Linking up the struggles!

Here are some things you can do to help this poor people's movement:

Write your political leaders.

Tell your Congressional representatives that true welfare reform legislation must start with bringing people up and out of poverty. It must also hold families together and help them to survive. At minimum, new legislation needs to include the following provisions:

    • Federal support for universally available, quality, and affordable child care.

    • Guidelines establishing uniform grant levels above the federal poverty line.

    • Expanding the definition of activities that count toward fulfilling TANF work

       requirements to include (a) participation in a full range of education and training

       activities, and (b) parents caring for their pre-school age children.

    • 'Stop the clock' for anyone in compliance with the TANF rules.

    • Oppose proposals that promote marriage as an answer to poverty.

    • Guaranteed quality and affordable housing.

    • Meaningful and adequate transitional support and benefits.

    • Provide equal access to benefits for immigrants.

These web sites can help you find the contact information for your Congressional representatives in the House of Representatives or the U.S. Senate

Economic Human Rights Campaign.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the international standard for Human Rights, expresses the rights due every human being--including food, housing, and living wage jobs. While claiming to defend human rights, the United States has consistently ignored and undermined the global consensus on economic human rights. Economic Human Rights are mainly expressed in Articles 23, 25, and 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Article 23: The right to jobs at a living wage and just conditions of work.

"Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favorable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment... Everyone who works has the right to just and favorable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection... Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions."

Article 25: Right to well-being of a person and their family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services.

Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special protection."

Article 26: Right to education.

"Everyone has the right to education..."

The full text of this document can be found on the United Nations' Universal Declaration of Human Rights web site. The Economic Human Rights Campaign web page has more information about this effort including testimonies from the EHR Tribunal in 1998 .

Please submit reports of economic human rights violations by using the

online report form, or by sending them to:                                           

Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign

Kensington Welfare Rights Union
PO Box 50678
Philadelphia, PA 19134
(215) 203-1945 * FAX (215) 203-1950
kwru@kwru.org                                                        Photo courtesy Kensington Welfare Rights Union

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Last modified: 04/17/08