Tag: labor
How Los Angeles Won the Largest Municipal Housing Program in the...
The ambitious funding campaign took strong cross-movement organizing and the right political moment.
Can Robotics Help Solve the Affordable Housing Crisis?
While affordable housing developers have been slow to embrace automation, for-profit companies are bullish on its prospects. What do they see as the benefits and drawbacks?
Shelter Shorts, The Week in Community Development—Aug. 31
HUD hosts listening tour for landlords, inmates protest exploitation of labor with prison strike, a payday loan alternative, and more
Administration’s Assault on Workers Continues in Congress
A proposed 20 percent reduction to the Department of Labor's overall budget would make working people less safe, and will discourage them from speaking up when abuses happen.
Local Contracting–Cost Cutting, Economic Development, Or Both?
We recently published both an article and an Answer column that shows how one group in Philadelphia, WPRE/NR, is challenging the conventional wisdom that...
Organizing Will Win
For anyone who organizes and advocates for worker justice, the last months of 2016 felt like an unmitigated disaster. But even as we begin...
At Last, Apprenticeships Will Be for All People
Not surprisingly, last Friday's headlines focused on the announcement that the Obama administration had rejected the proposal to build...
Interview with Ai-jen Poo, Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance
Ai-Jen Poo has been organizing with domestic workers for over 15 years, helping in New York to win some of the first statewide labor protections for occupations often exempt from labor laws, and expanding this campaign to a nationwide vision for a strong caregiving workforce and infrastructure for elder care. In 2014 she became a MacArthur Fellow, but this was hardly her first award.
On Beyond Income: Asset Building and Union Organizing Go Together
I wrote earlier this week about how the current increase in labor organizing among service workers calls for a conscious choice by other nonprofits who work with low-income households to offer our solidarity to those campaigns. Beyond the fact of supporting workers in their struggle for self-determination, there are some other opportunities for cross-pollination there. […]
On Progressives and Picket Lines
The story was very different, depending who told it. To the organizers of the I'M HOME and National Manufactured Homeowners' Assocation conferences, news that the Seattle Olive 8 hotel, which they had booked for their annual conferences this past November, was under boycott by the hotel workers union UNITE HERE for refusing to allow workers […]
Why Don’t We Build It Ourselves?
Humboldt Construction Company, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Chicago CDC Bickerdike Redevelopment Corporation, has been providing local employment and high-quality work for over...
Fukuyama’s Wisdom on Rent Control and Unions Is Anything But Conventional
The ideas of Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992) are making a comeback, in large part due to Glenn Beck, who has touted the libertarian economist and...
Community-Labor: A Coalition Whose Time Has Come
Ed Gorman of the NCRC board introduced Mark Ayers, president of the building trades department of the AFL-CIO, as “the man who is opening...
Interview: Assistant Secretary for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity John Trasviña
The Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity is dealing with an evolving set of discrimination challenges facing families, changes in the very definition of "family," and the political realities of the 112th Congress. Trasviña is no stranger to this balancing act.
The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire at 100: Businesses and Politicians Still “Cry...
A year and half ago Donald Cohen and I created the Cry Wolf Project to expose how business organizations and conservative politicians repeatedly evoked...
Labor Goes to Bat for Housing: a Community-Labor coalition in San...
Organized labor and affordable housing advocates in San Jose and Silicon Valley have formed a coalition to support more low-income housing, inclusionary zoning, and tenants rights.