Going Deeper on the Links Between Immigration, Housing Justice, and Worker Justice

During the winter months, Workers Confluence hosted three events for worker organizers and advocates to connect and learn about new tools and strategies.

On the morning of February 15th we worked with grantee Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha and their labor partner, the Minneapolis Building and Construction Trades Council, to host Partnering To Grow. At this well-attended event, representatives from 10 different Building Trades unions learned about the power and potential of partnering with worker centers to raise industry standards, and to reach workers who are not reachable through traditional union organizing due to factors like misclassification and immigration status. Guests heard from Roberto Jacobo, a worker-leader on CTUL’s Construction Campaign, as well as local and national experts on organizing immigrant construction workers.

Later that same day, Confluence hosted a mini-convening as a follow-up to our two-day event in October. It was an afternoon of candid conversations between funders, labor leaders, and BIPOC worker advocates, including deep-dive sessions on strategic campaign research and the new federal policies on immigrant worker organizing.

On April 14th (which still counts as winter in Minnesota) many Confluence stakeholders, along with some new partners, gathered to discuss the intersection of worker justice and renter justice. This event was a collaboration between Confluence and North Star Policy Action, a labor-supported think tank that will release a report later this year highlighting the lack of worker safeguards in the allocation of government grants and subsidies for building affordable housing. In many cases, the same company that profits from exploiting workers during a building’s construction will go on to operate unethically as a landlord. Often this means mistreating renters who come from the same low-income, Black and brown communities as the workers who originally built the project.

We look forward to continuing this conversation, and moving toward solutions, after the North Star report is released later this year.