The Murphy Institute is known for its public programming, bringing thinkers, leaders and policymakers together to discuss the issues vital to making change in our city and our world.
Watch Javier Valdez, Co-Executive Director, Make the Road New York and Diana Robinson, Campaign & Education Coordinator, Food Chain Workers Alliance discuss the prospects and challenges of organizing food vendors.
Spring is officially upon us. We saw it in the Fight for 15 protests, bringing workers and activists to the streets in cities across the country. We see it in the upcoming days of action for climate justice. Possibility is in the air. How will you help fight for the world we want to see? Some updates from the week:
Organizing 2.0 brings together hundreds of leaders, organizers, fundraisers, techies and activists to share our collective wisdom, skills, and talents. There will be workshops, trainings, discussions, consulting and networking opportunities, visionary speakers, and a provocative debate around strategy and practices.
Over two days here at the Murphy Institute, we will bring together hundreds of people to learn from each other, share stories and strategies and build our skills, organizations and movements. Featured tracks focusing on online to offline organizing, digital strategy, member engagement and much more.
For more information, visit:
www.organizing20.org or email clenchner[at]organizing20[dot]org
Immigrant youth organizing has grown to become one of the most vital social movement in existence today. How has this movement grown to where it is today? What are some of the pivotal strategic moments that have brought immigration reform to the center of mainstream discourse? An article in the latest issue of New Labor Forum provides some answers.
One of the most important social movements in the United States is the undocumented youth movement (Dreamers). The movement has not been successful in passing the federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act. It has, however, worked closely with its allies to rack up an impressive string of local and state-level victories and pressured the Obama administration to pass Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) in 2012. This latter measure provided approximately 553,000 undocumented youths with temporary relief (two years) from deportation. DACA was an important victory in its own right, but it also provided the legal and political precedent for the broader immigrant rights movement to push for a similar measure to cover all undocumented immigrants residing in the country (“DACA for all”). The Dreamers also helped politicize large segments of the undocumented youth population while inspiring thousands of older immigrants to take a more assertive and contentious stance in asserting their rights to stay in the country. Youths and adults now undertake high-risk civil disobedience actions including chaining them- selves to the White House, blocking deportation buses, occupying offices of national politicians, and engaging in hunger strikes, among other things. The importance of the Dreamers should therefore be understood broadly: they have achieved gains for undocumented youths, and they have unleashed political and legal dynamics that stand to alter the status of the broader undocumented population. Such dynamics contributed to an executive order introduced by President Obama on November 17, 2014 to provide temporary residency to an expected four to five million immigrants with tenuous legal status.
This article highlights contrasting moments in the movement’s development. The first reflects a strategy of the “bounded Dreamer,” aimed to construct political messages that stressed the “deservingness” of this specific population and an organizational infrastructure that instilled disparate youths with discipline when making arguments in the public sphere. The second reflects the strategy of the “unbounded Dreamer,” enabling the incorporation of youth activists into other mobilizations and struggles, especially the anti-deportation campaigns of recent years (2011-2014). The Dreamers in this latter instance are less bound to the tight framing categories of the earlier strategy, feel freer to express broader and more contentious arguments, and make much more use of informal organizations and social media to organize their political work. This article identifies these two strategic moments and assesses the factors that helped the transition from the former to the latter.
Read more at the New Labor Forum online.
Happy Friday! Each week, we come across interesting articles and stories around labor, community, and struggles for equity and justice in our changing world. Here’s a sampling of what we’ve found and liked on the world wide web in recent days:
Since its formal inception in 2009, National Nurses United has emerged as one of the lone upstarts in the otherwise-contracting organized labor landscape. Defending nurses in the face of hospital budget cuts, the nurses are also fighting for increased safety for themselves and their patients.
In The Little Union That Could from The Atlantic, journalist Alana Semuels writes, quoting NNU Executive Director RoseAnn DeMoro:
“You can’t poison the air because your company won’t give you more money per hour,” she said. “You’ve got to fight for safety standards for the public, and you’ve got to fight in the public’s interest. If unions don’t connect with the public interest, there’s not going to be unions..”
Semuels continues:
It’s a strategy that other unions have tried recently, most notably the AFL-CIO, led by Rich Trumka, which is seeking to represent the rights of all working Americans, not just its members. The fast food strikes of the past year have also sought to draw attention to the larger problems created by the minimum wage, rather than just a union. And the most successful unions these days organize from the bottom up, not the top down, said Julius Getman, author of Restoring the Power of Unions: It Takes a Movement.
“What I see is that the unions are organizing on a much more sophisticated basis,” he said.
But the nurses might be most able to lead a labor resurgence because of the fact that they’re highly-skilled workers, and not easily replaceable. Nurses are less afraid to strike than fast food workers, for instance, because they know their employer won’t have an easy time finding someone to replace them. That’s made it easier for them to speak their minds on things not necessarily related to their union. NNU has spoken out in favor of a financial transaction tax, protested water shut-offs in Detroit, and supported Occupy protesters.
