Manny’s: Power Lines: Building a Labor-Climate Justice Movement

The existential risk of climate change is about power. Human power. It will take real power to undertake a sufficient, just transition and the only source for that power is in the number of people we can organize to act collectively wherever we work, live and play.

The movements for worker power and climate justice are crucial allies in this cause. For too long, the corporate interests that stand opposed to a meaningful response to the climate crisis have pitted these movements against each other, as if the livelihoods of working families are at odds with our shared rights to a safe and healthy environment.

But recently this division has begun to heal. The book Power Lines collects the stories of some of these recent collaborative efforts of labor and environmental justice groups that have both exercised and foreshadowed the combined power of frontline workers and frontline communities.

Join co-editor and organizer Jeff Ordower and veterans of these recent fights for a discussion of the challenges and possibilities of a labor-climate justice alliance.

After the discussion, join us at the Café for happy hour to keep the conversation going. Enjoy $2 off drinks during happy hour from 7 – 8 pm.

Jeff Ordower: Jeff Ordower is a long-time labor and community organizer. He is the Director for North America of 350.org, co-founder of the Green Worker Alliance, and a veteran of 25 years of fighting for economic and environmental justice.

Miya Yoshitani is the Co-Director of the Movement Strategy Collaborative (MIC), a new
organizer-led effort to amplify and accelerate California’s power-building movements. MIC is catalyzing a unified, multi-racial, and intergenerational movement to scale up organizing power for racial, economic, and environmental justice. She formerly served as executive director of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network and has an extensive background in community organizing and the environmental justice movement.

Brooke Anderson is a photojournalist and photographer based on unceded Ohlone land in Oakland, CA. She was the founder of Climate Workers, a grassroots organization of rank-and-file union members organizing for a just transition away from an economy based on extraction and exploitation to one where we reclaim our labor and apply it to ecological restoration and collective care. She is a proud member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, CWA 39521, AFL-CIO.