Home Is Where the Union Is
What tenant unions can learn from labor unions and how they can both work together to win big.
Rebecca Burns
HARTFORD, CONN. — Three years ago, Dave Richardson was spending half of his monthly income on an apartment with rats, roaches and a broken elevator. A stroke had made climbing the stairs difficult, forcing him to limit trips outside of his third-floor home. Other wheelchair-bound tenants had to be physically carried up and down.
The landlord was ignoring phone calls, Richardson says, but one day in 2022, a group of organizers came to his door with a pitch to build a tenants union.
It didn’t take much to convince Richardson. Before his stroke, he had spent nearly two decades as a member and elected officer of the carpenters’ union. The prospect of mobilizing neighbors to demand a working elevator, for starters, made intuitive sense.
“Automatically, I signed up,” Richardson recalls.
He began hosting meetings and pressuring the city on code violations. The organizing grew more urgent when, in 2024, an electrical fire displaced more than 50 households—including Richardson — which started a months-long campaign for adequate temporary housing from the city and renovations from their landlord, the New York-based, private equity GreyHill Group.
Today, Richardson is back in his renovated building, serving as vice president of the Hartford chapter of the Connecticut Tenants Union (CTTU), which has swelled to nearly 900 members statewide. Drawing from his labor leadership experience, Richardson helped set up an elected tenant council that now governs the organization.
Whether fighting an employer or fighting a landlord, there’s a “common denominator,” Richardson says: “They [both] want more for themselves.”
That’s an ethos CTTU has taken to heart as it looks to labor for lessons on building a durable, democratic organization that can organize at the scale of the housing crisis. CTTU now has a formal partnership with Service Employees International Union 1199 New England (SEIU 1199 NE), a labor union representing more than 26,000 healthcare providers in Connecticut. Since 2023, the two groups have adapted the labor union’s battle-tested playbook for face-offs with some of the region’s most notorious slumlords.
The parallels between tenant and labor organizing aren’t exact, as tenants unions generally lack formal collective bargaining rights. But many of the same principles apply — like the importance of strong leaders, clear demands and a plan to force concessions. Above all, CTTU emphasizes the importance of “supermajority” unions, a term borrowed from labor, meaning the bulk of members — not just a handful of activists — are prepared to escalate collective actions.
That emphasis is critical, says Josh Poe, organizing director of the Louisville Tenants Union, which has adopted a structure similar to CTTU. Both groups belong to the Tenant Union Federation, a coalition that hopes to seed a national tenants movement with the ability to conduct coordinated campaigns and, ultimately, rent strikes — including in communities where labor has never gained a foothold.
The Louisville Tenants Union has organized in mobile home parks and subsidized housing is a currently working on building supermajority unions for a statewide campaign. “We’re able to organize people who have never actually been invited into building power before,” says Poe. “It’s very important to us, when we step into the community, that we’re able to say we are a union – we are not a nonprofit.”
CTTU has helped set new standards for what tenant unions can win. In 2024, the union won Connecticut’s first collectively bargained lease, guaranteeing maintenance standards and stabilizing rents in a building where Ocean Management, one of the largest landlords in New Haven, had attempted to hike them by as much as 30%. With that precedent, tenants in several other Ocean-owned buildings are now pushing for similar agreements.
“The idea is that what’s a winnable fight changes every time we win,” CTTU President Hannah Srajer says.
More than two decades ago, SEIU 1199 NE was part of a multi-union effort in Stamford, Conn., that wove together housing and workplace organizing. Mobilizing to defeat a city-led gentrification scheme, unions joined community allies to stop the planned demolition of four public housing complexes, establish landmark affordable housing requirements in Stamford and win union contracts that raised wages for thousands.
SEIU 1199 NE President Rob Baril says it was a natural step to join forces with CTTU, given the increasing rate of evictions and homelessness among members: “It doesn’t make a lot of sense for us just to focus on increasing worker wages if those wages are getting eaten up by housing.”
The labor union is currently providing technical and financial assistance to CTTU as CTTU builds out a dues base. Future collaboration could include dual union memberships, joint campaigns against employers who are also landlords, and even coordinated strikes. As Srajer says: “The vision is a union at home and a union at work.”
That vision is especially crucial as labor comes under relentless attack from the Trump administration, Baril adds. “If we don’t figure out ways to build alliances… at a much more collaborative and effective level, we’re all going to have hell to pay.”
Rebecca Burns is an In These Times contributing editor and award-winning investigative reporter. Her work has appeared in Bloomberg, the Chicago Reader, ProPublica, The Intercept, and USA Today. Follow her on Twitter @rejburns.
