by Sarianna Sabbarese
In Connecticut, soaring wealth and deep poverty are practically neighbors. A microcosm of the income and wealth inequality that negatively impacts so many Americans, Connecticut has become an important site for the National Jobs for All Network (NJFAN) to begin laying state-level groundwork for a Federal Job Guarantee. The CT Jobs and Human Rights Task Force — NJFAN’s Connecticut arm — has been working since its inception in 2021 to build “people power” and bring visibility to the NJFAN Full Employment policy plan through a program of mutually reinforcing components: outreach with local groups, labor unions, and coalitions; raising critical consciousness; and legislative advocacy.
The CT Jobs and Human Rights Task Force was born out of NJFAN’s Virtual Town Hall Meeting in 2021, which explored the intersection of employment justice and human rights advocacy work in Connecticut’s New Haven area. This event featured contributors from a diverse range of fields, backgrounds, and issue areas. Participants brought their various areas of expertise and lived experience to bear on the shared project of using economic policy to create a world in which all people are given the opportunity to actualize their latent potential. We found that — through utilizing Zoom, then a relatively new and unfamiliar technological medium to hold space together — we managed to bypass not only the physical distances separating us, but also the mounting sense of alienation so many of us experienced throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, we found that stepping outside of the silos of our respective institutions, issue areas, and niches enabled us to reinvigorate our own understandings of employment justice. Together, we envisioned and described some of the likeliest and most exciting aspects of a world in which NJFAN’s sweeping government jobs creation program was codified into law.
NJFAN has long held that full employment is the necessary bedrock upon which meaningful, lasting social justice can be built. This makes NJFAN’s vision of a Federal Job Guarantee a de facto intersectional concern: indeed, critical issues like climate justice and anti-militarism are built into the organizational mission and policy plan. In Connecticut, urgent state-level points of public policy — racialized austerity through the imposition of arbitrary “fiscal guardrails,” for instance — intersect with the employment justice advocacy and consciousness raising work of the CT Jobs and Human Rights Task Force.
Under the capable supervision of NJFAN Outreach Coordinator Logan Martinez and NJFAN Executive Board Member Professor Stephen Monroe Tomczak, the CT Task Force has been applying NJFAN’s national multi-issue approach to economic justice at local scale, in the hope that our work in Connecticut can serve as a model for other state-level efforts to build the movement for full employment across the United States.
During our last legislative session, longtime Task Force ally and contributor Senator Gary Winfield (well-known across the state for spearheading the legislative push to abolish Connecticut’s death penalty; as the driving force behind a bill protecting Transgender people in public accommodations; and for his contributions to many other vital pieces of progressive legislation), we successfully introduced a Study Bill to research the formation of a Full Employment Trust Fund in Connecticut.
Most recently, the Task Force has begun work on a podcast exploring the multi-issue and intersectional dimensions of employment justice. The concept features collaborations with local partners who can bring their own unique experiences and perspectives to the project — building our shared understanding of how NJFAN’s Full Employment policy plan would benefit a wide cross-section of different people and groups across both Connecticut and the United States.
The CT Jobs and Human Rights Task Force meets on the second Wednesday of each month. For more information about the CT Task Force’s vision for a more just and equitable future, or if you would like to join the Task Force, please contact Sarianna Sabbarese at ssabbarese@gmail.com.
Sarianna Sabbarese (LMSW) is a social worker whose professional experience centers on survivors of sexual assault and intimate partner violence. She also works with the National Jobs for All Network as a field organizer for the CT Jobs and Human Rights Task Force — and is very passionate about exploring the ways a Federal Job Guarantee would empower survivors (and everyone else!).