by Ady Barkan
A couple of days later, when Quinn was shown a copy of the petition with twelve signatures on it, she knew that her bluff had been called. She could no longer block the rising tide of support for the law, not with the Democratic primary for mayor coming up in September, and the crucial support of 32BJ at stake. So she told the bill’s sponsor and the coalition that she would negotiate a compromise and bring it up for a vote. The petition was never formally filed, but it had done the work we needed it to do.
The coalition had a number of key demands. We wanted all workers to receive five paid sick days every year, wanted them to be available for use in cases of domestic violence and on behalf of sick relatives, wanted stiff penalties for employers who violated the law, wanted viable enforcement mechanisms, and wanted workers to be given notice of their newfound rights. The Speaker was opposed to all of these demands.
Over the coming couple of months, Amy and I joined a team of five coalition negotiators who engaged in hand-to-hand combat with the Speaker’s lawyers over every sentence in the proposed law. Amy and I were particularly adamant that the law should contain strong enforcement mechanisms. At Make the Road New York, we had seen how employers regularly violated minimum-wage and overtime laws with impunity because workers had no good mechanisms for enforcing their rights without fear of retaliation. (And I had seen the same problem at Columbia University, where the anti-sweatshop rules were going unenforced, and in the Chinese restaurant case in law school, where wage, hour, and housing laws had been ignored.)
We were determined that the same thing would not happen with this new right. We also knew that the New York law would become a model for municipalities around the country, and we wanted to set a high standard. We drove the Speaker’s lawyers crazy. They were totally unaccustomed to this kind of back-and-forth. For years, they had drafted laws the way they wanted and presented them to other council members or advocates as faits accomplis. But the power dynamics were different than usual, so there were real compromises within the negotiations.
In May, with an agreement finally at hand, the city council passed the law with overwhelming support, making Mayor Bloomberg’s veto irrelevant. At the press conference at City Hall before the vote, our coalition and Christine Quinn were all smiles, pretending that there had never been bad blood between us. Half an hour later, public advocate Bill de Blasio stood alone in the same spot, giving his own press conference criticizing Quinn for having been the roadblock, congratulating the coalition on our win, and insisting that as mayor he would champion an expansion of the paid-sick-days law to even cover workers at the smallest firms.
I felt sorry for him that day. He had been our champion during the winter, putting crucial pressure on Quinn to come to the negotiating table, and now she was reaping the political rewards while he stood alone. But of course it was de Blasio who had the last laugh. New York voters understood that he was the real progressive in the race, and neither 32BJ’s endorsement nor Quinn’s newfound support for the paid-sick-days law could salvage her reputation. In September de Blasio closed an enormous gap in the polls and swept to victory. We got our paid-sick-days law and a more progressive mayor. Across the city, with the support of the Working Families Party and grassroots groups like Make the Road Action and progressive labor unions, insurgent candidates for the city council won resounding victories and the progressive caucus had grown to twenty members when the new session began in January. With so many votes and the new mayor’s support, the caucus was able to elect its own cofounder, Melissa Mark-Viverito, to the Speaker’s chair. All of a sudden a city that had for twenty years been governed by the anti-worker, pro–Wall Street mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg was now being led by proudly progressive Mayor de Blasio and Speaker Mark-Viverito.
In the ensuing years the paid-sick-days movement rode the momentum from New York to victories in three dozen cities and multiple states. We still haven’t passed a federal law, but tens of millions of workers are now protected by these state and local ones.
In between these exciting policy victories came the less glamorous but crucial daily work of building the Local Progress network: recruiting new members, establishing meaningful relationships with them, giving them the one-on-one support that they need, holding workshops and conferences—essentially, organizing these independent political actors into a collective institution. For the first three years of the network’s existence we muddled through this work, struggling to achieve significant growth or generate deep buy-in from more than a couple dozen of the network’s leaders. That began to change in the spring of 2015, when an organizer named Sarah Johnson told me she might be interested in coming to work for the project.
Sarah and I had met three years earlier when I volunteered on an insurgent state assembly campaign that she was managing. We stayed in touch and then, at the end of 2013, our paths crossed again. From her perch at the Working Families Party, Sarah had been in charge of the citywide effort to elect enough progressive city council members to permit the progressive caucus to control the chamber. She had supervised all the different campaign managers across the city who were trying to elect a crop of young, primarily black and brown progressives against more establishment Democrats. More than anyone else, it was because of her that the caucus grew from eleven to twenty members after that fateful fall election.
In the weeks after the election, Brad Lander reached out to both Sarah and me to see if we would come work with him and Speaker Mark-Viverito in the new council. Both of us were honored by the offer and intrigued by the chance to help implement genuine progressive governance in the city.
But our personal lives got in the way. Rachael was wrapping up her dissertation at NYU and had applied to university teaching jobs around the country. She had a slew of job interviews and ultimately received a plum offer to become a tenure-track assistant professor in the English department at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was an incredible job in an absolutely gorgeous part of the country, and since it was the only permanent job offer she received, there really was not much to discuss. She was going to move to Santa Barbara. We could have managed a long-distance relationship for a year or two, but it seemed foolish to me to start establishing deep professional connections in the New York City government if my partner was going to be in California. Much better, we both decided, for me to continue working with community-based organizations and local elected officials from around the country. Amy and Andrew were more than happy to let me keep working for the Center for Popular Democracy from home in Santa Barbara as long as I was willing to travel frequently. So I thanked Brad for the job offer but told him I was moving to sunnier environs.
Sarah found herself in a similar position. Her husband finished his psychiatry residency in New York and got a two-year fellowship in Boston; rather than spend every weekend on Amtrak, she decided she wanted a job that could travel with her from Boston to wherever they ended up next.
Over a hipster brunch in downtown Brooklyn, Sarah and I talked about how we might work together to make Local Progress into something powerful. Unlike me, Sarah had been trained as a real organizer. She had years of experience building relationships with elected officials, getting them to work together on a shared agenda, and navigating complicated coalition politics. I had been trained as a lawyer and policy wonk and been shooting from the hip ever since I arrived at the Center for Popular Democracy. Whereas I was improvisational and impulsive, Sarah was methodical and strategic. She would make a perfect collaborator, bringing to the project all of the skills and experience that I lacked. I was overjoyed when she called to tell me that she would take the job as my co-director.
Over the following year, I watched as Sarah and Brad refined our vision for the network, laying out a series of goals and strategies that would attract new members, funders, and allies. From them I began to understand that there were two very different ways of engaging in politics, particularly from the perspective of an elected official. The approach most culturally familiar
to us conceived of the elected official as the protagonist, a leader who could achieve policy and political victories that also promoted his (it is still almost always a man’s) personal career ambitions. But there was a different way to engage in politics. You could play it as a team sport. And in this version, elected officials worked in partnership with one another—and with constituents and activists outside of government—to build their collective power and advance a shared agenda. In this version the elected official saw her (in this case, it’s often a woman’s) role not as protagonist and leader but as one important player with a particular set of tools and powers who could help advance the coalition’s shared political project. Community organizations could identify problems and generate public demand for action; policy experts could adapt the existing best practices to fit the local policy, political, and legal environment; political operatives could help organize the institutional and media drumbeat to demand action; and elected officials could be vehicles for that action, pushing legislation forward and demanding that their colleagues get on board.
It was this second version of politics, I realized, that had led to the minimum-wage victory in Seattle and the paid-sick-days wins in New York and elsewhere. Elected officials had not been the leaders of those campaigns. They had been genuine partners with the outside advocates who were generating and marshaling public support for the policy changes. It was no coincidence that the same local legislators who had helped win so many legislative victories were the ones who had sat around our Washington, D.C., conference table at the first meeting of Local Progress: they were interested in building the network precisely because they knew that they would be most effective as members of a team and a movement.
I took two important lessons from those victories in Seattle and New York: first, the team sport version of politics is dramatically more effective and enjoyable than the protagonist version. Second, elected officials are afraid of being criticized, and therefore going on the offensive with bold demands and creative tactics is usually a much better way to get things done than asking nicely and being patient.
Over the next three years I watched with admiration as Sarah transformed the network. She implemented a deliberate plan to prioritize the recruitment of black and Latinx elected officials, particularly black and Latina women. She hired new organizers to focus on strengthening our work in the South. And, most important, she transformed the network by empowering the elected officials to take on real leadership over our programming and strategy, which led to incredible buy-in and enthusiasm from them.
Three days after my ALS diagnosis, I called Sarah to give her the news. She was predictably shocked and, like most people, didn’t know what to say. I was relieved, however, to know that Local Progress would be in excellent hands without me. I could take a few months off to get my bearings without worrying that the network would suffer. In the aftermath of the Trump election victory, funders from progressive foundations were eager to identify ways they could invest in resistance. Sarah and the elected leadership of Local Progress provided that opportunity, and in the ensuing months local elected officials from our network played a key role in the resistance to Trump’s Muslim ban and Jeff Sessions’s policy of attacking sanctuary cities.
By 2018, Local Progress had grown to over eight hundred members, ten staff, and a $2 million annual budget. On issues from worker rights to affordable housing and from police accountability to immigrant empowerment, the members of Local Progress are achieving many of the most important progressive public policy victories in the country. In Philadelphia, Council Member Helen Gym sponsored a law to guarantee workers a predictable schedule and fair workweek; in Austin, Council Member Greg Casar passed laws protecting residents from deportation and reforming the police department; in Minneapolis, Council President Lisa Bender and a crew of other Local Progress members passed a comprehensive twenty-year plan to combat climate change and racial inequity through smart housing, infrastructure, and budget policies; and members like Ayanna Pressley of Boston and Jesús “Chuy” García of Chicago have graduated from Local Progress into high-profile seats in Congress.
To be clear, victories at the local level have their limitations. Ultimately, access to five paid sick days a year—while important and valuable—will not transform anybody’s life. And although raising the national minimum wage to $15 would bring millions of people out of poverty, our movement has won this reform only in a few big cities. Still, these victories have altered the national political discourse, laying the groundwork for broader transformations. And the lessons I learned about listening carefully, collaborating deeply, making bold demands, and acting decisively apply equally to federal politics. Americans deserve a political revolution, and I believe that day is coming.
CHAPTER SIX
FED UP
I settled down into my aisle seat in the small commuter jet. The warm sunrise bathed the mountains in gold and made the white Spanish architecture of Santa Barbara’s tiny airport pop. I exhaled and smiled with anticipation. This trip, in late August 2016, would be one to remember for me and my colleagues at the Center for Popular Democracy.
I looked at my phone. A group text chain informed me that my comrades’ flights had left on time from Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere, but that the weather at O’Hare might create connection problems later in the day. An email confirmed that our press advisory had been blasted out to the in-boxes of most of America’s economics reporters. I’d been neither subtle nor modest when composing it: “7 Federal Reserve Presidents and Governor to Meet with Fed Up Coalition in Jackson Hole. Officials to field questions in unprecedented on-the-record session with 120 community leaders.” I scrolled through Twitter to see what people were saying about the upcoming Fed symposium in Wyoming’s stunningly beautiful Grand Teton National Park and whether we were getting any coverage.
A tweet from Binyamin Appelbaum, the New York Times’ chief Fed reporter, announced that he had just published his profile of the Fed Up campaign, previewing the meeting we were about to have in Jackson Hole: “A 32-year-old lawyer decided liberals should pay more attention to the Fed. So he launched a national movement.” The tweet was a shot of adrenaline straight into my ego. It vindicated years of hard work dating back to my clerkship with Judge Scheindlin; it cast me as both a visionary and a movement builder; it said that I was shifting national politics to the left. It was exactly the public recognition that I had yearned and fought for.
Yet I knew that, to the movement allies with whom I worked most closely, the tweet’s grandiosity, exaggeration, and internal incoherence would be clear: Fed Up was a very clever “grass-tops” campaign, one that paired savvy media work and political relationships with a light level of community-based organizing to create the veneer of mass support. By definition, a “national movement” could never be launched by one person. So long as Fed Up was the tightly controlled effort of a Yale-educated white male lawyer, it would never approach the transformative political power that would be unleashed by a genuine mass movement of organized working-class people who care deeply about the politics of money.
I quickly read the accompanying article, which gave a pretty fair summary of the campaign’s successes over the past two years while also acknowledging that we had not yet shifted America’s monetary policy. And it certainly cast me as the hero. None of the dozens of working-class people of color who had given the campaign its legitimacy and its moral force were quoted.
I replied to Binya’s tweet: “This tweet is too embarrassing for me to retweet. But thanks.”
I took a deep breath, trying to savor the moment and to look at the other side of things. Don’t sell yourself short, I thought. Be proud of what you’ve created. The Federal Reserve is the most powerful economic policy-making body in the country, but progressives have ignored it since the 1970s. We have had decades of growing inequality and flat wages, and yet there has been no concerted political effort to change the policies of the institution most responsible for this sta
tus quo. You’ve changed that. And as a result of the campaign’s work, the Federal Reserve is talking about race and inequality for the first time ever. Fed policy makers and economists and reporters are questioning whether we could actually push for genuine full employment. The Democratic Party platform is once again highlighting the importance of the Fed. And because of you, the next president, Hillary Clinton, has said that the institution must be made accountable to the public and not to Wall Street.
It may not actually be a national movement, but it’s a pretty damn impressive political accomplishment. Not bad for four years of work. And you’ve got a whole career ahead of you to build on this. Enjoy the moment. You’ve earned it.
The small jet took off and circled over the vast Pacific blue. The early-morning sun covered our whole plane in orange warmth. I looked down at my picturesque new home of Santa Barbara. Rachael and I had been there for less than two years, but it already felt deeply comfortable. Although my success with Fed Up was making me proud and hopeful, its significance was dwarfed by a different recent development in my life: three months earlier, Rachael had given birth to a wonderfully chubby boy, whom we named Carl King, in honor of my mother’s father—a proud, stoic, clever journalist and translator who went by Carol or Carl or Charles, depending on whether he was living in Romania, Austria, England, or Israel during those inconceivably tumultuous decades from 1920 to 1998. We gave Carl his mother’s last name because, well, screw the patriarchy.