Our History

Garth Ferguson, Patty Snitzler, Regina Douglas, Brian Russell and Steve Williams founded people Organized to Win Employment Rights (POWER) on May 1, 1997. After the federal government's passage of the welfare de-form legislation in 1996, the founders realized that welfare recipients and most low-wage workers would be facing a new social and political landscape with more cut-backs to public services and fewer quality job opportunities, so an organization committed to economic, environmental, racial and gender justice from the bottom-up was born.

From the beginning, we understood that the only way to win the changes we need would be to build the collective strength of working class communities of color. We would never get what we need through charity alone; we can survive only if we increase our power to shape our own destiny. That's why we chose the name POWER for the organization.

Based on POWER's unique approach to organizing, we are successfully building power for low-wage workers, tenants and families. Together, POWER members have waged more than twenty campaigns to improve the living and working conditions for welfare workers, domestic workers, low-income tenants and other working class people of color. As a result of our campaigns, San Francisco's welfare workers receive free public transportation and are protected by workplace health and safety protections just like all other workers protected by the California Occupational Safety and Health Administration. In coalition with other organizations, POWER helped to create San Francisco's Living Wage Ordinance, the only one in the country to protect welfare workers. POWER also recently co-led a community and labor coalition of more than twenty groups to raise the City's minimum wage from $6.75 to $8.50 per hour, increasing the purchasing power of low-wage workers by more than $180 million per year.

POWER's work is rooted in San Francisco, yet we have always understood that the problems we face in our local communities are connected to the problems that low-income and oppressed people experience all over the world. That's why the organization is committed to ending poverty and oppression- once and for all.

In the spring of 2004, POWER entered an 18-month period of reflection and strategic planning to better understand how we could respond to the increasing displacement of working-class African American, Latino and Asian families and to the growing disparity between the have's and the have-not's in San Francisco. We then documented our conclusions by writing a book entitled, Towards Land, Work & Power, published in the winter of 2006.

In 2005 based on our findings, POWER initiated two organizing projects in Bayview Hunters Point and amongst women workers in San Francisco's domestic work industry. Each of these projects continue to realize the founding vision of the organization: to build unity between African American and Latino communities to increase the POWER of low-income workers and tenants.

Throughout POWER's years of work, our roles, tactics and strategies have changed as the economic and political terrain has shifted. What has never changed is our commitment to be a racial justice organization led by low-income people whose mission is to win economic, environmental, racial and gender justice for all.