Rising Up For Justice: Tenants Strike for Affordable Rent

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FEATURING TARA RAGHUVEER - 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, Tara Raghuveer, director and founder of the Tenant Union Federation joins us. The Tenant Union Federation is a union of unions organizing tenants to wield power at a massive scale, as well as KC Tenants, the city-wide tenant union in Kansas City, MO. Tara has been organizing with tenants for more than a decade.

ROUGH TRANSCRIPT:

Sonali Kolhatkar: What does it mean to have a union of unions, especially when it comes to tenants? We usually think of unions as being something that organizes workers, not rent-payers. 

Tara Raghuveer: So tenant unions are actually an age old arrangement. We're not inventing anything here, but what we're doing with the Tenant Union Federation is trying to understand and refine a practice of organizing tenants that can maximize tenants, political and economic leverage, and their power. Much like a job site, much like a shop floor, tenants could exercise a lot of power in the places where they live, if they're connected. There's latent power that exists in our homes, in the properties in which we live, in the trailer parks in which some of us live. But that power is only something that's available to us to exercise if we get organized. 

Increasingly, we're borrowing tactics from organized labor to think about organizing tenants at home in similar ways to how workers are organized on their jobs. Specifically, what that means to us, is we're trying to organize what we call supermajority strike-ready unions.