OUR MISSION Colorado Jobs with Justice is a long-term, formal coalition of labor, community, faith, and student and youth organizations that come together to advance workers’ rights and social justice through building sustained relationships and taking direct action to create concrete change in the lives of working families. We are one of the oldest of the more than thirty local, autonomous chapters of the Jobs with Justice network, which has a twenty-five year history of fighting for working families and their communities. OUR VISION In Colorado, we focus at the intersection of other issues with a lens of economic and racial justice to build worker power. Across the network, Jobs with Justice works on a range of issues from labor law reform to health care, from organizing campaigns to immigrant rights.
OUR STORY We are one of the oldest of the more than forty local, autonomous chapters of the Jobs with Justice network, which has a twenty-five year history of fighting for working families and their communities. Since its founding in 1987, Jobs with Justice has been winning campaigns that build power for working people; advancing a sustainable and powerful network of grassroots coalitions; supporting the growth and leadership of local leaders and activists; and developing strategic alliances nationally and globally that strengthen the movement for workers’ rights, economic justice, and our democracy.
On July 29, 1987, more than 11,000 individuals participated in the first ever Jobs with Justice convening in Miami and together recited the "Jobs with Justice Pledge.” The pledge commits each participant to be there at least five times a year for someone else’s fight, as well as their own. Since then, over 100,000 individuals have signed the pledge in order to
Stand up for our rights as working people to a decent standard of living;
Support the rights of all workers to organize and bargain collectively;
Fight for secure family-wage jobs in the face of corporate attacks on working people and our communities;
Organize the unorganized to take aggressive action to secure a better economic future for all of us; and,
Mobilize those already organized to join the fight for jobs with justice.
The pledge highlights the organization and its network’s deep-rooted history and commitment toward organizing and direct action, promoting solidarity among members, and collectively working to win victories for workers everywhere. Throughout our history we have taken action to stand with workers and communities to win workers’ rights and economic justice. We have experienced unprecedented attacks on the rights of workers to organize and collectively bargain, a crumbling healthcare system, job losses due to trade policy, and the growing exploitation of immigrant workers. From the beginning, Jobs with Justice coalitions worked on building resistance on all these fronts and linking the struggles around health care, immigrants’ rights, and global justice to the struggle for bargaining rights.
THEORY OF CHANGE Creating membership empowerment by helping those directly affected by an issue into confrontation with those decision-makers who have the ability to rectify or help address the issue is a central component of the Colorado Jobs with Justice theory of change. We are constantly working to engage the people most impacted by worker exploitation and corporate greed in every component of our work. Accordingly, the voices, experiences and leadership of impacted individuals play a pivotal role in all of our strategic campaigns