We welcome you to TUWU’s First Quarterly Newsletter La Regeneración. Why call the updated TUWU newsletter, “La Regeneración”? Simply put, we wanted to evoke the radical imaginative power that comes from our working-class communities of color, ancestors, and predecessors who envisioned and saw a world in which we are all free.
On the question of why TUWU does political education, Paulo Freire, a brazilian educator in the 1960s was able to summarize it succinctly in the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Liberation cannot happen without the people who are most affected by systemic and workplace exploitation first becoming self-aware of the contradictions within the economic system, their role in the economy, and their belief in their ability to take action and make changes.
The quote that opens this issue of La Regeneración from Paulo Freire is a reminder that, for this collective liberation to happen, member leaders, worker centers, unions, and the labor movement as a whole must be very intentional to build consciousness. If we do not, the messaging that surrounds workers, are narratives that elicit powerlessness, self-blame, individualism, divisiveness among workers, and reinforce a collective sedation that prevents any meaningful change from happening.