Veronica Mendez Moore is co-founder and co- director of Centro de Trabajadores Unidos en la Lucha (United Workers’ Center, aka CTUL), a worker-led organization that partners with other leaders on movements for racial, gender, and economic justice. In spring 2024, she will step away from the organization she co-founded 16 years ago, partly to spend more time with her two young children. We talked with her about the successes and long-term vision of CTUL.
In my final year of college, someone came into one of my classes recruiting people to come to a three-day workshop led by a union. I went, not with a labor background but with degrees in political science and sociology, and an interest in social justice — wanting to make the world a better place. From this training I got a job offer in Chicago. That’s when I started to understand what organizing is.
We were organizing housekeepers in hotels to reduce workloads. They were expected to clean 15 rooms in a shift, when 13 was a more reasonable number. After months of organizing, we supported housekeepers one day to have everyone clean only 13 rooms and then punch out together to demonstrate their unity around workload issues.
People were scared about how management would react. I got on the elevator with a group of housekeepers who were nervous. Floor by floor, as we went down the building, more housekeepers got on. I got to watch people go from feeling fear with their heads down to...
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