Jobs With Justice: 25 Years, 25 Voices by Eric Larson

Author:Eric Larson [Larson, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, United States, General, Political Science, Labor & Industrial Relations, Political Process, Political Advocacy
ISBN: 9781604867466
Google: WP3pwAEACAAJ
Goodreads: 16144307
Publisher: PM Press
Published: 2013-01-15T10:27:52+00:00

FRED AZCARATE

FORMER EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, JOBS WITH JUSTICE

What were some of the key victories and accomplishments of JwJ during your tenure?

I got involved with JwJ over health care mobilization, probably in the early 1990s, {and} I came over to JwJ and did staff work for the national office and worked continuously until I left in early 2007. The key ones would be modernizing infrastructure, developing the model of JwJ as a long-term, multi-issue community organizing coalition, and really focusing on workers’ rights, and growing the network from a dozen or so loosely formed coalitions around the country to more than 40 coalition groups which were much more developed and more sophisticated in resources, staffing, and support. We were also building the national infrastructure as well as becoming fairly instrumental in fighting for collective bargaining rights and organizing drives, as well as voter drives and public policy issues like health care, rights for workers, welfare reform, and of course the Employee Free Choice Act.

JwJ has been committed to mobilization and the mobilization of its base, and during your time there was a lot of talk about “JwJ x 10.” Can you share a bit about that vision and what key lessons the network learned about building a real mobilization base?

I think that the concept of JwJ x 10 really came to be with Larry Cohen and the Communication Workers of America. The thinking was fairly simple: with what we had been able to build thus far, how much more could we impact if we were just bigger. It was just our way of talking about the challenge of growth {in the early 2000s}, which I think ultimately any movement or organization has. Either you get bigger or smaller, but if you want to have impact, whether with local or national or global issues, you’ve got to be big enough to make a visible impact. I think when we started talking about JwJ x 10 it was coming from the fact that we at JwJ were not powerful enough, not big enough in enough places to make enough of a difference in the issues and the lives of workers of and communities. We wanted to challenge ourselves to get bigger.

What were some concrete ways you all decided to make that kind of growth happen?

I think it was a conscious devotion of resources, and a sort of expansion of the long-held belief of not growing the D.C. operation at the expense of resources going to the local coalitions. Having an organization that built an operation around what the staff in D.C. can do to concretely assist the coalitions in building their organizations. It was about … moving some resources to local coalitions and devoting national staff to raising money to go to local coalitions as much as possible, and then experimenting with projects that would also provide some staffing on the ground in order to help people build their infrastructure.

JwJ has a long history of movement-building. How did JwJ approach that with other movements?

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