Political Power
Everyone deserves to live well
We believe that everyone deserves el buen vivir, a good life. We deserve dignity at work, safety at home, good education at our schools. We all deserve clean air and water, and good food to eat. We deserve to go to sleep knowing that no matter what the next day brings, we and our communities can handle it together.
We do not currently live this way.
Power is how we win this life for everyone.
We have not been able to win that life because we have not had enough political power. But it does not have to be that way – it is up to us. Martin Luther King Jr wrote, “Power, properly understood, is the ability to achieve purpose. It is the strength required to bring about social, political, or economic changes.”
We believe that immigrant workers are central to how power is understood in North Carolina. Immigrant workers are the foundation of industries that are essential to the state, such as construction.
Just as we know that respect in the workplace is deserved, politicians must also be required to listen to the voices of working people. We know there are many challenges today, from intimidation at the hands of immigration agents to labor abuse and wage theft.
We face these challenges head on – but we also know we cannot settle for verifying detentions and recovering wages that never should have been stolen in the first place. We must achieve political and cultural change to build the world we deserve.
To that end, we seek to build power step by step, person by person. We develop leadership in our communities, which gives way to building bases of neighbors with local power. We take collective action together. We believe in listening, identifying priorities, and creating strategies together to win on issues that bring our lives closer to living well.
The boss steals because the politician allows it. We believe in bringing employers and politicians to the table to negotiate directly with workers.
We believe that what happens at the ballot box is just one of many tactics, and that the work of shaping policy happens every day, all year long.here are many challenges today, from intimidation at the hands of immigration agents to labor abuse and wage theft.
We face these challenges head on – but we also know we cannot settle for verifying detentions and recovering a few stolen wages that never should have been stolen in the first place. We must achieve political and cultural change to build the world we deserve.
To that end, we seek to build power step by step, person by person. We develop leadership in our communities, which gives way to building bases of neighbors with local power. We take collective action together. We believe in listening, identifying priorities, and creating strategies together to win on issues that bring our lives closer to living well.
The boss steals because the politician allows it. We believe in bringing employers and politicians to the table to negotiate directly with workers.
We believe that what happens at the ballot box is just one of many tactics, and that the work of shaping policy happens every day, all year long.
Everyone has a choice to make.
Grace Lee Boggs gave us the question, “What time is it on the clock of the world?” All around us, blatant corruption, useless wars, and nonstop corporate growth live right alongside low wages, high cost of living, and lack of adequate healthcare. The contrast is astounding. Jeff Bezos sits next to his rocket ship and muses that perhaps we should all stop paying taxes, as if the rest of us had a rocket ship we could pawn when one of our loved ones is sick or to put our kids through school. We believe that we will all look back at this moment in time, that the actions we choose to take (or not take) will reverberate for years to come.
We can keep accepting the world as it is, or we can take steps to change it. We can lead in our neighborhoods, schools, churches and workplaces, bring people together and imagine the working conditions and living conditions we deserve. We can identify the barriers in the way of us having those things, and then build the power to move those barriers.
We must build a new kind of political power.
Beyond parties–we must start by talking to our neighbors and forming issue agendas. We must build political power at the local level across the state. North Carolina’s state legislature is one of the most powerful in the country–but in the last few years we’ve seen them work for themselves instead of for us. Our elected officials have a choice to make, too: do they stand with their rich donors, or do they stand with the people of our state?
