Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, was standing on a 19th Street sidewalk in South Side Wednesday, deep into a discussion about the effectiveness of union efforts in the 2024 election cycle, when this creepy pest showed up and exhibited complete disregard for the urgency of the decision facing voters in five days.
“When unions are campaigning,” Weingarten was saying at the time, “when working folks are campaigning for a candidate …. ”
That’s when Weingarten paused. Her gaze suddenly shifted slightly to the left. An interloper! This wouldn’t do, not when the future of Western civilization is at stake. She calmly reached out her left hand, which then hovered inches over a reporter’s shoulder and, with a flick of a finger, sent a spotted lanternfly tumbling to the concrete.
“It’s the teacher in me,” she explained.
Then, without blinking, she continued with her thought – that people have faith in working folks, and in unions, and tend to listen to their opinions about things like politics. This is especially true regarding the working folks her union represents: teachers and nurses.
Weingarten was in town as part of her union’s get-out-the-vote bus tour, which stopped by the AFT’s Pittsburgh headquarters on the South Side on Wednesday to rally for all those union volunteers who’ve been beating the pavement for the Harris/Walz ticket.
Before heading inside, however, Weingarten stood beside a blue charter bus with “AFT Votes” emblazoned on the side (a second line read: “Progress is Possible”), and offered her take on how things are playing out in what we’re hearing is the most important election of our lifetimes.
She stressed the importance of union voices speaking out in support of Vice President Kamala Harris and her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The AFT represents 600,000 members in battleground states (we got this number from a union news release).
Weingarten said support from AFT members is more powerful when combined with that from other unions – the trades, the United Steelworkers, the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, unions representing machinists, public employees, service workers, on and on.
“When we’re doing it together, we’re signaling workers trust Kamala and Tim,” she said.
Union efforts across the country have gotten a lot of attention the past year or so. Last summer, there was that big strike, and subsequent union victory, by the United Auto Workers. You may remember President Joe Biden walking a UAW picket line — he was the first president to join workers on the line. Then there was the writers’ and actors’ strikes. Those were just the high-profile actions. Locally, in the just the past few months, organized nurses have fought for and won better salaries and working conditions.
We haven’t written much about AFT’s efforts, so Weingarten filled us in.
“We had 185 organizing victories between July 2022 and July 2024,” she said. “Shops that became AFT union. Since I’ve been involved, we’ve never had that level of successful organizing.”
Some of those organizing campaigns have been big — in June, more than 27,000 employees of Fairfax County Public Schools became union members. Others are small. Weingarten mentioned a successful union drive at a small Ohio library.
The point she kept hammering is that workers increasingly view unions as key to obtaining better wages and working conditions. “What you’re seeing, over and over again, is that regular folks understand that to have that pathway to a better life, unions are the way to do it,” she said.
And of course, she added, Harris is the choice for union workers because her policies support working-class people. She mentioned, among others, proposals to expand Medicare to include home health care, tax cuts for working people, help for first-time home buyers and small businesses, and taking on price gougers.
“Look and compare what Trump is doing,” Weingarten said. “Divide, divide, divide. Demean, demean, demean. The economic policies I’ve heard from him are tariffs, which is a 20% sales tax on people on everyday goods.”
“And in the last few days, they’re letting seep out what they really want to do,” she added. She mentioned House Speaker Mike Johnson’s comments about wanting to kill the Affordable Care Act and allow health insurance companies to once again deny coverage based on preexisting conditions.
Then Weingarten laid into billionaire Elon Musk, who has spent the past several weeks literally leaping on stages and offering glances of his exposed belly in his support for Trump.
Trump has said he’d task Musk with auditing the federal government and suggesting drastic changes.
“What does Musk want to do?” Weingarten asked. “He wants to cut $2 trillion out of the budget. What is that? Social Security, Medicare, public schools. Letting the billionaires do whatever they want. Basically, Trump is a wholly owned subsidiary of Musk, or vice versa.”
The stakes? We’ve heard this before, and it was discussed in the rally by speaker after speaker. It bears repeating here. Why type of country will the United States become in the next few years? Who will have a voice?
Trump’s vision is quite dark for union folks who’ve been fighting to stake their claim in American workplaces.
“It is remaking America so that it is not about lifting everyone up, it’s about coddling and supporting only the people who already have control and power,” she said.
***
Minutes later, at the rally, the atmosphere was upbeat, but you could sense a bit of nervousness about how things will play out next week. Speakers expressed confidence that all of that door knocking and all those phone calls will pay off, that Harris’ message will get through. But then that uneasy feeling emerges in the belly. For progressives, November 2016 is like Michael Myers, the pesky nightmare that won’t go away. (Yeah, we wrote this on Halloween; what the hell, we’re on strike.) Maybe Harris will be the one to do a Jamie Lee Curtis smackdown of the left’s boogeyman.
OK, maybe that’s over the top and a bit silly. We’ll let the professionals take over. Hadley Haas, a candidate for a Pennsylvania House seat representing District 44, was more succinct when she told the crowd she was “nauseously optimistic.” Everyone nodded. Yeah, they feel it, too.
Well, it’s getting late, or early (past 1 a.m.; PUP’s duties are many), so we’re going to sum up a few of the rally’s highlights before we nod off:
“When I started teaching, I started at $16,000 in 1996. I understand what it means to wait for a paycheck. I understand what it means to save. I understand what it means to have a hard day’s work, to put in your time and feel dignified and responsible and proud at the end of the day.”
“I’m third generation union, folks. My grandpap was U.S. Steel Donora, my dad was AFT, and I was 28 years PSEA [Pennsylvania State Education Association].”
“We are on the precipice of something that can be amazing or frightening. And I’m choosing to look on the amazing side, and I’m choosing hope.”
– Nicole Ruscitto, candidate for state Senate seat representing the 37th District
“If you are a Pittsburgh constituent, you have lived through every single ad that has come on television, you have received all the mailers, you cannot watch TV, you can’t browse the internet, you cannot peruse social media, if you walk outside and you get in your car you might not want to listen to the radio, if you go into your mailbox there are the little notes. We’ve had famous people and important people, all descending on Western Pennsylvania.”
“We have seen everybody from Viola Davis – she’s fabulous – to ex-presidents to future presidents and everybody in between. And at the end of the day, these last six days, the only thing that’s left, the only thing that matters, is who are going to be the last folks standing. Who are going to be the people who fight through the finish line …. all that’s going to be left, Pittsburgh, is you deciding what direction you want our country to go into. The choice is yours.”
— U.S. Rep. Summer Lee, D-Swissvale, who represents the state’s 12th District
“You’ve probably read the stories. My opponent spent a little more money than I me. … Jess Yass gave him $12 million. One guy. We have 11,000 donors, he’s got less than 100. Let me repeat that: 11,000 to less than 100. But that’s why we’re gong to win. I don’t have Jeff Yass, but I have you. We’ve got a grassroots army all over this state.”
(Jeff Yass is a billionaire Wall Street trader and Pennsylvania’s wealthiest person.)
— Eugene DePasquale, Democratic candidate for Pennsylvania attorney general
“Today I was knocking on doors, trying to get out the vote, and I talked to a 78-year-old gentleman who never voted in an election, he never felt his vote mattered, he never felt there was any difference in the parties, never felt there was any reason to exercise his franchise. But for the first time, in 2024, he’s going to go to the polls next week and vote for Kamala Harris and Democrats all up and down the ticket.”
— Nick Pisciottano, candidate for Pennsylvania state Senate seat representing District 45
Steve is a photojournalist and writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, but he is currently on strike and working as a Union Progress co-editor. Reach him at smellon@unionprogress.com.