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Dear friends,
With Thanksgiving around the corner, EPI’s EARN team wants to share our thanks for all the work that you do in your states to build a progressive infrastructure that improves the lives of workers and their families and helps to achieve racial and gender justice. We witnessed earlier this month the powerful results of your expertise, organizing, and advocacy shaping the public debate leading up to the election in states like Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia, and others.
We know that it is only through your sustained efforts frequently in deep coalition with grassroots partners, organized labor, and elected leaders – often in the face of stiff resistance – that we are steadily making progress and pushing back against harmful, anti-worker policies.
We also want to thank you for your continued engagement with EARN’s team at the Economic Policy Institute and with one another: whether by attending EARNCon, joining EARN Talks, applying for EARN grants, or participating in EARN’s learning communities, the broader EARN community is stronger because of you.
And before tucking into turkey, tofu, or your preferred Thanksgiving dish, we want to share the joint National Employment Law Project (NELP) and EARN State and Local Policy Agenda. We know that many of you are already preparing to drive a robust policy agenda in the 2024 state legislative sessions. We hope that this agenda can be useful as you further refine your organization’s priorities and policy demands. Key policy recommendations that you'll find in it include measures empowering workers to organize unions and bargain collectively, ways to raise wages and improve job quality, policies that promote equitable access to jobs for Black and Latinx workers, and ways for states and localities to rebuild a strong public sector workforce. Please feel free to reach out to co-authors Paul Sonn, [email protected] at NELP or Dave Kamper, [email protected], with any questions.
We hope you also have time to check out the EARN team’s latest reports, including Dave Cooper and Sebastian Martinez Hickey’s report on bus driver shortages and Nina Mast’s recent blog on states strengthening child labor standards – a reflection of the work that many of you are leading and a positive development for which I am thankful to see, after witnessing so many states rolling back child labor protections.
We’ll be in touch soon. Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday.
Warmly,
Michael Schoettle
Deputy Director of EARN
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