PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA — The tens of thousands of people who descended on the City of Brotherly Love this week for the Democratic National Convention almost crossed a picket line.
Workers at Philadelphia’s airport had voted to strike during their busiest week of the year to demand raises, job security, and health care. At the last minute, after the Democratic mayor and governor intervened on behalf of the workers, and California’s entire DNC delegation threatened to boycott the airport, American Airlines agreed to come back to the bargaining table, and the strike was called off.
“It was wonderful leverage. They knew we were serious,” Philadelphia native and airport worker Shakira Stewart told ThinkProgress. “Now they’re willing to negotiate with us. It’s one step closer to winning.”
Stewart has worked at the airport for two and a half years. On each eight-hour shift, she directs people through the TSA security line, stacks and pushes used bins, and helps confused and grumpy passengers catch their flights. She started at $8.75 an hour, and now makes $12.
Labor Secretary Tom Perez told ThinkProgress on the floor of the DNC that Stewart’s complaints of low pay and instability are not unique to Philadelphia. “Some of the most neglected workers in America work at airports. The people who help folks in wheelchairs, for example, they’re tipped workers and make some of the lowest wages in America. And people don’t know that, so they don’t even tip them.”
As Stewart’s two children, ages four and five, tugged at her clothes and giggled, she described why hundreds of her coworkers are fighting to organize with the Service Employees International Union. “We need someone to back us up and protect us,” she said. “Right now we don’t have any protection. I don’t have anyone to fight for my job.”
A union, she argued, would put teeth behind the workers’ demand for $15 an hour. “It would be enough money to feed the kids, enough for childcare, and enough for miscellaneous things, like taking vacations with my kids,” she said. “Right now I’m scrimping and scraping by at the end of every month. And while I have seniority, a lot of people at work are on-call and don’t have set schedules. They also try to keep us working under a certain number of hours so they don’t have to pay us more.”
Millions of U.S. workers are on this form of on-call scheduling, in which employees do not know if or how much they will need to work until the last minute.
Stewart hopes that with the attention of the media political world on Philadelphia this DNC, she and the elected officials who have supported her cause can keep the pressure on and win the raises they’re fighting for. She told ThinkProgress the experience has made her think about elections in a new light.
“I was always a Democrat but I didn’t vote. I didn’t think it made that much of a difference,” she said. “But now I can see that the Democrats are for us. And if we don’t vote, we’re in trouble.”
Donald Trump’s ‘snake oil’
Stewart is one of 64 million workers in the U.S. who make less than $15 an hour. It’s a coveted voting bloc that both parties are actively wooing in the lead-up to heated general election. GOP nominee Donald Trump has made overt appeals to the American worker, promising to bring back manufacturing jobs from overseas and halt undocumented immigration, which he blames, incorrectly, for depressing wages.
Some delegates and Democratic officials are hammering away at Trump’s populist image, making the case for why he and the Republican Party are bad for workers.
“What Trump is peddling is snake oil,” said Wisconsin State Representative and Hillary Clinton delegate Cory Mason. “It’s a list of grievances in the most ugly and xenophobic way they can be expressed.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a prominent ally of the Fight for $15 movement, echoed this idea in her keynote speech on Monday. She blasted Trump’s record of actively opposing the rights of his own workers and refusing to pay them for their labor. “Time after time [Trump has] preyed on working people, people in debt, people who had fallen on hard times,” she said. “He’s conned them, he’s defrauded them, and he’s ripped them off.”
The lines won loud applause and standing ovations. But Susan Roy, a pollster who has interviewed hundreds of low-income workers about the election, said this might be the wrong tactic. In her research, she said Wednesday, she found that inspiration was a better motivator than fear or anger.
“There is a widespread alienation and disinterest in politics,” she said. “But I heard workers say [in radio interviews], ‘Even though I know he can’t really bring back my job. I feel like Donald Trump understands me.’ He’s speaking to people’s deep, deep emotions, people who fear their country is being taken away from them.”
Economic anxiety
At the DNC Labor Caucus meeting on Wednesday, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo gave a similar warning, urging Democrats to make a stronger case to the working class.
“You see a real economic anxiety and anger. That’s what’s driving this election,” he said. “There has been an economic recovery under Obama, but who has had the benefit of the recovery? Not the working man or woman. Wages have been flat for 20 years while everything else has gone up. And no one is talking enough to that issue.”
This week, Democrats repeatedly touted their party platform, which calls for raising the national minimum wage to $15 an hour, making it easier for workers to unionize, paying women as much as men for the same work, and giving all workers access to paid sick days and family leave.
“We’re going to be out on the front lines of the fight for $15,” Warren promised the DNC’s Labor Caucus on Wednesday to raucous applause. “Working people are the backbone of this country. So we’re going to have no more trade deals that help big corporations and leave workers in the dirt.”
Democrats are also highlighting everything the Obama Administration has done for workers over the past eight years — from signing an executive order to give 5 million more workers overtime pay, to appointing aggressively pro-worker members to the National Labor Relations Board.
“This is the most significant labor board for the side of workers probably since Roosevelt,” said Peter Rickman, a Wisconsin delegate and labor organizer. “They have found every possible way, within the law, to say workers’ right to collective action trumps — no pun intended — an invented right of bosses to keep their workplaces union-free.”
More battles to come
Labor organizers still predict several battles in the years ahead, even under a Clinton presidency. Many delegates are turning their attention to the question of ratifying the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) — an Obama-backed free trade deal with a dozen other nations that has drawn fierce opposition from many Republicans and Democrats for its provisions that threaten workers and the environment. Anger around the party’s refusal to include explicit anti-TPP language in its platform moved some delegates to loudly protest and walk out of the arena earlier this week.
“After we win the election, we have to show the power of our progressive movement by defeating the TPP,” New York Mayor Bill De Blasio told the Labor Caucus. “Think of it as a one-two punch. First, let’s win an election, then send the TPP to its grave. That will signal to working people that the changes the Democrats promise are real and lasting.”
Mason and other delegates agreed, noting that legislative victories are only possible if voters keep pressuring their elected officials.
“If you look at workers’ rights or civil rights or any list of things where we made progress, it’s rarely because legislators got into a room and decided among themselves to do something nice for workers,” he said. “It almost always comes because people mobilize and put pressure on people like me.”
It will be crucial, several Democratic officials said, for lawmakers to take a stronger stand with workers on the ground.
“I want to be a little subversive and say that our Democratic elected officials need to participate energetically in workplace organizing efforts on regular basis,” DeBlasio said. “Don’t let anyone tell you it isn’t appropriate. This is our party now. This is the party of working people, of change.”