While government agencies like the US Census Bureau figure out how best to measure poverty, grassroots organizations like P.O.W.E.R. (People Organized to Win Employment Rights) inform, organize, and mobilize working class citizens, demanding political solutions to the social ills of poverty. P.O.W.E.R. is a San Francisco based organization with a twofold mission: "to build unity between African American and Latino communities to increase the POWER of low-income workers and tenants." To these ends the group employs a multilayered strategy: build a broad local coalition of grassroots organizations, labor unions, religious leaders, and community activists; oppose discrimination and exploitation; propose political and practical reforms to lawmakers; and organize/mobilize local campaigns to affect change.

P.O.W.E.R. is currently working on two projects. The Bayview Organizing Project intends to improve Bayview Hunters Point, a longstanding African American community in San Francisco, racked by poverty, and whose residents have been threatened by municipal neglect and gentrification. The Women's Worker's Project aims to secure workers' rights for San Francisco's domestic workers, who have historically been women of color, and have suffered exploitative practices due to the lack of standards in the domestic work industry. In both of these instances the group is seeking to build local alliances, create political solutions to local problems, and affect change through collective action.  

What makes P.O.W.E.R. particularly intriguing is that it recognizes poverty as a world problem and wants to organize locally, nationally, and globally: "P.O.W.E.R.'s work is rooted in San Francisco, yet we have always understood that the problems we face in our local communities are connected to the problems that low-income and oppressed people experience all over the world. That's why the organization is committed to ending poverty and oppression- once and for all." To this end P.O.W.E.R. has collaborated with national coalitions committed to working class organizing like the Right to the City Network.

In an interview with Paul Jay of the Real News Network, Steve Williams, co-founder and co-director of P.O.W.E.R., spoke to his organization's commitments to communities of color and the political empowerment of the working poor. He also addressed other issues like President Obama's silence on the lower socioeconomic bracket, the prospect of a national workers' movement to fight poverty, and the corruption associated with ACORN. (See video)

Of particular interest to me were his brief discussion of the history of workers' movements and his suggestion that a nationally organized anti-poverty campaign comprised primarily of working class activists is soon to materialize. What do you make of this discussion? Is the current economic crisis analogous to the Great Depression in yet another way-that is, as an impetus for a national workers' movement? Can this type of movement create the expansive agenda and nationally applicable political strategies that are needed in order to address and resolve the problems of all of America's working poor?

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