The Color of Labor: Recognizing the True Face of Labor
The livestream below will begin at the time of the event. Today’s workers, and the labor organizations that support and represent them, are as diverse as ever. Yet, too often, […]
The livestream below will begin at the time of the event.
Today’s workers, and the labor organizations that support and represent them, are as diverse as ever. Yet, too often, the conversations and narratives about workers, and the policies aimed at helping them, fail to reflect the full extent of this diversity.
Join Next100 and the National Black Worker Center on Tuesday, September 8 at 4:00 PM EST for a long-overdue conversation about how we can achieve systemic change to build an economy and society that benefits all workers. We will also discuss organizing during the pandemic, the run-up to the 2020 elections, and why Black workers and women of color in particular are key to progressive movements and the broader fight for racial justice.
Please register to obtain the Zoom link.
Featuring:
- Tanya Wallace-Gobern, executive director, National Black Worker Center
- Neneki Lee, director of the public services division, SEIU
- Aisha Satterwhite, managing director, Coworker.org
- Moderator: Phela Townsend, policy entrepreneur, economic opportunity, Next100
Presented by Next100 and the National Black Worker Center.
Speaker Bios
Tanya Wallace-Gobern is the executive director of the National Black Worker Center Project. Born in Chicago, Illinois, after graduating with a bachelor’s of science degree from Loyola University of Chicago, she moved to the Deep South in 1991 to launch an organizing career empowering women and people of color. As executive director of the National Black Worker Center Project, she lives out her lifelong passion while executing the mission of empowering Black workers to advance their rights and improve the quality of jobs in key employment sectors.
Neneki Lee currently serves as the public division director of the Service Employees International Union, which represents more than two million workers in the United States, Canada, and Puerto Rico. In her current role, she is responsible for more than 800,000 public sector members of SEIU who deliver essential public services, including education, social services, and health care. Neneki leads SEIU programs that include organizing for economic justice, racial justice, education justice, and immigration justice, to name a few. Most recently, she led the largest organizing victory in the nation in decades and won collective bargaining rights for 45,000 family child care providers—mostly Black and Brown women—in her home state of California. Under her leadership, SEIU Public Services has organized more than 100,000 workers into the union. Neneki is a member of the board of directors for the National Black Worker Center Project and a graduate of Scripps College in Claremont, California.
Aisha Satterwhite leads Coworker’s team of strategists and organizers in supporting workers, providing education and training and offering strategic support, data analysis, and workplace advocacy tools. For the past twenty years, she’s been working at the intersection of human rights, racial and economic justice, labor, advocacy, and tech, and is a leader in the areas of digital transformation, advocacy, and team management. She’s used technology as a tool to win advocacy, narrative, and political campaigns and grow supporters. She’s worked in nonprofit, advocacy, education, and labor spaces, both in-house and on the consulting side, and has advised nonprofits, advocacy organizations, unions, membership associations, startups, and tech companies in the United States, United Kingdom, and Africa around the best ways to activate external audiences and internal teams working for social change. Before joining Coworker, Aisha was a managing director for Blue State, a global digital strategy agency and tech company. She’s also led digital and communications programs and tech and product development projects at Human Rights Campaign, National Education Association, Service Employees International Union, and One Economy Corporation.
Phela Townsend is a policy entrepreneur at Next100 where she primarily focuses on issues at the intersection of labor policy and technology policy to promote racial and economic equity and justice. She is also a PhD candidate at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations. Her academic research touches on several areas: employee stock ownership, newer forms of labor organizations, and technology’s impact on work and workers. Over her career, she has worked in a variety of labor and employment relations roles, across several industries and sectors, including health care, consumer goods, and aerospace manufacturing. She has a bachelor’s of science degree in industrial and labor relations from Cornell University, and a master’s of business administration from the MIT Sloan School of Management.