Highlander has worked recently with a number of different groups organizing for worker justice. In April, we led a leadership workshop for the Tennessee Education Association to help teachers from Chattanooga and rural counties in Middle Tennessee share information about how to approach the loss of their collective bargaining rights, which the state stripped from them in 2011.
With Jobs with Justice, we’ve been putting together a timeline history of Southern women in the Labor movement, and we’ve worked with the Oak Ridge chapter to develop a workshop on the same topic. In May, we hosted the Teamster women’s, ‘We Were Not Born to Follow’ retreat, where we led a session on Highlander’s history and participated in their sessions on women’s Labor history, energizing organizing, and cultural sharing. Some of the highlights of the weekend included bagpipe playing, a skit by a labor educator about her work as a painter, and some of the women’s wonderful story about transforming and energizing their workplace by decorating it with display boards about women’s history. You can see some of these highlights for yourself in the video below: