Sarita Gupta is a key leader and strategist in modern labor and progressive movements. This month, she is stepping down from her role as co-executive director of Jobs with Justice. She will continue in her role as co-director of Caring Across Generations, and will also continue to serve on the WILL Empower Advisory Council. 

Jobs With Justice honored Sarita Gupta on June 27 during the Eleanor Roosevelt Human Rights Awards Celebration. The award spotlights those who have demonstrated unwavering commitment to the fight for workers’ rights, Gupta among them. The ceremony honored her career of more than 20 years that has been dedicated to not only promoting organizing in workplaces to improve wages and working conditions, and pushing for greater worker protections, but also highlighting the value of women leaders’ position in the labor movement.

Born in the United Kingdom and raised in Rochester, New York, her career began with her involvement in student movements during her college years at Mount Holyoke College (1992-1996) and continued when elected president of the U.S. Student Association. There, she was able to represent students on a political level at the Department of Education and Congress. Working with Jobs With Justice, initially in Chicago, deepened her understanding of the importance and value of women’s roles in labor spaces.

One of Gupta’s more recent projects, called Caring Across Generations, focuses on pushing for care infrastructure, increasing availability of affordable care for those in need, supporting caregivers, and strengthening the care workforce. Through this project, Gupta hopes to transform “the way we care in this country,” as she said in an interview for WILL Empower.

At WILL Empower, Gupta serves as an Advisory Council member and was present as an inspiration for emerging women labor leaders at this year’s inaugural cohort.

Gupta firmly advocates the importance of recognizing women in the labor movement for their whole persons and has upheld the need for women and women of color to “redefine what bargaining is by centering race and gender.”

Gupta recently shared her wisdom with the seventeen members of the WILL Empower Emerging Leader Cohort at their first gathering.  Below is an excerpt from the transcript of her discussion with these future women labor leaders. 

The kind of leadership we need right now …is actually about putting your full self in and leading from a place of wholeness….

We need women out there talking about what’s happening to workers today and what we need to do and have a real intersectional frame and lens on that…. There’s a quote that I want to share with you. ‘If you say things of consequence, there may be consequences. The alternative is to be inconsequential.’ I really hold that quote deep in my heart because I feel like when we get to positions where we can leverage our voice, we should be leveraging our voice. …Stay focused and choose to work on the things that fuel your vision. And I say that because the labor movement is in crisis, our movements are in crisis. The world feels like we’re in crisis right now. It’s so easy to get distracted by that and to be caught up in the gossip of it all or the feelings of it all, which is not bad.

We should hold those feelings, but we should also stay focused on the long view and where we’re headed and make choices to work on the things that are impactful. And finally, to cultivate, like to really cultivate joy in your work and in your life. What gives you energy? How do you actually take care of yourself in this work? We are not running a sprint. We are actually running a marathon as leaders. So how do you take care of yourself? How do you create the supports that you need to do this work well? Cause again, leadership is a gift. It’s an awesome responsibility. So how do you really enjoy the gift but also honor it by really living to your best self every day possible? Having said all of that, why did I share all these lessons?

All in the spirit of saying, we need more of us out there in the world right now to really address the major challenges that we’re facing in this moment. I think it is so critical to have women and particularly to have women of color in leadership right now. We’re in a moment of such immense transformation, the way work is being organized, work, not like our work, but work is being organized and is transforming before us. How the labor movement is structured, and functioning is transforming our democracy, our economy. There’s so much in transformation. Climate, like the planet is transforming. I believe we’re in a time of magic and loss. And the challenge for us as leaders is how do we stay hopeful in a moment that feels so chaotic or can feel so chaotic?

The forces that are molding our future, whether it’s demographic shifts or it’s like just incredible radical inequality, to all of the sort of economic and technological change that’s happening to all the climate threats, they’re all intensifying right now. There are moments I put my daughter to bed and I’m like, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m doing everything I can.’ But these things are intensifying and our moral fabric as a nation is really being called into question. Especially as we see hate gaining momentum. At the same time as all that is happening, there’s just amazing amounts of activity and actions and mobilizations and people actually living their values and expressing their values right now. The gun violence movement that’s motivating young people to take on a powerful lobby, like the NRA is pretty fricking amazing.

The Movement for Black Lives that has just transformed how we think about criminal justice, how we think about all of our systems and really naming anti-Black racism right in this country or immigration and the risks that immigrant families are taking right now. There’s so many stories that we’ve been hearing. The incredible hatred and in the midst of the hatred, the love that immigrants can express in this moment and the courage to say, “No, I belong here too, and our families belonged together.” And the #MeToo movement, how amazing this movement is completely transformed…I’m thinking about the work of the National Women’s Law Center and others just transformed industries. Like it’s just a magical moment. Women running for office in extraordinary ways and numbers. It’s really kind of mind blowing.

So, the point I’m making is these are not normal times. Either we’re going to have some sort of an issue breakthrough or a major political shift. I believe that it has to happen, but it’s not going to happen because I just want it to happen. It’s going to happen cause we’re going to work to make that happen. We need to hold on to the long view and the long game here in the work that we’re doing. And remember that in this moment of magic, we have the potential with what we know we need to do. We have what we need in this moment and we just have to bridge between the short term and the long term. That’s the moment we’re in. Because everywhere I go, people are hungry for these connections across these various movements and many more that I didn’t name.

But people are hungry for these connections because, as Angela Davis has said, people don’t live in silos. They don’t live in issue silos. People live their lives. We need to learn how to organize in ways that actually like bring their full lives into focus and help us develop the kinds of solutions that are truly transformative, that are truly impactful. I have a friend who says, ‘Seizing the moment requires radical imagination.’ And I really believe that this is a moment of radical imagination. We have to change systems and we do that. Maybe you’ll learn it here. But some of you may have heard the wheel of change. It’s on us as leaders in this moment, and women leaders in particular, to really shift hearts and minds that can shift behaviors, not just of individuals but our own institutions. The way we lead helps us change systems and transform the world and the way that we know it needs to be.

We hold that and understand that then the wheels of change and our radical imagination can fuel and strengthen our work. That’s the moment we’re in. And so for us, especially those of us in the labor movement, this is particularly important because of the conversations about the future of work. I know some of you may or may not have read the article that I helped author with my two of coauthors, Stephen Lerner and Joe McCartin. What we tried to really intervene and disrupt there was to say the future of work is not about robots taking over our lives. This is actually about the concentration of wealth and power and who is going to wheel that power and who is going to make decisions. And guess what? It’s not only about how we think about how we build power, like real power for working people, but how we evolve our thinking on bargaining.

There’s a way in which we think about bargaining rights right now that’s very much codified in law, but we know that the kind of bargaining we really need and the power that people need is that people should be able to join together to negotiate with any entity that has power over their lives. Landlords, employers, regulators, financiers to really make change. So how do we create more of those pathways in this moment and redefine what bargaining is? Redefine what our movement is about and how do we center race? How do we center gender? And this is why the leadership of women and women of color is so important. We have to center race and have to center gender and sexuality and many much more in how we think about our analysis and the solutions that we’ve come up with.

Intersectionality is really key. It really is. Placing the most vulnerable people in the center of a strategy and figuring out from that point how you developed solutions that will better all of us is a really important orientation to hold as leaders in this moment. Finally, all of this is connected to our democracy because our democracy is in crisis. It’s not just that our labor movement is in crisis. And when I say our labor movement is in crisis, what I’m really referencing is unions and the structure of unions given the changing nature of work. Fissuring and privatization and financialization of our economy. The way in which we think about employee-employer relations has dramatically shifted. How do we really understand in this moment that if workers don’t have power, our democracy is actually in crisis as well?

Not just democracy and the ability to vote in a political election. I mean everyday democracy. There’s a really great article that I read a long while back by a guy named Yoni Appelbaum and he writes about everyday democracy in everyday governance that people have lost the understanding of everyday democracy and governance, and that they should be able to govern over all aspects of their lives. But we know as organizers that’s not true. Do you believe that workers just want higher wages? No. They want higher wages, yes. Should they get it? Yes. Should they get better quality jobs? Yes, but you know what they really want? They want a freaking voice. They want agency and power to shape the economy, to shape our democracy, but to shape every aspect of their life and that is what we have to seed and hold as leaders of this generation, your generation. I’m going to say your generation that’s going to have to hold that and breathe life into that.

Again, it’s part of our history, but it’s gotten lost and we’ve got to re-center it. It’s all about what we do. And I want to go back to our whole selves. In this moment, we have the ability to completely shape a whole new labor movement, a whole new way of organizing workers. It’s a once in a generation opportunity, no pressure. It is a moment for us to design a whole new social contract. It’s a moment for us to redefine how we understand race and gender in our society. Culturally, it’s a moment of great culture shift. Culture doesn’t just shift by itself. It shifts because people push it to shift. We have to shift culture to really embrace all the values that we hold in this room and so we have the power to do it. Like I often find myself asking like ‘who else is going to do it? Some leader somewhere is coming up with a strategy.’

No, actually all of us have to be doing it in all parts of corners of our life. We need to be the ones thinking about how we’re reshaping these major, big questions in this moment. We have the power to make that change. And that’s the urgency of the moment right now. And I’ll just close by saying the whole self is important. I’m saying all this to you and I’m trying to live it myself. So I have one daughter who is eight years old about to turn nine, and she’s a girl scout. She loves to play soccer and basketball. And so this year I decided I was going to coach her soccer team because I was like, ‘It’s really great that all the dads volunteer to coach the soccer team. I think my daughter needs a woman. I think all the girls need a woman who’s going to coach.’

In our first session of coaching I had them pair up and share their goals for the year. What did they want to learn? What do they want? What’s their vision for how they play soccer? What do they want to be able to do? And then we actually began a process of helping them feel a sense of governance. I said, ‘Well, we could do this, or we could do this, or we could do this. Let’s talk about it and vote on it.’ And my daughter’s in girl scouts and same thing, there’s this World Thinking Day. Apparently, it’s one day you think about the world. Then we decided to talk about climate, which a lot of families were like, ‘What are you doing?’ But we’re like ‘Actually how about we talk about coral reefs and we pick a country based on that and have a conversation.’ Last year we did Syria and talked about the war. My point is I feel a responsibility as a parent, as much as I do as a leader to really seed this idea of what it takes to have a healthy democracy. It is about worker power, but it is also about the everyday governance, the ability for people to shape their lives. And that is something that I hope you all will take forward with you in your future endeavors.”

Daniela Gaytan Rios is a WILL Empower intern and Georgetown University undergraduate (COL ’21).