Labor

of

Change

We are a collective of young people fighting for a just economy through creative innovation.

Group of people standing in a room, some posing playfully, with decorations hanging in the foreground.

Painting of farm workers harvesting flowers in a field

Diagram from Benjamin Franklin High School showing the role in a community housing program. Includes flowchart with committees like racial cooperation, health, leadership, and housing. Lists activities such as housing exhibits, rallies, and building projects for East Harlem. Prepared by School-Community Research Bureau.

Artwork depicting two figures in hooded clothing painted on stacked cardboard boxes, with colorful fruits painted at the bottom.

Basement Workshop document, 1971-1986, black and white photo of group with names listed, New York locations, design credits.

In recent years, technological transformations have become the norm for production. Less learned from are the organizers who labored to close knowledge gaps in their fight for workers’ rights, economic justice, and more — on the streets, in public hearings, and door by door. We ask how the foundations of our world — organizing, unions, and education — are also social “technologies” and creative innovations, and how young people are engaging with them.

Labor of Change was created to play a small part in connecting this: closing the information gaps between young people, big ideas, and institutions. We know young people are integral to the organizing of the broader labor and economics movement. We are the ones inheriting an economy being rebuilt around us, and we are directly impacted.

We want to inherit an economy where work is not a condition of survival, where technology is governed by the people whose labor it depends on, and where cooperatives, unions, and public institutions are our economic model.

Read our founding thesis here.