Highlights

In 2016, WEC was very pleased to honor two remarkable leaders with our Rising Star Award, a new honor intended to recognize outstanding new leaders from labor, environmental and community organizations. Our inaugural recipients were Nicole Scott-Harris & Reynalda Cruz. We hope to recognize additional Rising Stars in 2017, but we need help identifying promising potential awardees. Please consider nominating someone today. Nominations deadline is Friday, July 14. Please click here for the 2017 Rising Star Nomination Form. Nomination Form 2016 Awards Dinner

The United States needs to make major changes as we fight the threat of climate change. New Jersey is vulnerable to extreme weather like Hurricane Sandy, which threaten to take out our infrastructure and housing. The Shore is especially vulnerable to increased flooding from rising sea levels. New Jerseyans across the state will suffer as rising temperatures bring heat waves that will push summer highs above 100 degrees. We need to use a combination of strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and minimize the impacts of climate change. One powerful tool in our arsenal is energy efficiency. By reducing energy usage in buildings and homes, we can achieve major emissions reductions quickly and within existing facilities. Energy efficiency in buildings provides a triple benefit: the environment, public health, and job prospects all see improvements through energy efficiency programs. Strategies to implement energy efficiency in buildings take on many forms. They include programs such as installing efficient lighting, HVAC, and other appliances; insulating homes and repairing leaky windows; and using smart controls to turn off lights and heating when no one’s home. New Jersey is already seeing the benefits of these programs: on average, residents saved an average of $536 per [...]

As the gross inequality between the top 1/10th of 1% and ordinary working people worsens, our state and municipal governments often turn to privatization to combat budget shortfalls due to shrinking tax bases. These efforts often put control of public services in disadvantaged neighborhoods into the hands of corporations, and only offer a short-term fix for municipal and state budgets. These issues are exacerbated as Wall Street banks extract large fees from our state government, little of which is reinvested back into the state of New Jersey. Join LEARN, in partnership with the Work Environment Council and the Public Need over Corporate Greed campaign, to learn about a potential solution to this economic spiral: public banking. In this workshop, Walt McRee, chair of the Public Banking Institute, and Joan Bartl, state coordinator, two nationally-recognized experts and advocates of public banking, will review the history and theory of state banking, and detail the benefits and risks of establishing a public bank in New Jersey. If you want to understand what money is, how banks work, and how a state bank might improve the lives of all New Jerseyans, this workshop is for you. The event will be held Friday, May 5th from [...]

In 100 hours the Peoples Climate March will thunder through the streets of Washington, DC to demand action for jobs, justice and the climate. Do not miss this moment. There are multiple buses from NJ; click through this page to purchase tickets from several of our Jersey Renews partners. If you need a ride from another location, click here. To find out where to go once you arrive in DC, and the route, click here. Please consider joining us at the Labor Rally, beginning at 11am, at the Department of Labor. These maps (PDF) provide instructions for travel from the bus parking lots to the Labor Rally, illustrate the route for the march, and also have instructions on getting back to buses. In 100 days Donald Trump has done a lot of damage -- and our resistance stopped him from doing a lot more. But if we don't begin to reverse his attacks on the climate, all of that may be for naught. In the last few weeks, WEC helped coordinate Jersey Renews kick-off events in Montclair, Camden and New Brunswick. More than a dozen organizations spoke at the events, each declaring support for making NJ a climate leader [...]

On April 23, at a Workers’ Memorial Day Rally and March organized by New Labor and WEC in New Brunswick, NJ, workers stood together to remember those who have died on the job or suffered workplace injuries at work. Daniel Templeton Comerie was one of the 45 New Jersey workers who died at work in 2016.  Daniel, a maintenance mechanic employed by Joint Meeting of Essex and Union Counties, went to work on the morning of March 11, 2016 and never returned home to his family.  Nat Bender, Communications Director at American Federation of Teachers New Jersey, and friend of Daniel and his wife Cherrie, read this beautiful testimony from Cherrie. My husband Daniel Templeton Comerie died on March 11, 2016.  The man I married is the love of my life.  We were together for 25 years, and married for 21 years. If you asked me how I feel. I feel dysfunctional, devastated and stricken with overwhelming shock.  I spoke to my husband at 9:30 a.m. in the morning, in his office, and at 2:00 p.m. I was told that he was gone. He was killed on the job when a large concrete slab landed on his chest.  [...]