WILL Empower is pleased to announce that Erica Smiley begins a year-long WILL Empower Innovative Women fellowship today.

This is the first fellowship sponsored by this new organization that is designed to lift women’s labor leadership.  As a WILL Empower fellow, Smiley will concentrate on completing a book on a 21st century framework for organizing and collective bargaining, co-authored with Sarita Gupta.  As a part of the project, they are also developing a culture change project that amplifies and distributes the book’s core ideas–including establishing the initial scaffolding for a modern school of thought anchoring collective bargaining as a fundamental aspect of a healthy democracy.  Smiley will continue in her role as co-Executive Director of Jobs with Justice, alongside Gupta, while serving as a fellow.

In her fellowship application, Smiley wrote that the book and culture change project, “will be focused on the stories of working people actively struggling to re-define the theater in which they organize and collectively negotiate with employers, building owners, financiers, and others that keep working people from economic sustainability and a dignified life.”  She aims to reach and connect with working people who don’t necessarily identify with the labor movement, including a new generation of women workers. The book, yet untitled, is currently under contract with Cornell University Press and the expected publication date is in 2019.

As a fellow, Smiley will be able to draw on university research and resources, as well as mentoring support from academic and movement leaders.

Erica Smiley is co-executive director of Jobs With Justice. Prior to becoming co-director, she held many roles at Jobs With Justice, including organizing director, campaign director and senior field organizer for the southern region. Smiley is known for developing innovative strategies to expand collective bargaining power, including strategies that position working people to negotiate directly with the corporate actors that impact all aspects of their lives. She has authored several articles highlighting some of the organization’s most exciting developments in the New Labor Forum, Dissent, the Journal on Class, Race and Corporate Power, and other publications. Learn more about Smiley here.

“Erica Smiley is one of the workers’ movement’s most expansive thinkers, and we’re thrilled to host her as a fellow,” said Lane Windham, associate director of Georgetown University’s Kalmanovitz Initiative for Labor and the Working Poor (KI) and WILL Empower co-director.  “Her book will offer workers a much-needed road map for building power in today’s rapidly evolving economy.”

“We look forward to linking Erica Smiley’s innovative vision of expanded bargaining with the work we are doing with Bargaining for the Common Good at CIWO and KI,” says Marilyn Sneiderman, Executive Director for the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization (CIWO) at the Rutgers’ School of Management and Labor Relations. Sheri Davis-Faulkner, who serves as CIWO Senior Program Director and WILL Empower co-director, highlighted that WILL Empower is meant to not only support innovative ideas, but also amplify the work of women of color as strategic thinkers who push the movement forward and in new directions.

WILL Empower is a new program designed to identify, nurture and train a new generation of women labor leaders.  The fellowship program helps activists develop new ideas for advancing social and economic justice in today’s transforming economy, especially on issues that impact women workers and organizing. Other WILL Empower programs include: an apprenticeship program, launched this September, designed as an on-ramp to movement staff positions; a cohort of learning and mentoring program that trains and nurtures both emerging and executive women leaders; and the Future of Labor Interactive Project that places women’s labor issues at the center of evolving public discourse about working people, public policy, and building power in a changing economy.

For more information about WILL Empower or the Innovative Women Fellowship program, please contact willempower.labor@gmail.com.