Introduction
Want to change the story about work, workers’ rights, and economic justice? Looking for research on how to frame an issue on a certain topic area? Here is a collection of research, guides and recommendations for framing, narrative and messaging related to work, the economy, and economic justice.
If we are to challenge the status quo of work and create more just labor systems, we need a paradigm shift in the way people think about work.
Note: The brief summaries of each report have been taken from the source documents with some minor edits. Click on the heading of each item to access the full resource. Some clicks will result in a download of a pdf while others will direct you to another website.
If you have additional resources to add please contact the Commons Librarians. There are also other narrative directories and libraries with messaging guides to explore.
Topic Areas
Changing Narratives About Work
Self-Made Individuals and Just Labor Systems: Public Thinking about Work in the United States
Frameworks Institute: Work/Shift Project, [USA] 2024, Report
Workers in the United States face enormous challenges within the economy as it is currently structured. If we are to achieve a fundamental shift in power in favor of workers, rather than corporations and the wealthy, then we need to examine how we collectively think and talk about work. If we are to continue to challenge the status quo of work and labor in this country and create more just labor systems, we need a paradigm shift in the way Americans think about work.
Six Trends in Public Thinking about Work in the United States
Frameworks Institute: Work/Shift Project, [USA] 2024, Report
Is the current system of work in the United States—which many experience as insecure, unequal, and disempowering—amenable to a fundamental power shift in favor of workers, away from corporations and the wealthy? That is the question at the heart of an ongoing FrameWorks investigation, part of our multi-year WorkShift program, designed to develop a strategy for reframing work and labor that builds public support for change.
Framing the Economy
Framing the economy: How to win the case for a better system
Public Interest Resource Centre PIRC, Et al. [UK], 2018, Report
The PIRC, the New Economics Foundation, NEON and the FrameWorks Institute have launched two story strategies that progressives can use to shift thinking on the economy. They’re built on values and metaphors that encourage the hope that change is possible and increase people’s support for progressive policies.
We are the Economy: Making the case for investment in public services: A Messaging Guide
NEON, 2024, Guide
This messaging guide supports the 2024 We Are the Economy coalition campaign, which aims to build a public narrative around public services being the essential foundation of a thriving economy.
Framing the Role of Government and the Economy
Australia reMADE [Aus], 2020, Presentation
Want to know how to frame communication about the government and the economy in a way that will be of benefit? Here is useful research that was presented at the conference Virtual Progress 2020 (Australian Progress) by Lily Spencer from Australian reMADE.
How to talk about economics: A guide to changing the story
Australian Progress [Aus], 2018, Report
Australian Progress analysed the language people in Australia use to speak about economics (and tax, welfare, aid, privatisation, work and more). These new messaging resources will be useful for communicators, campaigners and advocates for more progressive economic policy.
Framing the economy: The austerity story
NEF, [UK], 2013, Report
The austerity story can be defeated, if its opponents identify and activate their own powerful frames. The frames must be developed from values and resonate with public opinion. They must be tested and refined based on what works. We outline some frames we believe could be used to build a new narrative and a story that brings them together.
Don’t buy it: The trouble with talking nonsense about the economy
Anat Shenker-Osorio, [US], 2012, Book
Anat Shenker-Osorio diagnoses economic discourse as stricken with faulty messages, deceptive personification, and a barely coherent concept of what the economy actually is. Cutting through conservative myth-making, messaging muddles, and destructive misinformation, this book outlines a new way to win the most important arguments of our day. The left doesn’t have to self-destruct every time matters economic come to the fore—there are metaphors and frames that can win, and Shenker-Osorio shows what they are and how to use them. Read a book review.
Race & Class
Amplifying Organizing: Using Race-forward Narratives in Organizing Programs
We Make The Future [US], Guide
Building a multiracial democracy requires effective communication, in person, and online. Every organizer, campaigner, and advocate is faced with the same fundamental challenge: we need to spread the word about our cause in order to meet our goal. By spreading a narrative across layered modes of communication – including real time organizing – we can win power on our issues, in our statehouses, and at the ballot box. This guide is specifically designed for Organizing Directors, Canvassing Leads, and others in the field, so you can use Race Class Narrative (RCN) and other empirically-based messaging research on the doors, in the streets, and at the mic.
Guide To Messaging Our Freedoms
We Make The Future, ASO Communications, and partner organizations [US], 2025, Guide
This guide provides examples for how to message towards the future that we deserve. These messages are rooted in the freedom frame, the Race Class Narrative, and other empirically-based messaging practices. What we share here are proven approaches to motivate, inspire our audiences to take action, and push people toward our desired solutions.
Every Worker in Australia: A Race Class Narrative
ACTU, Victorian Trades Hall Council, [AUS], 2022, Report and Presentation Slides
This guide offers a blueprint for building and sustaining the collective power needed for workplace and electoral wins. However, just like an architectural blueprint, lines on a page on their own do nothing. It is up to organizers, activists and elected leaders to take the guidance herein and apply it when and however you communicate. Presentation Slides.
Messaging Research on Race and Jobs
McKell Institute, Unions WA, Australian Fabians, [AUS], 2022, Webinar
A presentation of research commissioned by the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) and conducted by the Australian Council of Trade Union Insights Unit on messaging on race and jobs. Presentations are by Edwina Byrne of the VTHC and Simone Rosser from the ACTU. This presentation was recorded via Zoom on 20th April 2022. This event was co-hosted by UnionsWA, the McKell Institute, the UWA Centre for Public Policy and Australian Fabians.
The UK Race Class Narrative Report: Building solidarity across race and class to win progressive change and inoculate against the powerful few that seek to divide us
CLASS in collaboration with ASO Communications, [UK], 2022, Report
A report from the think tank CLASS sets out how and why the left is failing with its messaging and what needs to be done to transform its approach into a positive, inclusive narrative.
Race Class Narrative Guides, Example Language and Messaging Checklist
We Make The Future [US], 2020, Guides
In this resource, you’ll find sample language articulating how to follow these basic tenets of Race Class Narrative messaging:
- Lead with a shared value that names race and class.
- Name racial scapegoating as a weapon that economically harms all of us.
- Emphasize unity and collective action to solve the problem(s).
- Connect joining together to achieve desired outcomes. Give a call to action urging people to be an active participant in creating change.
Use this checklist to ensure that your campaign messages and communications materials – whatever they might be for – follow these basic tenets of Race Class Narrative messaging.
Greater than Fear Campaign in Minnesota
Brave New Words Podcast, [US], 2019, Podcast
This podcast hosted by Anat Shenker-Osorio outlines how, through rounds of research and strategic implementation of findings, a coalition of grassroots and labor groups found a narrative that speaks to both race and class concerns. From a 43,000 person celebration of the Muslim holiday Eid-al-Adha, to carefully considered door-knocking operations, to interactive social media memes, the Greater Than Fear campaign showed that we can simultaneously drive turnout from our base and persuade the middle.
Race-Class: A winning electoral narrative
DEMOS, [US], 2019, Report
This research demonstrates how to energize and persuade a truly multi-racial cohort to vote for progressive candidates and policies. The key for cross-racial solidarity, voter engagement, and policy victories is mobilizing around the connections between racial divisions and economic hardship. Here, for the first time, is empirical data that support tackling racism as a divide-and-conquer tactic that creates distrust, undermines belief in government, and causes economic pain for everyone, of every color.
Communicating Race Class Video with Anat Shenker-Osorio
[US], 2018, Video
Anat Shenker-Osorio shows how to apply research findings around communicating about race and class to the increasing white nationalism, xenophobia and race-based attacks that punctuate politics around the globe.
Guide: Responding To Harmful Content or Disinformation
We Make the Future [US], 2023, Guide
We Make the Future and the Black Race Class Narrative Project cohort developed content to combat disinformation — specifically online racialized disinformation targeting Black communities. Based on insights and strategies from Kelsey Suter (Drive Agency), this guide can be used by organizers responding to harmful content or disinformation targeting their audience. It aims to help organizers know when to respond to disinformation, how to respond, and how to better integrate long-term trust-building into their work.
Transgender Youth and the Freedom to Be Ourselves – Building Our Choir with a Race Class Gender Narrative: Messaging Guide
ASO Communications, Transgender Law Center, Lake Research Partners, 2022, Guide
New research by ASO Communications, Transgender Law Center, and Lake Research Partners finds that we can cultivate resistance to these attacks, build cross-racial solidarity, and advance a shared vision for the future by weaving together our shared values, experiences, and demands across races and genders. This new approach builds on the Race Class Narrative to tell a convincing story of how our opposition uses strategic racism and transphobia to harm us all; and how, by coming together, we can ensure we all have the freedom to be ourselves and support one another. Using a Race Class Gender Narrative, we can mobilize our progressive base (particularly Black, AAPI, and Gen Z audiences), marginalize our opposition, and move persuadables across race.
Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion DEI
Liberty and Justice for All: Confronting MAGA’s Anti-DEI Efforts to Resegregate Our Country
ASO Communications, US, 2025, Guide
United, we will defeat the MAGA segregationists, protect our freedoms, our families, and our futures, and push our country toward the unrealized dream of liberty and justice for all – no exceptions.
Care Work
Public Thinking About Care Work: Encouraging Trends, Critical Challenges
Frameworks Institute, [UK], 2023, Report
Care work is at the core of how we function as a society and how we relate to one another—yet it is often misunderstood. Recent findings from our Culture Change Project show that care work appears to be salient in the minds of the American public, but the skills and infrastructure involved in care work tend to be overlooked or deemphasized because of a prevailing conception of “caring” as a character trait. What kind of effects might this conception of care have on our public discourse? Our care infrastructure? Public policy? If care is all about individual carers, is there room to improve systems? Also watch Reshaping the Narrative About Care Work – Instagram Live.
Is It Care, Or Is It Work?: Cultural Mindsets of Care Work in the United States
Frameworks Institute [USA], 2024, Report
The future of care work is at a crossroads where new frames and narratives have huge potential to shift public thinking. During the COVID-19 pandemic, care was in the spotlight, and with that came an increasing recognition of its importance. This has been a relatively enduring effect, as we still find that care work remains salient in public thinking. Alongside this shift in attention, we have recently seen promising political shifts to prioritize care workers—shifts that can, hopefully, lay the groundwork for deeper structural changes.
This report shares our findings from in-depth research on the public’s mindsets, including the deeply held assumptions and understandings that shape their thinking about care and care work. These deep patterns of thinking offer opportunities and challenges for progressive communicators who advocate for systemic change.
Climate Justice & Work
Building Narratives for a Caring Green Economy: A Feminist Green New Deal Coalition Report
Feminist Green New Deal Coalition and Amanda Novello, [US], 2021, Report
The Feminist Green New Deal Coalition and Data for Progress released new polling finding that a strong majority of respondents believe care should be central to climate, workforce, and infrastructure policies, and that respondents believe care work are green jobs. In the midst of intersecting economic crises, climate crises, and the ongoing infrastructure fights, these findings reiterate that people support bold economic investments that center care for people and the planet. Key findings from the polling include:
- “Green” jobs should refer to all jobs related to the well-being of people and the planet, and that includes care. 69% of all respondents agree that green jobs are any job related to the well-being of people and the planet.
- Polling shows that, although there is initially a bias against care jobs being perceived as “green jobs”, that bias erodes when exposed to specific narratives demonstrating that care is climate work.
- However, respondents find messages around care work being critical, green work and care infrastructure being critical to an equitable green economy persuasive and popular.
Climate Justice Narrative
Communications Hub, [US], 2016, Toolkit
Communities of color and communities with low-income levels and wealth have been unrepresented in the mainstream environmental narrative. Considering climate change is an issue of economic and racial injustice, it is critical that the solutions and vision come from the workers and communities most affected. This toolkit puts forward a values based unified narrative to fill that gap. It includes talking points and strategies based on research and interviews with leaders and members from the community.
Manufacturing
Producing the Future: Cultural Mindsets of Manufacturing in the United States
Frameworks Institute [USA] 2024, Report
Through comprehensive research, this study identifies the deeply ingrained beliefs that shape how Americans view manufacturing. It explores the opportunities and obstacles these mindsets present for advocates aiming to communicate and implement systemic change. By examining current public attitudes and existing communication strategies, the report provides a roadmap for shifting public opinion toward a more just and sustainable future for manufacturing in the United States.
Health, Safety & Wellbeing
Healthy Workplaces Message Guide
Wellbeing SA, NSW Health, and Workplace Health and Safety Queensland, [AUS], 2022 Guide
This guide contains evidence-based recommendations for messages that motivate workplace leaders to create healthy workplaces. It is based on input from a wide range of workplaces, government agencies and service providers. Importantly, we found that most leaders’ motivation for workplace health and wellbeing stems from their care for others more so than workplace performance or financial benefit. The guide therefore recommends centering messages on care values.
How to use communications tactics to support your safety program
Action OHS Consulting [AUS] 2019, Guide
Tips for communicating about workplace safety. This guide is targeted at employers but may have useful insights for workers promoting Occupational Health & Safety.
Wellbeing Economy: A Messaging Guide
NEON and Positive Money, 2021, Guide
Developed with Positive Money, this aim of this guide is to support spokespeople communicating the need to prioritise our health and wellbeing instead of economic growth.
Poverty & Cost of Living
Talking About Poverty: Narratives, Counter-Narratives, and Telling Effective Stories
Frameworks [US], 2021, Report
This report synthesizes the complex body of research around existing poverty narratives and counter-narratives, with practical advice about how to use narratives to create better stories—and, ultimately, to create social change.
Talking about Poverty and Welfare Reform: A Guide to Strategies that Work in Aotearoa New Zealand
The Workshop [NZ], 2019, Guide
The Workshop undertook research to identify messages that: improve the New Zealand public’s understanding of the causes of poverty; improve their understanding of the role of benefits in overcoming poverty; and increase their willingness to act to do something about poverty. Rigorous methodology was used to test the effect of these messages. The findings identify the most effective messages. Recommendations cover values, metaphors, positive vision, and communicating a causal chain. A short user-friendly guide is also available: Talking about Poverty and Welfare Reform in Aotearoa: A Short Guide.
Framing Toolkit: Talking About Poverty
Joseph Rowntree Foundation & FrameWorks Institute, [UK], 2019, Toolkit
Compassion and justice are values that underpin our society – we believe in helping each other out when we’re having a tough time. We need to make sure those values underpin the way we talk about poverty too. This toolkit includes: how to build lasting support to solve UK poverty; a 10 step guide for communicating more effectively about poverty; 5 doodles that help make sense of UK poverty; and how campaigners can tell a different story. It draws on recommendations from the FrameWorks Institute’s research into public attitudes to poverty in the UK, involving 20,000 people.
Cost of Living
NEON [UK] 2023
A guide about how to communicate about the rising cost of living. No matter what we do for a living, where we live or what is in our wallet, we all want to know we have enough to get by – and enough to build a life on. It is time to redesign our system so that workers, families and local businesses feel the benefits of their hard work, rather than being ground-down by big bills and low incomes.
Taxation
Communicating Tax: A Brief Guide
NEON, PIRC, Date Unknown, Guide
This is a practical guide for how to talk about a fair tax system that sees those with the most pay more.
How to Talk about Wealth Tax: Messaging Guide
NEON, Date Unknown, Guide
A messaging guide on how to advocate for a wealth tax.
Collective Action
How to talk about strikes
NEON [UK] 2022
This is a guide with messaging tips to support spokespeople responding to news stories around strikes. Centre people in your messaging – ‘people going on strike’ as opposed to ‘unions going on strike’. Messages that put people front and centre are more effective at connecting with audiences. You want to remind people that unions are made up of people like them who are simply trying to get better wages and working conditions. People do things, and talking about unions alone disengages people from what is really happening.
How to talk about demonstrations
This is a guide with messaging tips to support spokespeople responding to news stories around demonstrations. Demonstrations are part of a democratic society. By finding a collective voice we can send a message to our elected representative that we are unhappy with a decision made by this government. It is a way for everyday people – like you and me – to make our voices heard outside of the ballot box.
Explore Further
- Workers Rights Hub
- Framing Issues for Social Justice Impact: Directory of Messaging Guides
- How to Change the Narrative / Story: Guides, Worksheets and Templates
- Narrative, Storytelling and Messaging Directories and Libraries
- Narrative and Storytelling: Training and Planning Tools
- Narrative Change: Start Here
- Public Interest Research Centre
- ASO Communications – Messaging Guides
- New Economy Organisers Neon – Messaging and Narrative Resources
