In commemoration of the first full year at the Corporate Action Network, I wanted to write a quick summary of our work and what we have learned. We launched this project last year at Netroots Nation and it's been a wild ride. If you happen to attending Netroots this year, join us to celebrate at the 2nd Annual Corporate Action Network Ice Cream Social.
A bit over a year ago I set out with a few colleagues to try something new -- a whole new way of thinking about campaigns against corporate abuse. When we launched this idea at the Netroots Nation ice cream social last year, it was the beginning of something special, a collaboration between institutions, activists, organizers, and others that has grown to literally thousands of people, so I wanted to take a moment to look back, kind of report out what we’ve been doing …
For years while I worked in the Senate, I kept seeing the same problem: as long as corporations have so much power to set the terms of the debate, there was not much chance to make real change. We could fight and scratch and claw for a victory here, a victory there, but the trajectory was inexorably toward more power and less accountability for the largest corporations. In the immortal words of that one Occupy protester, shit is fucked up and bullshit, and if we don’t change things, they’re going to stay that way.
So, I joined with a great (then small!) team to start to see how we as progressives rethink how we go about confronting corporations when they overstep their bounds and abuse the public trust. And, that’s when we came up with the idea for the Corporate Action Network.
The Corporate Action Network is a few things: it’s a set of tools for campaigns, it’s an idea on how to organize those campaigns in new ways to make them more effective, and it’s a team of people who will support those campaigns to take them over the top. In the past year we began trying out these tools, ideas, and working with the team.
Here’s how it works: Corporate Action Network provides a suite of tools for organizers working on campaigns to stop corporate abuse; anyone or organization can come on and (for free!) start setting up events, petitions, and letter-to-the-editor campaigns. It’s a full suite of organizing tools. Organizers have full access to any lists that they build, and they can share the campaign on any web site using “widgetized” technology that doesn’t interfere with a group’s branding. We are trying to break free of the ‘one campaign, one website’ model of an online coalitional campaign and instead create a true network, with multiple groups and individuals owning their own piece of a campaign, but working together toward the common goal.
Organizers working with multiple groups can see the metrics of how each group is contributing to the campaigns through their widgets, and groups can work together across campaigns to build petitions, events, and other campaign activities. The CAN team then supports those campaigns as needed with media help, with research on corporate targets, and when a campaign can bring a case against a corporation, we provide support to navigate the world of litigation.
We have made some real progress, so I wanted to talk about where we are what we learned.
Over the course of the past year we’ve hosted campaigns on our site that have drawn the attention of some major corporations. We’ve worked with Making Change at Walmart and OUR Walmart to push for real change in the world’s largest private employer. Back in November, in our first campaign, we had Walmart’s PR team working overtime to assure the public that the Black Friday strikes were no big deal. (It turns out they were, since it was the biggest strike in Walmart’s history and the largest labor protest in decades). In the recent actions in June, Walmart even went so far as to file a temporary restraining order against Walmart Strikers in Arkansas for the Shareholders Meeting. It didn’t work, as this year’s shareholder meeting was unlike any other with its focus on the company’s treatment of its workers.
And we’ve worked with a number of other campaigns as we’ve expanded out from that first campaign last November.
More importantly, we’ve been getting feedback from our users ranging from first-time activists to seasoned organizers, all of which have talked about how easy the tools are to use and how valuable they were to their event. Below you can read about some of the ups and downs of CAN’s first year, and at the end there’s a quick rundown of our latest tools as well as a teaser for the next version of our toolset due out later this summer.
Standing Up for Walmart Workers
For years, efforts to hold Walmart accountable for its abuse of workers were hamstrung by a simple question of scale: how can you organize actions on a scale that will get the attention of the world’s largest private employer? Corporate Action Network helped facilitate a broad effort to tackle that challenge, partnering with Making Change at Walmart and OUR Walmart to organize a Black Friday strike that brought out 30,000 people at 1,197 events in 44 states. For the first time, the scale of the action was large enough to overtake Walmart’s PR and advertising teams. Google searches and Twitter mentions of the issues of worker fairness significantly outstripped Walmart’s marketing messaging throughout the holiday season.
One of the best parts was CAN’s tools made it easy for anyone to plan an event. Quadeer Porter, a first-time organizer from New Jersey, spoke about how CAN’s tools inspired him to lead an event on Black Friday: “I’m not an organizer. I’m not a leader. I went to the Corporate Action Network, just figured someone had to do it and I did.” Actions like these from first-time organizers are essential to building a movement big enough to challenge Walmart, and I’m thrilled that CAN’s tools are helping to make that possible.
“No More Deathtraps” Tour Shines the Spotlight on Worker Abuse
As part of their low-price business model, Walmart, Gap, and other major brands produce clothing in unsafe factories in Bangladesh and around the world. Following the horrible factory fire that killed over 100 Bangladeshi garment workers last November, CAN partnered with the International Labor Rights Forum, Making Change at Walmart, SumOfUs, United Students Against Sweatshops, and Warehouse Workers United to bring Sumi Abedin, a survivor of the fire, and Kalpona Akter, a labor organizer and former factory worker, to the United States to tell their stories and demand justice for their fellow workers. The tour earned lots of media coverage and, more importantly, it drew wide attention to the plight of factory workers in the region. While, Walmart still refuses to sign on to the factory safety agreement, its shareholders are beginning to demand action (like replacing top executives, including CEO Mike Duke.) However, other major retailers including H&M have signed on. And most recently, the US Government divested from having military uniforms manufactured in such factories.
Bringing Justice to Justice
A few weeks ago you may have heard that people with the names of certain top bank executives were arrested on the steps of the Department of Justice. While it may not have been the Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, Brian Moynihan, and John Stumpf who were handcuffed that night, the event was still a great kick-off to a week of action to protest the DOJ policy of ‘Too Big to Jail.’ CAN partnered with Home Defenders League and Occupy Our Homes to bring hundreds of people from across the U.S. to show the Justice Department that we the homeowners are not okay with letting the big banks get away with decimating the economy. The question still remains of whether the Department of Justice will prosecute Wall Street Bankers who caused the financial collapse, but the heat is up on them as the campaign moves forward.
Using feedback from organizers, we are creating the next generation of CAN Tools
CAN and our partners had a solid first year. We learned a lot from trial-and-error and our passionate and resourceful partners, and we like to think that our online toolkit played a big part as well. Here’s a quick rundown of some recent additions and what’s still to come:
Groups: This feature lets different organizations to meet and interact around issue areas and create networks where members can discuss strategy in private, create actions together under the group’s banner, and more, with a federated structure and collaborative approach.
Events: A new widget allows you to embed a zip code search for campaign events on any website, which helps organizations work easily with partners and spread the word about events.
CAN Action Center 2.0: The newest version of our free toolset will allow you to run standard online organizing campaigns, create actions like petitions and events, and grow lists of activists through a mass emailer. CANAC 2.0 will also allow larger organizations to work together easily online with allies and “organize the organizers” for the biggest impact.
Check out
CorporateActionNetwork.org to see more information on our exciting tools, learn about our current and past campaigns, and start your own campaign. The more organizers who join the network, the more we will be able to leverage all of our work.
It’s been a great year, and we’ve got nowhere to go but up.