Workers' Rights

Workers’ Rights

Work just isn’t working for too many in America today. The government agencies charged with protecting workers’ health and safety have abandoned scores of regulatory priorities and scaled back enforcement efforts, leaving millions of workers under-protected. Millions of people work without such basic rights as paid sick days. Too many who try to organize in order to negotiate improved working conditions in their workplaces end up fired or find their efforts undermined by anti-organizing campaigns. Those whose rights are violated sometimes discover they lack meaningful remedies, as they either must depend on government agencies that may not respond to their problems or face obstacles to exercising their right to take their cases to court.

The Foundation’s Workers’ Rights Program supports organizations that are trying to improve the lives of working people, especially those most vulnerable to exploitation, by ensuring their basic legal rights to safe, healthy and fair conditions at work.

The Foundation makes grants to support:

·        Advocacy, policy analysis, research, litigation, and public education to establish, at the federal and state levels, new labor and employment standards for workers. For projects focusing on state policy, we encourage work in locations with particular strategic value. For projects focusing on enforcement, we seek to fund policy developments, such as laws increasing civil and criminal penalties or empowering workers to act as private attorneys general, rather than enforcement agreements with state or federal agencies, which can be temporary and contingent on labor-friendly administrations. We are particularly interested in:

o       Standards for occupational health and safety, including measures to make health and safety regulatory bodies more responsive.

o       Policies that restore and improve workers’ rights to bargain collectively, including measures that facilitate worker organizing, increase workers’ options for negotiating workplace or sectoral reform, safeguard democratic accountability in labor organizations, and protect workers against the loss of bargaining power from abuses of guest work programs.

o       Guarantees of paid sick days as a fundamental right for workers.

o       Measures that ensure employer accountability for workers’ rights by addressing such issues as misclassification, outsourcing and joint employment liability, and workers’ access to justice (including fee shifting for low-income workers’ wage claims, improved class action provisions, and private attorney general laws).

·        High-impact campaigns that may not result in federal or state policies but seek labor/employment reforms with a comparably broad-based effect on workers’ rights. We do not fund purely local campaigns, even those that aspire to be models for broader campaigns.

 ·      Investigative journalism, national broadcast news coverage, and other high-profile media and public education about the workers' rights issues discussed above. Proposals should specify the size of the typical audience or readership or demonstrate how a sizeable (preferably nationwide) audience or readership could be attained. Preference will be given to programs or publications with sustained and substantial nationwide audiences. .