Yale Ph.D. candidate Dorian Worren distills some of the lessons of the Immigrant Workers Freedom Ride and the triumphs of labor and community organizing in New Haven for the project of building a revitalized and progressive labor movement: The multiple social, political and communal networks in which workers are embedded on the shop floor and outside the workplace are all shaped by race, gender and nationality, and are critical resources that unions can tap. For example, successful HERE locals in Chicago (Local 1) and New Haven, Connecticut (Yale Unions), have used their members’ and leaders’ social networks—including churches and community organizations—to enhance their struggles and build enduring alliances...It’s one thing for a union president to approach a minister to ask for help; it’s quite another when a member or members of a union approach their own minister and congregation and ask for help in their fight for justice. By recognizing the multiple identities of their memberships during an organizing campaign, unions can expand their struggles from being a fight between the union and employer to being a fight between an entire community and an employer. ...Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. illustrated the interconnections between racial and economic injustices in a 1961 speech to the AFL-CIO, “…the labor-hater and labor-baiter is virtually always a twin-headed creature spewing anti-Negro epithets from one mouth and anti-labor propaganda from the other mouth.” ...Unions should not mimic corporate America’s dumbed-down “sensitivity trainings” and adopt a superficial celebration of “differences.” Instead, there are three lessons we can draw when unions take seriously the maxim “an injury to one is an injury to all”. First, and most important, recognizing the multiple identities of workers—and the varied and overlapping injustices the face as a result—brings valuable and often underused resources to a union. Second, when the tough issues of racism, nativism or sexism are addressed internally and head-on, it can increase strength and solidarity. Doing so allows unions to put these issues on the table before the boss uses them as ways to divide and conquer. And third, the most innovative and successful models of unionism, especially during periods of resurgence and rejuvenation, historically involved the active recruitment of previously excluded workers and the infusion of these workers’ other solidarities—race, ethnicity, gender, religion and even neighborhood—into the movement. The labor movement at its best has been connected to an organized left that has had a broader vision of democratic citizenship and social justice. From the abolitionist, socialist, women’s, and civil rights movements, to current campaigns for global justice and immigrant rights, the labor movement has been only as strong as the broader left, and the left has only been as strong as a powerful labor movement.\