Laurel Leff file photo
UNITE HERE Secretary-Treasurer Gwen Mills, running New Haven aldermanic campaigns in 2011.
We did the work. Now we need a say.
A half-dozen UNITE HERE leaders — including a New Haven native who is the international union’s secretary-treasurer — delivered that message Thursday about how organized labor’s get-out-the-vote efforts for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris should translate into “the most pro-union presidency” this country has seen in generations.
They promoted those expectations and demands during a virtual press conference moderated by Gwen Mills and featuring UNITE HERE President D. Taylor, Phoenix Local 11 Co-President Susan Minato, Las Vegas Local 226 Secretary-Treasurer Geoconda Argüello-Kline, Philadelphia Local 274 President Rosslyn Wuchinich, and Philadelphia Local 634 President Nicole Hunt.
In addition to serving as one of the top officials in the hotel and food service worker union, Mills grew up in East Rock and played a key role in getting labor-backed candidates elected to local office in the early 2010s.
The international union has several local chapters in New Haven, including Yale’s blue-collar and pink-collar unions, and represents roughly 6,000 people who work in the Elm City.
Zoom
Thursday’s UNITE HERE virtual presser.
As a handful of swing states continue counting absentee ballots received in advance of Tuesday’s presidential election, the UNITE HERE leaders said Thursday that they are confident that the Democratic Biden-Harris ticket will prevail.
And they stressed that Donald Trump will not serve another term as president primarily because of the door knocking, phone banking, and other in-person canvassing that thousands of UNITE HERE members and volunteers—including New Haveners—did over the past three months in the swing states of Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
“We believe that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will get to the 270 electoral votes necessary to win today,” Mills (pictured) said Thursday.
She said that union canvassers — including union workers who have been laid off from their casino and hotel jobs during the Covid-19 pandemic — knocked on the doors of 2.8 million voters in those three swing states since August.
“We knew that having workers talk to other working people was essential to preserving this democracy, removing Donald Trump from office, and getting us back on track for the future we all need,” Mills added.
“We believe canvassing is essential work, and we all should be proud of the workers who did it.”
Taylor (pictured) predicted that that on-the-ground political work by UNITE HERE should and must result in a presidency uniquely favorable to organized labor. He said Biden is likely going to lead the “most pro-union presidency in my lifetime.”
“What we’ve done is help assemble the car,” he said. “We’re not just going to turn over the keys and say, ‘You drive it.’ We think that if we helped assemble the car, we can say we have a say in which way it goes.”
He said that means pressing for “healthcare as a right,” a “living wage,” eviction protections for renters, strengthened union organizing laws, tax incentives for builders and manufacturers looking to keep their work in the United States, and a general promotion of union membership as a favored path for gaining access to the middle class.
“Right now the scales are so tipped in favor of employers,” he said. “We just want a fair and balanced thing, which doesn’t exist today.”
Based on what he heard from Biden on the campaign trail, Taylor said, he thinks the prospective president-elect will support organized labor and those policy priorities. And based on the organizing work done to help get him elected, he said, Biden should recognize that unions will be holding his feet to the fire to follow through.
“I think his [economic] message was fine,” said Hunt, who heads a local that includes primarily Black workers in the Philadelphia public school district. “All we worry about now is how he’s going to follow up on it.”
Taylor said that UNITE HERE targeted its get-out-the-vote efforts in “the poorest neighborhoods in Philadelphia, Las Vegas, and Reno,” among other swing state cities. He said they identified 300,000 voters who ultimately cast ballots this election, and that 120,000 of those voters didn’t vote in 2016.
“We think we made the difference,” he said. “We never listened to the pollsters or the pundits, because our work is in the field and on the ground.”
Minato (pictured), who heads a 30,000-member local in Phoenix, said that the get-out-the-vote team she oversaw was made up primarily of “the most devastated of people,” including hospitality workers who have been laid off during the pandemic and do not know if they will have a job to return to anytime soon.
She said they knocked 800,000 doors in Arizona, had more than 250,000 face-to-face conversations with voters, and made 2.5 million phone calls in the state. Arguello-Kline and Wuchinich and Hunt described similarly outsized canvassing efforts they oversaw in Las Vegas and Philadelphia, respectively.
When asked about the union’s confidence in a Biden-Harris victory, Mills told the Independent, “We know the counties that are still being counted and they are the counties we focused our door to door efforts in. We know their votes will take Biden/Harris over the top.”
And when asked about the international union’s organizing and political priorities going forward, Mills replied, “Continue to elect union members across municipal and state governments as we have helped to do in the City of New Haven.”