Building Regional Power

The 2004 elections were portrayed in the media as a conservative triumpth. Yet, consider these untold stories from 2004:

• A small majority Florida voters may have gone for Bush, but seventy percent also chose to raise their state's minimum wage.
  
• In the midst of the conservative heartland, Colorado voters elected Democrat Ken Salazar to a previously Republican Senate seat. And thanks to labor and its allies the Democrats broke a 40 year Republican lock on the state legislature by taking both the house and senate.
  
• While Governor Schwartzenger made headlines, Fabian Núñez the Los Angeles AFL-CIO's former political director has quietly become speaker of the California State Assembly. Progressive political organizing has already so shifted the state's politics that the public now debates paid family leave and mandatory employer provided healthcare.

These successes come from recent grassroots alliances of unions and community allies looking to chart a new path. We call it regional power building. It consists of a three-pronged process: bring together a diverse array of groups, develop an effective progressive policy agenda, and build a grassroots army to put that agenda into the streets and into the halls of government. This is how conservatives over several decades transformed the Republican Party and the nation. Today it is how progressive are on the march in cities as diverse as Los Angeles, San Jose, Seattle, Denver, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Boston, Atlanta, Houston, and South Florida.

The Labor Studies Center helps coordinate The Building Regional Power Research Network. The network brings together labor researchers and union staff to document cases of regional power building and to develop publicity and training materials used by activists to promote these new strategies.

Visit the Building Regional Power Website at powerbuilding.wayne.edu.