Ringo H.W. Chiu/AP Photo
Joe Biden at the SEIU Unions For All Summit, October 4, 2019
Five leading presidential candidates took questions on Friday from home caregivers, secretaries, bus drivers, and social workers in an SEIU Unions for All Summit in Los Angeles. Later, they took questions from political horse-race journalists.
Everyone involved should switch jobs.
Many unions this cycle have turned over their candidate forum events to their members, who draw on their own experiences to question politicians. I hadn’t seen it up close until the SEIU gathering. The diversity of professions that make up SEIU led favorably to a real discussion about the litany of challenges in American life, from employer power to healthcare to transportation and housing.
Meanwhile, in the press room, Joe Biden endured five minutes of questions about impeachment, none of which yielded any more information than the first answer.
The convention hall was simply a more interesting place to be. You could hear front-office worker Nila Payton from the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center detail the long fight to win $15 an hour, and the continuing fight for a union. You could feel for Theresa Rutherford, a healthcare worker who lives in Sacramento and works in San Francisco, a run of about 200 miles every day. You could shed a tear for Rhonda Miller, a public employee in Palm Beach County, recounting how she had racist epithets shouted at her when she was a child.
Tim Maddox, a passenger service worker at LAX Airport, told Kamala Harris about how his home in Inglewood is wedged between two freeways and under the airport’s flight path, generating noxious fumes sickening him and his family. Lisa McShane, an adjunct professor at Anne Arundel Community College in Maryland, is trying to make it on just $15,000 a year as a single mother. Tseganesh Endegeshet, an Ethiopian immigrant working two jobs in Denver, showed more savvy than most journalists on hand by pointing out to Joe Biden that when it comes to how more Americans can join a union, “We haven’t seen your plan yet.”
This is what Americans want to discuss with their would-be political leaders, something evident not only at pre-planned forums but town halls. The middle class has seen stagnant wages amid overwhelming corporate profits, rising costs for basic necessities amid fights with their employers for basic respect, soaring temperatures and environmental degradation and big business impunity for far too long. They want someone in the White House willing to be their voice for once, willing to make a tangible difference in their lives. It’s an obvious point, but one you internalize whenever you stop to listen.
The survival of democracy under a corrupt president matters as well, of course. SEIU members brought some of that up as well, like Debra Dawson, a warehouse worker in Georgia who organized for Stacy Abrams’s campaign and witnessed what she considers election theft. But these matters exist on a continuum with everything else workers see—rigged rules, structural racism, an economy that doesn’t work for working people. A candidate that can weave this all together into a presentable narrative would have a deep well of support.
A few moments in the forum stood out. Joe Biden took a question from Vivian Deniston, a home health care worker from Eureka, California. Amazingly, this was the first time this entire primary I’ve heard about long-term care. It’s a looming disaster, as millions are poised to outlive their savings and find themselves unable to afford decent treatment. The Affordable Care Act included the CLASS Act, which would have created a public option for long-term care, but ultimately the Obama administration decided it was unaffordable, and the law was repealed.
Biden gave a very effective and completely besides-the-point answer. He choked up talking about his family medical woes: his first wife dying in a car accident right after his initial Senate election, his son Beau succumbing to cancer a few years back. He said how he couldn’t imagine someone taking away hospice care from his son. “I make all of you a commitment, I will protect your right to health care as if it was my own family,” Biden said. It was sincere, it was powerful, and it was lacking any substance about the long-term care crisis.
I wanted to ask Biden in the press area what his actual long-term care plan would be, after the administration he was part of canceled a public long-term care option. But reporters with louder voices wanted to talk about Ukraine and Hunter Biden and Trump. “He’s unhinged,” Biden said. “I worry about what he’ll do the next year of the presidency.”
Back on stage, Kamala Harris made a pitch for sectoral bargaining, organizing entire classes of workers rather than workplace by workplace. Cory Booker talked about reversing bad rulings at the National Labor Relations Board and even put in a word against Prop 13, California’s property tax law that has robbed education funding and will face a ballot challenge in the commercial side next year. (SEIU is part of the coalition supporting the changes.) Booker had the crowd roaring when discussing criminal justice inequities.
Elizabeth Warren, mirroring the SEIU questioners, talked about her brush with labor discrimination: She was let go as a special needs teacher after one year because she was visibly pregnant. “If I had a union, that wouldn’t have happened,” Warren said. She pitched using the government’s power as a federal contractor to force higher standards on companies (part of the Day One agenda). She fielded a question on antitrust policy—at a labor forum!—and endorsed breaking up large corporations. She received a standing ovation when saying she would shut down for-profit immigration detention centers.
But it was back at the press room where Warren revealed some of the most pro-worker sentiment of the entire day. She was asked about national organizing director Rich McDaniel, who hours before the forum was fired for inappropriate behavior. She praised the courage of the individuals who came forward with the complaint, and then she added: “When I first set up this campaign, we put in place a procedure to deal with problems, and in this case we followed that procedure, we resolved the issue in a very short period of time … I do want to use this as an opportunity to say that employers all across this country need to have processes in place so that people who have complaints, who have concerns, can bring them forward without fear that they would be discriminated against or penalized.”
Campaigns are essentially startup companies, stuffed with millions of dollars of seed money. Some of them now have begun to bargain with their unionized staffs. How the campaigns act as employers can tell you a lot about how they value labor policy. They have to listen to union workers at candidate events if they want coveted labor endorsements. Listening to their own workers, and making what can be uncomfortable decisions, shows what they mean by a fair workplace.
