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ENJOY THE LATEST EPISODE OF OUR NEW SERIES, RISING UP FOR JUSTICE. Every Tuesday, Rising Up subscribers get the EXTENDED UNCUT version of the interview airing Mondays on Free Speech TV.
FEATURING ERICA SMILEY - Our nation and our world is overrun by billionaires and bigots, but they are few and we are many. On this series, exclusive to subscribers of Rising Up With Sonali and viewers of Free Speech TV, we’ll hear from organizers in the movements for social justice, and dig into the nuts and bolts of values, strategies, tactics, narratives, and building power.
This week on Rising Up for Justice, Erica Smiley, the Executive Director for Jobs with Justice joins us. A long-time organizer and movement leader, Smiley has been spearheading organizing and policy interventions for Jobs with Justice for nearly 20 years and is the co-author of The Future We Need: Organizing for a Better Democracy in the Twenty-First Century. Erica spoke with Sonali Kolhatkar about Jobs With Justice.
ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:
Sonali Kolhatkar: So, this program is really meant to help people find out about organizations like yours and understand where they fit within the social justice universe. It's intended to profile groups that are doing really, really good work. And these days, the economy and its impact on ordinary people is front and center almost everywhere you look. So, explain what Jobs with Justice is. You work for workers' rights, you work with unions, but you're not a union, right? What is it?
Erica Smiley: Yeah, that's right. Look, we're so glad to be on and to be showcased. Jobs with Justice is a national network of community labor coalitions that seek to expand the ways in which, and the number of people who have access to organizing and collective bargaining power.
And so, it's not simply about forming a union in the traditional sense of how unions are defined in the US under the National Labor Relations Act, but actually seeking to expand how we define unions. Even going back to, it's not just like a future issue, but going back to what our ancestors were doing before we won the National Labor Relations Act, which is to say democratizing the workplace.
And so at Jobs with Justice, we work with people as whole people, because very few people identify solely as workers. So we work around issues of race, gender, really operating at the intersections of people's lives to expand their ability to make decisions in their workplace.
And through that lens, Sonali, we see ourselves often not simply as a workers' rights organization, but as a democracy organization, a place where we are trying to expand the majority decision-making in our economic lives, and most particularly in the place where most of us spend the bulk of our time, which is at work.
