Episode 14: Sheri Davis

Black Work Talk

In this fourteenth episode of Black Work Talk, today’s Sheri Davis. Sheri is the Associate Director of the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization (CIWO) at Rutgers University and the Senior Program Director – WILL Empower at CIWO. The purpose of WILL Empower is to develop the next generation of women in the labor movement - unions and worker centers. Sheri fuses her desire to promote deep worker organizing with her Black feminist sensibility. Sheri also sees the need to move beyond a narrow focus on individual workers and explore how to transform their organizations – unions and worker centers – into weapon to be wielded in order to improve the conditions of workers both in and out of the workplace.

We had a wide-ranging conversation on a variety of topics including:

• Her assessment of the challenges facing movement building today
• The value of Black feminism and Critical Race Theory to building stronger worker organizations
• Community practice at WILL Empower

For more background on Sheri Davis and her work, here are links to some articles:

https://smlr.rutgers.edu/faculty-staff/sheri-davis

https://www.willempower.org/

https://forgeorganizing.org/article/we-want-bread-and-housing-too-bargaining-common-good-intersectional-feminist-strategy

https://medium.com/authority-magazine/sheri-davis-of-the-rutgers-center-for-innovation-in-worker-organization-5-steps-that-each-of-us-6e6d5b5baa07

https://newlaborforum.cuny.edu/2020/10/02/moneybags-for-billionaires-body-bags-for-workers-organizing-in-the-time-of-pandemics/