“We get on the bus early in the morning, and put on our purple gear so everyone knows that we are 1199,” says Brookdale Hospital patient service associate Dianne Dixon. “We get in groups, and we go to neighborhoods and knock on doors and then speak to voters, reminding them of the importance of getting out there to make a difference.”
Dixon is a member of 1199SEIU’s Weekend Warriors –– union members who voluntarily canvass various neighborhoods, and sometimes other states, to help boost voter education and registration for the upcoming elections.
Local unions like 1199 recruit volunteers and bus them to battleground states in ongoing efforts to encourage voter participation. Union members say they are compelled to get information to voters about this year’s candidates and what the results of this presidential election could mean to union families.
Dixon addresses the person opening the door she just knocked on with “Hi! How are you today? We’re here reminding our community that it is important to vote and we’re speaking about Kamala Harris. Have you heard of her?”
She’ll get a few people who say they’ve never heard of current Vice President and presidential candidate Harris, so she and her fellow Weekend Warriors will try to talk about Harris and what she’s done for the community. “We usually get a good response — a few negative ones, but usually good.”
Most labor activists are out canvassing in support of the Democratic Party ticket. Once President Joe Biden ceded his presidential ambitions to a Harris candidacy, labor movement activists were quick to voice support for the new candidate and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The United Auto Workers (UAW), AFL-CIO, United Federation of Teachers (UFT), and various other unions immediately announced they would back the ticket.
The only major union that does not support Harris is the Teamsters. According to an internal electronic poll, 60% of the Teamsters membership was eager to endorse Donald Trump. The International Brotherhood of Teamsters’ executive board, which has backed every Democratic presidential nominee since Bill Clinton, has refused to issue a presidential endorsement to its membership for the first time since 1996. Critics have blasted the executive board for forgoing an endorsement and not guiding its members with crucial information about this year’s election.
At the regional level, some sub-councils have broken rank, announcing that they are supporting Vice President Harris, including the Teamsters National Black Caucus’s councils in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada, and here in New York City.
“Local 237 members are overwhelmingly Kamala Harris supporters,” said Gregory Floyd, president of the 25,000-member Local 237 Teamsters. “We just don’t agree with Teamsters throughout the nation who’ve decided to remain neutral. We stand for a fairer America. We stand with Vice President Kamala Harris for president.”
The economy, healthcare, Social Security
Candis Tall, vice president and political director of SEIU 32BJ, told the AmNews that her unit has been talking to its members about this upcoming election for some time now.
“We actually started early in the summer ,going out and talking to our members at their work sites about what issues were important to them in this election,” she said. “We surveyed over 12,000 of our members across all of our states about what they care about, and of course, it’s not a surprise to know that it’s the economy, it’s healthcare, it’s Social Security, it’s immigration, it’s climate safety. These are the issues that our members care about, which is very similar to the issues the rest of Americans and New Yorkers care about.”
Tall said that leaders use those insights to reiterate the importance of voter registration and relaying where candidates stand on those issues.
Unions in New York are also making it a point not to educate voters solely about the presidential ticket. They are also emphasizing that congressional races and the fact that the ability to win back the House of Representatives in D.C. are going to fall on New York and California.
“We’re running a multi-pronged approach,” said Deborah Wright, political director for RWDSU-UFCW. “We are clearly focused on the top of the ticket — the presidential race — but we are also really focused on the congressional seats right here in New York. And we’re also focused on some of the lower ballot races in the State Senate and the Assembly, so we’re trying to really make a difference in several different areas.”
Union canvassing has meant talking to union members and the larger public about the importance of electing pro-labor candidates. The push for the union vote during this year’s national elections has been a welcome surprise for labor activists. Neither Republicans nor Democrats had prioritized prominent labor union concerns over the last few decades, but with one in every five voters –– some 20% in swing states –– being a union worker, both presidential and local candidates have been courting union support this year.
Union presidents were prominently featured at this year’s Democratic National Convention (DNC). AFSCME’s Lee Saunders, Service Employees International Union (SEIU) President April Verrett, Laborer’s International Union of North America (LIUNA) President Brent Booker, Ken Cooper of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Claude Cummings Jr. of the Communication Workers of America (CWA), and Liz Shuler of the AFL-CIO joined together during the DNC to say they would support the Harris-Walz ticket because even before Biden walked the picket line with striking United Auto Workers (UAW) in 2023, Harris had marched alongside McDonald’s employees when they picketed for a $15 minimum wage in 2019.
As vice president, Harris supported crucial labor-friendly legislation like the American Rescue Plan of 2021; when she was a senator, she voted for the Protecting the Right to Organize (PRO) Act. Harris even led the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, which was designed to make it easier for workers to form unions.
Labor activists expect the pro-labor Biden-Harris policies to extend to a Harris-Walz administration: fair pay for a hard day’s work, lowering unemployment rates, supporting project labor and collective bargaining agreements along with higher standards of living, health care, retirement security, and the free and fair ability to join a union.
The current climate for labor unions is promising. Activists want this political atmosphere to grow and not face the headwinds of another anti-union administration.
The link between labor and civil rights
Biden used his economic agenda, Bidenomics, to empower workers and show himself as what he termed “the most pro-union president in American history.” The Biden-Harris administration was the first in years to tackle the 40-year U.S. decline in unionization by embracing the labor movement and making workers’ interests once again a part of the daily discourse.
The previous Trump administration dismissed labor’s concerns by appointing an anti-union lawyer, Eugene Scalia (son of former right-wing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia), to head and dismantle the Department of Labor. Under President Barack Obama, labor unions were dismayed to watch the gig economy grow with few workers’ rights regulations.
In the past, pro-labor activism worked alongside civil rights activism to counter corporate power and push for the rights of the U.S. working class. As early as 1929, the AmNews was writing about the initial joining of A. Phillip Randolph’s historic Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (BSCP) with the American Federation of Labor. Together, the two organizations had been exposing how African American railroad car porters and maids were being intimidated by the Pullman Company.
Once the BSCP was granted a federal charter to join the AFL, union members felt more empowered. Randolph told a meeting of Harlem union members that the morale of BSCP members across the country increased 100% with the new charter: “At the next convention of the American Federation of Labor, a Negro will take the floor for the first time,” he said. “The Brotherhood will reorganize, establish locals, and fight for the Negro in every industry in an effort to break down union prejudice.
“All railroad employees are now unionized for the first time in railroad history. The Brotherhood is now affiliated with them all.”
By the 1960s, union power was strong enough to garner promises from presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. He promised concessions to both labor unions and Civil Rights Movement organizers during his presidency. JFK’s successor, Lyndon Baines Johnson, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 into law during his first year in office. The Act’s seventh amendment made it illegal for employers for the first time to not hire someone because of their race, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin.
Elections affect jobs and lives
Having a job is one thing, but reinforcing awareness of why union workers have and can keep a job –– particularly in guaranteed health and safety benefits, and which contracts dictate how salaries are paid — is all part of the worker education efforts labor activists put together.
In this political season, labor unions want their members to understand how political elections will affect their jobs.
According to RWDSU-UFCW’s Wright, “The international office, based in New York City, is working directly with the local presidents, creating programs for them to not only just make sure that their members are registered to vote. We have opportunities there for members to check their registration status, even if they believe they are registered to vote — sometimes they move and sometimes they forget to actually change their registration status, so we’re trying to make sure that we pick up any of those types of issues. But then, also for members who haven’t registered to vote yet, we make sure that they have all the information and help they need to be able to do that so they actually can vote.”
Door-knocking, phone-banking by calling every listed union member and every registered voter, reminding folks about voting deadlines, making Facebook and Instagram posts, sending text messages and emails –– everything is being used to get the word out about the candidates labor unions have endorsed. Activists say they will be working up until Election Day to keep voters informed about the election.
No matter who wins, SEIU 32BJ’s Tall added, labor unions will move on after the election to the next phase of their work. “Listen, we are working people,” Tall said. “We are Black and Brown and immigrant. Our members speak many different languages. We know [that] no matter who wins this election, our fight is not over. It’s never over, right? So the question is, do you want to fight in an administration that is more prone to have the same belief system as you and want to do the right thing or do you want to fight against someone who is oppositional to all of the major issues that you hold dear?
“We are going to have to fight regardless. If Trump wins, we’re in a full-blown fight and we have to fight to protect our standards, our way of living. And we’re not a stranger to that; we’ve been fighting for equity and justice and fairness on the job and beyond since we’ve come together as a labor union. But if we have a Harris administration, we know there are a lot of places where there’s common ground. Those will come together and in places where there’s not common ground, we’ll fight again. Because that’s what we do, you know — we’re a labor union. And we believe in fighting for the rights of our folk and we’ll continue to do that.”