Southerners for Economic Justice

Southerners for Economic Justice (SEJ) was founded in 1976 during a successful campaign to help J. P. Stevens textile workers unionize. Since then, SEJ has focused on empowering the unemployed and working poor to develop community-based strategies to solve social problems associated with economic crisis.

Southerners for Economic Justice (SEJ) was founded in 1976 during a successful campaign to help J. P. Stevens textile workers unionize. The organization formed to support the empowerment of workers by developing community and institutional allies at the local and national levels. SEJ especially engaged churches, locally to build community support for organizing workers and nationally at the denominational level for expressions of solidarity with their cause.

During the 1980s, SEJ focused its efforts on building community responses to the effects of economic crisis--unemployment due to plant closings, escalating racist violence, shrinking union membership, oppressive working conditions, environmental damage, and abuse of workers' health. Projects and networks such as the workers rights project, Betrayal of Trust: Stories of Working North Carolinians, North Carolinians Against Religious and Racial Violence (NCARRV), the Schlage Workers for Justice, and the womens/legal organizing project, grew out of their empowerment agenda. Their chief constituency during this period was dislocated and marginalized workers, often low income or unemployed and injured women of color. Development of leadership and organizational skills in African American youth became a second focus later in the decade.

In addition to organizing local grassroots projects, SEJ worked to articulate the conditions and concerns of southern workers and communities in a regional, national, and international context. In 1989, the organization helped to launch the Southeast Regional Economic Justice Network (REJN), with the goal of building a broad-based economic justice movement in the South. REJN sought to develop grassroots working-class leadership, to strengthen activist organizations, and to infuse local organizing work with a global political/economic analysis. Its working groups focused on transient industry, contingent workforces, health and safety, poultry/catfish workers, religious partnerships, and economic research. SEJ also allied with a number of other existing organizations, including the Center for Democratic Renewal, the Interreligious Economic Crisis Organizing Network (I/Econ), and the Federation for Industrial Retention and Renewal (FIRR) among many others.

During the 1990s, SEJ concentrated on responding to economic restructuring and global economic integration. SEJ continued to study contingent work, environmental racism, destabilized African American communities, and cuts in welfare and other health and social programs for the poor. Their programmatic efforts included building and participating in coalitions at the local, regional, national, and international levels, advocating for policy changes and analyzing economic trends. Some of their many networking and coalition partners during this period included the North Carolina Welfare Reform Collaborative; the North Carolina Multi Issue Alliance; and Voices of Experience, a collaboration of organizations to advise and advocate for people experiencing Work First welfare reform. SEJ's community organizing work, including the Working Women's Organizing Project and Youth for Social Change, aimed to help their chief constituencies--African American women and youth in Durham, N.C.--to achieve changes in their lives, neighborhoods, workplaces, as well as in community institutions and public policies.

As of 2009, Southerners for Economic Justice continues to work for the cause of economic and social justice.