Amid Lots of Bad News for Working People, a Win in New Orleans Offers Hope
The Workers’ Bill of Rights—supported by more than 80% of voters—is the latest tool to reduce labor exploitation.
Sarah Jaffe
For workers in New Orleans, 2025 opened with horror when a pickup truck hurtled down Bourbon Street at 3 a.m. on New Year’s Day, the driver intent on causing as much death and destruction as possible.
Bourbon is more than a tourist attraction and party site; it’s a workplace for many in the city’s
service industry, people who already labor with few protections and little
support. Too many of those people had to rush right back to work in the
aftermath. Though the story has dropped from the headlines, people in the city are
living with the reminder that, to many, their lives are cheap.
But there’s a little bit of hope in the city, even with grim election results and a grimmer start to the year. A Workers’ Bill of Rights was overwhelmingly approved by voters on Election Day. More than 80% of those who cast a ballot voted to enshrine workers’ rights in the city’s Home Rule charter, the first step in the process of building a real framework for enforcing higher minimum wages, employer-provided healthcare, paid family and sick leave, vacation time and the right to organize. In a state where President Donald Trump won 60% of the vote and where a far-right legislature and governor have preempted many of the possibilities for local action, the Workers’ Bill of Rights offers a blueprint for forward motion under conservative governance.
The bill was the signature policy of community organization Step Up Louisiana, and Shera Phillips was one of the organizers who built that 80% majority, door by door, conversation by conversation.
Before joining Step
Up’s Fall for Liberation organizer training program, Phillips, an artist and
teacher, had already been organizing in New Orleans, doing work she describes
as “anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchy.” That meant fights against environmental
racism and to remove white supremacist names and monuments from the
city. The Workers’ Bill of Rights fit with work she’d already been doing, she
says, and it seemed to strike a chord with the broader community as well.
The organizer training program began with classroom sessions, discussing the history of New Orleans and of community organizing and labor unions in the city, issues like the charterization of New Orleans’ public schools, the intentional dismantling of institutions and locations of worker power and how Step Up and its allies intend to rebuild them.
Then, Phillips and her cohort hit the streets, knocking doors and attending community events to make sure people were prepared to vote and that they knew about the ballot initiative, answering questions about what it might mean, and working to convince voters that the city government could indeed work for them.
That last part is a heavy lift in a city that has seen a string of politicians wind up in prison, where the streets are a wreck and city government often seems nonexistent, where the current mayor has been named in an indictment accusing a building inspection firm of bribing officials to falsify inspections and permits. And that’s not even bringing the state into the conversation.
Understandably, trust in government is low in New Orleans.
“For most people, their first question was just, ‘How does this impact me?’” says Samara Smith, another of the Fall for Liberation organizers. Smith got her start on Tulane University’s campus, where she was finishing a master’s in Latin American studies. She wanted to get some real organizing experience, and the Workers’ Bill of Rights chimed with her focus on international health policy. She canvassed in her Uptown neighborhood and spent a while explaining how the policy would work and what it unfortunately still could not do. She recalled her first phonebanking experience, calling up someone on her street and getting an angry response, being told “I don’t think it’ll work.”
Smith understands why people in New Orleans, particularly older people, have lost any faith in the possibility of change. But, she says, “alternatively, sometimes my age would make people feel hopeful.” They would tell her it was nice to see young people involved in the process and, she says, she’d use that to encourage those who had stepped back from politics to step back in. “A lot of them were like, ‘OK, I’m going to come to a meeting.’ And they did. They were really engaged. I think that there was a moment in this particular election where people felt like, ‘OK, if there’s ever a time for me to step back in, it’s now.’ ”
Many were interested in the finer details of the policy, Phillips adds, asking if their wages would go up immediately, what healthcare might look like, how the law could prevent companies from retaliating against workers who organized. They might believe that their taxes would be paying for the increase in wages, or they might worry about small businesses, but most people she spoke with were immediately on board with the idea of a $15 minimum wage.
“I will say that there were times when I have had conversations with workers where it took some time for them to see how they deserve more money than what they were making,” Phillips says.
She recalls a conversation with a 12-year dollar store employee — a group that Step Up has been focused on organizing — in which, “He didn’t see how someone just walking through the door should be able to ask for $15 minimum wage. I shared with him how he deserved much more than $15 minimum wage, being at a company for 12 years.”
In part, Smith thinks their success illustrates just how bad things have been in New Orleans. “Most people are not making even close to the living wage that you need,” she says, and housing continues to grow more expensive. But also, she says, “For a lot of people, just hearing the phrasing of Workers’ Bill of Rights — it emboldens people to feel like that their lives matter, that their rights as workers are valuable to the city.” It’s been obvious to them for a long time that the city prioritizes its out-of-town visitors over the residents that make those visitors’ experiences so special. Watching the city rush to fix streets before Taylor Swift’s conference and again before the Super Bowl arrives — in the midst of Mardi Gras season, no less — reminded New Orleanians, Smith says, that it is possible to have nice things, as long as the city sees a profit in it. (I am writing these words to the sound of the road outside of my French Quarter apartment being resurfaced.) And the rush to clear homeless encampments, the rush to reopen Bourbon Street after the New Year’s attack, has reminded them how little value the city has placed on their lives.
While many organizers, Phillips says, “come into communities and tell the communities what they need and instruct the communities on how they’re going to go about getting those things,” Step Up’s process has been driven by its members and their needs. Those struggles laid the groundwork for the Workers’ Bill of Rights, and the Fall for Liberation program helped train more leaders in the city to make demands and turn them into reality.
“Step Up really has their intention set on listening to the community,” Phillips says, “and allowing the community to put forth and drive their efforts and their aims.”
The vote secured, Step Up and its allies in government have turned to shaping the actual policy. The ballot initiative had fairly broad language to insert in the city charter, but the devil, as the cliché goes, will be in the details.
Britain Forsyth, Step Up’s legislative coordinator, says the political buy-in from elected officials and the health department has been great, and the next steps are about working out the details for a set of policies. “[For] the Healthy Workplace staff person and the health department and the program that we’re working to get in place, it’s looking like it’s probably going to be a midyear budget allocation,” Forsyth says. They plan to start relatively small to have the most successful possible roll-out, and also, unfortunately, “to make sure that we’re staying within the bumpers of preemption.”
“I think something that is unfortunately real is that when progressive policy is implemented, it’s often held to a much stricter standard for approval than other policies,” Forsyth adds.
Because Louisiana has, since 1997, preempted the ability to set a local minimum wage — and, more recently, preempted city laws around paid leave, project labor agreements and any regulation of the gig economy — the Workers’ Bill of Rights has to rely on carrots more than sticks.
The policy relies on First Amendment rights more than anything, Forsyth notes. The city has the right to make public statements about businesses that are upholding the core tenets of the bill of rights, to host gatherings and speak to workers about what is happening in their workplaces, and workers have the right to discuss those conditions among themselves. Then, they aim for the city to work with more businesses to get them to follow suit.
As I wrote in my July column for In These Times, that means the policy will likely include some sort of rating system or acknowledgements for businesses that uphold the four tenets of the policy: $15 an hour, paid leave, health insurance and the right to organize. “It’s looking like, initially, it’ll be something like, here are 25 model businesses all over the city.”
The nebulousness at times made it hard to explain to voters, Phillips says. People would get excited, then deflate when she explained that state law preempted raising the wage outright and the city couldn’t just provide healthcare. She’d have to challenge them to get involved in the broader struggle, explaining that the referendum was a first step in communicating demands to the city (and to higher-ups that might be watching on the state and federal level).
Smith agrees: “The biggest thing was getting people to ask more questions about why is it that you can’t have paid healthcare coverage? What’s actually stopping these people from doing that?” She points to some of the city’s biggest employers — including the university where she studied, Tulane — and noted, “Come on, be serious. You can afford a $15 minimum wage.”
“This campaign right here is really important because it can allow us to see ourselves in each other’s struggle,” Phillips says. “It can allow us to see how we are connected to each other, even if we don’t consider ourselves to be directly impacted by things.” She turned the recent crime panic around: “This is important for people from every socioeconomic status, in any neighborhood in the city, because when people aren’t able to meet their needs, they seek other ways to meet their needs. We care about crime, then we should care about poverty. We should also care about education and making sure that people have access to opportunities, access to education, access to resources.
“Even those of us who don’t consider ourselves to be exploited,” she concludes, “we are being exploited.”
The 80% vote on the ballot initiative can be a signpost to other organizers and progressive lawmakers in so-called blue oases in preemption states like Alabama, Arizona and Indiana. Forsyth notes, “I moved back [to New Orleans] specifically for this reason, which is that I firmly believe that whenever the federal government isn’t showing up or is actively attacking people, it’s the responsibility of local governments to take care of their people.”
To Smith, the sweeping victory for workers at the same time the country broadly swung to Trump was also a sign to focus locally. Right after the election, she thought, “[We still have] a lot of the same problems we had last week.” Political observers, she notes, often know about elections all over the world, but don’t know who their local tax commissioner is: “The disconnect from your local experience is unreal because I can go and talk to city council. That’s the stuff that we can really influence and make direct changes on. Get involved with the stuff that’s literally two minutes from your house instead of despairing about the stuff happening in Washington.”
Local engagement, Forsyth adds, is what made the Workers’ Bill of Rights possible. “I’m calling it laying the groundwork,” he says. “You really have to do this ground game of getting the city on board to push forward.”
And he’s excited to see experiments in other cities as the second Trump era unfolds: “I hope that other cities, these other blue dots and preemption states can look at us and think, there’s a real blueprint here for things that can be done.”
Sarah Jaffe is a writer and reporter living in New Orleans and on the road. She is the author of Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone; Necessary Trouble: Americans in Revolt, and her latest book is From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire, all from Bold Type Books. Her journalism covers the politics of power, from the workplace to the streets, and her writing has been published in The Nation, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The New Republic, the New York Review of Books, and many other outlets. She is a columnist at The Progressive and In These Times. She also co-hosts the Belabored podcast, with Michelle Chen, covering today’s labor movement, and Heart Reacts, with Craig Gent, an advice podcast for the collapse of late capitalism. Sarah has been a waitress, a bicycle mechanic, and a social media consultant, cleaned up trash and scooped ice cream and explained Soviet communism to middle schoolers. Journalism pays better than some of these. You can follow her on Twitter @sarahljaffe.
