Grant for organizing support

Is There a Women's Way of Organizing? 

Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, New York City Extension

As traditional industries decline, people are hiring into "informal and low-wage sectors" where turnover is high, legal protections are scarce, unions are rare, and workers tend to be immigrant women of color. Organizing such jobs is especially hard; often there isn't even a central workplace.

Cornell researchers used ideas from other reports as the jumping-off point for a series of focus groups and roundtable discussions in 2008 and 2009, where workers and organizers, most of them women, talked about how they mobilized diverse and fragmented workforces, and the experiences of women in unions.

At the core of the report they published are four exciting, non-traditional campaigns, run largely by and for women. The report reveals how they succeeded and poses provocative questions such as, "Is there a successful way of organizing that is unique to women-focused campaigns?" It investigates how seven key, non-traditional strategies helped make these campaigns work, and arrives at strong conclusions that challenge every union to shake up its approach to organizing if it is to succeed with today's workers.

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Grant for organizing support

Center uses arbitration database to defend working families 

Center for WorkLife Law, UC Hastings College of the Law

Joan Williams

From an interview by Louise D. Walsh. See full story on interview with Joan Williams.

It was a difficult pregnancy that awoke Joan Williams to the injustices other mothers face and fueled her passion to build a team and create a new legal discipline: WorkLife Law. Berger-Marks is funding an arbitration database at the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California.

"We live in the worst public policy environment in the industrialized world for working mothers. Some of what happens to women, especially low income women, is blatantly illegal," says Williams. "Far too often, women who have no problems at work until they have children find they face discrimination after they become mothers." And it's not just mothers who are vulnerable. "Men who need to leave work for childcare reasons face even stronger discrimination than mothers do."

"Family responsibilities discrimination" (FRD) is employment discrimination against workers with family responsibilities. They may find themselves rejected for employment, demoted, harassed, passed over for promotion, or terminated – despite good performance evaluations – because of those family duties.

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Grant for organizing support

STITCH helps unions reach out to Latina workers 

STITCH solidarity network

STITCH training workshop

How can you create a more diverse union? What are the challenges faced by Latinas, women and immigrants, and how can Latina workers overcome them and become leaders? STITCH, a women's solidarity network that shares organizing experiences and strategies across borders, used a Berger-Marks grant to help answer those questions.

The grant supports its Immigrant’s Rights Project, launched on behalf of women Latina workers in the United States. Its trainings, offered jointly with unions and community groups, are adapted from its curriculum in Central America and based on input from immigrant women workers about how the labor movement could help their fight for economic justice.

Click to see STITCH's training curriculum.

Helping immigrant women gain respect

STITCH's training stresses the importance of moving women into permanent, formal union jobs and building a more inclusive movement for economic justice. It aims to not only help immigrant women become leaders, but also to work with groups like CLUW to break down divisions among women in the labor movement.

STITCH also helps make women's voices heard in global debates on issues that impact them. Said one participant who had been in the U.S. for years: "I never thought that I had issues as an immigrant worker. This training was really important to recognizing those issues."

Expertise honed over a decade in Central America

The STITCH programs bring home the expertise it’s developed in over a decade of helping women organize in Central America. Many women workers in the U.S. are faced with the same problems they tried to escape by immigrating, whether it be low wages and discrimination or insufficient childcare services and dangerous working conditions. (And on top of that, even legal immigrants can get caught up in raids and jailed.)

A Stitch booklet, "The Other Immigrants," is also available online. The AFL-CIO hails it as "a collection of six fascinating, often disturbing, interviews with Latinas about their experiences as immigrants in the United States." When the book came out, one of the women profiled in it broke out in tears — she had never believed anyone would think her story was important.

STITCH’s slide show video on Facebook captures the conditions maquila workers confront in Central America along with those that poultry and other workers face in the U.S., and highlighting how STITCH helps build links.

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Grant for organizing support

Justice for Colombian flower workers 

US Labor Education in the Americas Project (USLEAP)

Woman selling flowers in Colombia

For 20 years USLEAP has worked for economic justice for workers in Latin America. This grant helps fund their Flower Worker Economic Justice Project, launched in 2005 in Colombia. It aims to improve working conditions and wages for flower workers and help the unions organizing them.

Sixty percent of the flowers sold in the U.S., mostly for women, are grown in Colombia, which leads the world in violence against union members. Most flower workers are women; many are discriminated against and endure sexual harassment and over-exposure to pesticides.

USLEAP wants to better connect women buyers and recipients in the U.S. to the women who grew, picked and packed their flowers. The grant helps USLEAP research flower distribution, respond to worker rights violations, produce campaign materials for religious and women's organizations, and build awareness and support with tools like Mother's Day cards.

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Research grant

Cornell study shows massive law-breaking 

Cornell School of Industrial and Labor Relations

Angela Warner and Kate Bronfenbrenner

Two out of three companies that unions tried to organize through a federally-supervised (NLRB) election between 1998 and 2003 violated U.S. labor law to fight the union. That’s what Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, discovered in a Berger-Marks-funded study of 1004 union campaigns. Bronfenbrenner, who has been studying employer behavior for 20 years, found that employer law-breaking has sharply escalated.

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Grant for organizing support

Domestic workers unite 

Damayan Migrant Workers Association, New York/New Jersey

Supporting domestic workers on Fifth Avenue

Focusing on a workforce of housekeepers, nannies, cooks, etc. that is overwhelming Filipino and female, DAMAYAN works to inform workers of their rights and build community. It has organized public protests to fight outrageous treatment of domestic workers that amounts to modern slavery.

It is setting up a collective center for their social, political, physical and psychological well-being, and organizing for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Domestic work can be highly stressful, isolating and toxic, and is exempt from many of the job standards of the Department of Labor.

The grant helps DAMAYAN hold small house meetings that bring workers together to share common concerns, acquire the skill and ability to advocate for their own rights and welfare, and learn about the social, economic and political roots of forced migration and poverty. Each house meeting is hosted by a domestic worker who involves other domestic workers in her/his neighborhood.

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Grant for organizing support

Organizers recharge their batteries 

National Organizers Alliance, Gathering VI

The National Organizers Alliance was formed by organizers seeking to have a "home" to talk about their craft and work across the lines of race, gender, geography, sexual orientation, age, labor, community and issue. They have 430 members and a mailing list of 4500 people who receive the Ark Magazine.

As Barack Obama was tapping community and union organizers for his election campaign, the NOA Gathering VI took place at the National Labor College in Silver Spring, Maryland. It had been seven years since Gathering V.

Organizers came from all over the country to pick up new ideas and exchange experiences at the 2008 event, June 29 - July 2. In total, 48 of the 115 participants, most of them women and half of them people of color, benefited from over $18,563 in scholarship assistance that Berger-Marks helped fund.

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Research grant

Union Organizing Among Professional Women Workers 

Department for Professional Employees - AFL-CIO, Cornell University

What kind of union organizing is being done among professional women and what is the potential for success? With more than a decade having passed since organized labor last investigated the question, the Department for Professional Employees (DPE) of the AFL-CIO called upon the Berger-Marks Foundation to fund a new report on the subject.

In the resulting groundbreaking report, Cornell University educator and researcher Kate Bronfenbrenner found that:

• roughly half of U.S. workers are in professional/technical and clerical occupations;
• women make up 58 percent of the professional and technical workforce;
• occupations in which professional and technical women are employed have the highest rate of successful union organizing; and
• organizing campaigns among these workers have the greatest likelihood of succeeding if they utilize multiple organizing strategies.

Click here to read the "Union Organizing Among Professional Women Workers" report.

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Grant for organizing support

Training helps JWJ be more effective 

Jobs with Justice, St. Louis

Rev. Audrey Hollis (right)

Less than $6,000 in Berger-Marks Foundation grant funds to Jobs with Justice in St. Louis, Missouri were “transformational to our capacity to do our work,” reports Director Lara Granich. Lara and the chapter’s organizer, Rev. Audrey Hollis, were both able to participate in unique organizing training that had been way out of their financial reach before.

Both also received database training that has made their mobilization work “more targeted, more efficient and more effective.”

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