About Us

Garden State Alliance for a New Economy (GANE)

An unusual alliance is forming in New Jersey, which has immense potential to reverse the region's three-decade trend toward a bifurcated economy in which more and more working families live in poverty. Through resurgent service sector unions and movements based in African-American and immigrant communities, families at the bottom of the new economy are beginning to organize to transform their economic futures and bring back the high-quality blue collar jobs that are so urgently needed to give all families in the region the chance to prosper.

GANE is tapping into the energy of New Jersey's labor movements and forging or deepening connections with other key constituencies.

• The surge of immigrant organizing in Newark will backfire if immigrant groups and the unions, which organize them, do not build deep alliances with the established African-American communities that feel threatened by the demographic changes.
• A great deal of the policy and social service work in Newark, and the street-level activism in Newark's African-American communities, focuses narrowly on the issue of access to jobs, without any discussion of job quality. As a result, the Newark residents who most need a stable, decent job-ex-felons, recovering addicts--are sent into the most marginal conditions, and often end up back where they started. By reframing the debate and by choosing campaigns that actively advance both local hiring and job quality goals, GANE can realign the landscape, so that extremely poor Newark residents are fighting with unions for the good jobs that give them the genuine chance to build a future.

Northern New Jersey is a strategic region, which could set new standards that spread throughout the region.

• Unions matter in New Jersey and key labor leaders have made the commitment to create a new kind of labor movement.

• New Jersey is a politically progressive state where concerted organizing efforts can win pioneering reforms that set regional trends.

• The port economy offers immense potential opportunity to create high-quality blue-collar jobs for local residents, and GANE will be at the forefront of a campaign to make good on that promise.

GANE is a worker organizing initiative, not a coalition of the usual suspects.

• We promote an organizing culture in existing groups, by creating campaigns which will concretely transform workers' lives, and by helping leaders use those campaigns to engage and expand their membership.
• We also directly engage individual workers through targeted outreach, and identify leaders through their ability to bring others into the campaign.

As a shared vision and relationships of accountability and trust develop between leaders of progressive unions and immigrant and African-American and environmental groups and others through GANE campaigns, a groundswell of demand for economic justice will begin to change the political realm of possibility and reshape the life possibilities of many thousands of working families in northern New Jersey and beyond.

For more information on GANE, contact Kate Atkins, Executive Director at (732) 287-8113.