S2E2: Stephen Lerner on Justice for Janitors: A comeback story that continues today

03/12/24 • 67 min

In this episode, we’ll hear about how tens of thousands of workers lost nearly all of their workplace protections, and then spent two decades campaigning against some of the most powerful Fortune 500 companies to win them back. Stephen Lerner, architect of the campaign, discusses how a realignment of global capital led the union to lose nearly all its bargaining power in the 1980s (17:47), how a few in the union decided to try a different approach (19:26), how they decided which building owners were the most important to target (38:15), and how they used creative tactics to undermine their political and community support, including blocking bridges the leaders of Congress used to get to work (41:27).
Stephen Lerner is a labor and community organizer who has spent more than three decades organizing hundreds of thousands of janitors, farm workers, garment workers, and other low-wage workers into unions, resulting in increased wages, first-time health benefits, paid sick days, and other improvements on the job. He was the Director of SEIU's Property Service Division, served on SEIU's International Executive Board and is the architect of the Justice for Janitors campaign. He has published numerous articles charting a path for a 21st century labor movement focused on growth and meeting the challenges of a global economy. In 2014 he helped launch the Bargaining for Common Good campaign. Today he is a Senior Fellow at the Kalmanovitz institute at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge

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Visit www.trainingforchange.org for workshops and training tools, or to make a donation. Follow us on social media @tfctrains. The Craft of Campaigns podcast is made possible by grassroots donors. We welcome your feedback; if you like these episodes, please consider donating, to keep the show running. This podcast is hosted by Andrew Willis Garcés and produced by Ali Roseberry-Polier.

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge

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Previous Episode

S2E1: Karina Mireya and Benji Hart on #NoCopAcademy: A Campaign Against Chicago’s ‘Cop City’

In this episode, we’ll hear about a campaign to stop Chicago’s “cop city” that recruited dozens of organizations to support an abolitionist effort for the first time. This campaign also helped pave the way for a shift in the city’s organizing landscape that propelled now-Mayor Brandon Johnson to victory in 2023. His administration’s first municipal budget, passed at the end of 2023, includes historic investments in alternatives to policing.

Organizers Karina and Benji explain how the campaign got started with innovative tactics like subway canvassing (20:48) and neighborhood art pop-ups (14:08), and how they recruited support from residents in the part of town where Mayor Emanuel wanted to build the academy (46:14). We’ll also hear their reflections on this campaign’s relevance to Stop Cop City in Atlanta (32:10), and how the campaign’s ripples reverberate in the city’s movement ecology today (52:28).

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge. For more resources about the campaign, check out the #NoCopAcademy toolkit. You can also find a documentary trailer and a series of oral history interviews on the #NoCopAcademy website.
Karina Mireya is a digital organizer and freelance photographer intertwining storytelling and narrative building in movements. Raised on the southwest side of Chicago, Karina began organizing around education while in high school and has been a part of No Cop Academy, Treatment Not Trauma, and Cops Out CPS.

Benji Hart is an interdisciplinary artist, author, and educator whose work centers Black radicalism, queer liberation, and prison abolition. They organized with the #NoCopAcademy campaign in the role of an adult ally.

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S2E3: Devan Spear on forcing universities to pay their fair share

In this episode, we’ll hear about a multi-year fight to get some of Philadelphia’s largest property-owners – nonprofit universities and hospitals – to make voluntary payments in lieu of taxes to fund local public schools. Devan Spear describes how the campaign gained momentum by investing in basebuilding (27:05), created action teams on different university campuses (28:18), and used the momentum of the 2020 uprisings for racial justice to quickly move new supporters into action and push their campaign over the finish line (31:06).

Check out a writeup on this campaign at The Forge
Devan joined Philadelphia Jobs With Justice as director in 2017. Under her leadership, Philly JWJ collaborated with the National Domestic Workers Alliance to launch the NDWA-PA chapter, won a $100 million commitment from UPenn to remediate lead and asbestos in public schools, and launched a new campaign for safety protections for Philadelphia warehouse workers. Devan is the communications vice president for the Philadelphia Coalition of Labor Union Women and a member of the PhilaPOSH board of directors.

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Craft of Campaigns - S2E2: Stephen Lerner on Justice for Janitors: A comeback story that continues today

Transcript

Andrew Willis Garcés: Welcome to the Craft of Campaigns. I'm your host, Andrew Willis Garcés. In this podcast, we go behind the headlines and hashtags, inviting movement storytellers to share lessons from social justice campaigns. Campaigns are a series of collective actions, focused on winning a concrete demand, beyond one-off mobilizations or election cycles. They have villains and heroes, teams that make plans to win, and activate people on the sidelines. In each episode, we expl