Getting Organized!
New Strategies for Tough Times
A Panel Discussion
Gage Gallery
Roosevelt University
18 S. Michigan Ave.
Chicago
Friday, December 10
3-5pm
Refreshments will be served
With legal reforms for an improved organizing climate at a standstill, workers, activists, unions and lawyers are turning to new strategies to build worker power within existing workplace labor laws. Creative and pioneering strategies crafted at Workers Centers have resulted in new ways for workers to demand their legal protections, often winning large back-pay awards. Advocates argue that in the long run, direct experience with the power of collective action develops savvy workplace leaders and lays the groundwork for a new wave of unionization.
Come hear organizers explain these new approaches and assess their potential:
Can these strategies expand the labor movement’s reach in the private sector where unions continue to weaken?
Can workers effectively represent themselves without formal union recognition?
Merely correctives for the worst workplace abuses or seeds of a powerful movement for workplace justice?
- Kim Bobo, Executive Director of Interfaith Workers Justice and author of Wage Theft in America: Why Millions of Working Americans Are Not Getting Paid – And What We Can Do About It
- Jose Oliva, National Policy Director of Restaurant Opportunities Center (ROC)
- Lou Weeks, Organizing Director, UniteHere Local 1
- Dr. Robert Bruno, Director, Labor Education, U. of Illinois
The mission of the Chicago Center for Working-Class Studies (CCWCS) is to bring together individuals from
multiple institutions to promote economic justice and to address class relationships. CCWCS is guided by
our commitment to strengthen the political, economic and moral power of working women and men,
and to expand understanding of how other identities intersect with class, including race, gender and sexuality.
For more information email Jack Metzgar at jmetzgar@roosevelt.edu
Co-sponsored by the Mansfield Institute for Social Justice & Transformation
