families and reduce the racial disparities that plague our region.
EARN in the South
EARN in the South is a cross-state initiative to develop a pragmatic, but aspirational agenda for improving economic conditions for working families in the South.
EARN in the South Vision Statement
EARN in the South Shared Vision Statement
Family Economic Security
Work supporting key economic policy reforms that have a transformative impact on children and families, and that advance racial and gender equity .
State of Working X
Detailed reports by EARN groups describing the economic conditions for working families in their state.
Worker Power Project: Centering worker power and equity in the implementation of industrial policy
EARN’s Worker Power Project, launched in 2021, focuses 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.
Other issues important to EARN
- Budgets and Taxes
- Care Economy
- Criminal Legal System
- Economic Development
- Education
- Enforcement
- Federal funds for state and local governments
- Healthcare
- Housing
- Immigration
- Income Inequality
- Infrastructure
- Job Training & Apprenticeships
- Jobs
- Manufacturing
- Minimum Wage
- Overtime
- Paid Sick, Family, and Medical Leave
- Preemption
- Public Services and Employment
- So-Called "Right-to-Work"
- Unemployment Insurance
- Wage Theft
- Wages
- Worker Hours and Fair Scheduling
- Worker Misclassification