What's Next in the Movement for Working Families: Opportunities for Offense and Building Power in the States

Across the country, working people struggling on the frontlines of America’s service economy are standing up for jobs that deliver stability and respect.  Millions of working people scramble with ever-changing workweeks that cause volatile incomes and strain families – making it hard to make ends meet and impossible to get ahead.

While the conservative right stokes America’s popular imagination of a “good middle-class job” by glorifying the manufacturing sector and the hope of infrastructure employment, the truth is that the United States’ economy is driven by the service sector – retail, hospitality, food service and healthcare represent 80 percent of U.S. employment and a significant portion of our electorate. Preliminary analysis shows that the retail workforce alone makes up an estimated 6 percent of America’s voting eligible population.

From Oregon to New York City, people are coming together to set wage and hour standards that recognize the essential role of the service sector to delivering opportunity and prosperity for working families. New polling shows that 3 in 4 Americans support fair workweek policies that deliver reliable hours with balanced schedules. For all these reasons, employers and policymakers are taking bold measures to address our country's work-hours crisis as an essential part of a good jobs strategy.

Join us on August 2, 2017 from 12:00-1:00pm ET for a funders webinar to learn more about this new movement for a family-sustaining workweek that cuts across civic engagement and workforce development strategies as well as the increasing role technology is playing in determining economic outcomes for millions of workers.  We'll discuss:

• Unprecedented policy momentum including this year's historic state-wide win in Oregon and new standards in six cities; 
• Powerful worker-led campaigns that moved the retail sector to end on-call scheduling and are showing us the path to creating good jobs in growing retail and food service industries; and
• Innovative strategies to build the voice of service sector workers in their workplaces, with policymakers, and at the ballot box in important cities and states across the country.

Speakers: 

• Greg Noth, Wyss Foundation
• Emma Oppenheim, Open Society Foundations 
• Carrie Gleason, Center for Popular Democracy's Fair Workweek Initiative
• Jeff Anderson, UFCW Local 555 & Working Families
• Gordon Mar, Jobs with Justice 

Related Resources:

• Fair Workweek Initiative: http://www.fairworkweek.org/ 
• Washington Post: Fast-food Workers Learn Their Hours On the Fly. Oregon Wants to Change That
• Huffington Post: Oregon Passes Pioneering Worker-Rights Bill
• Racked: America's Massive Retail Workforce is Tired of Being Ignored
• The Hill (Op-Ed - Carrie Gleason): What does the working class want? Better schedules.
• San Francisco Chronicle: Emeryville fair workweek ordinance takes effect
• Seattle Times: Seattle’s ‘secure scheduling’ rewrites work rules at stores, restaurants