Episode 14: Sheri Davis

In this fourteenth episode of Black Work Talk, today’s Sheri Davis.  Sheri is the Associate Director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization (CIWO) at Rutgers University and the Senior Program Director – WILL Empower at CIWO. The purpose of WILL Empower is to develop the next generation of women in the labor movement - unions and worker centers. Sheri fuses her desire to promote deep worker organizing with her Black feminist sensibility.  Sheri also sees the need to move beyond a narrow focus on individual workers and explore how to transform their organizations – unions and worker centers – into weapon to be wielded in order to improve the conditions of workers both in and out of the workplace.  We had a wide-ranging conversation on a variety of topics including:Her assessment of the challenges facing movement building todayThe value of Black feminism and Critical Race Theory to building stronger worker organizationsCommunity practice at WILL EmpowerFor more background on Sheri Davis and her work, here are links to some articles:https://smlr.rutgers.edu/faculty-staff/sheri-davishttps://www.willempower.org/https://forgeorganizing.org/article/we-want-bread-and-housing-too-bargaining-common-good-intersectional-feminist-strategy https://medium.com/authority-magazine/sheri-davis-of-the-rutgers-center-for-innovation-in-worker-organization-5-steps-that-each-of-us-6e6d5b5baa07https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2020/10/02/moneybags-for-billionaires-body-bags-for-workers-organizing-in-the-time-of-pandemics/

Om Podcasten

Black Work Talk is a show that elevates the voices of Black labor, workers, leaders, activists, and intellectuals in discussions on the connections between race, labor, capitalism and culture in the struggle for progressive governing power. On season three of Black Work Talk, new hosts Bianca Cunningham and Jamala Rogers explore the impact of 2023’s strike wave in conversations with rank and file workers from unions that have fought or are still fighting for better, more equitable contracts in 2023; including the UAW, Teamsters, Writers Guild of America and more. Where did the energy for this wave of labor movements come from, what does it mean for black workers, and where does it go from here? They also open the conversation by calling in the 90% of American workers who have yet to organize in their workplace with an ongoing accessible and educational series on the process of organizing and filing to start a union from scratch.