When I’m not in a university classroom, my dear friend, Jelger Kalmijn, and I co-facilitate the EWOC Fellow’s Program on zoom.
After 2+ years facilitating trainings and supporting new organizing campaigns, Jelger and I decided to interview our past participants. What barriers do these workers face to unionization? How do workers envisage alternatives beyond the NLRA? What are their motivations for organizing, even when the going gets rough? We’ve interviewed 40 workers from 25 different campaigns to date, and data collection is ongoing. If you’re trying to form a union or fight for social justice in your workplace and have interfaced with EWOC or our educational materials in some way, we’d love to hear from you!
On a more general note, I love volunteering my time to give free workshops on leadership development, building a democratic committee structure, and the nuts and bolts of relational organizing. I also love chatting formally or informally about movement strategy. Please do email me anytime at saratrongone@umass.edu.
I’ve also been incredibly grateful to collaborate with the wonderful Dr. Jennifer Gaddis on an assortment of projects about school food labor over the years. From 2015-2017, I worked on the “Lunch 4 Learning” campaign with my beloved organizing mentors, Liz Accles and members of the L4L Parent Caucus. We won that campaign for Unviersal Free School Meals in NYC in 2017, and when I arrived in Madison for grad school, I met Jen, who was hard at work furnishing the research and relational glue for a similar “Healthy School Meals for All” campaign in Wisconsin. (Thanks, always, to Erik Olin Wright for introducing us.) Our latest paper together, “Dishing Out Public Goods: School Food Workers and the Struggle to Revalue Reproductive Labor,” based on focus groups with frontline workers, school food directors, union staff, and other stakeholders, is forthcoming in Labor Studies Journal.
