We’re moving!

Please note new address and phone

We are here!

Effective May 28, the Berger-Marks Foundation has a new home, a little farther uptown in Washington, D.C. Our new office is located at:

4301 Connecticut Avenue, NW
Suite 108
Washington, D.C. 20008

Our new phone number is: (202) 243-0133. The email address stays the same.

New video funded by Berger-Marks grant

 

Innovative groups & organizers win $91,671 in 2010 grants

Here's what they're doing!

Eleven winners emerged from among the many exciting grant proposals the Foundation received this Spring. Many will create innovative resources to help women organize, often using media like websites, video and dramatic readings, and several offer training to help specific groups of women workers organize. They are developing new ways to organize women who work in isolation -- from immigrant domestic workers to freelance journalists. And two research winners are looking into what it takes to be a winning organizer, with some surprising conclusions.

Read about winners & exciting new project
 

Photo by Dan Speicher

 

On your own at work?

Look who's behind you!

Does organizing make a difference for working women? Can you really gain more rights, pay and fairness at work, just by getting together and agitating for them?

Yes you can! Our history proves it. Things may be far from perfect today, but women have much more opportunity than even a generation ago.

Want some hard proof-- and evidence to show other working women who aren't so sure they can make a difference? For Women's History Month, we put together a few short stories about women who got fed up, stood up and made huge breakthroughs, and how they did it.

Organizing has made a huge difference, for all working women. And it's still happening today, as other women take up their banner.

Read their stories here -- and enjoy!

Spotlight on grant recipient

Womens Way of Organizing report

 

Is There a Women’s Way of Organizing?

Cornell report on Gender, Unions, and Effective Organizing gives provocative answers

Ground-breaking study funded by Berger-Marks just released

As traditional industries decline, people are hiring into "informal and low-wage sectors" where turnover is high, legal protections are scarce, unions are rare, and workers tend to be immigrant women of color. Organizing such jobs is especially hard, because many people work in their homes or their employer’s home, with no central workplace, and many worry about their status in the U.S. Researchers used ideas from other Berger-Marks reports as the jumping-off point for a series of focus groups and roundtable discussions in 2008 and 2009, where workers and organizers, most of them women, talked about how they mobilized diverse and fragmented workforces, and the experiences of women in unions.

At the core of the report are four exciting, non-traditional campaigns, run largely by and for women. The report reveals how they succeeded and poses provocative questions such as, "Is there a successful way of organizing that is unique to women-focused campaigns?" It investigates how seven key, non-traditional strategies helped make these campaigns work, and arrives at strong conclusions that challenge every union to shake up its approach to organizing if it is to succeed with today's workers.

Read more about it

Spotlight on grant recipient

Alanna Stone (r.) with new union members & local Guild officers

 

Six workers stand up to media giant Thomson Reuters

Go union with help from Berger-Marks grant winner

The massive Thomson Reuters media company fought tooth and nail to keep six workers in New York from joining a union at its Buyouts Magazine. The company challenged the unit, forcing the National Labor Relations Board to hold a hearing about it. Then, for three weeks, the company forced those six workers to attend "captive audience" meetings, both together and individually, where it trashed the union.

But backing up the workers was Alanna Stone, a staff organizer for The Newspaper Guild of New York, TNG Local 3/CWA Local 31003. Stone had won a Berger-Marks grant to get in touch with non-union workers at companies her union represents, and help them organize.

Read more