Stand with Workers

Support Workers in Your Community

There are many organizations – either formed by working people or by workers and concerned folks who want to be in solidarity with working people – that welcome our involvement. All of the groups listed below are active in multiple locations around the country. Please investigate to see if there is one near you. Your involvement would strengthened their efforts.

Organizations that support numerous types of workers’ struggles

Interfaith Worker Justice calls upon our religious values in order to educate, organize, and mobilize the religious community on issues and campaigns that will improve wages, benefits, and working conditions for workers, especially low-wage workers. Nationwide, some 40 local coalitions of labor and religious organizations are “building a strong movement for worker and economic justice.” Find your local IWJ coalition.

Jobs with Justice engages workers, and religious and community allies in “campaigns to win justice in workplaces and in communities where working families live.” In more than 40 cities in 25 states across the country, JwJ coalitions of labor, religious, student and community organizations share a vision of “lifting up workers’ rights struggles as part of a larger campaign for economic and social justice.” Find your local JwJ coalition.

Congregation-based community organizing (CBCO) is community organizing rooted in faith bodies that come together in answer to God’s call to love our neighbors, stand with the marginalized, and work with God for a more just society.  Numerous UCC congregations around the country are members of a local CBCO network of congregations that work together to address the needs and injustices present in their communities. Pastors and church members report that participation in CBCO can be a transforming experience for congregations, individuals, and communities. For more information, go to the JWM website on CBCO.

Organizations that support focused worker struggles

Fight for $15 is a nationwide movement by fast-food workers to boost their pay to $15 per hour and have the right to form a union without retaliation. More info.

Wal-Mart workers are coming together to seek respect and dignity in their workplace. Organization United for Respect at Wal-Mart (OUR Wal-Mart)is a group of Wal-Mart employees who are seeking change at the world’s largest retailer. In conjunction with the United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) workers are organizing, asking for change, and even going on strike. Find out more and learn how to be supportive Making Change at Wal-Mart.  

Hotel workers are seeking and winning improvements in their jobs. Through the Hotel Workers Rising campaign of the union UniteHere, hotel workers are coming together with their allies to lift hotel workers into the middle class. In July 2013, a new agreement was reached between the union and Hyatt Hotels. Members of the UCC can feel especially good about this. When the UCC General Synod met in Long Beach, CA, in July, it honored the worker-called boycott of the Hyatt Regency Long Beach and did not book rooms at this hotel, right next to the Convention Center where the meeting was held. This act of solidarity with hotel workers undoubtedly played a small part in bringing about this agreement and UniteHere is grateful to General Synod for its witness.  

Food Chain Workers Alliance is a coalition of worker-based organizations whose members plant, harvest, process, pack, transport, prepare, serve, and sell food, organizing to improve wages and working conditions for all workers along the food chain.  Read The Hands that Feed Us.  We also support farm worker unions and organizations: the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, Farm Labor Organizing Committee, United Farm Workers, and PCUN.

Good Jobs Nation promotes living wage jobs for the over 2 million low-wage employees of federal government contractors – while contractor firms make billions, millions of their employees get poverty-level wages. Read Underwriting Bad Jobs: How Our Tax Dollars Are Funding Low-Wage Work and Fueling Inequality [612 KB].

National Day Laborers Organizing Network works to improve the lives of day laborers by unifying and strengthening its members to be strategic and effective in developing leaders, and mobilizing to protect and expand civil, labor, and human rights.

National Domestic Workers Alliance (with 39 local affiliates) is the nation’s leading voice for the millions of domestic workers in the United States, most of whom are women. 

National Farm Worker Ministry is a faith based organization which supports farm workers as they organize for justice and empowerment.

Restaurant Opportunities Center United works to improve wages and working conditions for the nation’s 10 million restaurant workers.  Use the National Diners Guide.  Read more.  

Retail Action Project is building a new movement in the retail industry to define the future of retail jobs.  Read Discounted Jobs: How Retailers Sell Workers Short [3.53MB]

Traditional labor unions continue to organize and struggle to improve workers’ lives. Forming a more traditional union is nearly impossible in the current political and legal climate, even though the right to do so is an internationally-recognized human right. So workers are creating alternative organization. For an overview of these see Alt-Labor by Josh Eidelson in the February 2013 issue of The American Prospect about alternative labor organizations