Tag Archives: feature

Nobody Leave Mid-Hudson Releases Just Utilities Report

A little over a year ago, this blog published an interview with members of Nobody Leaves Mid-Hudson — a Poughkeepsie based nonprofit that has been organizing low-income communities in the fight for affordable utilities.  Several weeks ago, Nobody Leave Mid-Hudson published a fantastic report called “Just Utilities: Organizing for Solutions to the Housing Energy Crisis.” The report draws on the experiences of organizers in Poughkeepsie to offer a template for utility organizing and its role in addressing what remains a national energy crisis.  Check out the report here.

Street Vendors & the Battle to Do Business

By Sean Basinski

Whether they are classified as traditional workers, independent contractors, or self-employed entrepreneurs, street vendors in recent years have been asserting their rights to a greater piece of the economic pie – or hot dog, as the case may be.

This is happening on the global scale, as vendor and other informal sector workers are now being included in UN-level negotiations about urban labor. It is also happening in New York. In April, 2014, the Murphy Institute hosted a panel entitled “Taking It to the Streets,” where members of the Street Vendor Project and allies kicked off their campaign to lift the outdated and arbitrary caps on vending permits, which limits the number of vendors on the street, producing a secondary market for permits and subjected street vendors to countless fines.

More than two years later, that campaign is now gaining steam. A recent undercover investigation by Jeff Koyen in Crain’s New York detailed how the complex permitting system has created a black market that enriches a few, while leaving most vendors earning poverty wages. Continue reading Street Vendors & the Battle to Do Business

Labor History: A Key to Making Bad Jobs Better

By Rebecca Lurie

This summer, the Pinkerton Foundation released a new paper called “Make Bad Jobs Better: Forging a “Better Jobs” Strategy,” by Steven L. Dawson. Dawson argues that the tightening labor market and improving economy offer new opportunities for organizers, educators and workers to bargain harder and “make bad jobs better.” Here, Rebecca Lurie, Program Director for the Community and Worker Ownership Project at the Murphy Institute, responds:

This Pinkerton Paper sings my song! Words like dignity, agency, organizing, self-worth, stability, respect are music to my ears. When workforce development can build pathways to this we do much more than create one job placement at a time. We contribute to the work of building a more just society, rooted in self-actualization and empowerment. Continue reading Labor History: A Key to Making Bad Jobs Better

Dial-an-Organizer: Using Storytelling and Emotion to Build Movements

By Kressent Pottenger

Imagine: you call a hotline to complain about how you were fired for being pregnant or harassed by your manager. On the other end, an operator gives you advice on organizing and labor law.

It sounds unlikely today, but in the 1970s, a group of women clerical workers, frustrated with their treatment, developed and achieved success with these non-traditional methods of organizing.

Migrating from the unpaid labor of the home to wage labor in the office, women workers needed a safe way to confide the humiliations and degradation they were experiencing in their offices. The working women’s group 9to5 therefore developed the “9to5 Job Survival Hotline,” which functioned much like hotlines for domestic abuse or suicide. This private hotline allowed women workers to call, anonymously, describe their grievances in what was at times embarrassing detail, and determine how to push back. 9to5 thereby created a safe space via phone for women workers to call and speak about what they endured on the job, and learn what course of action to take next. Continue reading Dial-an-Organizer: Using Storytelling and Emotion to Build Movements

Undesigning the Redline

In recent years, “gentrification” has infiltrated the everyday speech of urban residents struggling to stay in their communities in the face of rising rents. But gentrification is only one piece of a much longer history of displacement and policy-produced poverty in American cities. This history runs from slavery through Jim Crow, redlining, racial covenants, blockbusting, urban renewal, capital flights, planned shrinkage, the war on drugs, mass incarceration and serial displacement, and weaves a painful narrative of structural racism whose practices and consequences remain alive today.

In “Undesign the Redline,” designing the WE — a “social impact design studio” — illustrates this history in illuminating and sometimes painful detail. Currently on exhibit at the New York City offices of Enterprise Community Partners, this exhibit includes photography, maps, timelines and tools for community engagement, and puts present struggles for racial equality in historical perspective. Using housing policy as an anchor, Undesign the Redline makes it clear that segregation and persistent poverty are the natural outgrowth of a system that has explicitly divided people based on race. Continue reading Undesigning the Redline

Brexit & the Working Class

By Leah Feder

Brits, Europeans and the world at large have experienced a rude awakening over the past 24 hours. The people of the United Kingdom have, against most predictions, voted to leave the European Union — inviting an onslaught of as-yet unknown consequences.

Lots of factors conspired to bring the country to this unexpected place: xenophobia, falling wages, a crumbling National Health System, fear of terrorism. Many causes lie at the origin of these fears and grievances, including decades of neoliberal policies, climate instability and a growing wave of right-wing nationalism that has taken hold both across Europe and here in the United States.

That the predictions about this vote were so off-base can be attributed to a country that is starkly divided along geographic and generational lines. Those in control of the media narrative, the intellectual and political elites — these are not the people who came out to vote “leave” yesterday. In fact, it would seem as if the two camps can barely understand one another’s existence — let alone hear what each other has to say. Continue reading Brexit & the Working Class