Bargaining for the Common Good
Bargaining for the Common Good is the organizing arm of the Action Center on Race and the Economy. The BCG network includes unions, community groups, racial justice organizations and student organizations that alongside each other as equal partners in their regions to win bigger and broader demands at the bargaining table and in the streets.
Across the country, labor and community groups are finding alignment in their shared interest to demand that corporations and the wealthy pay their fair share, so that our communities have what they need to prosper. Within the BCG network, community organizations and unions work together to identify key compression dates across multiple years—like local elections, union contract expirations, or state budget fights—and leverage their collective power to make gains in each moment. The campaigns that emerge from this strategy move beyond settling a union contract or winning a local election to demanding long-term, structural investments in our communities. Click here to see some examples of the kinds of demands that emerge from community organizations and unions working together.
BCG’s History
Bargaining for the Common Good was founded in 2014 around the principle that labor unions and community organizations can leverage their collective power to win systemic change by building their campaigns together.
For years, ACRE co-convened BCG with the Kalmanovitz Institute for Labor and the Working Poor at Georgetown University and the Center for Innovation in Worker Organization at Rutgers University. Each organization dedicated staff to building and supporting BCG coalitions in regions across the country, like California, Chicago, Connecticut, Minnesota, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Portland, and Tennessee. In 2025, ACRE and BCG merged under one banner and ACRE became the organizational home for BCG.