Speakers
- Adewale Maye, Economic Policy Institute
- Jessica Fulton, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies
- Alex Morash, One Fair Wage
- William Spriggs, AFL-CIO
Session Descriptions
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.
Speakers
- David Kallick (Moderator), Immigration Research Initiative
- Anthony Capote, Immigration Research Initiative
- Jessie Hahn, National Immigration Law Center
- Paulina Lopez Gonzalez, National Domestic Workers Alliance Labs
- Kevin Slayton, Maryland Center on Economic Policy
Session Description
The social and political climate of the past few years has led to bold advocacy around immigrant rights and worker organizing. Delivery workers and farm laborers have advanced their organizing strategies and achieved policy wins. Work-related programs such as unemployment compensation and the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) have been extended to formerly excluded workers. The Biden administration has made changes to immigration enforcement to reduce immigrant workers’ barriers to organizing and is now being pressured to do more. 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.
Speakers
- Kyle Moore (Moderator), Economic Policy Institute
- Dania Francis, University of Massachusetts Boston
- Rachel Marie Brooks Atkins, St. John’s University’s Tobin College of Business
- Brian Smedley, Urban Institute
Session Description
In a wealthy country like the United States, we collectively decide how healthy we want our population to be by deciding how we distribute our resources (up to and including the provision of health care), and how we distribute the costs of producing the goods and services that keep our economy running. Historically, these decisions have been made in ways that benefit wealthier White Americans, while the health consequences of production fall on poorer, Black, and brown communities. The pandemic underlined the facts that 1) our existing economic arrangements lead to worse inequality when crises occur, both economically and in public health, and 2) we can effectively reduce that inequality when we want to through the smart use of public policy. Both insights are present in the stratification economics and political economy of public health frameworks. Our discussion will highlight how these two approaches view the intersection of economic and public health outcomes, and how both can be brought together to design better policy in a post-COVID America.
Speakers
- Jennifer Sherer (Moderator), Economic Analysis and Research Network (EARN)
- Tia Banks, SEIU Local 512 – Virginia
- Jacob Oldefest, Denver Health Workers United (CWA)
- Libby Vasey, Ohio Federation of Teachers (AFT)
Session Description
This plenary 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. Workers across the country are organizing new unions to improve their work lives and the public services they provide, often against long odds, and sometimes without full legal rights to unionize and collectively bargain. Such rights are essential for all workers, yet millions of workers lack full union rights due to long-standing occupational exclusions in federal labor laws. Millions more face steep barriers to unionization in temp work, gig work, franchised industries, or other “fissured” workplaces. Rooted in racism and sexism, these exclusions and barriers contribute to economic, racial, and gender inequalities across the labor market and economy—while leaving it up to each state to set policies on union rights for millions of workers. This session will consider lessons from workers’ experiences in recent organizing campaigns from states with a range of strong or weak union laws, the difference unions make in workers’ lives and to the public good, and how state policies shape workers’ ability to build power.