New Strategies for Labor with Jeremy Brecher & Elaine Bernard

Connecting the Issues: the Economy, the Climate Crisis, & War and Peace

Wednesday, December 16, 7:00 p.m. This conversation brings together 2 outstanding, long-time labor-movement activist intellectuals. It focuses on strategies for labor at this critical moment, particularly those that involve systematic collaboration with the peace/anti-war movement, climate justice movement, the single-payer health movement and the diverse coalition that elected Obama.

It also introduces the Majority Agenda Project as a potential solution to the strategic dilemma facing labor organizers: They care about a number of important issues that fall outside the traditional collective bargaining relationship but have to concentrate their work on areas prioritized by the needs of current campaigns.

Jeremy Brecher, author of Strike!

Jeremy is a leading labor historian, writer, and documentary script writer best known for the labor history Strike! For more than two decades, Brecher and the late Tim Costello have studied and written about labor and globalization, writing such well-known books as Building Bridges: The Emerging Grassroots Coalition of Labor and Community and Global Village or Global Pillage. For the past 8 years they have been joined by Brendan Smith, who collaborated with them on the book Globalization from Below: The Power of Solidarity. Their Emmy-nominated documentary Global Village or Global Pillage? has been used by unions and other groups in the US and throughout the world to present an international grassroots response to globalization. Together they partnered to form Global Labor Strategies. Recently, Jeremy helped found the Labor Network for Sustainability.

Elaine Bernard, Director of the Harvard Trade Union Program

Elaine is Executive Director of the Labor and Worklife Program and the Harvard Trade Union Program at Harvard Law School. She has conducted courses on a wide variety of topics for unions, community groups, universities and government departments. Her current research and teaching interests are in the areas of international comparative labor movements and the role of unions in promoting civil society, democracy and economic growth. Some of her more recent talks and publications include: The Changing Workplace and Building A Union's Organizational Capacity, Organizing in a Cold Climate, How to Get Momentum to Change the Structure, Why Unions Matter, Labor Rights as Human Rights, Why Health Care Should Not Be a Business, Social Unionism: Labor as a Political Force, Public Sector Workers and the Creation of Pubic Value, and The Way to the Future: Setting a Social Agenda for Labor.

Sponsored by the Majority Agenda Project