Community Labor United is a long-term strategic partnership between some of the strongest community organizations and unions organizing low and moderate-income people within our region. The greater Boston area needs a partnership that cuts across these sectors and increases civic participation. It needs to bring together the many diverse groups in the community and in labor in order to marshal the power and expertise necessary to hold our governments accountable for the creation of quality family-supporting jobs, secure health care, and affordable housing.

We are moving strategic campaigns that increase organizing opportunities for both unions and community organizations while building power for their constituencies.

We began our organizing with a campaign—Our Schools, Our Futures—aimed at creating high wage, career opportunity jobs for Boston residents with half of those jobs going to recent Boston Public School graduates. We organized a diverse coalition of youth organizations, community groups, churches and unions to work with the City of Boston to leverage its resources to create good painting career jobs for community residents.

Our current campaign --Secure Jobs, Secure Communities--addresses the growing wealth gap between rich and poor. Large commercial property owners in the Greater Boston area, like The Blackstone Group, enjoy many millions of dollars in annual profits, while residents of the communities where most of their service workers live --Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan-- can barely make ends meet. This campaign links SEIU Local 615's organizing of 2,000 low wage security officers working in downtown Boston office buildings with community organizations in Roxbury, Dorchester and Mattapan. The campaign is holding Boston's large commercial building owners accountable to both investing in their workers and to investing in the communities their workers come from.

We are asking large downtown commercial property owners, including Boston's largest commercial property owner, The Blackstone Group, to invest $1 per square foot of property they own back into Boston neighborhoods. This investment would support some of Boston's most pressing community issues – foreclosure prevention, youth opportunities, CORI reform, and access to quality jobs.