New structure designed to further innovative organizing in King County
The following is from MLK Labor:
SEATTLE, WA (January 16, 2025) — MLK Labor’s nationally recognized Seattle Presidents’ Organizing Initiative and the MLK Worker Innovation Center are now under a new umbrella organization—the People’s Organizing Center. The new structure reflects its expanded mission and commitment to developing innovative models of worker organizing.
Seattle POI was an experiment of the AFL-CIO, bringing together the presidents of national unions to jointly fund innovation in worker organizing. Under the leadership of MLK Labor, the Seattle labor movement was selected to pilot this program five years ago. In that time, Seattle POI has grown the local labor movement by facilitating the collaboration of unions and the use of innovative tools. Since January 2020, the 21 local unions participating in our program have organized over 18,000 new members throughout the region.
Seattle POI was launched during the COVID-19 pandemic. As King County recovered after shutdowns, stakeholders identified an opportunity to innovate a historic institution: the union hiring hall. We created a virtual clearinghouse for good union jobs, uplifting open positions in the Greater Seattle area. Our initial Virtual Hiring Hall connected jobseekers to open positions across industries, including hundreds of jobs at the newly opened Climate Pledge Arena. This project secured funding from the City of Seattle, King County, and the U.S. Department of Labor to reimagine the best ways to connect local jobseekers with high-road employment. In June of 2024, this workforce development project rebranded as UnionHiringHall.org, with a new site and additional capacity to conduct hiring events across our region.
With the announcement of FIFA’s arrival in 2026, our team began to ideate new ways to protect workers. In order to ensure any additional work was union-protected, we developed several new models to reimagine temporary work. Our three-pronged approach tackled this challenge by incubating worker cooperatives, building an online dispatch platform to accept temporary work, and negotiating with the local FIFA organizing committee for a first-of-its-kind Labor Standards Agreement.
To once again allow for advancement of our workforce development and barrier-breaking programs, we formed MLK Worker Innovation Center—a new nonprofit dedicated to worker education and uplifting worker-led models. This organization opens the door to new grant funding opportunities to ensure that our workforce development and other worker-led programs continue serving our communities at the highest level. We aspire to grow these new models across industries long after this year’s World Cup.
We are proud to announce that the Seattle Presidents’ Organizing Initiative and MLK Worker Innovation Center will continue building power under a new umbrella organization called the People’s Organizing Center. This new structure will allow us to expand beyond our original directives to realize innovative models of organizing. We are thrilled that this groundbreaking organizing work will remain housed at MLK Labor as we continue to grow our local labor movement.
