LAS VEGAS—Unite HERE has set an ambitious target for its 1800-and-counting canvassers in this fall’s election campaign: Almost 4.5 million door-knocks, virtually all in swing states, starting with Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Arizona.
They’re a quarter of the way to that total already, with half of the initial million door-knocks occurring in Pennsylvania alone.
So says new union President Gwen Mills, and her union has the track record to back its plans.
There are two motivations for the Unite HERE members on the campaign trail. One, of course, is the wide and spreading enthusiasm for the Democratic ticket of pro-worker Vice President Kamala Harris for president and Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Gov. Tim Walz, a union member, for VP.
The other is fear of what could happen to worker rights, voting rights, women’s rights, LGBT rights, and the U.S. Constitution if their Republican foes, former president and convicted felon Donald Trump for president, and hate-Haitians Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio, for VP, win.
Or, as the youngest canvasser, Adriana Rojas of Phoenix, quotes voters saying: “They don’t want any more crazy white men in there.”
In the presidential campaign four years ago, Unite HERE put tens of thousands of its unemployed members into the field. The workers all lost their jobs when the coronavirus pandemic shut their employers down to minimize physical contact and the spread of the modern-day plague.
At its worst, more than nine of every ten Unite HERE members were jobless. So the union paid them for election work, going door-to-door where they could, phone-banking where they couldn’t.
That 2020 presidential race wasn’t the only one where Unite HERE made a big difference. Georgia had post-election U.S. Senate runoffs, with pro-worker Democrats Jon Ossoff and the Rev. Raphael Warnock needing to win both to produce a 50-50 tie. Unite HERE flooded the state with workers, and both won.
Two years ago, Unite HERE workers in Philadelphia, especially in neighborhoods other canvassers did not hit, were greeted by potential voters all saying—before the unionists could open their mouths—that they feared for both the economy and the future of democracy, after the Trumpite U.S. Capitol invasion and insurrection.
The coronavirus may have receded, though it’s still out there, like the flu, but the union’s political activism hasn’t. Besides swing states Arizona, Nevada and Pennsylvania, Unite HERE is considering expanding into seven more, though Mills did not list them.
“This election is crystal clear,” Mills told the Zoom press conference with several members who have already been canvassing. “Donald Trump and J.D. Vance would cross picket lines. Unite HERE erects them.”
Politically, the union “is the opposite of ‘weird,’” Mills says, using the name Democratic VP nominee Walz hung on the two Republicans. For Unite HERE, “this election is critical” to its goal of “improving the quality of life” for its members, a majority of whom are women, workers of color, migrants, or combinations of the three.
Added to the target list
Nia Winston, the union’s statewide Secretary-Treasurer in another swing state, Michigan, added it to the target list. She says Unite HERE members are especially fired up by Harris “because they’re majority women, majority people of color” and they see in Harris “someone who looks like them.”
Harris is the first African-American woman—and Asian-American woman—major party presidential nominee. She doesn’t emphasize that on the stump but doesn’t have to do so.
Unite HERE’s Michigan stumpers will emphasize “workers’ rights, women’s rights, civil rights, LGBT rights and immigrant rights,” Winston added. By contrast, she warned, Trump and Vance and their GOP platform, Project 2025, crafted by the extreme rightist Heritage Foundation “would take them all away, and health care rights and voting rights,” too.
Rojas of Phoenix, a teenage Latina who works two jobs and isn’t old enough to vote, agreed. “Harris and Walz are the only two candidates who will fight for people like myself,” she says.
Not all is peaches and cream on the campaign trail. Both Unite HERE President Mills and Spencer Lindsay, a member of Unite HERE’s largest local, Culinary Union Local 226 in Las Vegas, hit what Mills calls “a lot of negativity about the political process.”
“It’s a very hard thing to battle. They have a sense their vote doesn’t matter,” Mills adds.
Lindsay is tackling a group like himself—African-American men. Trump believes he can make inroads among them. Lindsay is out to show him he’s wrong.
“I’m talking to other men of color about the importance of the election,” particularly for workers and their families who gained coverage through the Obama-era Affordable Care Act. Trump wants to kill it and congressional Republicans tried to do so dozens of times but failed.
Trump said in his debate with Harris that “I have an idea for a plan” to replace the ACA, but didn’t say what it is. That alarms Lindsay, whose son has asthma. Harris wants to keep the ACA and improve and expand it.
“She’ll continue to fight to bring down the prices of drugs our family needs,” Lindsay says. Harris’s boss, Democratic President Joe Biden, already forced Big Pharma to lower the price of insulin.
Health care is also a big issue for Rebecca Beah of Philadelphia, whose unit of airline food prep workers “hasn’t had a new contract for six years.” But so are worker rights. Beah’s bargaining unit voted to strike five years ago, but because those workers prepare food for air travelers, they—like other airline and rail workers—must toil under the Railway Labor Act.
It permits strikes only when the National Mediation Board says so. “And Trump didn’t allow us to strike,” she said of the Republican’s NMB.
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