Current Work

Workers Rights

Jobs with Justice brings together unions, worker centers and community organizations to build a powerful movement for workers rights’ and racial justice in San Francisco. We fight for a strong public sector and investments in our communities, pathways to good jobs, and to uphold labor rights for all workers. 

• We play a leadership role in the SF People’s Budget Coalition to fight for strong public services and investments into the working class communities and communities of color who make SF run, and make it special. 
• We organize with the Free City SF coalition to defend this powerful program that has transformed the lives of thousands of San Franciscans, making it possible for them to go to college, attend job training programs, take language courses, and change careers. 
• We fight wage theft alongside our worker center partners. As members of the California Coalition for Worker Power, we helped pass AB497, the Equal Pay and Anti-Retaliation Protection Act, and led local trainings on how to use this tool to defend worker rights.
• As members of the California Network for Immigrant and Worker Justice, we fight for benefits for excluded immigrant workers.

CLIMATE JOBS & WORKER-LED TRANSITION

Climate change is forcing a massive restructuring of our economy, and dramatically changing conditions for workers. From educators teaching in outdated buildings with no HVAC systems on smoke days, to airport workers cleaning planes on the hot tarmac after the air conditioning has been turned off, climate hazards are hitting working people and communities of color first and hardest. 

CEOs, from the oil industry to agriculture to aviation, are driving a race to the bottom for working people and the planet – profiting off polluting industries as long as possible before shutting workers out in the cold; they position themselves to get rich off new technologies without sharing any of the gains. At the same time, corporate America is trying to hollow out the public sector, and threatening our ability to respond to climate catastrophe. But if we organize and build power as working people, we have enormous opportunities to influence this once-in-a-generation economic transition. 

Our climate work engages unions, worker centers, and community organizations in the movement for a worker-led transition that benefits communities and the planet. In 2023, Jobs with Justice launched California Labor for Climate Jobs (CLCJ), a statewide coalition of labor unions organizing for climate hazard protections, safety nets for communities and workers, good union jobs in new green industries and a strong public sector. Member unions represent public sector workers including in oil and gas dependent counties, as well as teachers, utility workers, domestic workers, healthcare workers, farmworkers, janitors and many more. We are building a strong labor/climate movement that aligns partners to build a thriving future for working people as well as communities who have been on the frontlines of pollution exposure and historically excluded from good jobs.

DeFend Communities, Fight Authoritarianism

In the face of dangerous attacks on immigrants and rising authoritarianism, Jobs with Justice has been organizing to keep our communities safe. 

We initiated a Sanctuary Workplace Drive, to equip San Francisco businesses with the knowledge, tools, and legal understanding needed to create safety plans that protect workers from federal enforcement overreach.

When federal agents threatened to descend on the Bay, we launched the SF Community Foot Monitor program, coordinating a citywide, community-led safety network that trains neighbors to spot, verify, and report ICE activity while supporting local organizations anchoring neighborhood protection efforts. 

Jobs with Justice has been an integral part of the fight back against rising authoritarianism in San Francisco, organizing with Bay Resistance, labor and community to train thousands of working people to know their rights, organize their coworkers and neighbors, and join strategic campaigns to resist.

Solidarity & Racial Justice

The most important thing we do as JwJ is to have each other’s backs when times are hardest. JwJ performs a crucial movement role of bringing groups together in intersectional solidarity and building power so that we can win bigger victories together.

Racial justice is explicitly a part of all of our work fighting for low-wage workers of color. We have also created specific projects to support the Movement for Black Lives. In 2014, JwJ founded Labor for Black Lives organizing actions, workshops and member education. In 2020, during the uprisings following the murders of George Floyd and many others, JwJ coordinated with labor partners to organize protests supporting the movement to defund the police and reinvest in communities of color, along with demanding accountability on racial justice from police officer unions.

In 2016, JwJ co-founded Bay Resistance, a broad and diverse network of groups defending our communities from Trump and the Right. In the face of intensifying attacks on immigrants, we fought for a clean DREAM Act, to save Temporary Protected Status and supported local families facing deportations and actions that helped close the Richmond immigrant detention center. In 2025, JwJ helped relaunch Bay Resistance and has played a leadership role in building a multi-racial grassroots movement to take action in solidarity with immigrant communities and fight rising authoritarianism.