Connecticut Worker Center provides immigrant workers and their families with access to stabilizing resources and social services, rights-based training, and leadership development opportunities. The overarching goal of this work is to help immigrants move from experiences of crises and exploitation to empowerment and community leadership. We help immigrant workers, and their families navigate struggles that stem from poverty and racism, including economic insecurity and emotional, physical, and mental health challenges. We encourage them to join our membership community, recruit them to attend training on their rights and join our organizing and advocacy campaigns, and ultimately help them realize their power.
All CWC programs further active civic engagement by our community. Our workers’ rights and domestic workers’ organizing efforts, and our active involvement in immigrant rights campaigns, are aimed centrally at increasing the number of community activists and leaders engaged with CWC and with broader movements for social change at local, state and national levels.
Our organizing and training support workers in gaining the knowledge for analyzing their own situation, for learning legal and political options available to them, for joining with others in struggle, for developing their own voice, and for taking action to solve their problems. We welcome and support all who can take on leadership roles at the CWC.
We do everything we can at every stage to back them up, at the CWC offices, in community settings, in public actions, and in the media, such as on call-in radio shows.
We help workers file wage theft complaints to DOL and come up with ways to hold government agencies and employers accountable to laws that protect workers. Following the passage of SB943, the DOL began funding us in 2021 to help do outreach to and train domestic workers and their employers about their rights and obligations under the law.
Since 2012, the domestic workers who lead CWC have spearheaded the movement to secure new labor rights for Connecticut’s 55,000 domestic workers. In 2015, because of their efforts, CT became the 9th state to pass a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Since then, our members have trained their peers on their rights, advocated for enforcement, and won new protections under the anti-discrimination regulations of the Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities. Most recently, CWC together with the National Domestic Worker alliance and their affiliates won SB943, a law that requires employers to provide domestic workers with information about their rights and which required the CT DOL to establish a wage education and enforcement program to support domestic workers. CWC has also been deeply engaged in immigrant rights organizing, defense of immigrants’ rights, and supporting movements for immigration reform at the state and national levels.