Attica Scott is the Coordinator of Kentucky Jobs with Justice. RESIST had a chance to talk with Attica this month about solidarity and the local work of Jobs with Justice, a RESIST grantee.

RESIST: Can you tell me a little about Kentucky Jobs with Justice?

ATTICA SCOTT (AS): Kentucky Jobs with Justice (JwJ) is a coalition of community activists, faith leaders, labor union members and students who are united together to fight for economic justice and workers rights.

RESIST: It sounds like you have people coming together from a lot of different backgrounds.

AS: Yes, [there are] lots of different types of backgrounds, and that is one of the reasons why solidarity is at the core of our work. For us solidarity means standing together with one another on the front lines of justice.

We have so many different issues that we support and we fight for, but we also connect those issues. We say to labor unions that the rights of gays and lesbians and people who are bisexual and transgender and questioning are the same rights as people who are members of labor unions, because they’re not separate individuals. They’re all a part of who we are and what makes us whole.

RESIST: When there all different kinds of people who have different stakes in the campaigns that you work on, are there things that Kentucky JwJ does to build solidarity among those different constituency groups?

AS: We do. One of the more administrative ways that we try to build solidarity within in our network is that we have a planning session at the beginning of the year where we bring together as many of our partners as possible to flesh out what we want the remaining year to look like. They all have an opportunity to have a stake in setting our agenda for the year. They get to sit down together and talk about the different campaigns – we’re a coalition organization – and then they get to say, “Well, this is how I think JwJ can connect to this campaign.”

RESIST: In the context of the work that you all do, what do you think it means to struggle with someone as opposed to for someone?

AS: For us it means that people who are most affected by the injustices that we are fighting against are speaking on their own behalf. They’ve come to us for some particular kind of support, so we may not necessarily be leading the campaign , but we have some strategic thinking that we can bring or we have some strategic partners that have relationships in key places that folks who are fighting for their rights may not have.

RESIST: Do you think that ideas about solidarity at Kentucky JwJ have shifted over the years?

AS: Definitely. Our ideas about solidarity have been shaped in part by what’s going on in our state, in part by our leadership and in part by our organizational allies, who were the ones who kept pushing us and saying to us, we need to be fighting for fairness as much as you’re fighting for the idea of labor rights. We need to be fighting for housing and homelessness issues in the same way that you’re fighting for fairness.

In the past three to four years our work has become much more broadly focused. We’ve done a much better job of helping labor here in Kentucky to see that their fights have got to be connected to community and social justice organizations, and we’re able to show community justice organizations how their fights connect to labor.

For us, it’s important that when we talk about the issue of solidarity that we have a goal and a focus and a purpose for that solidarity. It’s not just about being there for one another for some particular action or campaign, but it’s all about the process of building power – and building power in this state. And that happens in many different ways. It can be electoral power, it can be organizational power, it can be community or neighborhood-based power, but it has to be about building power. If we’re just doing the solidarity for the sake of doing it, in the end we won’t really win.

PHOTO courtesy of Kentucky Jobs with Justice.