Reflecting on Labor Notes 2024
What happens when 4,700 community organizers, rank-and-file workers, and dedicated troublemakers get together over a long weekend?? They organize, share skills and winning strategies, collaborate across industries, and dissect past campaigns and roadblocks! Most of all, attendees of the recent Labor Notes Conference in Chicago celebrated historic wins across the country – the UAW stand up strikers, the striking Newton educators, the UPS workers and their rejection of a tiered contract. We also danced at the UMass Labor Center reception, crashed the Railroad Workers United convention, rallied for Palestine, and stuffed our bags with labor-focused summer reading.
Workers taking part in fights across the country led over 300 workshops, like “Building Women’s Power on Heavy-Duty Jobs,” “Creative Tactics and Strategic Mischief,” “Black Labor Struggles Over Time: An Intergenerational Panel,” and “Worker Justice is Disability Justice: Building Unions for Everyone.”
MassJwJ attended a panel called “Reproductive Justice: Rights to Abortion and Parenthood,” that featured Glitter Felten, an organizer at Central Florida JwJ. Speakers reflected on the challenges of working in politically hostile spaces, asking questions like: “How do we organize our communities to join the fight for equitable healthcare?” and “How can unions bargain for healthcare benefits in a way that lifts up all workers?” Others shared their experiences working in abortion clinics in the Midwest. Not only do they continue to battle for bodily autonomy on behalf of their clients and selves, but they also sought union representation within their workplace. In the Q&A we discussed sharing language and creative ideas for inclusion in our union contracts, so that workers receive the reproductive healthcare they deserve.
In “Labor and Mass Incarceration: Fighting for Workers, Communities, and Justice,” moderators urged the audience to engage more critically with their unions and to build solidarity with incarcerated workers and workers with criminal records. Opening the floor, they asked: “What kind of labor is done by incarcerated people?” We listed a range of jobs – furniture making, textile work, farming, serving fast food – and reflected on the mere pennies per hour that workers are paid in exchange for their labor. Representatives from the Florida organization Beyond the Bars offered first-hand perspectives of working while incarcerated and the struggle to find work and housing with a criminal record. We left energized to make more space in our unions for workers with criminal records, to show solidarity with abolitionist work, and to reject the legal system’s abuses of imprisoned people, while relying on their production.
A number of unions also collaborated to create hands-on trainings where workers could role play scenarios in an effort to build union power, test power mapping, and share expertise in sessions, like “Building Democracy into Contract Campaign” and “Grievance Handling: Best and Worst Practices?.” NewsGuild-CWA provided a workbook in the session “Inoculation” to guide participants through questions to ask coworkers and neighbors. We also discussed how to manage expectations and potential roadblocks that workers or communities might face when building campaigns.
On the final morning of the conference, we cheered as UAW President Shawn Fain recounted the events of the night before. Workers at Volkswagon in Chattanooga, TN won a historic vote to unionize, a vote that Jobs with Justice organizer Michaela Winter had the opportunity to celebrate in person. In the wake of this tremendous success, we acknowledged labor’s deep roots in the South – of worker solidarity, of righteous resistance to the violences of racism and Capitalism, and of militant organizing.
Listening to workers from Waffle House, from Starbucks, from Amazon, and so many other industries, MassJwJ celebrated the upsurge of organizing in the US and globally, and we returned home to Massachusetts with renewed energy and commitment to racial, economic, and social justice in our communities and workplaces.
