The Economic Justice Research Lab’s first project seeks to recover and preserve the activist cultures of two broad categories of essential laborers in the city: 1) tourism and hospitality, including hotel, restaurant, and other services such as musicians, cultural workers, and related construction and day laborers that are integral to the city’s economic base in tourism; and 2) healthcare workers. Both groups are making headlines in recent years as their unions have achieved unprecedented victories.

This project uses oral history and kindred methods to publicly document the history and present of essential workers’ own collective organizing in New Orleans, a city in the crosshairs of climate change and suffering extreme inequities further exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Our team of academic researchers partners with representatives from local unions, workers’ centers, non-profits, and community-based storytellers and archives to record and preserve new oral history interviews with tourism industry and healthcare workers who have been or are current advocates in the struggle for higher wages, stable employment, fair treatment, and unionization in their industries. Our pool of narrators includes rank and file workers, union staff, and community organizers.

We seek to learn directly from the rank and file leaders who not only advocated for better conditions on the job but also rallied their co-workers or brought neighbors and other activists into the fight with them. We want to understand the cultures of their workplaces, the solidarities they forged, the visions they expounded, and the successes and failures of their various campaigns, strategies, and tactics. We ask broad, open-ended questions about their childhoods and early lives, their transitions into the workforce, and the ways in which they got involved in collective organizing. Their stories shed light on not only their personal experiences but the broader experiences of the many workers they sought to bring together and represented as union and community organizers.

This project links leading academic researchers with community partners, both of whom play a central role in directing and executing the project. Our five-member Advisory Board includes allied researchers and representatives from relevant unions and membership-based working-class organizations. Board members work collaboratively with us to identify and recruit interviewees and are invited to join in conducting interviews and interpreting and presenting our findings.