The Bay Area Essential Workers Agenda, seeded by ReWork the Bay and supported in partnership with the San Francisco Foundation’s Worker Center Learning Cohort, engaged over one thousand workers across the Bay Area during the COVID pandemic.

This platform and campaign sought to understand and lift up how the pandemic has impacted the lives of workers and their communities, develop worker leadership across region and industry, and define standards for an equitable economy from the worker perspective.

As lead organization for this project, Chinese Progressive Association (CPA) researched recovery-related organizing opportunities as well as the workers rights policy and political landscape. Drawing on that research and identifying project partnerships with the other worker and economic justice organizations, CPA and the Leadership and Planning team surveyed over 1,400 workers, led a process to synthesize the worker input, and developed a vision and set of key principles.

The Bay Area Essential Workers Alliance, now led by Trabajadores Unidos Workers United, formed to advance the Agenda and support regional organizing infrastructure, is leveraging the power of workers to support policies to make work equitable in the Bay Area.