How Labor Beat City Hall

Gwen Mills was on her way to another precinct when she noticed volunteers lingering in front of Frank Douglass’ home. Polls would close in fewer than four hours, and there was a party machine to defeat.

Mills (pictured in top photo), a 37-year-old union organizer who has quietly developed a reputation as a top campaign strategist, was racing around New Haven keeping tabs on 15 Democratic Party primary elections at once Tuesday. The union she works for — UNITE HERE, whose locals represent Yale’s blue-collar and pink-collar workers, its graduate students and two other unions — had recruited or backed candidates for alderman in all those races in a bid to take on candidates backed by City Hall, and try to shake up New Haven’s strong-mayor one-party government in the process.

The effort wasn’t expected to produce a lot of victories. And now in Dwight’s Ward Two, she didn’t like what she saw.

The volunteers, a mix of union workers, community activists and Yale students, were enjoying a block party atmosphere at the corner of Elm and Orchard. They were supposed to be helping Douglass win the primary for ward aldermen. Instead they gobbled freshly-prepared fried dough (savory with tomato sauce and sweet with sugar and cinnamon) and grooved to a blast of Jill Scott on 94.3 WYBC.

Mills had just been inside Douglass’ second-floor apartment, which served as the campaign’s headquarters, going over a wall-full of lists of people the campaign had targeted to get out to vote. Douglass, a member of Yale’s blue-collar UNITE HERE Local 35, was one of the few union candidates on the 15-member pro-labor slate who had run for office before, four years ago in the same Dwight neighborhood.

“We’re ahead but we need to be more ahead than we are,” his campaign coordinator, Anna Robinson-Sweet, had explained to Mills and other workers crammed into the upstairs apartment. ​“We can win or lose in the next few hours, so we’ve got to get out there and drag people to the polls.”

Scanning the scene in front of Douglass’ house on her way out, Mill knew that this was crunch time, 4:30. People were beginning to leave work. They needed to be shepherded to the polls. At least those the campaign had meticulously identified as likely Douglass voters.

So Mills dashed back up the stairs and gently suggested to Robinson-Sweet that she get all her volunteers into the field.

Robinson-Sweet immediately headed outside and scooted the loitering volunteers to one of the 17 ​“turfs” into which the campaign had carved the ward.

Douglass ended up wining decisively, beating the incumbent and City Hall-backed Doug Bethea 358 to 172.

It was one victory among many Tuesday night that even Mills, political field director in Connecticut for the North American union UNITE HERE, described as ​“astonishing.” Her team took on entrenched power — and walked away winning a stunning 14 of 15 races, unseating incumbents in the process. Some races weren’t even close. With other pro-union candidates unopposed in the primaries, organized labor suddenly found itself poised to take over majority control of New Haven’s legislative body.

And Mills, who helped Dannel Malloy become governor last year and Barack Obama take Virginia two years earlier, had a lot to do with that. She might not have the title ​“party chair.” Her allies might not be called a ​“town committee.” But they assembled a strong team of new faces to run for office. They flooded the streets with workers who identified likely voters and brought them to the polls. They spent enough money to take on a machine that had over $425,000 at its disposal.

And they emerged Tuesday night as an unquestioned force to reckon with in city politics and government, a new machine of their own.

“I don’t think anybody expected it would be this overwhelming,” Mills said late Tuesday night above the din of a raucous victory party at Leon’s restaurant at Long Wharf. She dressed primly in a black skirt and geometric top; only a slight rasp to her voice and the hint of a tattoo on her upper arm suggested a more subversive nature. She admitted that in her best-case scenario, she didn’t expect to win more than half the races and anticipated that many would be tight.

Mills doesn’t like to put herself in the spotlight, partly because of an unassuming personality, partly because she’s not a union spokeswoman or president, partly because union organizers are supposed to put other people out front. But at Tuesday night’s party, Mills was treated as the conquering heroine. One supporter, giving her one of hundreds of embraces, proclaimed her ​“the mastermind.”

Although a few of the union-backed candidates may have to win general elections in November against independent challengers, Tuesday’s primary victory marks a milestone in union history. Union members have certainly won local elections before. But at least in recent memory, no union has backed such a large slate of candidates, almost all of whom won, and taken effective control of a branch of government.

Before Tuesday’s victory, Mills said she hoped their efforts in New Haven would serve as a model for other cities. After the victory, Mills noted wryly of the leaders of her national union: ​“I’m sure they’re watching.”

Work, Not Talk

Mills called several factors crucial to the union’s victory.

First, the unions assembled a strong slate of candidates who worked hard — something that New Haven’s long-time state Rep. Pat Dillon noted as she left the victory party Tuesday night.

There were the tangible factors; the union candidates put in the hours necessary canvassing their neighborhoods, talking to voters. ​“You can’t win aldermanic elections if you don’t do the groundwork as a candidate,” Mills said. ​“People expect to meet the people they are being asked to vote for for aldermen.”

There were also the intangibles. Many of the union candidates seemed to have a good time on the campaign trail; some of the pro-City Hall incumbents did not.

In Fair Haven’s Ward 14, incumbent Stephanie Bauer seemed grumpy even as a parade of City Hall officials, including Living City Initiative’s Rafael Ramos and the housing authority Executive Director Karen DuBois-Walton streamed into her headquarters set up next to the Fair Haven polling place at the Atwater Senior Center.

In contrast, her opponent, 22-year-old Gabriel Santiago, who was endorsed by union officials at the last minute and had the individual support of Yale Local 34 President Laurie Kennington all along, was obviously having fun. Surrounded by his mother, aunt and little brother, Santiago laughed and chatted throughout the long day.

Early in the afternoon, Board of Aldermen President Carl Goldfield, who lost in Beaver Hills’ Ward 29 in one of the day’s biggest upsets, was accompanied at the Beecher School polling place only by Democratic Town Committee Chair Susie Voight. By evening he was a little less lonely with five or six community supporters there. Even then he couldn’t match the crowd surrounding his opponent, Brian Wingate.

“We’ve never had so many people at the polls,” said Goldfield, who has been through 10 elections. ​“They’ve got union folks. He’s got a lot of relatives here too.”

Wingate said he had eight relatives with him, including two of his six brothers who had come from Charlottesville, Virginia, to help. Wingate’s supporters were so lively that at one point the candidate instructed his brother-in-law to tell a particularly enthusiastic woman to quiet down.

The hard-working candidates were backed by an equally hard-working organization. On Election Day, Dwight’s Douglass had 20 to 25 volunteers getting out votes for him at any one time.

“None of this stuff is very sexy,” Mills said. “You just need to talk to people.”

The candidates and the organization wouldn’t have mattered much if there wasn’t a deep disquiet in the city around the high murder rate and a sense that city’s economic development hadn’t been reaching into all its communities, Mills said.

“All this stuff has been happening downtown,” Mills said. “In the neighborhoods, people feel a lack of investment and a lack of opportunity.”

Rank-&-File Rumblings

The union effort didn’t start with a grand plan.

Both Mills and Kennington, president of Local 34, said the decision to support candidates running in some of the 30 aldermanic races arose from concerns expressed by union members.

“It was because of the unhappiness among members in their own lives,” Mills said, citing unemployment, violence and the school drop-out rate. “We had close relatives shot and killed.”

Kennington agreed that her members—who had to endorse the plan to field aldermanic candidates as did four other HERE unions’ memberships—were moved by their life experiences. “It’s been a reality check for us,” Kennington said. “We continued to get better and better contracts for our members while their families were suffering. As long as we’re an organization of working people in the city, we have a responsibility to try to do something to improve the every day life of working people.”

The unions had been involved in municipal elections since the late 1990s. City Point’s Dolores Colon of Local 34 has been on the Board of Aldermen for a decade; two other incumbents, Jacqueline James and Claudette Robinson-Thorpe have been sympathetic to the unions and received their endorsements this year.

But the idea of local unions fielding a number of candidates was new, both to New Haven and seemingly other cities. The union leadership asked their members if they would be interested in running. Five union members decided to run, as did a number of other insurgent candidates whom the unions endorsed.

“All of us were surprised at the number of candidates who came forward and the number of races we found ourselves in,” Kennington said. “But what are you going to do, tell people they can’t run?”

The unions knew the candidates would need more than their endorsements; they would need the unions’ resources in terms of money and volunteers.

“It’s very difficult for one person to run against the organization that exists in Democratic Party,” Kennington said.

The unions ended up spending about $200,000 and organizing about 400 volunteers in the 15 races. (A primary was expected in Ward 23 for union-backed Tyisha Walker, but City Hall-backed incumbent Yusuf Shah dropped out in the face of strong neighborhood support for Walker. He may run again as an independent in November.)

The unions approached the races like any other organizing drive, which is how Mills said she has approached her position as political field director all along. “What I brought to that position was not a background as a political operative, but a background in organizing,” Mills said.

New Haven Bred

Mills has been organizing for a decade.

She grew up in East Rock a few houses from where she now lives. Her father, who was raised in upstate New York, attended Yale on a scholarship in the 1960s, met her mother in New Haven, and stayed.

Mills said she didn’t come from a union household; both her parents were small business people.

Mills went to Cornell University. At a university known for its school of labor relations, Mills put together an interdisciplinary major, mostly in the sciences. She graduated in 1997.

Only upon returning to New Haven did Mills become interested in labor issues. After holding a series of unremarkable jobs, she became in 2000 an organizer for the Connecticut Center for New Economy (CCNE), a not-for-profit labor affiliated organization devoted to urban issues. CCNE is affiliated with UNITE HERE.

CCNE’s medical debt campaign dominated her six years there and shaped her political outlook, Mills said. After workers at Yale-New Haven Hospital complained that the hospital had put liens on their houses when they couldn’t pay their medical bills, CCNE launched an investigation and political campaign. The drive took five years; it resulted in the lifting of the liens and a new state law that reins in hospital’s aggressive collection practices and requires better access to charity care.

“I saw that when people get together they can make significant change,” Mills said. She said it also taught her the “the courage and integrity of people facing an issue in their lives and taking action.”

When UNITE HERE’s political director left in 2007, Mills assumed that position.

She became more deeply involved in electoral politics in 2008. At the behest of the union, Mills joined 45 other union officials and members registering voters in southern and western Virginia on behalf of the Obama campaign. Mills said her areas of the state had been so resistant to integration that rather than desegregate, some communities had shut down their public schools entirely for as long as seven years.

“We were registering a population that had been left illiterate because they literally didn’t have schools to go to,” Mills said.

On Election Day, Mills watched as thousands of newly-registered African-Americans came to the polls before they opened.

“I have never experienced anything like that,” she said. “Usually the voting starts out slow and goes up and up and up. In 2008, nobody was there at the end of the day because everyone had voted at the beginning.”

Obama won Virginia, the first Democrat to take that state since Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

Mills was also instrumental in the unions’ efforts on behalf of Dan Malloy’s successful gubernatorial campaign in 2010.

“If you want to intervene and change things elections are just one way to do it,” Mills said, “but it’s a pretty powerful way.”

Brushfire Patrol

Tuesday’s New Haven primary election day found Mills zipping from ward to ward in her white Chevy Flex van, or standing on street corners with a cell phone glued to her ear. She was mostly putting out brush fires. With 15 candidates, there were conflagrations in rapid succession.

West River’s Ward 23 didn’t open until 6:30 a.m., a half hour late. In the Hill’s Ward 5, the translator’s child suffered a seizure, so there was no one to help the ward’s Spanish-speaking voters. Several voters in Fair Haven’s Ward 14 were told they had to show photo IDs in order to vote. In Ward 28, four or five voters were told they weren’t registered even though they had copies of their registration cards.

Mills offered advice and dispatched a lawyer, a volunteer from the National Lawyers Guild, to various locations. Mills’ ramped-up handling of what proved to be minuscule problems spoke to both her expectations for the race and her intensity as a person.

“I’m just running around dealing with problems, and problems suck,” Mills declared right after the incident in front of Frank Douglass’ house. She then insisted that the comment be off the record and asked a reporter to stop following her for the rest of the day.

Later, in the flush of victory, Mills said there weren’t any major problems, just a multitude of small ones that stressed her out.

During the day, she seemed happiest talking to candidates and voters. Around 10:30 a.m., Mills visited the Ward 27 polling place at Mitchell Library on Westville’s Harrison Street. Union candidate Angela Russell, a home day-care operator, had set up an umbrella on one side of the polling place’s entrance to shield her four or five volunteers from the sun. Her party-endorsed opponent, Stan Kontogiannis, set up on the other side.

“This is bigger than one person,” Russell told Mills, noting that it was great to see so many of people she had canvassed actually vote. ​“They are excited about coming out do what they do best.”

Russell added, ​“It’s a peaceful, serene environment” between the two sides.

“You’re setting the tone,” Mills responded.

In what proved to be the biggest margin of the day, Russell defeated Kontogiannis 426 to 123.

Although she handled the many strategic decisions with aplomb, Mills clearly would have rather been out in the field like two of the hundreds of teams she sent to get out the vote.

In The Hill’s Ward 6, three women were trying to get voters out for incumbent alderwoman and Local 34 member Colon in the Church Street South housing complex, a privately owned complex of 301 federally subsidized apartments across from Union Station. The volunteers were Lisa Bergmann, like Mills a former CCNE organizer; Esther Martinez, who has lived in Church Street South for six years; and Jissette Chona. ​“I’ve lived here since I was 17,” Chona, 37, said. ​“I got married and moved out. I got separated and moved back in.”

Chona now lives there with her three daughters, 12, 7 and 4. She is on the resident’s committee meeting with representatives of the complex’s owner, Northland Investment Corporation of Boston, which is planning a mixed-income development on the desirable location.

According to Bergmann, Alderwoman Colon had been instrumental in pushing for residents’ participation in the plans for the complex and in trying to assure that current residents will have a chance to live in the new buildings. That made Church Street South a critical site for Tuesday’s get-out-the-vote drive.

“There are 100 people we want to pull out of here today so we need to hunker down and focus,” Bergmann said to Martinez and Chona as they tromped through the dingy cinder-block complex painted in various ugly shades of tan. Only a few straggly trees interrupted the blacktop pathways. Chona’s smiling 4‑year-old daughter was in tow.

By noon, the women hadn’t had much luck. They had a list of supporters who needed rides to the polls. As they went door to door, they found people were not home, or not ready, or they had already voted, or they wanted to vote later or they had decided not to vote at all. The three women kept at it.

It was obviously enough. Colon had 265 votes to beat the party-endorsed Norma Rodriguez-Reyes’ 157 votes. (Note: Rodriguez-Reyes is publisher of the newspaper La Voz Hispana. She also volunteers as chair of the board of the not-for-profit Online Journalism Project, which publishes the Independent.)

Across town, in the Edgewood neighborhood, Max Fraser and Raquiem Hosten formed another of Mills’ teams. They were getting out the vote for Evette Hamilton in Ward 24, who pulled off another of the day’s big upsets, against incumbent Alderman Marcus Paca.

Hosten, 24, became involved in the campaign because of his relationship with Hamilton’s daughter. ​“Running into this family was like a godsend to me,” Hosten said. ​“If not for Evette I’d be in New York doing God knows what.” He works at the Au Bon Pain across from Yale.

Hosten teamed with Max Fraser, 26, who is in a Ph.D. program in the Yale history department. Fraser, whose interest is American labor history, previously wrote about labor issues for the Nation magazine.

Hamilton was a late entrant in the race against party-endorsed Paca. ​“Paca came in two years ago as a young up-and-comer,” Fraser said. Fraser said that from talking to voters he had concluded that they ​“feel as if once he was elected he went downtown and they never saw him again.”

Hosten added: ​“They don’t know what he’s done; they don’t know him.”

Fraser and Hosten were returning to streets they had already been to at least twice, searching out people they had already talked to. They didn’t find many voters home in the early afternoon.

On Brownell Street, they may have struck pay dirt. They spoke to a young man cleaning his house. The man said the entire block was filled with his relatives: grandmother, uncle, sister, brother, and more, living in adjacent homes. He said he would be sure to vote himself, once he was done cleaning, and would tell all his relatives to vote for Hamilton too.

Hamilton won by 84, with a total of 312 votes. A stunned Paca said Tuesday night that he might ask for a recount.

Jigs Up

All those individual votes the unions ​“pulled” added up to an ​“amazing” victory — the word of the night — and a loud party at Leon’s restaurant that drew hundreds of ecstatic supporters. Almost no one uttered a greeting without throwing their arms around one another. Spontaneous cheers erupted and echoed even above the loud band.

There was dancing with and without music.

“I’m so speechless,” Fair Haven’s winning candidate Santiago said. ​“I’m going to celebrate. Tomorrow is a new day.” He then did a jig.

Chona from Church Street South also said she was speechless. ​“I thought I was going to have a heart attack when I heard the news,” Chona said.

“We just turned the city upside down,” CCNE’s Shirley A. Lawrence declared to a woman who had dropped by Leon’s for a drink and knew nothing of the reason for the festivities. ​“I’m so tired it’s unbelievable,” Lawrence said after the women left. ​“It’s been long hard work but the people have spoken in the city of New Haven. New Haven will never be the same again.”

“Have you ever been to a party like this one?” said CCNE co-founder Rev. Scott Marks, who had to shout to be heard even standing outside Leon’s. ​“This is what happens when people who have suffered so long get a chance to celebrate.”

To Marks, the city’s murder rate is what, above all else, drove voters to the outsider candidates. Twenty-five people, mostly young black men, have been killed so far in 2011. ​“How can we not stand together when our kids are dying in the streets? This is what this is about.”

The challenge for the union-backed candidates will be to transform what were fuzzy policy goals into concrete legislation. Although reluctant to be pinned to an agenda, Mills said all the candidates seemed to have two common concerns. One was a return to community policing, having more cops walk a beat to head off violence. The other was assuring that ordinary citizens have a ​“seat at the table” when development decisions are made in their communities.

What form those goals would take, Mills couldn’t or wouldn’t say. She said she has some ideas about aldermanic initiatives but it’s not her place to make those decisions. As has been the case all along, the unions make the policy decisions and she implements them, she said. And in a totally new posture, the aldermanic candidates, should they all win in November, won’t necessarily have to be guided by the unions.

“Clearly people here are hopeful and excited,” Mills said. ​“Something was started here that we’re not about to walk away from. But the shape it takes, the specific legislation that comes out of this, will be the result of a process.”

“Keep Organizing”

On Monday evening, before she or anyone knew the scope of the unions’ victory, Mills was asked about her philosophy of organizing. How do community organizers keep from being co-opted when they get involved in electoral politics and their candidates win?

“The trick,” she said, ​“is to keep organizing. Just because you have a few ordinary people on the Board of Aldermen doesn’t mean organizing in the community should stop.”

On Tuesday night, she offered a version of that approach in explaining how the union candidates might develop a legislative agenda.

“The next step is to continue the process of engaging as many as possible in the city about what they want to see,” Mills said, ​“and then working with newly elected candidates to come up with an agenda.”

Does that mean sending the troops back into the field to knock on doors?

“We’ve been knocking on doors for years,” Mills said. ​“We’ll keep knocking on doors.”