United for a Fair Economy

United for a Fair Economy (UFE) is a nonprofit organization founded in Boston in 1995 that raises public [Page 1413]awareness on the dangerous consequences of growing economic inequality in the United States.

UFE provides resources to support organizing efforts to build a grassroots social movement that demands a fairer economy, emphasizing how the excessive concentration of corporate and financial power is bad for the economy, undermines democracy, and harms communities. In a country where even those most hurt by the system are often unaware of the dynamics that oppress them, UFE emphasizes popular education, creating strategically targeted workshops that demystify key economic concepts and problems. Other programs train trainers to teach others to use UFE workshop materials to spread economic literacy; promote creative political action through providing sound bites or visual bites that illustrate key concepts and can be replicated by activists; and contribute to talk shows, newspapers, and other media to challenge public perceptions that—often with right-wing manipulation—accept economic policies that increase inequality.

Working with state and local partner organizations, UFE has used such programmatic tools to raise the visibility of issues such as the phenomenal growth of chief executive officers' salaries even as workers' wages fall, to support movements for economic fairness such as the Living Wage movement, to bring economic education to unions and religious denominations, and to link sectors such as labor and community-based organizations in the global justice movement.

UFE helps local, state, and national groups defend progressive taxation and influence tax and budget issues, helping to strengthen the capacity of state coalitions that have a strategic opportunity to effect tax reform and actively participate in building a permanent national movement infrastructure to address the assault on progressive taxation at all levels.

The UFE program Responsible Wealth organizes progressive wealthy people to contribute their unique voices against proposals that would benefit them as individuals but would hurt them as members of society, such as proposals to abolish the inheritance tax. The project was initiated by UFE cofounder Chuck Collins, an heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune who gave away his inheritance to promote social change and has received widespread media coverage.

In 2006, UFE launched a major educational and outreach effort to address the racial disparities of wealth. One such was The Color of Wealth, a book addressing the racial wealth divide aimed at a wide audience. Finally, the Racial Wealth Divide is a program that organizes workshops adapted to concerns of communities of color and has strengthened UFE's ties to media sources that reach ethnic minorities.