[ When Bargaining for the Common Good is done well it models an
alternative way to theorize the root causes of oppression, to take
action with impacted communities to remedy the problem, and to reflect
on what liberation looks....]
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CRITICAL RACE FEMINISM AND COMMON GOOD UNIONISM  
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Stacy Davis Gates, Sheri Davis, Marilyn Sneiderman and Alisha Volante

September 28, 2022
NonProfit Quarterly
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_ When Bargaining for the Common Good is done well it models an
alternative way to theorize the root causes of oppression, to take
action with impacted communities to remedy the problem, and to reflect
on what liberation looks.... _

Images of the June 16th March calling on Twin Cities Developers to
Uphold Labor Standards – courtesy of CTUL // NonProfit Quarterly,

 

Our democracy is in shambles. The racist and radical right wing,
institutionalized in the GOP, won the right to impanel a retrograde
Supreme Court—one committed to rolling the clock back to an America
where Black Americans are back on plantations, LGBTQIA+ individuals
are back in the shadows, women are barefoot and pregnant, and
landholding, gun-toting white men are the only individuals with
freedom. Over the span of the last several years, the Supreme Court
affirmed the revocation of worker rights
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rights
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rights
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rights
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Opposition to the GOP’s exclusionary practices requires an equally
radical reimagining of coalition work. One of many ways unions and
community organizations are building power together is through
innovative strategies such as Bargaining for the Common Good (BCG).

_[This article is the fourth installment in our series co-produced by
Bargaining for the Common Good and _NPQ_, titled Building a Movement
for the Common Good
[[link removed]].
In this series, we learn how and why Bargaining for the Common Good
(BCG) is the right strategy for our times of social crisis, featuring
extreme wealth inequality and declining democracy as well as a renewed
attention to labor organizing and mass uprisings for racial justice.
The authors reflect on how the BCG strategy needs an intersectional,
critical race feminist approach in order to advance racial and
economic movement that can take on 21st century capitalism.]_

When unions focus on bargaining in a way that addresses the whole
person and members’ whole communities, they can transform both the
union itself and our communities. BCG encourages common good
campaigns, meaning campaigns grounded in a critical analysis of the
interlocking oppressions, including racism and sexism, that shape
community conditions and suppress worker power and economic justice.
It advances multi-pronged approaches that are necessary to
structurally change those conditions and calls on labor to demand
respect for the humanity of its members and neighbors through common
good unionism.

TELLING COUNTERSTORIES: INTERSECTIONALITY AND THE LABOR MOVEMENT

Bargaining for the Common Good is an intersectional feminist strategy.
In a 2020 piece for _The Forge,_ “We Want Bread and Housing Too,
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Lauren Jacobs, Executive Director of PowerSwitch Action
[[link removed]], Renata
Pumerol of the Action Center on Race and the Economy (ACRE)
[[link removed]], and Sheri Davis and Marilyn Sneiderman
of Rutgers’ Center for Innovation in Worker Organization (CIWO)
[[link removed]] asserted
that intersectionality is key to building strong social movements
because it “is the analysis that made clear the interconnectedness
of different unjust and exploitative systems.… Having an
intersectional approach means everyday folks have a forum and a means
to build real solidarity and more tools to win bigger gains.”

The concept of intersectionality emerges from a labor struggle: Black
women at a car manufacturing company lacked support from their union
or legal redress for identity-specific layoffs that were informed by
racist 
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policies
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practices. “The labor movement was not a movement focused on the
ability of men to financially support the patriarchally headed
family,” the authors write, “it was a movement by which workers
would fight for the nurturing and security of an entire community.”
However, while widely referenced in Black feminist and critical race
theory, intersectionality has only recently been included in labor
literature. It is nonetheless central to a critical race and feminist
approach that promotes: 

* Counterstories that center the experiences of marginalized,
invisibilized, silenced communities of color and illuminate how these
communities are legally and economically excluded from basic rights,
resources, and privileges as a result of racism, sexism, and other
forms of oppression
* Contextualizing counterstories within historical events,
legislation, and contemporary policies and cultural practices,
revealing how white supremacy is a system
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in the exploitation of Black labor and displacement of Indigenous
peoples from the land, with the ultimate characteristic of this system
being the “right to exclude”
* Naming the practice of barring certain groups from participating
in the development of legal and cultural remedies
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society’s ills precisely because multiple systems of oppression are
working together to exploit these same groups and create unique
barriers
* Caution and reflection regarding “progress” that occurs
when elites’ 
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converge
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the demands of marginalized communities because the tendency has been
for elites to co-opt movement messaging for profit while maintaining
oppressive structures
* “
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to the bottom
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the social hierarchy to learn about historical harms and ways to
remedy them through reparatory justice projects that seek to
restructure oppressive systems

When Bargaining for the Common Good is done well it models an
alternative way to theorize the root causes of oppression, to take
action with impacted communities to remedy the problem, and to reflect
on what liberation looks like for historically marginalized and
exploited peoples.

Community and worker justice organizations are putting critical race
feminism into practice by making broader demands and building power to
win bigger victories for gender, racial, and economic justice. The
themes and stories across campaigns reveal how women are leading these
organizations with more collaborative styles of leadership. In this
newer and more successful praxis, campaign demands reflect issues
raised by women POC membership, and democratic processes for
decision-making lead to long-term relationships that advance radical
solidarity.

TENDING THE SOIL: FROM CONTRACT CAMPAIGNS TO RADICAL SOLIDARITY

Image Credit: CTUL
In June of this year, a coalition of Minnesota organizations
called Tending the Soil [[link removed]] (TTS) hosted a
week of action that demonstrated the power of BIPOC-led worker and
community power. Actions addressed climate concerns and the role of
utility companies, declining labor standards, unfit housing, and
unjust working conditions at Amazon.

Tending the Soil is a coalition of Minnesota organizations led by
people of color and formed with the purpose of organizing in
working-class communities of color with a shared analysis of power and
organizing strategy. The TTS organizational alliance is currently
comprised of: the Awood Center [[link removed]]; the
Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (CTUL [[link removed]]);
Inquilinxs Unidos por Justicia (IX
[[link removed]])/Renters United for
Justice; the New Justice Project
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[[link removed]]; and Unidos MN
[[link removed]] EF/Navigate. TTS launched as a formal
organization in 2021; however, the organizational alliance has existed
since 2018 with an origin story dating back to 2008. These groups work
together to identify intersectional approaches to their campaigns to
build real, lasting solidarity.

Workers from TTS organizations—including CTUL non-union construction
worker-members and Local 26 union members—have been working together
to establish a Labor Standards Board
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the City of Minneapolis. Made up of workers, employers, and the
public, this policy board would be empowered to investigate
market-specific conditions and inequalities in the city. In addition,
the board could make recommendations for safety regulations, minimum
wages, training, and scheduling requirements, among other areas of
oversight.

During the week of action, TTS organizations and their allies marched
through downtown Minneapolis to call on Twin Cities Developers to
support the establishment of such a board. The organizations have
placed a high value on ensuring that BIPOC and women leaders from
impacted communities lead the movement, on forming a shared analysis
of power that recognizes the intersectionality of unjust and
exploitative systems, and on building community solidarity as the
central component to common good work.

In February 2020, thousands of SEIU Local 26 janitors struck in
Minnesota’s Twin Cities for better working conditions and to address
environmental concerns. Their demands included the creation of a
committee consisting of building owners, contractors/employers, and
union members to address commercial building carbon emissions, the
right to review cleaning products and promote the use of green
chemicals, and a Green Cleaning Fund program.

SEIU Local 26 invited community-based environmental justice
organizations, including Environment Minnesota
[[link removed]], MN Youth Climate Strikers
[[link removed]], Sierra Club
[[link removed]], MN 350 [[link removed]],
and MN BIPOC Climate & Environmental Justice Table
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during which participants engaged in vigorous debates over green
cleaning demands and the 2020 strike vote. Together, these
organizations produced the report, Sky High Pollution
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highlighting the immediate environmental issues workers and community
members were (and still are) grappling with and which formed the
foundation of worker and community demands. Union member and climate
refugee Elsa Guamán explained how she was displaced from her
childhood home in Ecuador due to climate devastation. She did not
hesitate to join her union’s campaign for climate justice after
immigrating to Minnesota, where she found herself cleaning buildings
that were some of the biggest polluters in the state.

In March 2020, right before the COVID pandemic closed the nation down,
Local 26 janitors won the best contract
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their commercial janitorial members in the union’s history. The
contract included many Green Cleaning demands.

By forming a shared analysis of power, elevating BIPOC and women
leaders from the communities served, and building community solidarity
as central to their common-good work, Minnesota organizations have
prioritized coalitional work that makes their campaigns stronger and
more successful. This kind of cross-employer, cross-sector solidarity
is key to realizing all kinds of radical, transformative visions for
justice.

BARGAINING FOR OUR LIVES: CHICAGO TEACHERS UNION AND THE CITY
CHICAGOANS DESERVE

Image Credit: Chicago Teachers Union
After the 2012 strike, the CTU pivoted from struggling for the schools
Chicago students deserve to the city Chicagoans deserve. This shift
stemmed from recognition of two facts: (1) public schools do not exist
on islands but in larger communities populated with families and (2)
transformation of our public schools requires the collective
leadership of community organizations in coalition with labor,
families, and students.

According to the CTU, the only way to win well-funded schools is to
win well-resourced neighborhoods. Issues such as the instability of
homelessness impact the academic outcomes
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Chicago students, while the lack of affordable housing threatens the
sustainability of the public school district represented by the
Chicago Teachers Union (CTU). The concept of a members-only
organization narrowly focused on teachers’ rights, wages, and
benefits is insufficient to create a better city. Rather, the vision
for labor must be anchored in the common good and in a willingness to
shift concepts of power to a coalition of leaders who see their
struggle as one for human rights.

The CTU has built power by employing feminist leadership practices and
a praxis model that is shaped by listening deeply to a membership
that is majority women
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recognizing that members are also residents and parents. At the same
time, CTU leaders have deep relationships with leaders of community
organizations representing working people, oftentimes women who are
heads of households and are demanding a more inclusive vision for
Chicago.

This manifested powerfully during the 2019 CTU contract campaign and
subsequent strike, when affordable housing for 20,000 Chicago Public
School students and their families became a chief demand
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the negotiating table. As the authors of _The Forge_ article
outlined, the intersectional nature of that campaign demanded “the
community and city government to step forward and love these kids, to
collectively take responsibility for them with their parents. Every
day the strike communicated to Chicago Public Schools’ students:
‘You are worth it, you are worth everything.’”

Just a few months later, CTU confronted COVID’s impact on
marginalized communities, which was visible almost from the
pandemic’s beginning—especially for educators who zoomed into
their students’ homes. Negotiations over safety protocols were a
real-time simulation of how entrenched racial and socioeconomic
inequities show up in every facet of daily life, exposing the lack of
infrastructure and capacity our institutions must address. Our society
already fails to address the needs of everyone who isn’t white,
male, and wealthy. Our institutions have very little practice
centering the needs of Black and Brown working mothers who may be
“head[s] of household” _and_ “essential workers.”

The lack of access to technology, internet, stable housing, and
trusted healthcare providers exacerbated the challenges many Chicago
families already faced. We centered those families in our
negotiations, especially because their school communities are often
already under-resourced and understaffed. We had little trust that the
city’s leadership would address those school communities’ profound
needs because they were failing to meet such needs before the pandemic
even began.

Equally challenging for many to grasp was a labor union prioritizing
the needs of Black and Brown families living below the poverty line.
The city’s political establishment, especially Mayor Lori Lightfoot,
refused to acknowledge the root causes of widespread inequity in
Chicago. Instead of focusing on the collective demands of tens of
thousands of public school teachers and staff for safety and
resources, the mayor amplified the voices of the elite and monied,
focused on a quick restart of the economy, and tended to the needs of
a well-organized, vaccinated, and vocal parent demographic living in
economically advantaged neighborhoods. These inequities became the
focus of our negotiations because most of the families who our members
serve were unvaccinated and dealing with the disproportionate impacts
of Covid.

To practice common good unionism, the CTU helped lead a coalition to
stop evictions during the pandemic and fought for vaccine access for
our members and students and their families. Union members were not
bargaining for a contract. They were bargaining for their lives.

THE POWER OF PURPOSE: CONNECTICUT HEALTH CARE WORKERS CENTER RACIAL
JUSTICE

Image Credit: SEIU 1199
In the first year of the pandemic, Connecticut’s 14 billionaires
seized $12.6 billion in additional wealth
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hundreds of thousands of working people, especially women
(disproportionately women of color) in essential healthcare jobs,
suffered. The crises that arose during the pandemic exposed and
exacerbated extreme disparities in a state that consistently ranks
among the wealthiest regions in the world. While billionaires used the
crisis as an opportunity to consolidate wealth
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power, thousands of long-term care workers at SEIU New England 1199,
mostly Black and Brown women, questioned their material conditions,
organized in the streets, and won concrete demands.

Over the past two years, women of color in Connecticut, who occupy
multiple marginalized identities, led and won campaigns addressing a
broad range of racial, gender, and economic justice policies. SEIU
1199 led a strike demanding racial and gender justice on the job and
quality delivery of care in the community. Working together with a
coalition of unions and community partners, including Bridgeport
Generation Now [[link removed]] and the Transitions Clinic
[[link removed]], the union ultimately won
landmark pay raises for some of the lowest paid healthcare workers. It
also won Juneteenth as a paid holiday preceding the national
declaration, expanded services for undocumented workers, an increase
in mobile units staffed by social workers instead of police, and
enhanced workplace policies that would track discipline by race and
gender, providing a pathway for addressing sexism and racism on the
job. These victories were impactful for union members as workers,
women, people of color, parents, immigrants, and individuals who are
deeply invested in their communities.

This broad coalition of unions and community groups took mass direct
action and won nearly $4 billion in new revenue by requiring the
super-rich and big corporations to contribute more of what they owe to
working people and to provide emergency relief to struggling working
families during the pandemic. Rather than conform to the manufactured
austerity imposed by the wealthy few, the campaign took an
intersectional approach to identify the ways in which interlocking
systems of oppression impacted not only women of color workers, but
also the greater communities they belonged to and served.

THE FUTURE FRONTIER: INTERSECTIONAL COMMON GOOD WORK IN THE SOUTH

The BCG network continues to learn from our experiences, advancing a
critical race and feminist approach to organizing and crafting
campaign demands. We believe such an approach is essential for taking
on the conditions that workers and communities face in the South,
where racism, sexism, and classism overlap in ways that have
historically produced the greatest and most overt levels of injustice.
BCG campaigners in Tennessee are ready to take up this challenge.

Workers across Tennessee are fed up with the state’s low wages,
massive tax breaks for corporations, and state sponsored
anti-unionism. While the richest thrive, rural and urban communities
alike are starved of resources to fund education and other essential
services. Low-wage working women and women of color feel the brunt of
this, as they are the support staff at our schools and the ones most
likely to fill in childcare gaps to compensate for an underfunded
education system. These women, along with low-wage workers across the
state, have a stake in funding education and defeating an upcoming
Right to Work measure
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they could have the power in numbers to win.

As a growing number of unions, workers, interfaith leaders, and
community groups come to the table, they could be the next to adopt an
intersectional feminist strategy focused on organizing women across
the state around progressive revenue solutions that would fund the
services their communities need. A broad coalition of Tennessee’s
diverse working-class communities could win union jobs, secure
equitable funding for public education, build political power, and
ultimately grow a strong multiracial labor movement capable of taking
on bigger challenges each year.

Combating the impacts of COVID-19 pandemic profiteers who made
billions off the backs of “essential workers,” the underfunding of
public education, and the hyper-concentration of violence in our
neighborhoods and cities cannot simply be the work of grassroots
organizations or political officials. Overreliance on failed electoral
schemes hampered by corporate interests weakens our ability to improve
our communities and workplace conditions. The radical revision we need
must be tethered to justice—social, racial, and economic justice.
Sustainability for all will require transformation, which demands an
intersectional feminist common-good approach.

_[STACY DAVIS GATES is president of the Chicago Teachers Union and
executive vice president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers.
Before her election to the office of president in 2022, Mrs. Davis
Gates served four years as vice president of the Union, where she
helped lead a 15-day strike and negotiate a historic contract that
provides for smaller class sizes, ensures a nurse and social worker in
every Chicago public school, secures sanctuary protections for
immigrant families, and supports students and families experiencing
homelessness. In her time at the CTU, she has been the architect of
bold political and legislative campaigns for the schools and city that
all Chicagoans deserve._

_SHERI DAVIS is the Associate Director with the Center for Innovation
in Worker Organization. She is also Assistant Professor of
Professional Practice with the Labor Studies and Employment Relations
Department in the School of Management and Labor Relations at Rutgers
University. She co-directs the WILL Empower (Women Innovating Labor
Leadership) program, a joint initiative with the Kalmanovitz
Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University._

_MARILYN SNEIDERMAN is the Executive Director of Center of Innovation
in Worker Organization (CIWO) and is a Distinguished Professor at
Rutgers University. Previously, Sneiderman directed the National
AFL-CIO’s Department of Field Mobilization for 10 years, where she
launched the national "Union Cities" initiative to increase the
community/labor capacity to support and win organizing, political and
policy campaigns around economic and racial justice in states and
cities throughout the country. _

_ALISHA VOLANTE is the Strategic Initiatives Director at Georgetown KI
focused on Bargaining for the Common Good with a specific focus on
Corporate owned rental property. Previously she directed research at
SEIU Local 26 and has experience in legislative campaigns, advocacy
work, and community and common good organizing.]_

_Thanks to the authors for sending their article to xxxxxx._

_This article was originally published by NPQ online
[[link removed]], on Sept. 28, 2022.
([link removed]).
Used with permission._

_Sign up for our free newsletter. Subscribe to the NPQ newsletter to
have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox. Click here
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* community organizing
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* economic justice
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* gender and sexuality
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* Labor
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* Trade Unions
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* Racial Justice
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* Racism
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* Racial Equality
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* gender equality
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* Minneapolis
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* Twin Cities
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* chicago
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* CTU
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* Chicago Teachers Union
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* SEIU 1199
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* Bridgeport
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* Tennessee
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* Black workers
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* women workers
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