Community Labor United is an incorporated 501(c)3 nonprofit organization. CLU’s mission is to move strategic campaigns combining the joint power of community-based organizations and labor unions in order to protect and promote the interests of low and middle-income working families in the greater Boston area. Through a program of coalition building, research and policy development, public education and grassroots mobilization, we will move forward policies that promote quality jobs, secure healthcare and affordable housing for all of the Boston area’s working people.

We accomplish our mission through a program of coalition building, research and policy development, public education and grassroots mobilization that move policies forward to promote quality jobs, secure healthcare and affordable housing for all of the Boston area’s working people.

Our campaigns focus on bringing together low and moderate-income people already organized through existing community organizations and unions, who come together based on interest in the issues involved. We aim to develop new organizing opportunities for community organizations and labor. Through these campaigns, we hope to spur increased civic engagement. We also aim to educate the wider public through our research studies and through aggressive dissemination of the findings of these studies. Essentially we plan to develop a new “think and act tank” coming from poor and working people’s perspectives.

CLU is fortunate to be able to build upon the existing strength of a number of different organizations in the Boston region. These groups are effectively organizing and winning important improvements and changes for their constituencies. We believe the sum of this different, individual work can, over time, add up to even more than its combination of individual parts. Together, we have the potential to change the terms of the economy and of our regional picture. Like the living wage movement has changed the terms of wage debates across the country from that of minimum wages to living wages, we have opportunity, through a collective focus, to change the economic dialogue of our region. We can move from a discussion of how many new jobs are created and how much new development is being spurred to a discussion of the quality of these jobs and the necessity of supporting strong community life through good jobs, park space, affordable housing, health care and proximity to transit corridors.