STRATEGIC PLAN 2003-2006 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Building Power For Working Families

"We strive to build worker and community power to win concrete victories on critical issues by engaging diverse allies in building Jobs with Justice."

Jobs with Justice is a national campaign for workers' rights. Our network of 41 local coalitions and organizing committees in 25 states bring together labor, community, faith-based, and student organizations to work together on campaigns that win victories for workers and their families.

This strategic plan is the culmination of an eight-month process of conversations at the local, regional, and national level among Jobs with Justice leaders and stakeholders. The process was guided by a Board Committee of the Jobs with Justice Education Fund. It included local coalition planning retreats; regional gatherings in Denver, Cleveland, and Boston; one-on-one meetings with a variety of stakeholders; and two retreats of the full national Board. The strategic plan presents a long-term vision of building power for workers' rights and three-year benchmarks for base-building and program development.

Increasing corporate power, the lack of meaningful oversight of corporate behavior, and diminished union density combines to undermine the ability of all workers (organized or not) to bargain collectively with employers around issues of wages, benefits, and workplace democracy. Healthcare costs are soaring and the system is out of control. Attacks on immigrant workers and communities are increasingly aggressive- even as corporations lure more immigrants to the U.S. to serve as low-wage workers. These conditions make it critical and urgent that we re-double our efforts to build power for working families by strengthening organizational infrastructure and engaging diverse allies in the fight for Jobs with Justice.

We believe in local organizing and engaging people in campaigns that are relevant to their local reality. Corporate targets are no longer local, and so we recognize the need for coordinated actions at the national and international levels in order to win. Our goal is to build a national network - made up of local coalitions and organizing committees - that adds value to local organizing and engages a broad range of sectors in national campaigns that challenge corporate power. We are committed to local autonomy and strongly believe that effective organizing necessitates local ownership, where local coalitions identify their own priorities according to local realities. While Jobs with Justice coalitions work on a variety of issues and campaigns, we identified 4 priority programs that unify our network and strengthen local work:

1. Right to organize and collectively bargain: supporting workers efforts to exercise workplace democracy;
2. Healthcare for all: ensuring everyone in the U.S. has access to affordable quality healthcare;
3. Global justice: highlighting the domestic impacts of globalization and fostering international solidarity among workers and communities around the world; and
4. Immigrant rights: denouncing attacks on immigrant workers and communities.
   These issues are very interconnected and we will continue to make connections between them. Winning healthcare benefits on the job is a key reason that many workers organize a union. Greedy corporations pushing for egregious trade deals do so in order to exploit our brothers and sisters in other countries and abandon a commitment to living wage jobs with benefits in the U.S. Immigrant workers are a key constituency in many of our campaigns for collective bargaining and community justice.

In the next three years, we want to focus on strengthening our local and national infrastructure:

• Multiply our base and our mobilization capacity. By the end of 2006, we will triple the number of people engaged in JwJ - reaching 150,000 workers and allies who are willing to take action to win justice in workplaces and in communities where working families live.
• Deepen relationships with diverse allies. We will work with existing local coalitions to deepen their relationships with member organizations.
• Broaden our reach as a network. We will continuously assess the reach of our network and identify opportunities for strategic expansion.
• Continue to develop diverse and talented staff and leaders in the effort to win jobs with justice. We will implement leadership development strategies to train and engage at least 1% of our pledge base in volunteer and leadership roles.
• Strengthen our Workers' Rights Board Project. We will double the number of local Workers' Rights Board members to 1,000 and launch a National Workers' Rights Board.
• Continue our strategic alliance with the US Students' Association through the Student Labor Action Project.

This is an ambitious plan that relies on an infusion of resources to the national office and directly to local coalitions. We have identified goals for fundraising, media, technology, and national infrastructure that will make it possible for us to accomplish our goals and bring to scale the fight for Jobs with Justice.

The Board of Directors of the Jobs with Justice Education Fund adopted the Strategic Plan on April 28, 2003. For a copy of the complete strategic plan, contact us at: (202) 393-1044.