by Ady Barkan
Our first conference was scheduled for early December, so I had ten weeks to prepare. I wrote up a dozen policy briefs highlighting the best practices from cities around the country on issues like protecting worker rights, empowering immigrant communities, and building affordable housing. I worked to line up a series of policy panels, and I cold-called council members from around the country, inviting them to attend.
In a small windowless room in a Washington, D.C., hotel, our embryonic board of directors met the morning before our conference began. A dozen of us sat around the table; although I didn’t know it at the time, our group included three of the most accomplished local legislators in the country: Wilson Goode of Philadelphia, Brad Lander of New York, and Nick Licata of Seattle. In the years before and after that meeting, the three of them would author and shepherd to passage dozens of major laws on nearly every conceivable topic. Also at the table were council members from smaller jurisdictions, like Faith Winter of Westminster, Colorado—an organizer who went on to train hundreds of aspiring candidates for office—and Karundi Williams, representing the Service Employees International Union, which was investing in our nascent effort as part of its long-term agenda to build progressive power in America. There was plenty of kibitzing and a bit of grandstanding in that first meeting, but we did accomplish one important task: coming up with a better name for our network. We settled on Local Progress, which conveyed the two central ideas behind our project.
As we wrapped up our day-and-a-half-long conference, it became clear that we had already begun to achieve two of our stated goals: helping elected officials learn about best practices from one another and from the policy experts whom we had assembled in the room, and giving them a space to build relationships and solidarity with one another, which was a precious opportunity for progressive elected officials, who are often surrounded by colleagues more interested in self-aggrandizement, machine politics, or neoliberal policy than in pursuing social justice. And because Local Progress would be housed at the Center for Popular Democracy, we were confident we could help deepen relationships between progressive elected officials and members of grassroots community-based organizations, in order to strengthen the practice of “outside/inside” organizing that can be critical not only to winning specific campaigns but to building relationships and power for the longer term. But we hadn’t yet developed a theory of how we might accomplish our broader goal: getting elected officials from cities around the country to move forward on a shared agenda in a coordinated way that would enhance local policy and simultaneously help advance the national political discourse.
As is true of many start-up projects, our challenge with Local Progress was to build the plane while we were flying it. We needed to convince elected officials that we had something valuable to offer them. But it was hard to offer them much of value with only a few part-time staffers working on the project. So we simultaneously had to persuade some nonprofit and labor funders that it was worth investing in our network of elected officials even as the network was tiny and weak. Whenever I fretted that our promotional material was overstating the extent of our work, Amy would flash her big grin and remind me to put my head down, work hard, and “fake it till we make it.”
The first opportunity to make it came in early 2014, when our board chairman, Nick Licata, called my cell phone with an idea. The city of Seattle was considering establishing a minimum wage of $15 an hour for all workers and he thought that Local Progress could be helpful. Opponents of the measure were arguing that Seattle would be venturing into dangerous uncharted territory with such a high minimum wage, so Nick thought that it would be a good idea to show them that many other cities were also moving forward on a bold workers’ rights agenda and that if Seattle paved the way, others would follow. We got to work planning a symposium–cum–pep rally that would showcase the rising municipal workers’ rights agenda in America.
The new mayor of Seattle had recently set up an advisory committee of community, labor, and business leaders, along with a few elected officials, including Nick. He hoped that the committee would reach consensus on the important, controversial details: how high to set the minimum wage, over what time frame to raise it, and whether or not to include any carve-outs for workers like waiters who receive tips. The event that Nick had asked me to help produce was meant to offer answers to those questions, and it featured an array of voices ranging from skeptical business leaders on the center-right to Kshama Sawant on the left. Kshama had recently been elected to the city council, running as a member of Socialist Alternative, and her unapologetic commitment to equity and justice had excited a large portion of the Seattle public, which has for many decades included a significant radical contingent. To my dismay, she was even too much of a purist to join the membership of Local Progress: we weren’t left enough for her and her base. (This prefigured by five years some of the tension on display today, with activists from the Democratic Socialists of America and other movements pushing progressives to be bolder and move faster—a dynamic that I generally think is good.)
Nick’s theory was that the symposium could highlight the smart policy reasons for raising the minimum wage significantly and also permit Kshama and her allies to showcase the public enthusiasm behind the idea. Together, he hoped, the strong evidence and the political energy would force the mayor and the committee’s business leaders to support the reform. In the end, it worked like a charm.
In a large auditorium on a local college campus, about five hundred people gathered for the one-day event. The panels featured smart, progressive economists laying out the rationale for raising the wage and dispelling the notion that it might lead to significant job losses or business closures; a dozen Local Progress members from Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and various California cities explaining how their local governments were also moving forward with plans to raise wages; and inspiring speeches from workers and their allies, met with boisterous support from the audience, which included a large contingent of red-shirted Socialist Alternative members.
As the day came to a close, Nick and I huddled in the lobby. He seemed very pleased. No new decisions had been made, and he had yet to receive any new commitments from the mayor or the business leaders, but he felt like the event had meaningfully strengthened his bargaining position. He promised to keep me updated on the internal deliberations. We hugged, and I headed for the airport with a new bounce in my step. Our political project was finally paying some real dividends.
Within a few months, Seattle had passed a $15 minimum wage, although the phase-in period was significantly longer than Kshama and Nick had hoped it would be. Nevertheless, it was a watershed moment in American politics. The “Fight for $15 and a Union” had shifted the goalposts dramatically: whereas President Obama had recently called for a hike in the federal minimum wage to $9 per hour, the protests and strikes by fast-food workers around the country had roused the conscience of the nation, putting on stark display the immorality of billionaire CEOs profiting by keeping their workers unstable, insecure, and poor. What began as an organizing drive among black and brown fast-food workers in Brooklyn, coordinated by New York Communities for Change, spread rapidly across the country with the support of the Service Employees International Union. Seattle’s move was a breakthrough in the campaign to reset the terms of the debate. From that moment onward, progressives could argue from a more principled and rational position: that the minimum wage should be set at a level that permits a worker to raise a family and live with dignity, not in poverty. We still are far from winning the argument. The federal minimum wage remains stuck at $7.25 per hour. But the American people support raising it significantly, and we now have robust evidence from many different cities where elected officials partnered with social movements to follow Seattle’s lead—from New York City to Oakland, from Los Angeles to Chicago—that significantly higher minimum wages can reduce poverty dramatically and do not lead to significant job losses. More than 25 million Americans have seen their
pay grow due to minimum-wage increases at the local or state level, with more than 10 million winning raises up to $15 per hour. And someday soon, when Congress is controlled by more compassionate elected officials, our federal policy will follow in the footsteps of Seattle and the other cities that blazed a trail forward.
Back in New York, the battle over workers’ right to live with dignity was playing out under different political circumstances. Among the many ways in which America’s brand of capitalism lags behind the rest of the rich world is our foolish failure to guarantee the right of workers to take a day off when they are sick. Although white-collar professionals, government employees, and unionized workers are generally allowed to take five or ten paid sick days every year, 40 percent of private-sector workers in America have no such protection. That means that they must either show up to work sick or give up pay and risk losing their jobs while they stay home to recuperate. It also means that working parents are forced to improvise whenever their sick children need to stay home from school. (We know how difficult this is firsthand: Carl has had to stay home from the germ factory that is day care at least ten times a year. We’re lucky that Rachael has a flexible schedule, but most folks don’t.)
Beginning in 2007, American cities began to try to address this problem with local laws that guaranteed workers the right to take a handful of paid sick days every year to care for themselves or their close relatives. The paid-sick-days movement was a particularly exciting one for progressives working at the municipal level, because it represented a clear opportunity to improve workers’ lives through local legislation. One of the enduring frustrations for city council members and advocates like myself is that, in most American states, the authority of cities to pass local laws is severely constrained. Most cities, for example, are prohibited by state law from establishing minimum wages for private-sector workers or imposing new taxes to raise revenue. (In Washington State and California, cities are explicitly empowered to set minimum wages, which is one reason why Seattle and San Francisco were on the vanguard of the municipal minimum-wage movement. New York City was granted the authority to set a higher minimum wage only after labor unions and other progressive organizations put significant pressure on Governor Andrew Cuomo to amend the state law.)
However, the vast majority of American cities have the legal authority to guarantee the right to take paid sick days because the regulation falls under the general power to protect the public’s health and safety. Keeping sick workers and sick children at home reduces the spread of disease. By 2012, the movement to guarantee paid sick days had racked up victories in San Francisco, Seattle (thanks again to Nick Licata’s leadership), and Washington, D.C., and the battle had now reached New York City. A robust coalition of labor unions, public health advocates, community-based organizations, and feminist organizations were pushing for enactment through the city council. Their rallies and press conferences always had a good visual hook: rows of strollers, doctors and nurses in their scrubs, or the icky mascot Germy, a reminder that nobody wants their cook or waitress to come to work while sick. My friend Emmanuel Caicedo of the Working Families Party had been tasked with coordinating the coalition, and Amy and I had joined the legal team and were responsible for drafting a proposed ordinance.
We faced two major obstacles. Mayor Michael Bloomberg was fiercely opposed to any new protections for workers. And, frustratingly, he had a strong ally, Christine Quinn, in the Speaker’s chair at the city council. The Speaker controlled which bills get to the floor and receive a vote—which meant that, in practice, nothing passed if it didn’t have the Speaker’s support. For more than three years Quinn had done the mayor’s bidding and prevented a vote on the paid-sick-days ordinance. She did this even though the bill had the support of an overwhelming number of city council members—enough, most likely, to override a veto from the mayor.
Our coalition had two reasons to believe that now, in 2013, we might finally be in a position to overcome Bloomberg and Quinn’s opposition. First, it was an election year, and Christine Quinn was running for mayor. (Bloomberg was term-limited out.) Guaranteeing paid sick days was enormously popular, especially among the Democratic primary voters who would determine her fate. Second, our allies on the city council had succeeded in building significant power, particularly through the creation of a progressive caucus. Of the fifty-one members of the New York City Council, forty-six were Democrats. But many of them, like Christine Quinn, were more accountable to the Democratic machine and the city’s business lobby than they were to the middle- and working-class people who made up the bulk of Democratic voters in the city. Beginning in 2009, the Working Families Party had begun to try to change the balance of power within the council by electing genuine progressives to office and then organizing them into a caucus. By mid-2013, the caucus had eleven members and was led by Melissa Mark-Viverito of Harlem and Brad Lander of Park Slope, Brooklyn (who had come up with the idea of building Local Progress and enlisted the Center for Popular Democracy in staffing it). The caucus was challenging Christine Quinn for power and seeking to expand its membership in the upcoming election by winning many more council races around the city. The paid-sick-days fight was a perfect vehicle for that political objective because it highlighted how Quinn was blocking progressive legislation at the behest of Bloomberg and the business lobby.
One Thursday evening in February, I traveled uptown with my seventeen-year-old brother, Muki, and my comrades from CPD to attend a mayoral candidate forum we were cosponsoring along with a number of other groups from the paid-sick-days coalition. We passed various protesters and speechifiers as we entered the large church and took our seats near the back. Héctor Figueroa, the president of 32BJ Service Employees International Union, a union that represented janitors, security guards, and doormen throughout the city, welcomed the audience. He decried the widespread poverty in a city of such great wealth and highlighted the importance of the elections that were coming up later that year. Onstage, Christine Quinn was joined by a crew of candidates who were both more progressive than she was and were trailing her in the polls. The moderator probed the candidates about their positions on a series of policies that were in front of the council—a living wage law for city contractors, reform of the police department’s stop-and-frisk program, and, of course, the paid-sick-days ordinance. Public Advocate Bill de Blasio used his towering frame and baritone voice to decry the tale of two cities that was playing out every day in New York. He was strongly in favor of paid sick days, he said, and it was Christine Quinn’s fault for blocking the measure. The other candidates piled on, to increasingly enthusiastic cheers, and then, when Quinn attempted to defend her actions by saying that the city’s economy was not strong enough to accommodate a mandatory paid-sick-days law, the audience heckled and booed her. Muki and I were eager participants in raising the volume of opposition.
32BJ had been an important ally of Quinn in the preceding years, but that candidate forum in Harlem made clear to Héctor Figueroa that she had to change her ways. He had seen firsthand his members’ enthusiasm for paid sick days and a bold progressive agenda. His union would not be able to endorse her, Figueroa told Quinn after the forum, unless she moved the paid sick-days bill to passage. It was a crucial turning point.
A few weeks later, sensing that our political power was at a peak, the coalition and our allies in the Progressive Caucus decided that it was finally time to unveil our secret weapon. For more than two years we had mused about the possibility of forcing a vote on the legislation through the use of an esoteric procedural move called a petition to discharge. This mechanism, which also exists in the U.S. House of Representatives, permits the sponsor of a bill to force an up-or-down vote on it on the floor of the full legislature, rather than keeping it bottled up in committee (the motion is literally to discharge the committee from further responsibility for the bill), if she or he can get a majority of the legislature to declare its support for such a vote.
In February, I had been
asked to draft a legal memo explaining the mechanics of the discharge petition, based on the published rules of the city council. They required that seven members of the council, including the bill’s sponsor, sign their names to a petition requesting a vote on the legislation. A few days later there would then be a vote of the full body about whether to vote on the bill itself. That vote required only a simple majority for passage. Although the discharge petition had long been part of the council’s rules, nobody could point to a single time that it had ever been used. Doing so would be an affront to the authority of the Speaker, and there had never been a sufficient number of council members who were willing to stick their necks out and risk the retaliation that would surely ensue.
Finally, however, with a super-majority of members signed on as cosponsors of the bill, public sentiment on their side, elections fast approaching, and a coalition of advocates demanding action, the leadership of the Progressive Caucus was ready to act. One weekend morning in mid-March 2013, as I was lounging about our Astoria living room, Brad Lander called my cell phone with a few hyper-specific questions about the discharge petition. What words had to be used? Was there any particular format? If he was about to go after the Queen, he didn’t want to get tripped up by a technicality. I spent my day trying to find answers and sent over a proposed petition for the bill’s lead sponsor and him to use.
Later that week, a flurry of frantic emails and text messages indicated that the deed was under way. Brad had shared the petition with the sponsor of the bill, who had to be the first signature on the petition to discharge. Brad had then signed in the third spot, leaving room for someone else to sign second. He was willing to be the gang leader but preferred that his signature not be the first one that Quinn saw when she read the petition. In the search for additional signatures, Brad approached Donovan Richards, a twenty-nine-year-old who had just taken office that month, filling an open council seat in Queens. Few politicians would have the courage to challenge authority so early in their tenure, but when Brad asked him to sign, Donovan was fearless: Why did he run for office if not to help protect New York’s workers? he asked, echoing the sentiment that I had heard the year before from Judge Shira Scheindlin.