About The Labor Force
What is The Labor Force?
The Labor Force emerged from a vision of cultivating solidarity among all workers by finding an accessible way to bring everyone–unionized or not–into the labor movement.
Our goal at The Labor Force is both audacious and simple: to leverage mass public support of the labor movement and build worker power at scale.
What do we do?
We partner with traditional and independent unions and workers’ centers across the country to add the power of our community to the most pressing labor campaigns. Each week, we will support the needs of these campaigns through donations, petitions, phone calls, rallies, and more.
By acting in solidarity, The Labor Force community multiplies the strength of every campaign and grows our momentum and power as a unified labor movement.
Let’s collaborate!
We are looking to uplift campaigns that will resonate with our community and where our actions can have a direct and meaningful impact for workers on the ground.
Interested in sharing one of your organization’s campaigns with The Labor Force? Click the button below to learn more about collaborating with us.
Our Origin Story
The Labor Force emerged from our vision of finding a way to bring everyone into the labor movement, unionized or not. Of creating a groundswell of support for workers that could point itself like a laser beam at any and all movement fights, multiplying their power.
The Labor Force is new. Our team is small and mighty. But we’ve already tested our strategies through our work with Trader Joe’s United and Amazon Labor Union, working with both unions through Workers Winning, a project of the Action Network Fund that supports nascent worker groups.
My name is Maeg Yosef. In 2022, my coworkers and I unionized the first Trader Joe’s in the country in the small town of Hadley, MA, and in the process formed Trader Joe’s United. As an independent union run completely by TJ’s workers, raising our own funds and engaging the community in our fight were both crucial and monumental tasks.
In collaboration with the Action Network Fund, Workers Winning, & Strategy and Hustle, TJU found a way to do both. We built an email list of over 115,000 people and raised tens of thousands of dollars to cover legal bills, travel expenses, and small stipends for TJ’s workers in union leadership roles. Our supporters also took action to supercharge our fight at key moments, doing everything from signing petitions to calling our CEO’s direct line to give him a piece of their mind.
TJU’s community support was and is a lifeline for our union. The Labor Force is the culmination of our vision of scaling those strategies to support the labor movement as a whole. With only 10% of the American workforce currently unionized, but public support for unions at around 70%, the desire to build worker power is clearly there. We are building the conduit.
As an organization, The Labor Force is new. A scrappy little startup, much like my union. We don’t have major funding. We don’t have an office, or departments. In fact, I built this website myself at my kitchen table, using WordPress for the first time.
Nevertheless, we are determined to build this thing from the ground up one way or another, because we believe that a powerful labor movement is a fundamental part of changing people’s lives for the better. It’s that simple. Are you ready to join forces with us?
Join forces with us!
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