Solidarity/Solidaridad: Cross-Racial Relationship Building

Workers in Mississippi's chicken plants come from many different countries and cultures. This diversity is often seen as a barrier and is used by the company to divide workers. In reality, our diversity is our biggest strength and greatest opportunity! To build worker power, we need to understand and respect this diversity and use it to make us stronger. For this reason, MPOWER makes it a central focus of our organizing and popular education work.

Our Solidarity/Solidaridad program focuses on building relationships between poultry workers of diverse backgrounds. Through different activities, classes, and interactive workshops, U.S.-born and immigrant workers get to know one another, improve their communication skills, and learn about what concerns and ideas they have in common.

Raising Our Voices: Workers' Rights and Language Learning is a series of 36 classes in which poultry workers learn to speak Spanish or English that they can use to communicate at work, while also learning about their rights in the chicken plants. In order for workers of different backgrounds to defend their rights at work, they first need to know these rights and how to enforce them. They also need to be able to communicate with one another-at the most basic level, speak each others' languages-in order to build a collective movement for workplace and social justice. Raising Our Voices seeks to address these two fundamental needs through 9 topical units:

Unit 1: Identifying Communication and Cultural Barriers

Unit 2: Poultry Plant Communication and the Right to Organize

Unit 3: Protecting Our Rights with a Strong Union

Unit 4: Getting Paid for a Hard Day's Work

Unit 5: Missing Work and Taking Care of Your Family

Unit 6: Health and Safety; Workplace Injuries and Workers' Comp

Unit 7: Breaks and Using the Bathroom

Unit 8: Immigrant Workers Have Rights Too

Unit 9: Saying No to Discrimination and Supporting One Another

Power and Oppression: Valuing Our Differences, Envisioning Our Common Struggle is a series of 4 participatory multicultural workshops through which poultry workers learn about our co-workers' backgrounds, histories, and cultures and discover how oppression and discrimination have impacted our diverse communities. Everyone in the room is a teacher. We focus on building relationships with one another, respecting and valuing diversity, and building a critical analysis of the workings of power. As we explore topics such as slavery, immigration, the Civil Rights Movement, and globalization, we learn that despite our differences we also have a lot in common. Power and Oppression aims to build poultry workers' collective power to make the chicken plants healthier, better places to work.

Feedback from Solidarity/Solidaridad Students and Participants

"In this class I realized that no matter what kind of people you're around you can relate to them in different ways or languages."

"This class has helped me be able to speak to other people in their own words about their rights."

"I now have boots that make me want to walk out of this class content to walk on in life helping people."

"I learned that we aren't the only ones who have been mistreated. I never knew that before! I always thought it was just the Black folks been oppressed. But now I see that the immigrants is in our shoes, where we used to be."

"No matter what walk of life people may come from, we all are the same and should be treated that way."