Welcome to Catalyst’s September newsletter! This month we reflect on the struggles of working people and the changes in the labor movement over the last few years. Seven unions – whose members make up almost half of all union members in the US – have demanded an end to US military aid to Israel. We are taking inspiration from incarcerated people who have been fighting for their rights as workers, the growing power of domestic workers, and the struggle for sex workers’ rights. We start off with Braden alum Jessica Beard’s reflections as a labor organizer…
In my day job, I spend more time than I ever thought I would thinking about hope. In this context, hope is a plan to win, an offering to a potential activist into the co-creation of a future where we all thrive. It is not simply a wish or an intention though. It is usually a complicated table, excel spreadsheet, or assessments on flipchart paper that we follow closely and with purpose.
I am a labor organizer with a teachers union in California. In 2014, I was part of a reinvigorated labor movement in the Bay Area that was initiated by SEIU 1021’s move to organize adjunct professors at private schools.I felt the first tinglings of transformational hope
when our small organizing committee at
the San Francisco Art Institute joined the Fast Food worker’s Fight for 15 march in Berkeley. Marching with my contingent faculty colleagues who worked 4-5 jobs alongside fast food workers whose workload was similarly inconsistent and whose pay also necessitated multiple jobs, felt like the kind of solidarity work and praxis I found to be lacking in the academy. As a worker, and a person raised working class, I was offered a vision of labor activism that was building across race and class, and I wanted to keep on creating that world.
Ten years later, I feel fortunate to still be part of a labor movement that has seen more than a few waves of this invigoration as multiracial organizing with Amazon, Starbucks, fast food, education, automotive, and domestic workers build working class power for themselves and their communities. I do not and cannot ignore the many critiques of labor and its past and current iterations. It is often not the most radical in its largest form, and it contributes mightily to a Democratic party machine it could be challenging and dismantling. There is much more work to be done.
But in the local, 1:1, school site, community-by-community solidarity building and bringing people into movement efforts that happen every day, the potential for real change feels massive. The organizing at both the local and national level has been engaging and growing BIPOC leadership and community. In the last 4 years, teachers in the Bay Area and beyond have organized in solidarity with other school workers for COVID safety, safe schools for queer and trans kids, keeping ICE and cops off campus, Palestinian liberation and the right to learn and teach about it, and housing for their unhoused students and families.
Right now, I know a lot of people in need of hope and a vision. While it is easy to lose focus and become overwhelmed in times like this, I work to remain hopeful in the daily BIPOC led educators’ union movement building I am fortunate to support and witness in my role as staff, and on the organizing committee for my own union. I look to the continued organizing, in small shops and big shops alike, that committed workers practice towards a collective liberation. And to you, dear Catalyst community, I offer this bit of hope that is a vision of a world not yet born.
–Jessica Beard, Anne Braden Program Alum, Braden 2021