World Social Forum: New and Old, US Groups Forge Broad Alliances

Two of the most notable were the Right to the City (RTTC) and the National Domestic Worker Alliance (NDWA), a grouping of 11 local and regional domestic worker organisations.

"There's been a tremendous amount of progress [since the USSF]. The alliance has expanded to include 10 cities and over 20 groups of domestic workers around the country," Ai-jen Poo, a participant in the founding meeting of the NDWA, told IPS.

"We have started working on an international campaign together with domestic worker organisations around the world to impact the first International Labor Organisation Convention on Domestic Work. That's going to be discussed at the ILO in Geneva in June of this year and next year as well. It would be the first ever," Poo said.

"We've also started working with the U.S. Department of Labour to look at potential administrative and regulatory reforms at the DOL that can include enforcement of existing laws for domestic workers at the federal level," Poo said.

She said that the New York chapter has been fighting for statewide legislation to establish labour rights for domestic workers there, while domestic worker groups in California are launching a statewide domestic worker bill of rights campaign.

"Now we actually have a national vehicle to build power which we never had before the Social Forum, and to raise the level of respect for this work and really bring attention to the conditions and the abuses but also the tremendous organising that's happening in the sector," Poo said.

"It's a new attempt to build power in a sector which has been very challenging to organise in the past, where workers are all isolated and it's mostly women of colour who are primary income-earners for their families," she added. "It's almost like a national union. We have partners and lawyers, but the membership is based on the women themselves."

The other group, RTTC, was organised as "a new alliance that unites our struggles for housing, health care, and public space to fight neoliberalism and build an alternative for our cities," according to its website.

RTTC held its first business meeting at the USSF later that year and ratified its organisational structure.

It brings together over 36 different organisations from seven cities across the U.S.: Boston, Massachusetts; Washington, DC; Los Angeles, California; Miami, Florida; New Orleans, Louisiana; New York, New York; Providence, Rhode Island; and San Francisco, California.