We urge everyone in Jackson to labor with us and liberate workers in our state by supporting the Jackson Just Transition Policy Reform Plan! Through the plan we seek to increase employment opportunities by making Jackson a 0% emission and 0% waste city, build union membership, push for participatory budgeting processes, train workers to be organizers/activist, and push for collective bargaining! Now it’s time to discuss and implement! Join us Saturday July 15th, 2017 from 10:00am-12:00pm at the Chokwe Lumumba Center at 939 W. Capitol! Please invite members and organizations you think might be interested in joining this conversation!
This meeting is being called for and organized by Cooperation Jackson, the May Day Alliance, and the Climate Justice Alliance.
The May Day Alliance is an initiative of Cooperation Jackson to develop and advance the “Union-Coop” model of working class organization, and has held 3 consecutive years of educational activities with various unions in Jackson around International Workers or May Day.
Now, what is a “Just Transition”? What does it mean? And where does it come from? The concept and term originally comes from radical forces in the energy sector of the labor movement in the 1980’s, who were struggling to make sure that workers who were being thrown out of a rapidly changing industry were retrained and repositioned in new industries by the government and the corporations they labored for and enriched. However, the since the 1980’s, the term has grown and expanded to focus on comprehensive change systems change, particularly away from our present economies dependence on petro-chemicals and the systems of exploitation, extraction, and repression that underlie our world order. For more information on the overall Just Transition Framework, we invite you to read the Just Transition Principles crafted by the Climate Justice Alliance. These principles were crafted through years of interactive dialogue, strategic alignment, and consensus building within the Alliance, which includes Cooperation Jackson. You and find the principles here https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BxqkHpiiFq_eWk9QR1JwNFRDSndzZEVwRmtWZkZFcXdWWTBn/view.
Building on this framework, Cooperation Jackson worked over a year to draft the “Jackson Just Transition Plan”. It was prepared in part to guide Cooperation Jackson’s local transformative work, particularly about how our labor interacts with our ecology, but also to set a stage for how the organization would interact with the global climate justice movement at the United Nations Paris Climate Change negotiations in the fall of 2015. We view the Jackson Just Transition Plan as an ongoing work in progress. Comments, concerns and principled addition are welcomed. We also encourage as many local organizations and individuals to sign onto the plan and help us advance its adoption and implementation here in Jackson from the ground up. To read and review the plan, please see the attachment below.
We look forward to seeing you all on Saturday, July 15th at 10 am at the Lumumba Center located 939 W. Capitol Street, Jackson, MS 39203. If there are any questions please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at CooperationJackson@gmail.com or contact Monica Atkins directly at monica.e.atkins@gmail.com.
We will also have conferencing capabilities for those who aren’t local, but hope you will do your best to be in attendance to better connect with everyone in the room!
Here are the main topics we will discuss and begin to develop plans on! Bring your thinking CAPS!
May Day Alliance Initiatives Furloughs/Human Rights Budgeting Training Workers Assembly Jackson Just Transition Plan Advocacy to new Jackson Administration to support workers rights
Building a solidarity economy in Jackson, Mississippi anchored by a network of cooperatives and other worker-owned and democratically self-managed enterprises.
