|
Greetings, EARN community,
I hope you all had opportunity to rest and recharge over the summer. For me, the transition to fall has felt particularly abrupt. Chaotic school drop-off lines and complicated extracurricular sign-up processes have layered stress on top of oddly high-stakes BLS and Census data releases and daily new troubling actions taken by federal authorities against workers, immigrants, and our democratic systems.
In the face of relentless and chaotic federal threats, our network’s focus on state and local resistance and progress toward a more equitable, just, and people-centered economy is heartening and more important than ever — like the recent news of New Mexico establishing the first statewide universal child care program in the country, or New York enacting legislation to safeguard threatened federal labor protections, or the successful effort to stop a rollback of the Olympic wage ordinance in Los Angeles, or the thousands mobilizing in Missouri to protest gerrymandering and weakening of the state’s voter-led constitutional amendment process, or the largest union election of healthcare workers in Pennsylvania history. The list goes on, and EARN groups have had key roles in many of these efforts.
We on the EARN team at EPI continue to take inspiration from these and other recent wins as we focus our thinking on what states and localities can proactively do to protect workers in this moment, and to sustain the multiracial labor and grassroots organizations our country needs to strengthen communities and reject authoritarianism.
I know many of you are thinking about these things too. I’m looking forward to hearing your ideas, your success stories, and your ambitions for what we can do together at EARNCon - New Orleans in less than two months.
In the meantime, thank you for all that you do and, as always, don’t hesitate to reach out if we can be helpful.
Cheers,
Dave
|
