Policy is a question of labor.

In the 1980s, amidst the rise of neoliberal economic policies and conservative political movements in the United States, some economists brought forth the theory of Asymmetric Information: how unequal information between market participants can lead to market failures and inefficiencies. Technological transformations, similarly, have been opportunities for liberating social transformation, yet have failed to deliver in including all of us. Less learned from are the organizers and political leaders who labored to close knowledge gaps in their fight for workers’ rights, economic progress, and more – on the streets, in public hearings, and during lobbying trips. 

Labor of Change (LoC) was created to play a small part in intersecting the two: closing the information gaps between big ideas and real institutions to advance economic justice and change amidst accelerating technological disruption.

In the past few years, there have been major developments of technological progress in synthetic biology, robotics, quantum computing, artificial intelligence, and clean energy. Biotechnology has put forth vaccines and gene editing for progress in reversing diabetes, curing sickle cell disease, and creating Alzheimer’s drugs. Brain-computer interface restored speech to an activist who lost it. Language model techniques have been applied to advance understanding of DNA sequences and proteins. In a faster than expected advancement, AI has achieved human-level language and coding capabilities. Clean energy innovations like energy storage, electric vehicles, solar power/energy, and more have retained even the fundamental possibility of pushing forward for progress. 

Even with these advancements, there is asymmetric information in who understands them, who benefits from them, who can use them, and who will leverage them. More importantly, we ask how the foundations of democracy: organizing, unions, education are also social technology. While economists, entrepreneurs, scientists, and capital are crucial for innovation, we emphasize that the loving labor of public education, public policy, and local institutions is equally significant. The labor of young people has also been missing from this conversation. In response to the rapidly shifting material conditions they’ve only known, young people have created and continue to create policy recommendations, technological advancements, and scientific innovations to advance economic justice.

Labor of Change (LoC)’s vision is to build a youth-led movement leveraging public education, labor organizing, policy advocacy, and democratic innovation to advance economic justice. We first present an open-source collection of strategies, tactics, and policies that modern institutions in academia, government, art, technology, and grassroots organizing have used to build a more inclusive and just economy. Although they pull from different gaps in economic justice, and these approaches have yielded varied results, our goal is to stimulate broader discussion about systematically testing and implementing similar innovative interventions – more quickly, intelligently, and often to intentionally respond to the economy’s current conditions and its rapidly approaching future. 

We chose to focus on economic progress because we’ve seen how institutions, elections, campaigns, and conflicts have been predicated on the economic question: the dance between who benefits from economic progress and who is left in the margins. The labor of economic progress, though, has already been done by many; in that way, it transcends elections and administrations. Attention to that progress offers a locus for how we can push the world to a place we prefer it to be. 

As we approach new administrations, we can not continue to falsely believe that change “just happens” – if people simply continue to hope and dare. In the name itself, Labor of Change acknowledges the labor of love, commitment, and care that change needs.