By Sarianna Sabbarese (Field Organizer for the Connecticut Jobs and Human Rights Task Force and the National Jobs for All Network)
The Connecticut Jobs and Human Rights Task Force (JAHRTF) serves as Connecticut’s chapter of the National Jobs for All Network, responding to unique challenges within the state’s economic, employment, social and political landscape from a self-consciously human rights-centered perspective.
In Connecticut, soaring wealth and deep poverty are practically neighbors (even if they live in segregated neighborhoods), which makes the state particularly fertile ground for transformative policy proposals, like a Job Guarantee. Compared to states with a less disparate wealth and income distribution, transformative labor policy implemented at the state level in Connecticut could reveal valuable data that would then be integrated into federal full employment policy proposals like a Federal Job Guarantee.
Connecticut serves as a useful microcosm for fielding strategies for just economic policy, but also for testing and refining our broader organizing and movement-building strategies at the state level. Through a combination of consciousness-raising efforts and meaningful partnerships with local organizers, labor unions, and organizations across Connecticut who share our core principles and values, we maintain lines of horizontal communication and engage in mutual aid with the people who build and enable successful movements for meaningful, robust socioeconomic change.
Over the past year, the JAHRTF has taken on a local leadership role, alongside other state-level organizations, in the planning and hosting of several high profile events. Our task force served as a sponsor and organizer for the No Kings protest in New Haven this past March, alongside Connecticut’s ACLU, the Connecticut for All Coalition, Greater Westville Indivisible, New Haven Rising, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the Greater New Haven Peace Council, and other organizational leaders across Connecticut.
The JAHRTF also helped to organize New Haven’s annual May Day celebration, commemorating the organized labor unions whose courage, solidarity, and unyielding adherence to principle despite incredible pressure (and outright force!) ensured that Americans have access to the labor rights and workplace protections that we have today. The JAHRTF set up a table at these events, from which representatives dispensed flyers; answered questions about the Task Force and NJFAN; discussed jobs and justice with members of the local community; and collected signatures pledging support for a possible Connecticut-wide bill for broader access to good jobs.
On March 25, the JAHRTF and NJFAN hosted a virtual town hall meeting — Liberating the Future: Jobs, Justice, Peace and the Way Forward — which brought together justice advocates, policy experts, and like-minded compatriots for an evening of consciousness raising and shared learning. Featured presenters included keynote speaker Robert D. Leighninger, Jr. from the Living New Deal Project; Phil Brewer from Physicians for a National Health Plan (PNHP); Jill Marks from local labor organizing leader New Haven Rising; Henry Lowendorf, who chairs the Greater New Haven Peace Council; Manuel Camacho from the New Haven Peace Commission; the immigrant rights and advocacy organization Unidad Latina en Accion (ULA) founder John Jairo Lugo; and Frank Panzarella, who performed musical selections from throughout labor history in his role as Labor Troubadour for the New Haven Labor History Association. Additionally, NJFAN Chair Gertrude Schaffner Goldberg and Director Cortney Sanders spoke on the intersection between jobs and human rights, while advocating for full employment policy. The event was a successful and well-attended reminder that the fight for a just and equitable future is a shared, collaborative, multi-faceted one.
If you support the movement for universal access to good jobs at life-supporting wages — in Connecticut, and beyond — please consider adding your virtual signature to our petition! Your help is appreciated in guiding us toward our long-term goal of achieving transformative, universal, human rights-centered employment policy for all.