Time and time again, we’ve seen major roadblocks to justice overcome through community solidarity, worker organizing, and effective organization. Today, we’re launching a multi-racial fundraising campaign to raise $50,000 by December 31st to support Workers’ Dignity’s campaigns for workplace justice, equitable transit, and base organizing among immigrant workers. Can you pitch in?
In the past eight years of Workers’ Dignity, we have pushed to expand low-wage worker capacity and build leadership. This year alone, Workers’ Dignity won major wage theft campaigns led by workers cleaning a high profile hotel and a large retail store. Sixteen Workers’ Dignity members recovered $18,000 in wages stolen from a cleaning agency contracted by the Nashville Omni Hotel. Over the summer, workers recovered $2,000 in unpaid wages from cleaning TJ Maxx. This past Sunday, Martha and Navor led an action to demand Target break their contract with cleaning agency Diversified Maintenance, a national company with a sordid history of stealing wages from janitorial workers cleaning Target, Home Depot, and other large retailers. Martha and Navor are just the latest in a long line of workers Diversified Maintenance has shafted here in Nashville and in other areas of the country. It’s not enough to win back owed wages. We are standing with janitors in demanding Target take responsibility and cut ties with a notoriously low-road company, and that the billion-dollar corporation hold its cleaning contractors to more humane standards. Every worker who labors on Target’s properties deserves to be paid and treated with respect and dignity. This fight takes organized people — and it takes organized money. Your donation during our Winter Fundraising Campaign will help Workers’ Dignity continue standing with workers who say ¡Ya Basta! Enough!
Meanwhile, our members in Music City Riders United have been fanning across the city, surveying over 600 fellow bus riders about what needs to be changed to address the racial and economic inequities in Nashville public transit. In December, they will release the Bus Route Report Card report and simultaneously launch campaigns demanding that city authorities prioritize working-class communities, especially communities of color, for major improvements in public transit. Just last month, bus riders joined Walk Bike Nashville in holding the first of several actions calling attention to TDOT and Nashville Public Works’ neglect of rider and pedestrian safety in North Nashville. We’re tired of public transit infrastructure projects focusing on wealthy and gentrifying neighborhoods like 12 South and Midtown while hundreds of pedestrians are struck and even killed because working-class areas are ignored. Your donation will help MCRU’s coming campaigns taking on the city and state authorities’ inequitable funding priorities.
Nashville Community Defense has been busy knocking on doors in low-income neighborhoods informing our neighbors of the anti-immigrant state law HB2315, taking effect this coming January. They have held workshops in apartment complexes, people’s homes and churches to not only inform immigrant workers about the law, but to support creation of networks of neighbors who look out for each other, report ICE activity, and respond in the event of an ICE raid. Your donation will help Nashville Community Defense continue this base-building work that will build immigrant worker power over time.
Your donations are critical to our ability to support, mobilize, and defend community members. Now more than ever, we need all hands on deck to sustain our ongoing fight for equitable transit, community defense efforts, and campaigns for workplace dignity.
Donate here and tell your family and friends. United, we can achieve our vision for a Nashville that treats each and every one of us with respect and dignity. A Nashville where we can all work safely and live without fear.