John Minchillo/AP Photo
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) speaks during a news conference outside the USPS Jamaica station, August 18, 2020, in the Queens borough of New York.
When the coronavirus halted television and film shoots across New York City, postproduction supervisor Amanda Hanna-McLeer had time to think. Hanna-McLeer, 27, worked on shows filmed in New York, like Broad City, The Americans, and High Maintenance. The recent Rhode Island School of Design graduate is an aspiring writer-director, who’s been fortunate to climb the ranks of the entertainment industry since leaving school. But she’s always had some concerns about her work environment.
“Some days I would clock a 12-hour day,” Hanna-McLeer said in an interview with the Prospect. “Other days I would work from the moment I got up, sending emails from bed, to the very same thing at night. And that’s the culture on these shows. That you have to put your entire life into it.” It was not unusual for Hanna-McLeer to sign on to contracts mandating 60-hour workweeks. She would also often be told to not log the real hours that she was working on her time cards. Postproduction supervisors, unlike other roles in TV and film, are not unionized.
So when the pandemic halted the grueling hours of television making, Hanna-McLeer had time to start organizing her co-workers. She’d reached out to different labor lawyers about how to improve the situation, and then stumbled upon Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Facebook and YouTube webinar on workplace safety and organizing, streamed live on September 16.
As a member of New York’s Democratic Socialists of America, Hanna-McLeer already knew about AOC, but doesn’t live in her district. “The thing is, with other representatives it’s all defensive work. I think AOC does offensive work,” she says. “It’s not just asking your boss for PPE. It’s … here’s how to have a more offensive presence in your workplace and speak up for yourself.”
This is a deliberate strategy on the part of the first-term congresswoman. After defeating a Wall Street–backed primary challenger, Team Ocasio-Cortez has shifted focus to the needs of her constituents, who have been among the most affected by the COVID-19 health crisis and its economic repercussions, as well as the ever-present issues with policing in New York City. In addition to the workplace-organizing workshop, the campaign has posted seminars on what to do if you’re being evicted, what to do if you’re confronted by ICE agents, and how to organize collective child care while schools are struggling to coordinate reopenings. The campaign has become an unusually direct set of actions aimed at helping the vulnerable and building power.
Ocasio-Cortez is often not the leading voice in the videos; sometimes she’s not in them at all. “We want to shift people away from an orientation of depending on a person of authority, which is often an elected official saying, ‘I’m going to come save you,’” says Nina Luo, the campaign political organizing director. “The congresswoman, with as powerful a voice as she has, she really cares about organizing led by the people that are directly impacted by issues, who are in the actual communities.”
This organizing strategy decentralizes the candidate from her own campaign. But in exchange, local organizers and community leaders hold the spotlight and speak to their areas of expertise. It’s the kind of organizing you’d expect from someone interested in building a movement, rather than a brand.
IN THE WORKPLACE-ORGANIZING video, Bianca Cunningham shared her own experiences organizing fellow workers at Verizon retail stores. The union drive was successful for seven stores in New York, but Cunningham was ultimately fired for her efforts. She later went on to become a trainer with Communications Workers of America, and was blunt about the risks of her organizing experiences.
At the webinar, Hanna-McLeer learned more about the community-building work necessary to form a union, and the strength in numbers when it comes to labor organizing. The entertainment industry features unique challenges. The harsh working conditions have been normalized; the associated mental-health strains are left largely unspoken; fierce competition for jobs makes people early in their careers wary of speaking out; and many TV and film productions hire on a contract basis for short-term arrangements, which can end before organizing gets started.
“It reinforced some of my own feelings and some of the methods I was using,” Hanna-McLeer says about the webinar. “It was really nice to hear about the community-building and how essential it is, because that’s what I’m doing.” She’s been reaching out to people on both coasts, in New York and Los Angeles, to build support, mostly using social media private groups and Slack to connect.
“Also hearing stories of other union attempts, the library workers, and Bianca being a Verizon worker and hearing her story, it is also really uplifting and encouraging,” she adds.
The informational videos have struck a chord with people across the country, not just in and around AOC’s district. Where some residents and voters are not hearing from their own representatives in Washington, AOC is filling in the information gap.
Campaign AOC’s organizing strategy decentralizes the candidate from her own campaign. But in exchange, local organizers and community leaders hold the spotlight and speak to their areas of expertise.
Daniel Barthel, a Colorado resident who watched the workplace-organizing video, told the Prospect that while he’s not really involved with politics at the congressional level, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez represents him best. “I have not had direct contact with AOC or any of her colleagues but I do appreciate everything she’s doing and makes me feel proud of being a millennial in the working middle class,” he said in an email. “She gives us a voice in the government body that needs to be heard.”
The videos also have related organizing components. A child care workshop, hosted in August and still viewable online, spawned a volunteer-operated “Homework Helper” program to assist parents with their education needs during the disrupted school year. Second-grade teacher Linda Parker of Lynden, Washington, found the event only because she follows AOC on Facebook. As a mother of two, she wanted to hear about solutions to securing child care during the pandemic.
“There’s a lot of contention with COVID and students not being in school, and sort of this back-and-forth between blaming teachers and the school system for kids not being in school during a pandemic,” Parker says. “We’re being put in a spot where we’re getting the blame and responsibility for what’s happening.”
What Parker liked most about AOC’s webinar was its focus on solutions. “She does inspire me with how she’s willing to work with people and come up with solutions and doesn’t play politics with the issues,” she says.
It’s been frustrating, Parker adds, that none of her representatives at any level of government have contacted her about her own child care issues. “I’ve started receiving phone calls from candidates who want me to vote for them,” she says. “And I think, where is the representation when it’s not election time? Where is the follow-through with the people you’re supposed to be representing?”
Ocasio-Cortez’s constituents in Queens and the Bronx get a more retail version of these events, specifically around assistance with food security and census applications. Campaign volunteers have been active locally, engaging with residents since well before the election.
Campaign AOC makes conscious efforts to include Spanish-language text or translations in both literature handouts and online presentations. Cristi Zuniga, a volunteer for the campaign and a NY-14 resident in Queens, says speaking Spanish also helps engage more people in the district. She says there are times when parents will signal for her to speak to their children, who can translate from English to Spanish for them, and when they find out the volunteer also speaks Spanish, it’s a relief and makes them more comfortable.
Jonathan Soto, the campaign’s political organizer, said that AOC focuses on leading through listening to constituents on where the stresses are in their lives. “If you work with the rank and file and you work with people who are most impacted, they’ll tell you what the issue is,” he says.
IT’S TO REP. OCASIO-CORTEZ’s advantage that she came to politics from an organizing background, outside the electoral arena. In her first day on the Hill, AOC participated in a sit-in with the Sunrise Movement at House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. With her constituent services during the coronavirus crisis, AOC continues to blur the line between organizer and elected official.
Members of Campaign AOC don’t think their candidate’s approach should be so unique. The online workshops are “totally replicable,” Luo says. But there’s little financial reward for high-priced campaign consultants in running workshops and tangibly helping constituents; they’d rather run ads and print mailers and take a cut of the media placement. Soto believes that campaigns should be run as a “public good” instead of “enrich[ing] pockets of the consultancy class.”
But in order to take this step, candidates would have to willingly decenter themselves from their own operations. Candidates are usually the stars of campaigns, relying on their own charisma, 30-second TV ads, and well-placed celebrity endorsements. Switching to an AOC-style campaign means leaning more on substance around issues with immediate relevancy to people’s lives.
Running this type of campaign requires deep investment in communities, to build authentic partnerships with organizers. “Many [organizers] may not even talk to an elected’s staff or just don’t even trust electeds in general, but we have a relationship,” Luo says. “I can’t stress enough when I say relationships are based on trust and organizing together, not just electoral organizing.” When that trust is earned between a representative and her community leaders, constituents and people across the country can reap the benefits.
Amanda Hanna-McLeer still has a lot of work to do before she unionizes her colleagues in the entertainment industry. But the information she got from Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s workplace safety workshop will play a small role in driving that effort forward.
“I just saw that there was an immense need for change. If that results in some kind of blacklisting on my end, I don’t mind because I feel like the reward of protecting my colleagues is so much more important,” Hanna-McLeer says. “The only way to be successful is if you stand up and make your voice heard.”
