****Mark your calendars for this week’s Progressive Labor Summit on Saturday, April 19th beginning at 9am at the Convention Center at 111 Harbor Drive, San Diego!***
The Eighth Annual Summit will examine the challenges we face and provide a forum for union members, students, and community to exchange ideas, engage in discussion, and gain the tools we need meet the moment.
Of particular interest to AFT members is the breakout panel, “Schools and Colleges as Sites of Refuge and Resistance,” at 3:00 featuring SDCCD Board Member Geysil Arroyo, San Diego County Board of Education President/AFT 1931’s Gregg Robinson, AFT 1931 Intern and City College student Nicole Delgado Garcia, and AFT 1931 City College VP Kelly Mayhew as moderator as well as Erin Tsurumoto Grassi from Alliance San Diego and Kyle Weinberg, President of the San Diego Education Association.
Members and their students can attend for FREE by registering with this link: AFT 1931 members/friends: www.eventbrite.com/e/1236457580909/?discount=PLSummit25_AFT1931 Feel free to let your students know about this excellent educational opportunity! Free light breakfast and lunch will be included with your registration.
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The Progressive Labor Summit is a one-day event taking place in San Diego, CA, bringing together members of the Labor community with left-of-center activists and community leaders to build stronger understanding, knowledge, skills, and partnerships in tackling the broader social challenges we are facing today.
Featured Speakers Include:
Julie Su, Former Acting Secretary of Labor
Charmaine Morales, President, UNAC/UHCP
Lorena Gonzalez, President, California Federation of Labor Unions
Program will include:
Workers in Resistance: Rank and file workers who are fighting against corporate and governmental assaults on working people discuss what they’re facing and the role of their unions in fighting back against exploitation and reckless management.
A Pro-Worker Economic Agenda in the Trump Era: President Biden was the most pro-worker, pro-union administration in our lifetimes. What do we need to do to defend the progress we’ve made, organize for resilience and solidarity in the Trump Era, and lay the foundation for an effective, durable pro-worker movement in the years to come?
The Cost of Living is Too Damn High: The cost of everything from eggs to housing has been spiraling up faster than wages can keep pace. Local experts and policy leaders discuss how to help our paychecks keep up, and reel in some of the worst abuses that are making it too hard for working families to make ends meet.
2024 in Review – Latinos and Trump: Much has been made of the swing towards Trump and Republicans in recent elections. What’s real, what’s hype, and how are Latinos actually thinking and voting, both here in San Diego and across the country?
***Schools and Colleges as Sites of Refuge and Resistance: This panel will explore the various ways schools should serve as refuges in the face of assaults from the Trump administration and local manifestations of MAGA ideology. From sheltering undocumented students and trying to protect vulnerable trans children, to resisting the efforts of the Trump administration to impose an anti-DEI, ideologically “pro”-American curriculum, panelists from a wide range of perspectives will grapple with the historic challenges facing public education in San Diego right now. Panelists are the SDCCD’s Geysil Arroyo, City College student and AFT Intern Nicole Delgado Garcia, SDEA’s Kyle Weinberg, SD County Board President and AFT 1931-R member Gregg Robinson, and Alliance San Diego’s Erin Tsurumoto Grassi; the moderator is AFT 1931 Vice President and City College Professor, Kelly Mayhew.
The Economics of Climate Disaster: From fires to floods to heatwaves and beyond, the environmental risks of climate change have become the economic realities of climate disaster. How is our increasingly dangerous reality impacting the household economies of working families, and the larger public budgets of governments trying to prepare and respond? What are the infrastructure investments we need to make, the threats we need to plan for, and the challenges that communities face?
Our Budget, Our Values: We are facing significant local budget deficits, major threats to federal funding, and widespread uncertainty around the near-term health of the economy. Local leaders and policy makers will discuss how to establish priorities that reflect our community values, needs, and shared dangers as we weigh potential cuts and opportunities to increase revenue.
LGBT+ Issues Are Worker Issues: With a renewed attack on the LGBT+ Community broadly and the trans community specifically, it’s more critical than ever to stand up against efforts to divide us, and remember that these attempts to break our solidarity are also attempts to break worker power. How can we continue mobilizing to be mutually supportive as a community and as allies, and where are the areas most in need of support?
Housing Is Dignity: The nation, the state, and San Diego are all dealing with major homelessness and housing crises with little sign of easing. Our efforts to expand homeless shelter and service capacity is struggling to keep up with the continuing flow of the newly homeless, and even the most aggressive efforts to increase housing supply have not produced enough to bring down prices. And wages are struggling to keep up even with the basic inflation for cost of living, much less any dream of saving for a home. How did we arrive at this place where poverty is treated as a moral failing that someone deserves instead of a policy outcome that can be deliberately fixed? How can we break down the long-held underlying misconceptions that are continuing to drive our housing and homelessness challenges, and what would a policy response look like that isn’t hamstrung by moralizing?
Free the Toothpaste: Who’s Really Robbing Who: There’s been a significant swing towards cracking down on low-level retail theft, with toiletries and other basic items being locked away and criminal penalties increasing. At the same time, wage theft remains the largest source of theft in the nation, by several orders of magnitude. Why is there such a gap in how seriously these are treated in policy making and public discussion, how did we allow wage theft and exploitation to become normalized to the point of invisibility, and how can we shift our focus and priorities to ensure that stealing from working people is treated at least as seriously as stealing from their corporate bosses?
Building Solidarity in Action: During these exceptional times, it’s more important than ever that we invest in cross-issue solidarity and prioritize a dynamic movement that stands together against common enemies and structural deficiencies. How have these coalition efforts succeeded or failed in the past, and what lessons can we apply to our advocacy and power-building now to ensure that we are not divided and weakened by self-interest?
Within the context of the current political climate, it is more important than ever that we are able to build strong, authentic relationships that allow us to move forward together in solidarity, as we strive towards greater justice for the communities we serve and represent. While many of us have collaborated and interacted tangentially, the current political landscape requires us to be more intentional and strategic than ever in order to create the changes we seek.