By the Nashville Homeless Power Project
The gap between Tennessee’s richest and poorest families is fifth largest in the nation, according to a new study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Tennessee is a right to work state and traditional unions have struggled to organize effectively for years. It’s also a state without a state income tax, and as a result, even in a time of outsourcing and automation, many corporations have been moving jobs to Tennessee. “The problem is that these new jobs aren’t fit for living. It seems like people are either struggling to find a job or struggling to work three jobs that pay far below the $10.44 per hour living wage,” said Garrett Stark, Organizer for the Nashville Homeless Power Project (NHPP).
To address the problem, the NHPP has recently helped form a new coalition of low wage workers, community organizations, students, and congregations to win living wages and ignite a broad based worker’s rights struggle with the poorest workers in Nashville. The new coalition was formed when the Mid-TN Jobs with Justice, Nashville Homeless Power Project, Urban Epicenter, and Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, came together in 2007, collectively realizing that the poorest workers in Nashville (who were the membership of these community organizations) desperately needed to have a voice at the job.
“We’re calling our new coalition ‘The Nashville Movement’ which borrows its name from one of the strongest and most important civil rights movements of the 1960s. We see ourselves as picking up where the civil rights movement left off, in a tradition that succeeded here, but we’ve expanded our focus to worker’s issues, because we don’t just want a seat at the lunch counter anymore. We want to afford what’s on the menu,” explained Keith Caldwell, who is the Director of the Urban Epicenter.
The Sommet Center is the building that
homeless workers clean
This new movement looks different than it did in the 1960s because the people who are without rights look different today. Megan Macaraeg, who is with Jobs with Justice and is the Coordinator of the New Nashville Movement further explains, “We’re hoping to build bridges across groups of people that have been pitted against each other in the past. It shouldn’t matter the color of your skin, your gender, or immigration status. We’re trying to unite as many poor people as possible, because the truth is that the richest nation in the world is conducting a quiet war on poor and working people. The Nashville Movement is here to be the resistance in that war. We’re already winning, where others haven’t been able to, because our ties are so deep and now united in the community.”
The coalition has already seen progress helping the largely East African immigrant taxi cab drivers organize against a system of local government that allows taxi companies to charge more than $9,000 a year to a worker for a permit that costs taxi companies only $245. Abdinasir Ismail, who is a member of the Metro Nashville Taxi Alliance said, “The cab companies have had their way for too long. Now it’s time for the workers to have a seat at the table.”
Homeless workers are joining the fight also. “As homeless workers we clean up Nashville’s stadiums and convention centers and work through temp services. We sometimes even have to sleep inside these temp services because the work starts after shelters close. The temp services are ‘doing us a favor’ by letting us stay there after hours. But we know that the temp services are preying on us. Still, the real winners are the corporations that eliminate full- time work by hiring us, and are getting huge subsidies from our local government. The Predators complex here in town just got $7 million from our local government to keep the team here. Meanwhile, we clean the place, and can’t afford anywhere to sleep at night,” reported Cecil Outlaw, Homeless Worker and Chair of NHPP’s Worker’s Rights Committee.
To follow the progress of the Nashville Movement see www.TheNashvilleMovement.Org
