Todd Cherkis
I’m a leadership organizer with the United Workers and the human rights approach really boils down to bringing people into a community where human rights are respected and where human rights values are at the center. Respect and dignity and the sanctity of all life is our focus…. We’ve seen human rights really be a transformative and universal process for bringing immigrants and African Americans and whites into the same room and talking about the same issues affecting them regardless of job or sector. We’re organizing at the Inner Harbor [in Baltimore] where you’ve got servers in the front and dishwashers and cooks in the back, and you’ve got retail clerks and janitors, all in the same room having a conversation, multi-ethnic, gender, age, you name it. And the human rights language and those values are really a huge bridge to making that possible. So we’ve seen it work extremely well in Baltimore, in addition to reframing debates around development in the city and reframing the conversation around working conditions more generally.
