Organizing Resources

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 ACORN Milwaukee

The Wisconsin Works program (W-2) is the showpiece of the conservative assault on income support programs, and the welfare rights organizing there by ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) is being directly supervised by the association's national field director, Madeline Talbott.

Virtually every welfare mother whose children are at least 90 days old must register for W-2. Private non-profit and for-profit contractors have been given responsibility for running the program. Of all the states where ACORN is organizing around welfare and workfare, Wisconsin is the one most clearly committed to providing free labor to private-sector employers.

Wisconsin ACORN began organizing in October and reports that it has already collected authorization cards from over 3,000 low income families. In November, the W-2 Workers Organizing Committee went public with a mass action at Goodwill Industries, a major beneficiary of free workfare labor. According to W2WOC, the initial confrontation jarred loose a number of workplace improvements as well as safety equipment for workers on the GI plastic spoon packing line.

Negotiations broke down, however, at the point W2WOC members put job training and living wages on table. At a follow-up demonstration in late February, when fifty people arrived to confront Goodwill management, private security guards tried to block their entrance and attacked members of the delegation with Mace. Police then arrested two W2 participants. At a hastily called press conference following the assault, W2WOC/ACORN members vowed to keep the pressure up on the well-known non-profit.

Prepared by John Beam for the Workfare Organizing Support Center, a Welfare Law Center project.

-- from the March 2nd 1998 issue of Welfare News