How Do We Get the Progressive Netroots to Care About Workers’ Rights?

How Do We Get the Progressive Netroots to Care About Workers’ Rights?

by Tula Connell, Aug 3, 2007

Educating the netroots about the importance of workers’ rights issues is critical for us in the labor movement. And also extremely difficult. While today’s Slugging It Out with the Christian Right workshop by Working America here at YearlyKos drew a solid crowd—the workshop focused on grassroots political action—a handful took part in the Bread, Blogs and Roses workshop this afternoon. Is it because Bread, Blogs and Roses highlighted workers’ struggles to form unions in workplaces where employers harass and intimidate them, rather than focusing on political action (the crowd here is very politically active)? Or was it just a matter of logistics—that is, the featured speaker next door drew the lions-share of the crowd with a discussion of his book on the “political brain”? Or do we really have a long way to go to convince the netroots that workplace issues are very much a part of our mutual progressive agenda?

The participants in the workshop, which featured staff at American Rights at Work, the nation’s worker advocacy group, took part in a lively and deeply felt discussion about communicating the importance of workers’ efforts to form unions. Among featured speakers, registered nurse Maggie Nielsen, along with her co-workers at Resurrection Health Care, has sought to form a union with AFSCME here in Chicago. Nielsen shared her story (which you can read about here; get the latest on Resurrection here) and described the short-staffing conditions that employees say have compromised quality patient care