Partnership Blog

In the last several months, CASE has kicked off a pair of jobs campaigns in the city of Phoenix. The more advanced of those campaigns surrounds the job security of between 700 and 1,000 workers in food service, parking, and ground transportation at Sky Harbor Airport. Represented by our partner unions UNITE HERE! Local 631 and UFCW Local 99, those workers have struggled for years to raise the quality of their jobs—winning improvements in wages and health insurance, along with health and safety measures like floor mats for workers who stand on concrete for eight hours a day, forty hours a week. In doing so, those workers have raised the floor for all of the approximately 4,000 terminal service workers at the airport.

The Syracuse Alliance for a New Economy (SANE) is in the process of seeking a Community Benefits Agreement with the Board of Directors of the Near Westside Iniative, a major economic development project located in Syracuse, New York. The Near Westside Initiative (NSWI) is a $56 million project that will transform one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States (according to the last Census) into a community filled with market-rate condominiums, office buildings and an extension of the development currently taking place in downtown Syracuse. The project has already been jump-started using public dollars, and the NWSI will continue to seek an infusion of public monies to complete this massive project. SANE firmly believes that community residents should have a voice in the planning and development of the project.

Difficult economic times are providing unique challenges—and even greater demand—for the work of the Partnership for Working Families. Our Partners are seizing opportunities in communities across the country to make sure that available funding and new legislation helps to create family-sustaining jobs with career pathways. In other communities, we’re rallying allies to fight against reactionary, mean-spirited efforts to minimize or even reverse workers’ hard-won gains. Together, we are organizing our cities to look ahead and plan for a future of shared prosperity.

Imagine 500 acres in the middle of your neighborhood that could become anything you want it to be. That’s the scenario Georgia STAND-UP posed to over 150 community members at Fiske Elementary School in southwest Atlanta last August. 

For years, the planning process in Anaheim has excluded the voices of low income, immigrant communities. As a result, Anaheim’s working families find themselves trapped in a perpetual cycle of poverty, as elected officials fail to address their concerns.

by Ben Boyce, New Economy Working Solutions

What a year it has been! Across our network, Partners are bringing communities together to fight for real change, and scaling up to effect major policy changes to improve the lives of thousands of workers and their families. Time and again we are realigning our regions around a shared, big picture vision: that by lifting up workers, communities and the environment together we can achieve shared prosperity and sustainability for our cities and country.

The emerging green energy economy offers great promise for rebuilding America’s middle class. Across the Partnership, we are working to ensure that federal, state, and city funds support a new green economy that grows the next generation of construction trades workers with access to family-supporting jobs, and opens career opportunities for low-income communities and communities of color.

Across the country, our Partners are fighting for this goal in ways that support their unique communities:

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act injected unprecedented funding into home weatherization programs in states across the nation, creating an immediate impetus for states to build weatherization programs that really work.  This includes reaching a scale that addresses climate change, making a real impact on energy costs for the lowest-income homeowners, and creating many thousands of entry-level jobs in construction that become the first step into sustainable careers in construction for workers who desperately need them.

On May 27th, FRESC and the Campaign for Responsible Development (CRD) won community benefits at Union Station – a large mixed use redevelopment project located in downtown Denver that will be the hub of FasTracks, our metro area’s future mass transit rail build out estimated at a cost of around 500 million dollars.  After three years of organizing, coalition building, research and advocacy, the CRD formalized support of the project to the Denver City Council with a vote 12-1.