Katharine Cristiani: Profile of Empowered Leadership in Business

Katharine Cristiani, Labor Organizer Graduate of NCCJ's Anytown Youth Leadership Institute

I remember my first year at Anytown. I was a fifteen-year old white girl from an upper-middleclass family in the suburbs. I sat in a circle with people like and unlike me, exploring the ways in which systems of social interactions create discrimination, oppression, hatred and violence. I had entered Anytown as an already politicized person, interested in fighting sexism, racism and homophobia. I left Anytown understanding these social problems not as a grocery list of issues, but as a complex set of systems of oppression.

Today, I'm twenty-five and an organizer for a labor union. I work all day with working class folks, mostly people of color, a huge number of which are immigrants. I decided to become a labor organizer because historically, the labor movement all over the world has been a key agent for affecting social change. In Germany, Canada, Sweden, Great Britain and many other countries, the labor movement has fought and won universal health care, while in this country approximately one in three people do not have health insurance. They have fought for things like universal day care, where mothers are not stuck in their houses, unable to work and thus, disproportionately poorer, because they can't afford to pay for day care. Our union, The Hotel and Restaurant Workers Union, which is made up of low-wage service workers in the hotel, gaming and food service industries, is leading the fight for immigrant rights.

My decision to become a labor organizer was rooted in something I learned at Anytown: the best way to affect social change is to understand where systems of oppression come from and how they perpetuate themselves, and then to attack these systems at their root. While the above mentioned fights for free health care, day care and immigrant rights might not seem at a surface level as fights against oppression, they most certainly are. The working class of this country, especially the working poor, is disproportionately composed of people of color and of women (especially single mothers). Racism and sexism, as well heterosexism, which is highly tied to sexism, cannot be undone as long as working families are exploited and/or oppressed.

Article by Katharine Cristiani for the Spring 2003 Issue of NCCJ's Newsletter