“Transforming Spaces” is a series about women driving change in sometimes unexpected places.
It takes approximately 30 seconds of conversation with Janelle Jones, the chief economist and policy director of one of the largest labor unions in the United States, to learn where she’s from and why it matters.
“I’m from Ohio! Is that not obvious?” she exclaimed, at a decibel level that reflects how core the state is to her identity. Lorain, Ohio, to be exact, where her mother and her mother’s mother (and aunts, uncles and cousins) worked in the local Ford plant.
Those union jobs, and the upward mobility they provided to millions of Black people who migrated from the South in search of freedom and opportunity, taught Ms. Jones what it means to move from the margins to the middle class. She noticed the difference when her mother switched to making Econoline vans after years serving Happy Meals at McDonald’s — a business that her current employer, the Service Employees International Union, is in a long-running battle to unionize.
Now she is fighting to make more jobs as good as the union jobs that supported her family — or, even better, jobs with new safeguards that protect workers’ physical health.
“It is a town where one of the best jobs you can have is to work at Ford,” Ms. Jones, 39, said of Lorain. “And while I love that for a lot of the people I know, it’s not the only way a town of 70,000 should be able to have economic security.”