Union Engagement in Five Crises that Shape Our Time

The Worker Institute annually convenes the National Labor Leadership Initiative. This is a national leadership program that serves the highest level leaders of unions and their partners in community organizing and worker center organizing.  We are in the process of developing new written materials that can serve as pre-readings for participants in this program. The first of these sets the context for union leadership in the current moment – including mapping out five crises that shape our time, and how unions have (or haven’t) engaged with them effectively. The research fellow on this project will help research examples of unions taking action on: inequality (beyond their existing worker organizing/bargaining strategies); climate crisis; racial justice & immigrant justice; protection of democracy, especially in relation to pushing back on fascist movements like book banning; and gender policing (including women’s reproductive rights, lgbtqia+ and the like). The goal of this research is both to support our existing framing of the context of leadership, and potentially to support developing new case studies as part of our curriculum. The research fellow may also be asked to work on other dimensions of the NLLI curriculum as this work evolves. - with Kathleen Mulligan and Ileen Devault.