The country\u2019s largest non-union workers\u2019 group will soon announce plans to establish chapters in every state, achieve financial self-sufficiency and extend its organizing\u2014so far focused on politics and policy\u2014directly into the workplace.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis organization has done really what nobody else thought could be done,\u201d AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told The Nation, \u201cand that\u2019s recruit more than three million people without a union to be part of the labor movement.\u201d<\/p>\n
That organization is Working America, the AFL-CIO affiliate for workers without a union on the job. Created ten years ago, it now claims 3.2 million members\u2014more than any of the individual unions in the AFL-CIO, or any of the other \u201calt-labor\u201d groups organizing and mobilizing non-union workers in the United States. \u201cWe\u2019re taking the momentum that we\u2019ve built organizing workers in communities,\u201d said Working America Executive Director Karen Nussbaum, \u201cand beginning to organize a community in the workplace.\u201d<\/p>\n
As I reported in The Nation\u2019s October 29, 2012, issue, Working America\u2019s past efforts have taken place outside of work. Paid canvassers go door-to-door in what the group calls \u201cworking class moderate\u201d neighborhoods, starting conversations about economic issues and asking people to join the organization (according to Trumka, two out of three people sign up by the end of the conversation). During election season, organizers come back to persuade and mobilize these members to vote for endorsed candidates, touting their stances on issues like outsourcing (they explicitly avoid discussing so-called \u201csocial issues\u201d). Year-round, Working America supports union-backed campaigns on issues like supporting paid sick leave or opposing liquor store privatization; members write letters, lobby politicians and join rallies.<\/p>\n
Nussbaum told The Nation that, following the group\u2019s success in mobilizing workers who haven\u2019t been reached by unions or other progressive organizations, \u201cit was the local labor leaders who came to us last August and said, \u2018We need you in every state.\u2019\u201d The organization plans to double its number of state chapters over the next three years, to twenty-four, and to create chapters in the rest of the fifty states by 2018. Working America\u2019s most recent new chapters are in Texas and North Carolina, both Southern states with even lower unionization rates than the country as a whole.<\/p>\n
Nussbaum, Working America\u2019s architect since its founding, said she expects the expansion to require at least one staffer in each state. Given the expense of maintaining full-time, year-round canvassing teams, she said the group is \u201cbuilding on the base that we have and turning that into a more flexible, vibrant organization\u201d that can \u201cbuild out in a lot of different ways, meeting the immediate needs of whoever our partners are.\u201d Nussbaum noted that Working America staff now include online organizers, who push members to take actions ranging from calling legislators to sharing \u201cI support the minimum wage\u201d on Facebook. But \u201cat the end of the day,\u201d she said, \u201cwe still think that face-to-face, one-on-one communication, that makes the difference in bringing new people into our movement.\u201d Click here for the full story.<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The country\u2019s largest non-union workers\u2019 group will soon announce plans to establish chapters in every state, achieve financial self-sufficiency and extend its organizing\u2014so far focused on politics and policy\u2014directly into the workplace. \u201cThis organization has done really what nobody else thought could be done,\u201d AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka told The Nation, \u201cand that\u2019s recruit more […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35060","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-important-news-stories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35060","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35060"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35060\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35060"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35060"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/uprisingradio.org\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35060"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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