WASHINGTON—Fully restoring national abortion rights, better-paid child care and paid family leave and protecting workers’ rights, especially union rights, are driving union women to mobilize to elect Kamala Harris and Tim Walz as president and vice-president, a labor-called session shows.
An October 1 zoom meeting preceded the vice-presidential debate between Walz, the Minnesota governor, and Republican nominee J.D. Vance, the Ohio senator and Donald Trump clone.
The two Republicans’ stands, past party actions and their rhetoric are motivators for women, too. So, does their male chauvinism, says Georgia AFL-CIO President Yvonne Brooks.
“We scare men like Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. So they think they have more power and can take away our voting rights, our economic rights and our reproductive rights.
“It is time for women to deploy our strength at the ballot box. Let’s stand up to misogyny and stand up for progress and win the rights and respect we deserve.”
“Think about Trump’s first term and how awful it was for women and for workers,” AFT Executive Vice President Evelyn DeJesus told the conclave of woman leaders and workers on the zoom call, touting the ‘Union women get it done” mobilization and turnout program.
“But it could have been worse. It wasn’t because it was chaos.” A second Trump term “puts everything we have on the chopping block…It would take away our unions and our jobs.”
Given Trump’s and Walz’s statements, and the GOP platform, aka Project 2025, “It could not be more appropriate,” to discuss those issues and the threat of an “organized” Trump, AFL-CIO President Liz Shuler added. “Project 2025 is the biggest threat to women, to labor unions and to workers.”
Put in impossible position
Nancy Higgins, RN, President of the New York State Nurses Association and a co-president of National Nurses United, spoke for many of the mobilized women on the call by declaring that “In states with abortion restrictions, nurses have been put in the impossible position between doing their duty as nurses” helping female patients seek abortions “and being jailed” for doing so.
“The stakes could not be higher for women, for health care and for the trade union movement,” added Higgins. Shuler later pointed out the three overlap since organized labor is almost half female.
Quoting Trump’s saying “I have the concepts for a plan” to replace the Obama-era Affordable Care Act, Shuler deadpanned “That’s the equivalent of saying ‘The dog ate my homework.’”
Junking the ACA and turning health back over to rapacious insurers who reap workers’ dollars through high premiums and co-pays while denying care has been a longtime Republican goal.
Child care—and how to pay for it—is a top issue for Harris and part of her economic platform. It also is for Shannon Pikka, a journeyperson drywall finisher and member of Painters Local 802 in Green Bay, Wis., a key swing state.
To ascend to that well-paying job, the single mother had to drive to courses in Madison, 200 miles away. There were times she couldn’t find child care for her so, Kingston, so she took him along.
“Schooling required creative logistics, and with child care costs too much for apprentice wages, sadly many” of her female colleagues in those classes “have to leave.” That’s even though, jobs in the building trades, once you finish training, pay very well.
Harris gets that, which is why paid family leave and helping families find affordable child care, while paying child care workers living wages, is a key plank in her economic platform, unveiled several days before on a campaign trip through Southern swing states.
Harris, “having been raised by a single mother, has the same type of experience,” said Auto Worker Pauline Mims, a UAW member and GM worker in Arlington, Texas. It’s also why Pikka took paid leave, from voluntarily contributed campaign finance funds, to go out on the hustings.
Harris’s boss, current Democratic President Joe Biden, “made good progress on health care, preserving pensions, collective bargaining and LGBT rights,” stated Chicago Ironworker Local 1 member Vicki O’Leary, now chair of the Building Trades’ Tradeswomen’s Committee. “All are at risk this November.”
“We the women of the union movement are going to vote like our democracy depends on it,” concluded News Guild member Elise Bryant, president of the Coalition of Labor Union Women.
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