THE CALUMET PROJECT
Steven Ashby, Executive Director
John Stankovic, Community Organizer
7128 Arizona Ave., Room 203
Hammond, Ind. 46323
(219) 845-5008
(219) 845-5032 fax
E-mail: calproject@surfnetinc.com

Organized in 1984 as a joint project of Chicago's Midwest Center for Labor Research and the chuch-based United Citizens Organization, the Calumet Project is a community coalition of labor, community and religious organizations organizing for economic and social justice in the aftermath of the recession that struck the region's steel industry during the early 1980s, leading to dozens of factory closings and the loss of 50,000 industrial jobs.

Over the years, becoming an independent non-profit in 1989, the Calumet Project has remained faithful to three essential goals -- saving jobs, creating new QUALITY jobs, and fighting "working poverty" -- through specific, targeted projects that have ranged from working with the aging owners of small businesses to help them find a buyer rather than going out of business, to active advocacy for worker-friendly economic-development and business-tax policy. One current policy issue of interest that is now being pursued in numerous cities (including New York) is that of tax abatement: Specifically, when local government offers tax breaks and other incentives to encourage a business to choose the community for a location, tax-abatement laws require that workers' interests be considered when the city and the industry negotiate the deal. In practice, this means, for example, that the industry may be required to pay a living wage in exchange for the tax benefits that it receives. If the average wage in the auto-parts industry is $11 an hour, for example, then a new auto-parts firm lured to the city through tax advantages must not offer its workers $6 if it expects to receive the "corporate welfare" of a tax advantage.

The Calumet Project seeks this commitment, along with ordinances opening the process to public scrutiny, as a matter of law; it also presses public opinion, as when an organized protest by clergy halted a religious order's plan to close a hospital in Gary, throwing scores of workers out of jobs.

Among other current activities, the Calumet Project's "Early Warning Workshops" provide workers and unions with forms and other tools they can use to scrutinize their employer and identify signals that management may be quietly planning to downsize or close, hoping that this early alert will make it possible to organize community and labor forces to prevent a shutdown

Another major ongoing project, Brownfields Redevelopment, encourages the cleanup and redevelopment of abandoned industrial properties. Such "brownfields" typically lie undeveloped because the cost of rehabilitation and environmental cleanup exceeds the property's sale value, making it apparently unfeasible to put them to corporate use. But Calumet Project, through organizing and public opinion, encourages partnerships between government and business to attract businesses and, through appropriate subsidies and incentives, make possible economic-development efforts that will create jobs.

One of Calumet's major public-education projects, the annual Report Card on Workers' Rights in Indiana, analyzes statistics to gauge the quality of employment, wages, benefits, workplace safety and labor organizing throughout the state. This document is issued every Labor Day and generally gets a lot of coverage.

With just three full-time staff and one part-time worker, Calumet Project accomplishes much with its $150,000 budget, most of which comes from foundation grants. They're also working on establishing a branch in Elkhart and St. Joseph County, Ind., in the north-central part of the state.

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