Capitalism separated the physical location of waged work and unwaged work. The idea of the home, the idea of the private family household, and zoning law cemented this division. When we care for waged work, we care for its governance, for its ownership, for its internal workings. If we’re to care for unwaged work, then we have to care about something else: the home - its location, its architecture, and its ownership; the family - its private nature, its relation to inheritance, its privilege in property ownership. What insights does adopting a holistic “labor” approach focused on both waged and unwaged “labor” afford us at the Law Center? What are the movement and legal tools we feel are immediately available to us?

A group of Law Center staff started reading M. E. O’Briens book "Family Abolition" this year, which made us think about what it would be like to socialize domestic labor, and ultimately lead to the shaping of this round table discussion. We hope sharing some insights from our readings can open a door into a whole new way of thinking about labor.

This discussion will be pre-recorded and made available to the public via Youtube on Wednesday May 15th. RSVP to the event to get the video direct to your email inbox!

Facilitator:

Ari Pomerantz

At the Law Center, Ari's work focuses on land and housing, specifically working with groups that are liberating land and creating homes and healing spaces for unhoused and BIPOC people. He's drawn to this work through his relationships with elders who've spent their lives providing mutual aid, housing others, and bringing people together around warm meals.

Participants:

Jay Cumberland

Jay believes political theory, social movement theory, and an international perspective must inform his work supporting housing cooperative conversions and worker cooperative conversions. These conversions are, after all, political exercises happening in social spaces around the globe. Learning about Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi somewhat immediately propelled Jay into this work. He believes there’s a thick relationship between that introduction to cooperative economics and politics and the way he approaches his present work. Jay’s approach finds less excitement in creating things from scratch than in making existing things different. In a world without unoccupied political space, he believes it is not only exciting but also necessary to learn to travel through what exists to arrive at our imagined futures.

Mwende Hinojosa

Mwende is leading the Law Center’s effort to refine and envision the story of the Law Center. She coordinates the Law Centers social media channels, newsletter, and blog and co-manages the Law Center's online educational materials and website. She holds operational roles in the Internal Resilience, Abundance, and Finance Circles. She also contributes to programmatic work within the Food and Farm Circle.

Veryl Pow

Veryl aspires to be, in the words of Joy James, a “guerrilla” teacher and scholar. Veryl’s politics developed from his grassroots organizing experiences in Seattle around Palestine and Third World solidarity, abolition, and anti-austerity campaigns; and refined through his rebellious lawyering experiences in South Los Angeles around traffic court debt. As a teacher of law, Veryl challenges his students to critique black letter legal doctrines in their origins and material outcomes, while simultaneously reimagine and repurpose the law towards collective liberation. His scholarly musings center on racial capitalism, critical race theory, and destituent power.

A lawyer by training, Veryl’s conception of movement lawyering has been inspired by his tenure in Baltimore, where grassroots community members have creatively and resiliently built urban farms, cooperatives, and community land trusts in response to neoliberal conditions of disinvestment, immiseration, and death.

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