As a mass organization led by the poor, United Workers has been busy gearing up for the June 18th Poor People’s & Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly and Moral March on Washington and to the Polls. June 18th is not just a march, it's a declaration of an ongoing moral movement coalesced by the Poor People’s Campaign: A National Call for Moral Revival. The goals of this campaign are to unite and build the power of the 140 million poor and low-wealth people in this country, shift the political narrative, and make real policies to fully address poverty and low wealth from the bottom up. 

Since the early days, United Workers has been a part of this national and statewide effort to reawaken Dr. King’s Poor People’s Campaign. This revival of the Poor People’s campaign is not merely a reenactment, but a continuation of Dr. King’s strategic vision. We share the goals of this campaign. As Dr. King teaches us in the above quote, the poor must be the leaders of this movement to end poverty.  Only by taking action together can we, the poor and dispossessed, become the “new and unsettling force” that will transform our country.

In this month’s e-alert, we’ll share some of the creative ways we’re demonstrating our leadership and mobilizing across our state towards June 18th.  We’ll share a video from a recent Art Build in Westminster hosted by the Maryland Poor People’s Campaign, a member’s reflection on being a mobilization captain for June 18th, spoken poetry by Damontae Taylor, a United Workers Youth Leader, and another installment of our United Workers' history series.

Art Build 

On May Day, a group of United Workers leaders traveled to Westminster to participate in the Maryland Poor People's Campaign Art Build to gear up for June 18th. Check out this short video from the event! 

With June 18th less than a month away, our mobilizing captains have been working hard in organizing people to join in the Moral March on Washington. Here are reflections from two of United Workers leaders on why they decided to become  mobilization captains and why June 18th is so important.  

“We decided to be mobilizing captains for June 18th because it is important to build unity and leadership of low income and poor people. We all need to come together so that we can demand better housing, an end to homelessness, better education, less crime, and equal rights for all. We must do our part in order to educate people and bring them out to the March on Washington.” -Jerry and Jackie Mayo, United Workers Leaders

Leadership Day

On April 16th, we held our annual Leadership Day for the first time in person since the pandemic. This year we focused on how we as an organization and as individual leaders can carry on the legacy of Dr. King’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in our current times. During our opening exercise participants were asked to read Dr. Kings quotes and create skits that reflect the message of his words. Click below to watch one of the groups perform their skit. 

To watch the other skits please check out our YouTube channel here. 

PART II: Why Human Rights?

When United Workers began, we had to confront the challenges of how to unite into a powerful and as Dr. King  described, “new and unsettling force”. How do you bring workers together when they are day laborers who are contending with being hired and fired everyday, working jobs that may not last more than a day or a week. And when there is no legal framework that upholds the right to organize. And when conditions are so bad that many of these workers are depending on homeless shelters and meal programs to survive. 

These are big challenges that in so many ways have only gotten worse since our founding in 2002. We see more and more of the workforce becoming temporary workers and part-time workers so corporations can exploit our labor and reap tremendous profits at our expense. As day laborers you have no job security and you don’t know how many hours you are going to work from week to week.. that must sound familiar to a majority of workers employed at the largest employers in American including Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon; or with rising new comers dispatching work via cell phone such as Lyft and Door Dash. 

How do you build an organization when you are up against Wall Street and Big Tech that have bet big time on corporations that see us as expendable? That create, refine and invest in business models that turn more of us into simple a part of a logistics plan for moving inventory or to be replaced by automation in the very near termed?

Below is a piece Todd Cherkis, wrote when trying to summarize this initial period where we had more questions than answers. We were trying to understand what values have the potential to build community and unite working class people across historic divisions as well as new divisions based on new technological advances making our labor more precarious. Further - we also wanted to best describe what our experiences were and that our struggles were not about small concessions here or there but about our survival. That is how how high we saw the stakes 20 years ago and now after enduring the ongoing Pandemic and seeing even further how vulnerable we all are, we know the stakes are rising for a growing majority..... Click here to read more!

Art and Culture

Spoken Poetry By: Damontae Taylor, United Workers' Youth Leader

    We need to build a mass movement of working class people to end poverty, and we need your help to do it.  If you’d like to support our work by volunteering your time and skills, please reach out to us at [email protected] to get involved in our ongoing campaigns.  You can also support us by clicking the button below and donating to United Workers. Your financial support will contribute to us becoming independently sustained by our base of members, family, and friends.

When United Workers began, we had to confront the challenges of how to unite into a powerful and as Dr. King  described, “new and unsettling force”. How do you bring workers together when they are day laborers who are contending with being hired and fired everyday, working jobs that may not last more than a day or a week. And when there is no legal framework that upholds the right to organize. And when conditions are so bad that many of these workers are depending on homeless shelters and meal programs to survive. 

These are big challenges that in so many ways have only gotten worse since our founding in 2002. We see more and more of the workforce becoming temporary workers and part-time workers so corporations can exploit our labor and reap tremendous profits at our expense. As day laborers you have no job security and you don’t know how many hours you are going to work from week to week.. that must sound familiar to a majority of workers employed at the largest employers in American including Walmart, McDonald’s, Amazon; or with rising new comers dispatching work via cell phone such as Lyft andDoor Dash. 

How do you build an organization when you are up against Wall Street and Big Tech that have bet big time on corporations that see us as expendable? That create, refine and invest in business models that turn more of us into simple a part of a logistics plan for moving inventory or to be replaced by automation in the very near termed?

Below is a piece Todd Cherkis, wrote when trying to summarize this initial period where we had more questions than answers. We were trying to understand what values have the potential to build community and unite working class people across historic divisions as well as new divisions based on new technological advances making our labor more precarious. Further - we also wanted to best describe what our experiences were and that our struggles were not about small concessions here or there but about our survival. That is how how high we saw the stakes 20 years ago and now after enduring the ongoing Pandemic and seeing even further how vulnerable we all are, we know the stakes are rising for a growing majority. 

Why Human Rights?

Written By: Todd Cherkis, Leadership Organizer

United Workers confronted a number of organizing challenges when it set out to improve the working conditions and pay for day laborers in Baltimore.  First, as traditional union organizers know, it is extremely difficult to organize temporary workers who are dispersed over multiple and changing work-sites that are characterized by very high turn-over that produce an entirely new workforce every few months.  In Baltimore, day laborers work for dozens of labor agencies and dozens of different contractors throughout the city, which makes even identifying and reaching them difficult.  Second, day laborers inherently lack leverage vis-à-vis employers.  Unlike production-based industries, where employers can suffer economic losses from the withdrawal of skilled labor, day labor agencies can draw from vast pools of unskilled and readily available workers to replace laborers who stop working.  In Baltimore specifically, day labor agencies maintain their access to large pools of surplus labor through the homeless shelters and soup kitchens with which they maintain good relationships.  Third, the legal framework for traditional labor organizing, based in the Fair Labor Standards Act and the National Labor Relations Board, provides no redress for day laborers.  Among other things, legal prohibitions against “secondary targets” would deprive day laborers of their only leverage.  These factors compelled us to look beyond traditional union organizing.  Other approaches, however, were rejected either because they implied “charity” or reinforced identity politics.  United Workers turned instead to human rights both as an alternative to union-based, charity-based and identity-based models and as a way of overcoming the weaknesses inherent to these approaches.  

We found in the human rights framework means for overcoming the challenges of reaching and organize day laborers, as well as for cultivating interest in and mobilizing allies. Embedding day laborers’ grievances and demands in the broader human rights framework, with its emphasis on universality and human dignity, accomplishes the following.  First, by its very nature, temporary work is not conducive to workers developing a commitment to a particular workplace or employer. Embedding demands in human rights is providing the possibility of reaching and mobilizing workers irrespective of workplace, duration of employment or employer because the issues transcend place and time.  We attribute the strong appeal that human rights has registered with members to the effectiveness that framing our demands in terms of a political struggle for larger principles.  The broader framework of universal principles has also helped to penetrate race and ethnic barriers that have exacerbated day laborers’ spatial dispersal.  

Second, by calling attention to a living wage and freedom from poverty as inalienable human rights to which all human beings are entitled, including day laborers, United Workers is able to articulate demands that have the potential to reach the public at large.  Instead of calling on the public to come out in support of these particular workers’ demands for higher wages, they are calling on the public to support the human rights of all.  Indeed, rather than seeking charity to alleviate the dire conditions faced by day laborers, the human rights model spotlights the political and economic cultures that force some to rely on charity instead of ensuring a distribution of resources that upholds the dignity and justice to which all persons have an inalienable right.

Our first major campaign - the Living Wages Campaign at Camden Yards was a human rights campaign calling for work with dignity. It would come to transcend racial lines, gender, and even where people caught temp work to go and clean up Camden Yards as throughout the 4 years of the campaign, many temporary agencies were deployed to disorganize and disunite our campaign. 

Through our focus on values - human rights values - that all life is sacred no matter how much you earn, what race or gender you are, your immigration status or whether you had a criminal record.. these values become the sacred center of our work and the fight for our dignity and survival at Camden Yards - at the time the largest employer of day laborers in Baltimore. 

Here are some reflections from two of our youth leaders who participated in the youth programing at the Hope Garden:

"There are many things we do at the garden and one of those are media. In media we used DJI cameras and drones to capture people's stories at the Hope Garden. Telling stories are important because stories are your experiences you had throughout your life. Stories also inform people of the many problems we face. One of the problems we face is homelessness. Homelessness is a big problem all over the world. Poverty is another problem we face in the world, including Harlem Park. Storytelling is a way to make people more aware of these problems so they can help stop these problems. Telling stories with our media will help people see the truth instead of the many lies we can find in the news and media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and many more." -Michele Coleman, United Workers Youth Leader

"I really enjoyed building a shed and garden beds. I learned about the different parts of a drill and how to help people build. I planted potatoes and carrots with Ms. Vern. Ms. Vern taught me how to take care of the plants. Also each Tuesday we paint our history and future. So if you like to build and paint and garden, come to the Hope Garden."- Marquis Coleman, United Workers Youth Leader

It’s Movement Time!!!

United Workers has been making moves this month in more ways than one. As a mass organization of the poor in Maryland, we’re contributing our energy towards a national and statewide mobilization push for the Mass Poor People’s & Low-Wage Workers’ Assembly & Moral March on Washington on June 18th. This weekend is our annual Leadership Day in which we reflect on the kind of leadership required to build a mass movement to end poverty led by the poor. This year’s Leadership Day will focus on how we as an organization and as individual leaders carry on the legacy of Dr. King’s 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in our times. In this e-alert, we’ll share updates around these efforts, as well as content written by our members. We’ve included a letter to the editor authored by Shirley Eatmon, a MD Poor People’s Campaign leader in Western Maryland, and reflections on the Hope Garden from two youth leaders—Michele and Marquis Coleman.

If that weren’t enough to keep us moving, we’ve been making some physical moves as well. United Workers said goodbye to our home of 9 years in the basement of St. John’s Church at 2640 St. Paul Street and moved our office to our new location at 2239 Kirk Ave. Some readers might be familiar with the space as the former home of the Oak Hill Center for Education & Culture. We’ve participated in events here before, including some of the initial meetings around the 2018 re-launch of the Poor People’s Campaign. That relationship continued to deepen in this space through Oak Hill Center’s popular Books and Breakfast event hosted in collaboration with the Baltimore committee of the MD Poor People’s Campaign. This space will now be our permanent home.

The Hope Garden in Harlem Park also had its own move this month, having outgrown our former space at 1314 Harlem Ave. We’ve moved across the street to an inner block park that offers us more space and more sunlight while retaining easy access to the rec center and the surrounding community that has come to love the garden. Thanks to contributions of time and seedlings from the community, we’re already growing food and minds in the new Hope Garden.

Here are some reflections from our youth leaders who participated in the youth programing at the Hope Garden:

"There are many things we do at the garden and one of those are media. In media we used DJI cameras and drones to capture people's stories at the Hope Garden. Telling stories are important because stories are your experiences you had throughout your life. Stories also inform people of the many problems we face. One of the problems we face is homelessness. Homelessness is a big problem all over the world. Poverty is another problem we face in the world, including Harlem Park. Storytelling is a way to make people more aware of these problems so they can help stop these problems. Telling stories with our media will help people see the truth instead of the many lies we can find in the news and media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and many more." -Michele Coleman, United Workers Youth Leader

"I really enjoyed building a shed and garden beds. I learned about the different parts of a drill and how to help people build. I planted potatoes and carrots with Ms. Vern. Ms. Vern taught me how to take care of the plants. Also each Tuesday we paint our history and future. So if you like to build and paint and garden, come to the Hope Garden."- Marquis Coleman, United Workers Youth Leader

Moving to these new spaces is an opportunity for tremendous growth and new beginnings in our work. Just as United Workers returns to the space where we contributed to the revival of the Poor People’s Campaign, so too is the Poor People’s Campaign returning to its roots in Washington D.C. in another mass mobilization that will transform our nation. Movement facilitates growth- in our movement, in our work, and even in the crops at Hope Garden. If you want to join us in this growth, sign up with us here. You can also register to join us on June 18th by clicking the link below.

Register for the Poor People's Campaign Moral March on Washington!

The June 18, 2022 Mass Poor People's & Low-Wage Workers' Assembly & Moral March on Washington and to the Polls will be a generationally transformative and disruptive gathering of poor and low-wealth people, state leaders, faith communities, moral allies, unions, and partnering organizations. Click here to learn more and register!

Letter to the Editor:

Government Must Stop Turning it's Back on Homelessness

An article in The Carroll County Times on March 15,

“Cities change course, clear homeless camps,” reports on the problem of homeless encampments in cities across the country. Cities are planning to use aggressive measures to remove encampments rather than treating homelessness as the humanitarian crisis it is. Instead of addressing the root causes of homelessness, cities have focused on criminalizing people who are homeless. While doing outreach in Carroll County with the Maryland Poor People’s Campaign, I talked with people who are homeless and those working yet facing eviction and possibly becoming homeless. A woman working two jobs had hours cut and when unable to pay rent, the landlord told her to pay with her credit card, putting her more in debt. A mother with a young child was three months behind in her rent due to her place of employment closing several weeks during the pandemic and then cutting her hours. The landlord did not inform her of the Emergency Rental Assistance Program that would have paid her back rent to keep her housing. A palliative patient on continuous oxygen was evicted by a landlord during the rent moratorium. These stories are not unique to Carroll County and can be heard all over Maryland and throughout the country. At the root of homelessness is systemic poverty, racism, ecological devastation, a war

economy and the distorted moral narrative that seeks to blame the poor instead of addressing systems that cause poverty. Social welfare and antipoverty programs have been underfunded to the extent that only a quarter of eligible families receive federal housing assistance. We live in a country where there is an abundance of resources, but our government chooses not to use the resources to uplift people. Housing provides stability, security, community and belonging. Without housing, everything else collapses. On June 18, I am joining the Maryland Poor People’s Campaign with thousands of people coming from across the country in the Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Worker’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington to demand changes in a system that ignores the needs of people. It’s time to stand in solidarity to demand our basic rights to housing, healthcare, living wages and voting rights. Somebody’s hurting our people, and we won’t be silent anymore.

— Shirley Eatmon, Finksburg

Eatmon works for the Maryland Poor People’s Campaign — Western Region

We need to build a mass movement of working class people to end poverty, and we need your help to do it. If you’d like to support our work by volunteering your time and skills, please reach out to us at [email protected] to get involved in our ongoing campaigns. You can also support us by clicking the button below and donating to United Workers. Your financial support will contribute to us becoming independently sustained by our base of members, family, and friends.

Hello again from United Workers!

Since the start of the new year, United Workers has been engaged in our annual strategic planning process. This is an important time of reflection for the organization. We review the work of the last year, draw out lessons learned, and set our priorities for the forthcoming year. Although this is an annual process, this year’s strategic planning is especially significant. For one, we have reached a critical milestone in our organization’s history. This summer will mark our 20 year anniversary as a membership-led human rights organization of the poor and dispossessed in Maryland. From our founding by homeless day laborers in an abandoned firehouse turned homeless shelter to our Living Wages Victory at Camden Yards, from the fight for Fair Development at the Inner Harbor to our multi-issue fights for our human rights to housing, healthcare, and clean air, we have a lot to celebrate, but also a lot to learn from. In recognition of our upcoming anniversary, we’ll be including in our upcoming e-alerts a segment looking back at important moments in United Workers history, starting with the founding of the organization in this edition (see below).

Additionally, this year’s strategic planning process is also significant, because we are envisioning the next phase as a period of “reconnaissance” to help determine our next focal point campaign.

One of the slogans we often say in the United Workers is that the struggle is the school. However, the school extends beyond critically reflecting on our past struggles. We are also studying the history of the poor organizing the poor, and lessons from contemporaries in the movement to end poverty today. Reflecting together on the struggle is how we grow as leaders in our movement led by the poor to end poverty.

Though the usual activity of the organization continues, we have been scheduling time twice a week to meet as a collective and talk about the work, past and future. These deep discussions are about more than our plans for the year- they’re an opportunity for political education and developing strategic unity. We are incredibly grateful to those fellow organizers who have joined us thus far in these conversations. These guests have included our own emeritus Leadership Council member Willie Baptist, Nijmie Dzurinko and Phil Wider from Put People First! PA, and Sarah Weintraub of Vermont Workers’ Center and the WI Poor People’s Campaign. They’ve generously shared their insights on strategies for leadership development, challenges and setbacks they’ve overcome, and ways to think more critically about the work we’re doing.

This upcoming year will be a “year of reconnaissance” for United Workers. We will focus on research and education as we develop our next campaign. As Willie Baptist teaches us, you cannot correctly identify the solution if you cannot correctly identify the problem. We are not fighting for moderate reforms or crumbs from the table of the ruling class. We are fighting to end poverty, to attack it at the roots and change the system that produces it. To do this, we need to understand that system. Over the next period, we’ll be engaged in an intentional listening and research process to determine a focal point campaign- one that unites poor people across Maryland, and one that builds upon what we’ve discovered so far in 20 years of learning as we lead.

Part I: The Founding Years

Watch a video from our archives: “United Workers Founding Years”

United Workers’ history began with asking questions- Why are we working so hard but still living on the street? What has happened to the economy that has kept our wages low and our basic survival needs unmet? Can we unite homeless brothers and sisters around these questions, reach a better understanding of our circumstances and the powers-that-be that are oppressing us, and do something about it?

This video clip from our early days showcases two important aspects of the organization that have been central to our work since the beginning. First, United Workers comes out of a history of organizing among the poor and dispossessed - particularly the National Union of the Homeless movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Willie Baptist, featured in the video, was an educator and organizer with the Union of the Homeless during that time period. His emphasis on collective study and being about to develop ourselves so that we might outsmart our opponents comes from the lessons of that period - where people with little in the way of money or other resources were able to use their intelligence and resourcefulness to outsmart who and what they were up against. The connections to Willie Baptist (now an emeritus board member of United Workers) and others were instrumental in our formation and ability to stick and stay.

Secondly, the video shows the emphasis we placed on leadership development and study. During this period in 2002-2004, we largely centered our work around two precious hours at the Eutaw Street homeless shelter. The abandoned firehouse turned small shelter afforded us a time and place to study. We started out organizing day laborers who would work all over Baltimore at some of the most powerful institutions in the city. We studied how this work was organized, compared notes on the worst and best jobs, saw how we were being divided by race and gender, and dug into the question of who is benefiting from this system, what did we see as weaknesses that we may be able to exploit and where were our leverage points as day laborers who were hired and fired every day. This was an active process that would continue when we left the shelter. Our outreach to workers as seen in the video was a central way we began to formulate and test our analysis. It was through this theory and practice that we developed and launch our first campaign - the Living Wages Campaign at Camden Yards, where we would organize the hundreds of day laborers who cleaned the stadium during and after home games.

United Workers launched our first campaign in 2004 with a protest march to Camden Yards.

Register for the Poor People's Campaign Moral March on Washington!

The June 18, 2022 Mass Poor People's & Low-Wage Workers' Assembly & Moral March on Washington and to the Polls will be a generationally transformative and disruptive gathering of poor and low-wealth people, state leaders, faith communities, moral allies, unions, and partnering organizations. Click here to learn more and register!

We need to build a mass movement of working class people to end poverty, and we need your help to do it. If you’d like to support our work by volunteering your time and skills, please reach out to us at [email protected] to get involved in our ongoing campaigns. You can also support us by clicking the button below and donating to United Workers. Your financial support will contribute to us becoming independently sustained by our base of members, family, and friends.

Letter to the Editor:

Government Must Stop Turning it's Back on Homelessness

An article in The Carroll County Times on March 15,

“Cities change course, clear homeless camps,” reports on the problem of homeless encampments in cities across the country. Cities are planning to use aggressive measures to remove encampments rather than treating homelessness as the humanitarian crisis it is. Instead of addressing the root causes of homelessness, cities have focused on criminalizing people who are homeless. While doing outreach in Carroll County with the Maryland Poor People’s Campaign, I talked with people who are homeless and those working yet facing eviction and possibly becoming homeless. A woman working two jobs had hours cut and when unable to pay rent, the landlord told her to pay with her credit card, putting her more in debt. A mother with a young child was three months behind in her rent due to her place of employment closing several weeks during the pandemic and then cutting her hours. The landlord did not inform her of the Emergency Rental Assistance Program that would have paid her back rent to keep her housing. A palliative patient on continuous oxygen was evicted by a landlord during the rent moratorium. These stories are not unique to Carroll County and can be heard all over Maryland and throughout the country. At the root of homelessness is systemic poverty, racism, ecological devastation, a war

economy and the distorted moral narrative that seeks to blame the poor instead of addressing systems that cause poverty. Social welfare and antipoverty programs have been underfunded to the extent that only a quarter of eligible families receive federal housing assistance. We live in a country where there is an abundance of resources, but our government chooses not to use the resources to uplift people. Housing provides stability, security, community and belonging. Without housing, everything else collapses. On June 18, I am joining the Maryland Poor People’s Campaign with thousands of people coming from across the country in the Mass Poor People’s and Low-Wage Worker’s Assembly and Moral March on Washington to demand changes in a system that ignores the needs of people. It’s time to stand in solidarity to demand our basic rights to housing, healthcare, living wages and voting rights. Somebody’s hurting our people, and we won’t be silent anymore. 

— Shirley Eatmon, Finksburg

Eatmon works for the Maryland Poor People’s Campaign — Western Region

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