Georgia’s workers, organizers, and labor leaders know what it’s like to live and work in a hostile political climate. They know the challenges of operating in a world where laws make it harder for workers to organize, where statewide electeds overturn or bar local policies that put workers first, and where resources are too often allocated without workers’ needs prioritized.
As Acting Secretary of Labor during the Biden administration, I worked with leaders nationwide to build a country where everyone could get a good job, no matter the zip code they were born in, the income of their parents, the color of their skin, or the funding available to their schools. Throughout our work, I knew that we had to focus on communities that previously had been left out. We wanted good job creation for all workers, which in Georgia—as in many states in the South—meant acknowledging that Black workers, despite having the talent and work ethic needed, have long been denied opportunity and meaningful investments in their communities.
As part of this effort, I worked with incredible local leaders such as Deborah Scott, founder and leader of the base-building and advocacy organization Georgia STAND-UP; Yvonne Brooks, president of the Georgia AFL-CIO; and Sandra Williams, president of the Atlanta North Georgia Labor Council. We united with a shared belief that joblessness and poverty wages were not caused by individual shortcomings but policy failures; combating them required infrastructure investments, not just in physical roads and bridges, but in people. Together, we built a coalition of labor unions and community-based organizations—the Atlanta Good Jobs Alliance—that focused on building this opportunity infrastructure for workers.
Recently, to find out how we at The Century Foundation could support the continued fight for racial and economic justice through good jobs in Georgia—work made even more urgent and difficult amidst unprecedented threats to workers from the Trump administration—I returned to Atlanta to participate in a listening session with workers, along with Deborah Scott, Yvonne Brooks, and Georgia icon, national leader, and award-winning author Stacey Abrams.
Hosted at the Communication Workers of America Local 3204 union hall, the listening session surfaced many of the critical issues and lessons learned in the fight for good jobs in Georgia—lessons that should be valuable to labor leaders and policymakers across the country in the months and years ahead. Drawing on just a few of the many insights participants shared, lessons include:
- Working families need increased access to supportive services—including affordable quality child care, transportation, housing, and utility assistance. Without public investment in these essential services, workers face overwhelming barriers to getting and staying in good jobs. Actions could range from ensuring that infrastructure investments reach communities that struggle with a lack of public transportation options, as was the case under Biden-era federal investments; to a universal child care initiative, as New Mexico recently became the first to announce at a state level; increased funding and flexibility from federal laws such as the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) to cover such work-adjacent costs; to stronger support for community organizations such as the YMCA and City of Refuge to increase their capacity to provide essential services on the ground while ensuring the caregivers and other workers who deliver these services also have good jobs.
- Effective job training programs connected to actual jobs, such as registered apprenticeships, are essential. Policymakers can take action by investing in registered apprenticeships and expanding proven programs such as those supported by Women in Apprenticeships and Nontraditional Occupations (WANTO) grants that train women and women of color for good-paying jobs in industries such as construction from which they have long been excluded; expanding pre-apprenticeship programs that participants agreed change lives, such as Georgia STAND-UP’s Trade-Up and the federal YouthBuild program; and supporting partnerships between local governments, unions, employers, and education and training providers to recruit a diverse array of workers from the local community into high-quality earn-and-learn programs that end not in a job search, but in an actual job.
- Job creation must be paired with prioritizing job quality. People in Georgia and beyond should not have to choose between bad jobs that mire them in poverty or no jobs. Measures of job quality raised by participants in Atlanta include living wages, including for tipped workers, and paid leave. One way for policymakers to advance job quality is to tie public dollars to job quality standards, including incentivizing job quality outcomes in public contracting. Another is to do what the City of Atlanta under Mayor Dickens has done, along with visionary mayors across the country, to educate, encourage, and promote employers and other workforce stakeholders to ensure that job opportunities align with Good Jobs Principles.
- Enforcement of labor standards is critical. Too many workers continue to labor under exploitative conditions where basic labor laws and health and safety standards are ignored. Particularly where the federal government has slashed resources for enforcement, state and local government becomes more important than ever as a protector of workers and a force for fair competition for law-abiding employers. Increasingly, cities have developed their own labor enforcement standards capability, particularly where a higher city minimum wage exists than the state or federal minimum. Collaboration between city, state and federal enforcement should ensure that workers get the highest protections to which they’re entitled.
- Worker well-being and racial justice go hand in hand. The room reflected the diverse leadership in Georgia and the critical work being done by Black-led organizations. From labor unions to community-based organizations to the Georgia AFL-CIO itself, history-making leaders who are the first Black women to be in their positions are demonstrating how powerful it is when racial barriers to advancement are broken down. Today, attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, are thinly veiled efforts to discredit Black leaders and other leaders of color, women of color, and institutions, employers, unions, and government entities that acknowledge that proactive efforts to combat systemic racism are not only appropriate, they are necessary. Our nation’s labor laws also reflect a history of racism, from the exclusion of farmworkers and domestic workers, who were largely Black when the Fair Labor Standards Act was passed, from federal labor protections, to the fact that the five states without a state minimum wage are all in the South, and Georgia is one of two states with a state minimum wage below the federal minimum. The current administration’s attacks on immigrants and on people of color under the guise of immigration enforcement are part of a history of divide and conquer that attempts to appeal to worker insecurity by scapegoating other workers. The work of racial and economic justice are deeply intertwined, and the unfinished work ahead demands that labor leaders and policymakers continue to advance them together.
- The right to organize is still too elusive for workers who face the greatest barriers to a secure life. So-called “right-to-work” laws mean workers who want a union face insurmountable barriers to getting one. Participants spoke of the devastating impact of captive audience meetings and lack of a functioning National Labor Relations Board for workers on strike who are enduring unfair labor practices. For workers who do not have the right to collectively bargain, like home health care workers in Georgia, it is simply too hard to get by. Policies that prevent workers from having a real voice on the job and allow them to be punished for speaking up must be replaced by protections for workers’ right to have a real say in the conditions of their work.
These lessons are the product of the collaboration between the Biden Department of Labor (DOL) and labor leaders and workers on the ground in Georgia, as part of DOL’s effort to ensure that a surge of federal investments in American industries would truly benefit workers.
In Georgia, the Biden DOL Had Accepted a Challenge
With historic levels of funding flowing from landmark legislation such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act, I worked with my team to develop a strategy to ensure that “all workers” truly meant all.
At the outset, we knew a few things:
- we had to confront longstanding, systemic exclusion head-on by prioritizing communities and people that have been shut out of the promise of a good job;
- federal investments could be leveraged to ensure job quality (meaning we cared not just about creating a lot of jobs, we also cared that they were good jobs, and as much as possible, union jobs);
- those good jobs should be open to people—including people of color, women, those without four-year college degrees, people facing housing insecurity and intergenerational poverty, individuals coming out of incarceration—who live in communities where investments were most needed; and
- the work of making this happen would require strong labor-community coalitions led by local leaders and organizers.
The problem of not enough good jobs in certain areas, and residents of those communities being denied the security and sense of pride that comes with a good job, creates a vicious cycle, sending the local economy into a downward spiral, making it less likely to attract employers. But the opposite is also true: if we could invest in those communities and ensure that the jobs created were available to the people who lived there, it would encourage even more investments and create more good jobs. But getting more people into good jobs required understanding the existing barriers to employment. It required building another kind of infrastructure: roads and bridges from poverty to prosperity, from exclusion to employment.
Part of the problem was, for too long, our nation’s workforce development system focused on worker training without looking at the actual jobs that employers needed to fill—or would soon need to fill—which meant training programs didn’t match employer needs. Moreover, even individuals with the desire and the right skills often could not get hired because they faced other barriers, such as transportation and child care needs, or discrimination and bias, that kept qualified people out of work. These barriers all too often have been seen as arising from individual shortcomings; that is, workers who couldn’t find transportation or child care, or couldn’t land an existing job, were seen as not trying hard enough. But just as poor freeway connections and crumbling bridges create delays and are deterrents to reaching your destination, we have to think about meeting workforce needs as an infrastructure challenge.
Working with Communities in Georgia
The historic Biden-era federal investments gave the DOL a chance to—really, demanded that we—do it better this time. Working with Georgia’s leaders, we helped build the Good Jobs Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and community-based organizations that focused on building this opportunity infrastructure.
Among other accomplishments, the Alliance guaranteed entry for graduates of Georgia STAND-UP’s pre-apprenticeship program—overwhelmingly women of color—to Georgia Building Trades apprenticeships. Such pre-apprenticeship programs function as on-ramps for young people from disadvantaged communities and communities of color to join union apprenticeship programs, including young people like Lisa Brooks. Through Georgia STAND-UP’s pre-apprenticeship program, Lisa got a job she didn’t even know existed before, as a union painter. Today, she leads her IUPAT local and pays it forward by recruiting others, many of whom didn’t know they could do it until they saw a Black woman like them in her role.
This type of job placement also happens because IUPAT has continuously made a concerted effort to recruit and retain workers from the full breadth of talent in all communities. The leadership of unions in breaking down historic barriers to membership has been crucial to expanding the promise of good jobs to more people and to building a diverse labor movement.
The Good Jobs Alliance also worked with Mayor Dickens’ office to get a citywide commitment to Good Jobs Principles, which included the establishment of the first labor enforcement agency inside the city. And because the YMCA was part of the Alliance, child care was offered to people who participated in the mayor’s summer jobs program, allowing previously excluded workers to obtain employment.
President Biden’s Department of Labor invested not just time but real money in organizations on the ground. Through funds such as the WANTO grant, we supported women-led organizations that recruit, train, and help retain women electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, and ironworkers. Trump’s DOL sought to eliminate those grants. But each time, the organizations and the women they’ve served pushed back, and each time, Trump’s DOL was forced to reverse course. It can be hard to hear the wins through all the noise this administration is making, but stopping the federal funding cuts to WANTO is worth celebrating.
Hearing from Workers and Understanding the Fight Ahead
The accomplishments made by Biden’s DOL and the Good Jobs Alliance don’t solve all the problems of economic insecurity, racial exclusion, and challenges to unionization in a “right-to-work” state like Georgia, and the need for still more good jobs persists. The recent listening session focused on the challenges workers and labor organizers face in a perilous economy and an increasingly harsh policy landscape.
We heard how the high cost of living continues to create deep instability and how job loss, including Donald Trump’s slash and burn approach to the federal government, is hurting Georgians. One former federal employee from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta spoke of the harrowing experience of being vilified by the Trump administration, which has been used to justify firings, abuse, and a shooting at CDC headquarters that killed a police officer.
There was concern expressed that Trump’s militarization of America’s cities and criminalization of communities of color would come to Atlanta. Several speakers talked about the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants. And we heard calls for unity—the importance of not allowing the administration to pit workers against one another.
We also heard how unions are stepping up and opening their halls to provide food and financial assistance as workers face unemployment. Lisa Brooks shared how she continues to go to high schools and tech schools to spread the word about good union jobs in the trades. She emphasized the value of having one good job that gives a family security rather than having to piece together multiple jobs that just don’t provide enough.
And we heard from striking workers who, in the face of great odds, are holding out for a contract they deserve. Workers who strike often endure the rescission of employer-provided health care benefits—one of the ways employers exercise leverage over their employees—and the hardworking Teamsters Local 528 drivers who deliver for Kroger are enduring such hardship now in their fifth month on strike.
Many speakers noted the disproportionate harm of the Trump administration’s attacks on Black women. The Women’s Entrepreneurial Opportunity Project is addressing this and has seen interest in and demand for their work to expand opportunity for minority-owned businesses and leadership for women of color grow dramatically since January.
We heard about how the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is organizing to improve working conditions for home health care workers. The fight for a better future for home health care workers is about making sure that those who care for us and our loved ones—a workforce that is overwhelmingly made up of women of color—get the security and dignity they deserve. We heard speakers’ pride in the recent wins for their sisters and brothers in Michigan, and we also heard resolve that, despite Governor Kemp vetoing the same right for Georgia workers, the organizing continues.
In the coming months, my colleagues and I at The Century Foundation will focus on ambitious but concrete ideas that policymakers can adopt and implement at the state and local levels to meet the needs of workers like the ones I heard from in Georgia. These listening sessions are critical to ensuring that workers are part of policy development and that policy solutions address real problems and deliver real benefits.
Looking Forward
For me, sitting down with Yvonne, Stacey, and Deborah, knowing the hard work we had done together to make good on the promise of a good job for all in Georgia, was rejuvenating. Even as the Trump administration has abandoned many of the commitments in the Good Jobs Alliance, Atlanta is showing that at a time of relentless attacks by our own federal government on our nation’s cities, the workers, unions, mayors, and community leaders in Georgia continue to hold the line and even to advance it. As has always been true, the work of cities and states will be critical to the struggle for economic and racial justice, and The Century Foundation and I will be there for it.
Tags: jobs, department of labor, atlanta
What Labor Leaders and Policymakers Can Learn from Georgia
Georgia’s workers, organizers, and labor leaders know what it’s like to live and work in a hostile political climate. They know the challenges of operating in a world where laws make it harder for workers to organize, where statewide electeds overturn or bar local policies that put workers first, and where resources are too often allocated without workers’ needs prioritized.
As Acting Secretary of Labor during the Biden administration, I worked with leaders nationwide to build a country where everyone could get a good job, no matter the zip code they were born in, the income of their parents, the color of their skin, or the funding available to their schools. Throughout our work, I knew that we had to focus on communities that previously had been left out. We wanted good job creation for all workers, which in Georgia—as in many states in the South—meant acknowledging that Black workers, despite having the talent and work ethic needed, have long been denied opportunity and meaningful investments in their communities.
As part of this effort, I worked with incredible local leaders such as Deborah Scott, founder and leader of the base-building and advocacy organization Georgia STAND-UP; Yvonne Brooks, president of the Georgia AFL-CIO; and Sandra Williams, president of the Atlanta North Georgia Labor Council. We united with a shared belief that joblessness and poverty wages were not caused by individual shortcomings but policy failures; combating them required infrastructure investments, not just in physical roads and bridges, but in people. Together, we built a coalition of labor unions and community-based organizations—the Atlanta Good Jobs Alliance—that focused on building this opportunity infrastructure for workers.
Recently, to find out how we at The Century Foundation could support the continued fight for racial and economic justice through good jobs in Georgia—work made even more urgent and difficult amidst unprecedented threats to workers from the Trump administration—I returned to Atlanta to participate in a listening session with workers, along with Deborah Scott, Yvonne Brooks, and Georgia icon, national leader, and award-winning author Stacey Abrams.
Hosted at the Communication Workers of America Local 3204 union hall, the listening session surfaced many of the critical issues and lessons learned in the fight for good jobs in Georgia—lessons that should be valuable to labor leaders and policymakers across the country in the months and years ahead. Drawing on just a few of the many insights participants shared, lessons include:
These lessons are the product of the collaboration between the Biden Department of Labor (DOL) and labor leaders and workers on the ground in Georgia, as part of DOL’s effort to ensure that a surge of federal investments in American industries would truly benefit workers.
In Georgia, the Biden DOL Had Accepted a Challenge
With historic levels of funding flowing from landmark legislation such as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the Inflation Reduction Act, and the CHIPS and Science Act, I worked with my team to develop a strategy to ensure that “all workers” truly meant all.
At the outset, we knew a few things:
The problem of not enough good jobs in certain areas, and residents of those communities being denied the security and sense of pride that comes with a good job, creates a vicious cycle, sending the local economy into a downward spiral, making it less likely to attract employers. But the opposite is also true: if we could invest in those communities and ensure that the jobs created were available to the people who lived there, it would encourage even more investments and create more good jobs. But getting more people into good jobs required understanding the existing barriers to employment. It required building another kind of infrastructure: roads and bridges from poverty to prosperity, from exclusion to employment.
Part of the problem was, for too long, our nation’s workforce development system focused on worker training without looking at the actual jobs that employers needed to fill—or would soon need to fill—which meant training programs didn’t match employer needs. Moreover, even individuals with the desire and the right skills often could not get hired because they faced other barriers, such as transportation and child care needs, or discrimination and bias, that kept qualified people out of work. These barriers all too often have been seen as arising from individual shortcomings; that is, workers who couldn’t find transportation or child care, or couldn’t land an existing job, were seen as not trying hard enough. But just as poor freeway connections and crumbling bridges create delays and are deterrents to reaching your destination, we have to think about meeting workforce needs as an infrastructure challenge.
Working with Communities in Georgia
The historic Biden-era federal investments gave the DOL a chance to—really, demanded that we—do it better this time. Working with Georgia’s leaders, we helped build the Good Jobs Alliance, a coalition of labor unions and community-based organizations that focused on building this opportunity infrastructure.
Among other accomplishments, the Alliance guaranteed entry for graduates of Georgia STAND-UP’s pre-apprenticeship program—overwhelmingly women of color—to Georgia Building Trades apprenticeships. Such pre-apprenticeship programs function as on-ramps for young people from disadvantaged communities and communities of color to join union apprenticeship programs, including young people like Lisa Brooks. Through Georgia STAND-UP’s pre-apprenticeship program, Lisa got a job she didn’t even know existed before, as a union painter. Today, she leads her IUPAT local and pays it forward by recruiting others, many of whom didn’t know they could do it until they saw a Black woman like them in her role.
This type of job placement also happens because IUPAT has continuously made a concerted effort to recruit and retain workers from the full breadth of talent in all communities. The leadership of unions in breaking down historic barriers to membership has been crucial to expanding the promise of good jobs to more people and to building a diverse labor movement.
The Good Jobs Alliance also worked with Mayor Dickens’ office to get a citywide commitment to Good Jobs Principles, which included the establishment of the first labor enforcement agency inside the city. And because the YMCA was part of the Alliance, child care was offered to people who participated in the mayor’s summer jobs program, allowing previously excluded workers to obtain employment.
President Biden’s Department of Labor invested not just time but real money in organizations on the ground. Through funds such as the WANTO grant, we supported women-led organizations that recruit, train, and help retain women electricians, plumbers, bricklayers, and ironworkers. Trump’s DOL sought to eliminate those grants. But each time, the organizations and the women they’ve served pushed back, and each time, Trump’s DOL was forced to reverse course. It can be hard to hear the wins through all the noise this administration is making, but stopping the federal funding cuts to WANTO is worth celebrating.
Hearing from Workers and Understanding the Fight Ahead
The accomplishments made by Biden’s DOL and the Good Jobs Alliance don’t solve all the problems of economic insecurity, racial exclusion, and challenges to unionization in a “right-to-work” state like Georgia, and the need for still more good jobs persists. The recent listening session focused on the challenges workers and labor organizers face in a perilous economy and an increasingly harsh policy landscape.
We heard how the high cost of living continues to create deep instability and how job loss, including Donald Trump’s slash and burn approach to the federal government, is hurting Georgians. One former federal employee from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta spoke of the harrowing experience of being vilified by the Trump administration, which has been used to justify firings, abuse, and a shooting at CDC headquarters that killed a police officer.
There was concern expressed that Trump’s militarization of America’s cities and criminalization of communities of color would come to Atlanta. Several speakers talked about the Trump administration’s attacks on immigrants. And we heard calls for unity—the importance of not allowing the administration to pit workers against one another.
We also heard how unions are stepping up and opening their halls to provide food and financial assistance as workers face unemployment. Lisa Brooks shared how she continues to go to high schools and tech schools to spread the word about good union jobs in the trades. She emphasized the value of having one good job that gives a family security rather than having to piece together multiple jobs that just don’t provide enough.
And we heard from striking workers who, in the face of great odds, are holding out for a contract they deserve. Workers who strike often endure the rescission of employer-provided health care benefits—one of the ways employers exercise leverage over their employees—and the hardworking Teamsters Local 528 drivers who deliver for Kroger are enduring such hardship now in their fifth month on strike.
Many speakers noted the disproportionate harm of the Trump administration’s attacks on Black women. The Women’s Entrepreneurial Opportunity Project is addressing this and has seen interest in and demand for their work to expand opportunity for minority-owned businesses and leadership for women of color grow dramatically since January.
We heard about how the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is organizing to improve working conditions for home health care workers. The fight for a better future for home health care workers is about making sure that those who care for us and our loved ones—a workforce that is overwhelmingly made up of women of color—get the security and dignity they deserve. We heard speakers’ pride in the recent wins for their sisters and brothers in Michigan, and we also heard resolve that, despite Governor Kemp vetoing the same right for Georgia workers, the organizing continues.
In the coming months, my colleagues and I at The Century Foundation will focus on ambitious but concrete ideas that policymakers can adopt and implement at the state and local levels to meet the needs of workers like the ones I heard from in Georgia. These listening sessions are critical to ensuring that workers are part of policy development and that policy solutions address real problems and deliver real benefits.
Looking Forward
For me, sitting down with Yvonne, Stacey, and Deborah, knowing the hard work we had done together to make good on the promise of a good job for all in Georgia, was rejuvenating. Even as the Trump administration has abandoned many of the commitments in the Good Jobs Alliance, Atlanta is showing that at a time of relentless attacks by our own federal government on our nation’s cities, the workers, unions, mayors, and community leaders in Georgia continue to hold the line and even to advance it. As has always been true, the work of cities and states will be critical to the struggle for economic and racial justice, and The Century Foundation and I will be there for it.
Tags: jobs, department of labor, atlanta