Tag: Election Day

Five million poor, low income voters could make the difference Tuesday / by Mark Gruenberg

Rev. Barber, co-chair of the national Poor People’s Campaign | Jose Luis Magana/AP

In a massive pre-election push the Poor People’s campaign has contacted 5.5 million low-wealth and poor registered voters who could deliver the GOP a massive defeat on Election Day. The organization headed into the final weekend before Election Day intent on ensuring they get to the polls and that their votes are counted, too, despite voter repression in various states.

The theme of this last drive: “If you ever needed to vote for democracy, the time to vote is right now.”

The campaign set a goal of five million voter contacts in states with chapters, but particularly in 15 targeted states, including North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Illinois, Arizona, Kentucky, Kansas, Nevada, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Overall, it’s operating in 30 states and more than 140 cities, Barber said.

It raced past that mark four days before the rally, hitting 5,504,713 contacts by the time the event began. Contacts included 700,000 Floridians, 209,440 in Arizona and 731,785 in Georgia, a key purple “swing” state.  In 2020, the campaign contacted 2.1 million people total.

“Vote for democracy, vote for health care, vote for freedom. It’s all in the balloting,” urged Malik Gray of Tallahassee, Fla., one of dozens of PPC volunteers who spoke on the organization’s nationwide zoom mobilization call/rally on the evening of Nov. 2.

But the point is to get people the volunteer PPC canvassers contact to vote. Many are registered but not voted in years, if ever, “because no one contacted them” or listened to their concerns, said campaign co-chairs the Revs. William Barber and Liz Theoharis.

“The power to transform the entire political landscape is in the hands and in the votes of poor and low-income people,” Theoharis explained. “All over the country, people are hurting.”

Can make the difference

So turning them out on Nov. 8 can make a difference in the close races in target states, Barber and the others said. He used his home state, North Carolina, as an example.

“There were 1 million poor and low-wealth people there who didn’t vote” in 2020 even though they were registered, he explained. “If we had had 20% of them, the outcome would have been quite different” from Democratic nominee Joe Biden’s narrow loss to Republican Donald Trump in the Tar Heel State.

That’s what happened in Pennsylvania in 2020, Barber added. The campaign contacted tens of thousands of people there, helping Biden win by 110,000 votes.

This time, it’s contacted 614,991 voters, urging those who support its agenda of diverting federal funds from the military to domestic programs, raising the minimum wage, enacting strong worker rights, improving housing and public schools and providing health care for all. Two of the volunteers speaking via zoom specifically endorsed government-run single-payer health care, too.

Pennsylvania is particularly important because it has an open Republican-held U.S. Senate seat and open Democratic-held governorship. The Senate race between pro-worker Democratic Lieut. Gov. John Fetterman and Trumpite Republican Dr. Mehmet Oz could break that chamber’s 50-50 tie.

And Pennsylvania’s governor controls the election machinery in the Keystone State.  Attorney General Josh Shapiro (D) faces a Trumpite Republican state senator who has led the former Oval Office occupant’s campaign to erase not just Biden’s margin, but the votes of poor and low-wealth people in Philadelphia.

Other volunteers highlighted other problems poor and low-wealth people face—problems they’re using on the campaign trail to attract people to vote on Nov. 8.

“There are millions of paid caregivers who are earning less than $15 an hour,” the minimum wage floor the campaign is lobbying for, said caregiver Teresa Muldrow of Philadelphia. “And there are millions more who are unpaid.” They’re family members.

“The expanded child care tax credit lifted 30 million people out of poverty in 2021” when lawmakers used it to aid poor- and low-wealth people left with little or no income due to the coronavirus pandemic. “But Congress refused to extend it” though the modern-day plague still afflicts the U.S. Restoring the tax credit and making it permanent is is a Poor People’s Campaign goal.

“Our public schools aren’t funded enough,” said Anam El-Jabali, a Palestinian refugee and mother of five from Chicago’s southwest suburbs. “This is why we demand quality, equitable and diverse schooling.”

“I want folks to understand this is serious,” Barber said. “We march, we organize, we vote. But the one thing we don’t do is quit,” signaling the campaign will continue after Election Day, to hold politicians’ feet to the fire.

“Voting is the guaranteed way to shift public policy—if the masses get together” to elect officeholders who will work to end the plight of the nation’s 140 million-plus poor and low-wealth people, Barber added.

“If the extremists” who oppress the poor “didn’t know this, they wouldn’t be fighting us so hard. They want the lobbyists and the greedy to use the vote,” but not the rest of us.

Mark Gruenberg is head of the Washington, D.C., bureau of People’s World. He is also the editor of the union news service Press Associates Inc. (PAI). Known for his reporting skills, sharp wit, and voluminous knowledge of history, Mark is a compassionate interviewer but a holy terror when going after big corporations and their billionaire owners.El galardonado periodista Mark Gruenberg es el director de la oficina de People’s World en Washington, D.C. También es editor del servicio de noticias sindicales Press Associates Inc. (PAI).

People’s World, November 4, 2022, https://www.peoplesworld.org/

Labor Day: Unions Have a Stake in Ending Minority Rule in the United States / by Mark Weisbrot

Photograph Source: Bastian Greshake Tzovaras – CC BY-SA 2.0

This first appeared on MSN.

In 2021, just 10.3 percent of American workers were members of unions, less than half the proportion we had four decades prior. This collapse in union membership didn’t happen in Canada; it happened in the United States, for a number of reasons that were specific to this country, including unpleasant changes in labor law and the practices of corporations that have taken place here over the past 40 years.

Today, in more than 40 percent of union election campaigns, employers are charged with violating federal law, often for illegally firing workers for union activity.

The assault on labor has contributed greatly to soaring income inequality and stagnant living standards for workers in the United States. From 1979 to 2019, productivity (the income generated from an hour of labor) has grown by 60 percent; yet the typical worker’s real (inflation-adjusted) compensation rose by just 14 percent. But wages used to rise with productivity: from 1948 to 1979, productivity rose by 118 percent, and real compensation increased by 108 percent.

Now come Republicans and opponents of labor with accusations that unions are a “tool” of the Democratic Party. Never mind that Republicans have consistently opposedlegislation that would strengthen workers’ rights, increase their income (including increases in the minimum wage), or even provide them with health care (Medicare and Medicaid). Many unions are also multiracial organizations and cannot stomach the Republican Party’s growing commitment to racism.

But at present, there is another reason for the partisan divide that labor — like it or not  — must deal with. As many political experts have recognized, the current political system is one of minority rule. Republicans are able to capture and hold political power through elections and institutions in which the majority of the population is effectively sidelined. Republicans also now control the Supreme Court by a 6-3 majority; this is perhaps the most obvious example where labor cannot ignore how difficult it will be to organize unions within a judicial system stacked by Republicans.

Think of the Starbucks workers, who have fought tenaciously to organize 326 locations, and are finding that they have to fight legal battles to force the company to negotiate in good faith  — which is the law under the National Labor Relations Act.

There is currently proposed legislation in both the House and Senate to expand the Supreme Court, which would help remove some of these anti-labor constraints. This may well happen if Democrats win Congress and hold on to the presidency.

But there are other structural elements of minority rule that give Republicans power far beyond their actual or potential electoral support. The current 50-50 split in the Senate has 43 million more votes for the 50 Democrats than for the 50 Republicans. And the filibuster — which could be easily abolished — gives Republicans another huge helping of undemocratic power. Corrections of these gross injustices at the margins  — e.g., statehood for Washington, DC, which is an important end in itself, for democracy  — could make a big difference.

Both George W. Bush and Donald Trump came to power in elections in which they lost the popular vote. We could, with some legislative changes, elect the president by popular vote, as other democracies do.

Electoral reforms that increase turnout, such as increasing polling locations and ballot drop boxes, making Election Day a federal holiday, and same-day voter registration, could also make a difference. It is not clear that Republicans could win national elections if people here voted at the same participation rate as most of Europe has. But Republicans fight for the opposite: last year Republicans in state legislatures, beginning soon after being sworn in, introduced more than 440 bills aimed at restricting voting.

Then there is Trump, and many of his followers, who clearly do not think it is necessary to accept the result of a democratic election if they don’t like the result. These Republicans are currently trying to put “election deniers” in offices where they could possibly influence election outcomes in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, Arizona, and many other places.

These are among the most serious threats to democratic elections in the United States that we have seen in many decades. Two months from this Labor Day, members of unions, as well as working people throughout the country, will have some important choices to make in our national elections.

Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, in Washington, D.C. and president of Just Foreign Policy. He is also the author of Failed: What the “Experts” Got Wrong About the Global Economy (Oxford University Press, 2015).