Community Justice

In addition to organizing community support for workplace justice, Greater Kansas City Jobs with Justice works to engage labor organizations in community issues that affect working familes. We work on a range of social justice campaigns: from immigrant rights to healthcare; from living wage campaigns to criminal justice reform; from farmworker justice to welfare reform.

This Spring, Jobs with Justice teamed up with the WECAN Coalition to stop Ward Connerly's anti-civil rights ballot initiative in Missouri. In Kansas City, Jobs with Justice trained dozens of volunteers to become "voter educators" that would comb the streets of their communities to find petition gatherers. Once found, they would stand alongside the petition gatherer and make sure voters knew exactly what the deceptively-named "Missouri Civil Rights Initiative" would really do to Missouri. Local volunteers logged hundreds of hours next to petitioners, who often gave up signature gathering once they encountered one of our educators. For more on the WECAN coalition and the campaign, see http://wecanmo.org/.

Also this year, Jobs with Justice teamed up with the Kansas Action Network to raise the minimum wage in Kansas City, KS. Workers in Kansas who are excluded from the federal minimum wage law can be paid as little as $2.65/hr according to State law! This is the lowest state minimum wage in the country. Working in a coalition that also included United Autoworkers Local 31, Tri-County Labor Council of Eastern Kansas, Interfaith Worker Justice, and the Business and Professional Women of Kansas, we lobbied commissioners, gathered petition signatures, and developed ordinance language that would raise the wages of an estimated 2,300 workers in KCK to the federal minimum wage and keep them matched to the federal level in the future. To learn more about the campaign to raise the minimum wage for all Kansas workers see the Kansas Action Network's Raise the Wage Kansas website.