PowerSwitch Action

📣 We are hiring! We are looking for someone to join our national team in a newly created General Counsel role, serving as the primary legal advisor for our entire organization. The General Counsel is a seasoned attorney who thoroughly understands movement work, including campaigning and organizing, and can act collaboratively and skillfully, with excellent judgment, in a variety of scenarios. The General Counsel provides excellent analysis, ensuring the organization’s leadership has a clear and sufficient understanding of legal risk and an appropriate set of options for decision and action. This is a fantastic opportunity for someone who is passionate about social justice and wants to ensure the effectiveness and sustainability of a leading movement organization, allowing it to act boldly and safely. This is a remote, full-time, exempt position, but we are open to candidates who may want to work part-time. We offer a competitive starting salary, which for the full-time position is between $135,000 and $150,000 (based on experience) and generous benefits. Learn more about the role, responsibilities and qualifications, and how to apply here: https://lnkd.in/gJNKQNqV

Today The Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR) is releasing the Luddite Lab Resource Hub (https://lnkd.in/gufSJgWR). The hub hosts case studies, resources, and political education for unions, labor organizations, and workers who want to fight “AI” and automation at work. As part of this Hub, we feature case studies from three initial labor partners detailing their strategies of resistance: National Nurses United, the New York Times Tech Guild, and the Ziff Davis Creators Guild. From these case studies, we learned about the diversity of tactics available to workers in the fight against AI at work and how these struggles are fundamentally tied to the broader fight for worker power, agency and dignity. We are also releasing a new research primer, "Myths about Generative AI, Productivity, and Labor Displacement", which discusses five common myths around generative AI at work. This primer will be the first of many. Additionally, we are building a Resource Library from partners who have been thinking about these issues for a long time, including from friends at Data & Society Research Institute, the UC Berkeley Labor Center, and PowerSwitch Action. We hope to support unions, labor organizations, and worker organizers who want to fight “AI” and automation at work. Visit our website for more information and to get in touch. https://lnkd.in/gufSJgWR

Surveillance is the primary tool used to dismantle our movements and threaten our neighbors. I’m proud to share new resources produced by one of the Fund to Build Grassroots Power’s four core networks, PowerSwitch Action PowerSwitch Action (PSA). The Stop the AI Surveillance Pipeline! toolkit creates a way for us to learn how these systems work so we can dismantle them together and was built by artists, researchers, and organizers. (There’s even a zine that works as a board game!) As PSA shared, in this fight, we win together or lose together. Download the toolkit to start and continue the conversations needed to protect your community: https://lnkd.in/eN8nP5Ab.

Why power analysis is key to fighting ICE: Deep research is key to identifying ICE’s pillars of support and building the power necessary to topple them. That's the title of a hot new article in Waging Nonviolence by James VanHise. I have some quotes in the piece, along with my allies at LittleSis, PowerSwitch Action, and several other amazing folks. I shared about research actions and the four power analysis questions that drive campaigns: what do people want, who do people fear, who has power over them and who do they have power over? Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ecMBJvZb

"ICE cannot carry out its operations alone, it relies on a network of companies to provide equipment, intelligence, communications, travel, accommodations and everything else huge bureaucracies require." Our ED Lauren Jacobs joined Molly Gott of LittleSis and James Mumm of People's Action Institute to make the case for power analyses in campaigning, pointing to recent efforts to fight back against ICE and authoritarian violence. Read the full piece: https://lnkd.in/egr48Mj9

Minnesotans went head-to-head with a violent, authoritarian regime on a highly visible, national stage. As ICE continues to terrorize and kidnap our people, we need to keep showing up in solidarity with each other. I’ve been thinking about how other national groups and networks (like us at PowerSwitch Action) can effectively plug in to key moments of powerful local organizing. https://lnkd.in/gNwJtC7x

"Minnesotans went head-to-head with a violent, authoritarian regime on a highly visible, national stage. If there was still any need for a wake-up call about the political reality we now live in, this was it." Our Executive Director, Lauren Jacobs, writes about three big lessons we learned from Minnesota and how national groups and networks can support critical moments of local organizing. https://lnkd.in/edQjMy9C

Workers at a San Bernardino Amazon warehouse have been organizing to improve working conditions. After Juan Loera was injured at work he discovered he was not the only one. He knew he and his coworkers had to speak up. But, as his lawsuit alleges, that's when Amazon clamped down, placing him involuntarily on unpaid leave and ultimately firing him with a single email. This had devastating effects on Juan and his family. Read more about how Juan is fighting back. https://lnkd.in/gNz3Qtrr