Police Unions are Losing the War on Criminal Justice Reform

Law enforcement organizations have long treated mass incarceration as a job creation program. In 2020, the tide began turning against them.

November 11, 2020 Jay Willis THE APPEAL 


Law enforcement organizations have long treated mass incarceration as a job creation program. In 2020, the tide began turning against them.

This commentary is part of The Appeal’s collection of opinion and analysis.

Law enforcement unions are maybe the most powerful force in politics that most voters never think twice about. By quietly dumping millions of dollars in key prosecutor elections and ballot initiative fights, these organizations manage to affect everything in the criminal legal system’s orbit, usually while flying well beneath the political radar. Police unions are sort of like gravity, if gravity played a significant role in enabling agents of the state to systematically terrorize communities of color without facing meaningful consequences.

In races that take place outside the quadrennial spending bonanzas for control of the White House, these strategic allocations of time and outlays of resources can be decisive in elections, especially since no cohesive pro-reform interest group exists to counteract their influence. (Tight-knit, well-organized police unions can coordinate in ways that the larger but more heterogenous and dispersed coalition of people who favor criminal justice reform cannot.) One recent study found that law enforcement groups have spent about $87 million in local and state elections over the past 20 years, including almost $65 million in Los Angeles alone. At the federal level, their recent campaign contributions and lobbying expenditures approach $50 million, according to The Guardian.

Such expenditures are savvy investments for police unions, who keenly understand the value of having sympathetic friends in high places. Because prosecutors work so closely with police, they have a strong incentive to develop a friendly relationship with rank-and-file officers, even if earning that trust comes at the price of turning a blind eye to abuse: It is not a coincidence that researchers have tracked the rise of police unions to an increase in on-the-job police killings. In a country where law-and-order rhetoric is deeply embedded in the cultural zeitgeist, if you’re a prosecutor intent on keeping your job, filing charges against the badge-wearing hand that feeds might not feel worth the retaliatory smear campaign that will inevitably follow.

In recent years, however—and especially as a result of the sustained protests of police violence in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis—people have grown more attuned to how these organizations bend the criminal legal system to their will and stymie efforts to reform it. A growing number of elected officials have pledged to refuse the support of law enforcement organizations; in California, a coalition of reform-minded prosecutors has been lobbying for a state bar ethics rule that would prohibit DAs from accepting donations from these sources altogether, arguing that prosecutors cannot ethically prosecute police officers if they are receiving the support of their unions.

“The ties that bind elected officials to police unions must be broken,” the Los Angeles Times editorial board wrote in June. “An elected official considering whether to prosecute officers should not be, in essence, on the political payroll of the agency defending the very same people.”

On Election Day 2020 in California, voters delivered police unions a series of resounding defeats that threaten to flip this time-honored paradigm on its head.

In the race for Los Angeles County District Attorney, reform-oriented challenger George Gascón ousted incumbent Jackie Lacey, earning control of a sprawling office that employs nearly 1,000 line prosecutors and retains jurisdiction over more than 10 million people. Lacey was the clear favorite of law enforcement organizations, who spent some $5 million boosting her candidacy and attacking her opponent’s. And for good reason: During Lacey’s eight years on the job, she reviewed more than 250 fatal shootings by on-duty law enforcement officers. She filed charges in one of them.

Occasionally, Lacey’s penchant for lenience extended beyond even that of high-profile police officials. None other than then-LAPD chief Charlie Beck called on Lacey to charge one of his officers, Clifford Proctor, in the 2015 killing of Brendon Glenn, an unarmed, homeless Black man. Lacey declined. “As independent prosecutors, we’re supposed to look at the evidence and the law,” she said. “And that’s what we did.” When the time came for Lacey to seek re-election, it seems that grateful police unions did not forget her choice.

Gascón’s résumé is one that might seem as if it would appeal to law enforcement types: A former LAPD patrol officer who rose to the rank of assistant chief, he also served as police chief in San Francisco and Mesa, Arizona, and as district attorney in San Francisco, before returning to run for DA in the city where he grew up. But Gascón is among the group of prosecutors who have disclaimed the support of police unions, and his campaign pledges include reducing the population of the county’s chronically overcrowded jail system, reopening investigations of high-profile police shootings that Lacey had closed, and declining to seek the death penalty altogether. For the unions, loyalty apparently extends only so far as it will allow their members to evade accountability.

Their efforts echoed those of the San Francisco Police Officers Association during last year’s DA election, when it spent some $650,000 on, among other things, mailers that declared progressive DA candidate Chesa Boudin to be “the #1 choice of criminals and gang members.” These scaremongering predictions were insufficient to prevent the city’s voters from electing Boudin—also a member of the no-money-from-cop-unions coalition—as Gascón’s successor.

Further down the ballot in 2020, California voters rejected Proposition 20, which would have reclassified certain misdemeanor theft offenses as felonies and reduced the availability of parole. (Incidentally, this would have rolled back the reforms of Proposition 47, a successful 2014 referendum co-authored by Gascón.) In other words, Proposition 20 would have resulted in more incarceration for more people for longer periods of time, which is why law enforcement organizations contributed roughly $2 million to the campaign to pass it.

Police unions also opposed San Francisco’s Proposition E, which eliminated the city’s minimum police staffing requirement, and Los Angeles’s Measure J, which earmarked hundreds of millions of dollars in public resources for non-police community investment. The Los Angeles County Professional Peace Officers Association, which represents sheriff’s deputies, claimed that Measure J would “cripple public safety,” and local law enforcement organizations combined to spend more than $3.5 million fighting it. Both measures nonetheless passed with overwhelming support.

Law enforcement unions reliably oppose criminal justice reform for the simple reason that any attempts to reduce the criminal justice system’s footprint will make police less relevant. (Over the years, they have opposedeverything from body camera mandates to the simple requirement that officers wear nametags.) For them, mass incarceration is the world’s most lucrative job creation machine. To justify their lavish spending habits and the generous rules that apply to their conduct, police always frame themselves as a mere half-step ahead of staving off mass chaos, warning that any abrogation of their authority by naive do-gooders will put everyone in danger.

What this year’s election results demonstrate is that people understand the lies that infuse this narrative, which conspicuously omits from the ledger the staggering human costs that policing imposes on the communities it purports to keep safe. These losses won’t put an end to incidents of police brutality, or any other strain of rot that pervades the American criminal justice system. But they do signal that police unions are likelier to have to answer for their myriad failures, instead of relying on beneficiaries of their largesse to pretend that these failures do not exist.

Jay Willis is a senior contributor at The Appeal.

 Local Unions Defy AFL-CIO in Push to Oust Police Unions

Several local unions have moved to oust police unions, despite the federation's approach that collective bargaining can be used for police reform.

June 30, 2020 Rebecca Rainey and Holly Otterbein POLTICO

Chicago police officers face off with protesters. 

Natasha Moustache/Getty Images

The nation’s labor movement is splitting over police reform in the wake of George Floyd’s death.

Local unions are defying leaders of the AFL-CIO, who have rejected calls to cut ties with the labor federation's law enforcement arm and stressed the importance of collective bargaining instead to counter the use of excessive force. Several local unions, including those affiliated with the AFL-CIO, have moved to oust police unions within their locals and remove officers from schools and other workplaces. They argue that police have used their bargaining power to resist reform and protect those who have killed unarmed African Americans.

The vastly different approaches to solving what has become a major election year issue have not only exposed the rift within the labor movement but also threaten to diminish law enforcement unions in liberal cities and could even affect the behind-the-scenes race to succeed AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka.

“There are a lot of unions that are very concerned about police brutality,” said Lowell Peterson, executive director of Writers Guild of America-East, which adopted a resolution calling on the AFL-CIO to disassociate itself from the International Union of Police Associations, the federation’s police union affiliate. “There’s definitely a lot of talk in the labor movement about, ‘Why is this happening and what can we as unions do about it?’”

The nation’s second-largest teachers’ union, United Teachers Los Angeles, last week voted to eliminate police in Los Angeles public schools and “redirect funding to mental health and counseling” for students. The Chicago school board voted down a similar measure to cancel a $33 million contract with city police that was backed by the Chicago Teachers’ Union in protests and rallies throughout the week.

The Martin Luther King County Labor Council, a body of labor organizations representing more than 100,000 workers in the Seattle area, voted to expel the Seattle Police Officers Guild earlier this month. The Association of Flight Attendants, which sits on the AFL-CIO’s executive council, passed a resolution demanding that police unions embrace change “or be removed from the labor movement.”

Even the leader of the Service Employees International Union, the second largest union in the country, which itself represents some law enforcement employees, has expressed openness to the idea of ejecting police unions from the movement, though she has stopped short of endorsing the move.

“That's an option,” said SEIU President Mary Kay Henry of the Seattle federation’s decision to oust the police union. "I think another option is to use the union structure and leadership to educate and engage every member” in “re-imagining policing and criminal justice."

That would have been unheard of just months ago — and demonstrates how much has changed since Floyd’s death at the hands of a Minneapolis cop sparked nationwide protests against police brutality.

While labor activists say it is unlikely that Trumka would ever support efforts to expel law enforcement unions from the labor movement, the push from locals and some national unions to ostracize the police, as well as the larger Black Lives Matter movement, could drive more modest change.

Police unions have fought back, saying that no one forced local governments to sign collective bargaining agreements that contain provisions protecting police and warning that attacks on law enforcement unions are part of a pattern of going after organized labor.

“No contract is rammed down the throat of a city or jurisdiction. They signed it, they negotiated it, they agreed to it,” said Jim Pasco, executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.

Sam Cabral, the president of the International Union of Police Associations, slammed Trumka’s response to the unrest, writing in a June 12 letter that the federation's comments regarding America’s “history of racism and police violence against black people” were “inflammatory and patently false.” Cabral said he wouldn’t be willing to sit down with those who “have already indicted” law enforcement “based on one horrible incident.”

California’s largest police unions ran an ad in the Washington Post earlier this month calling for a national use of force standard, misconduct registry and “ongoing and frequent” training. Trumka also wrote in a recent op-ed that the labor movement is calling on Congress to adopt reforms including a chokehold ban and demilitarization.

Still, AFL-CIO leaders have maintained that the best way for the group to address the issue of police brutality is to “engage” its affiliates “rather than isolate them.”

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, an affiliate of the federation, said many members of the movement believe it’s important to have a conversation with police unions, “to the extent that they were willing to have it, for them to change and for us to change the criminal justice system.”

At the same time, the AFT recently passed a resolution calling to remove police from schools and instead train security personnel as “peace officers.”

Part of the solution, SEIU’s Henry suggested, is changing police collective bargaining practices.

“The role of the labor movement is to be a vehicle for the structural change that the Movement for Black Lives is demanding in policing and criminal justice all over this country,” she said.

Some progressives say those collective bargaining agreements often help shield officers accused of misconduct.

Dozens of city police departments, including in Minneapolis, have added provisions to their contracts that delay officer interrogations after suspected misconduct, according to a 2017 study. Agreements with police agencies in Austin, Baltimore, Chicago and Washington, D.C., have included language that mandated the removal of disciplinary records from personnel files over time.

As more local unions choose to step away or distance themselves from the police, the pressure to break with law enforcement unions has generated an internal debate over the issue within the AFL-CIO executive council itself in recent weeks.

Color of Change, a racial justice organization, said it has discussed the possibility of ejecting police unions with at least five labor groups in the AFL-CIO.

Weingarten said “a couple members of the council raised it” during a three-day meeting in June. In a call earlier this month, American Postal Workers Union leader Mark Dimondstein brought up the matter, according to a person on the line.

The federation’s general board released several recommendations on June 9 for affiliate unions to address police violence but declined to drop the International Union of Police Associations as requested by the WGAE.

The debate could affect the quiet race to succeed Trumka, who is expected to step aside. The election won’t be held until the federation’s convention in October 2021, but Flight Attendants union president Sara Nelson, whose organization has taken one of the most progressive stands on the question, and AFL-CIO secretary-treasurer Liz Shuler are both rumored to be interested in taking the role.

In June, Nelson publicly accused AFL-CIO leadership of misleadingly attributing a statement opposing the ouster of the IUPA to the entire general board.

“To be clear, this issue was not discussed by the General Board today and there was no vote on the resolution put forward by WGAE,” she tweeted. “Also, collective bargaining empowers workers; it is not a means to oppress workers’ rights.

Tim Schlittner, the AFL-CIO's communications director, disputed the claim. He said Trumka referred to the WGA-East’s resolution but that no one offered a motion on it.

The labor movement has successfully ousted unions in the past that didn’t abide by its principles. The Congress of Industrial Organizations expelled 11 member unions around 1950 due to their alleged links to the Community Party. The AFL-CIO also cut ties with three unions in 1957 over corrupt behavior. And throughout the Civil Rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s, the AFT moved to expel local unions that were racially segregated.

Police unions, meanwhile, insist that any efforts to oust them will blow back on all of labor.

“Those who are looking to kick police officers out of the union movement should be very careful," said Patrick Lynch, president of the Police Benevolent Association of New York. "The rhetoric that they are using now is the same rhetoric that has been used to strip union protections from teachers, bus drivers, nurses and other civil servants across this country."

Capitalism Made Women Of Color More Vulnerable To The COVID Recession

For all women who have lost their jobs during this pandemic, Black women and Latinas who perform the bulk of essential work during lockdown, for all Black and Brown elders who have lost their lives, capitalism is their preexisting condition.

October 26, 2020 Tithi Bhattachary TRUTHOUT

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Migreldi Lara, a single mother of three who is out of work as a hair stylist due to the pandemic, stands with her daughters during a protest outside the Berks County Services Building in Reading, Pennsylvania, on September 1, 2020., Ben Hasty/MediaNews Group/Reading Eagle via Getty Images


The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) monthly jobs report for September proves with numbers what we have all known anecdotally and experientially: This pandemic-laced recession has been disastrous for women, especially women of color.

Between August and September, 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce, a rate four times higher than that for men. One in 9 Black women, and 1 in 9 Latinas, aged 20 and over, respectively at rates of 11 percent and 11 percent, became unemployed in September. Compare this to white men who have an unemployment rate of 6.5 percent and white women who have a rate of 6.9 percent.

These figures are not very different from the spring, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics report in April told us that women accounted for 55 percent of the 20.5 million job losses. The unemployment rate for adult women then was 15 percent, as compared to the 13 percent unemployment rate for adult men.

From the start of the pandemic, job losses for women have been so much greater than for men that some feminist policy makers have called this a “shecession,” in contrast with 2008. And “she” is most certainly a woman of color.

Sometimes numbers — percentages and charts — can obscure social wounds. We can see the 11 percent job loss figure for Black women, but we don’t necessarily associate that number with the impacts on people like Kyaira Jackson, a seventh grader in my daughter’s class, whose mother, the sole earner for her family, just lost her job at Walmart. Her mother, Jazmine Pinckney, asked me if I could help return some of Kyaira’s school things as the family would be moving soon. As is the case for most Americans, Jazmine’s family’s health care, as well as her ability to pay rent and buy food, were solely and relentlessly dependent on her wage. She would now move back to her childhood home in Atlanta, back to the house she left to make her way in the world, this time with her two young children.

Jazmine’s life, like the lives of so many Black women in this pandemic, is like Ariadne’s thread, leading us through the maze of capitalist social relations. It helps illuminate the monsters behind the inequality that existed long before the virus was even heard of. The first step to understanding the devastation caused by the virus in the lives of women and people of color, is to understand that it was merely the spark; the kindling was there all along.

Let us begin with the wage, since its tyranny shapes not just our working lives but crucially, our lives outside of the workplace.Between August and September, 865,000 women dropped out of the workforce, a rate four times higher than that for men.

Well before the pandemic, women in this country earned 82 cents to the dollar that a man earned, while Black women earned 62 cents on the dollar, and Latina women earned 54 cents on the dollar. Often it is difficult to determine cause and effect for gendered wages. It is because women earn less than men that they tend to work part-time and spend their unwaged time doing care work in the home, as both child care and elder care remain exorbitant in the U.S. But it is also true that certain jobs become less prestigious and lower paid when women become the ones primarily performing them. Teaching was treated with much respect and remunerated better in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century when it was mostly men who became teachers; now, K-12 teachers are mostly women, and they are neither as well paid nor well respected.

Waged work remains inextricably braided with unwaged work. Lack of access to quality child care and elder care forces women to consider quitting waged work before their male partners since their jobs were less paying to begin with. This in turn ensures that women are pushed into, or remain locked into, lower-paid work due to “lack of experience” or for having taken “career breaks.” Just under a third of single mothers were already living below the poverty line; since the pandemic, over a million of them have lost their jobs.

When schools and child care centers closed in the spring, and as they continue to offer partial services through the fall, many women, particularly white women, decided to leave the work force. As Stefania Albanesi put it in The New York Times, “white families tend to have higher wealth and higher average income so they can afford to reduce labor supply, compared to most African-American households, where earnings are quite low.”Just under a third of single mothers were already living below the poverty line; since the pandemic, over a million of them have lost their jobs.

If our analysis stops at the doors of the workplace, and only pays attention to the wage gap or unemployment figures, it will fail to see the multiple ways in which waged work orchestrates the unwaged slices of our lives. Ecologists use the term “cascade effect” as a concept to understand how primary extinction of a species can trigger multiple secondary extinctions. The tyranny of the wage has a similar cascade effect on our life-making.

Consider the health of Black women and Latinas during this pandemic. Low wages certainly determine the kind of health care these women have or whether they have it at all. But we should not only be concerned about low wages in the here and now. Historically, Black communities have been forced to live in neighborhoods that have poor air quality and/or contaminated water. They are 75 percent more likely to live near polluting industries that produces hazardous waste.

Schools that predominantly serve Black and Brown communities are chronically underfunded and the first ones to close during a financial crisis. Consistent redlining through the years have ensured that these neighborhoods are also more likely to be what the federal government calls “food deserts” or “areas in which residents are hard-pressed to find affordable, healthy food.”

When a virus with no apparent cure comes into the lives of people in these communities, who, then, shall we blame for the disproportionately high death rates? It is not simply the pandemic or the recession that is driving the disproportionate harm experienced by women of color in this moment. It is an economic system stacked against them.

For all the women who have lost their jobs during this pandemic, for Black women and Latinas who have performed the bulk of the essential work during lockdown and borne the brunt of the recession, for all the Black and Brown elders who have lost their lives during this crisis, it is capitalism that has been their preexisting condition.


Tithi Bhattacharya is a professor of South Asian History and the director of Global Studies at Purdue University. Her recent coauthored book includes the popular Feminism for the 99%: A Manifesto (Verso, 2019), which has been translated into over 25 languages. She writes extensively on Marxist theory, gender and the politics of Islamophobia.

LABOUR HISTORY

Justice for Scotland's Miners and the Great Strike's Legacy Today

With confidence in capitalism at a low ebb and millions challenging Thatcher’s legacy, small wonder her heirs refuse to shed light on the savagery used against those who first resisted neoliberalism. The truth of the miners’ strike must be exposed.

November 12, 2020 MORNING STAR

An angry miner pounds the roof of a car at the gates of Bilston Colliery near Edinburgh during the 1984-5 miners' strike,


PARDONS for Scottish miners convicted during the great miners’ strike of 1984-85 are a victory won through years of determined campaigning.

Former mineworkers, their relatives and trade-union and Labour campaigners such as MSP Neil Findlay can be proud that they have won justice for working-class people fighting for their livelihoods whose reward was brutality and persecution by the British state.

And the Scottish government should be congratulated on its ready acceptance of the need for a pardon in line with the recommendation of the independent inquiry led by John Scott QC, to “remove the stigma” from innocent people who in far too many cases “lost their jobs and futures through being arrested,” in the words of National Union of Mineworkers (Scotland) president Nicky Wilson.

The next step, as Wilson makes clear, is for the labour movement of all the nations of Britain to use Scotland’s decision to press the British government to agree to an inquiry into the behaviour of police during the miners’ strike – in particular regarding the police riot at Orgreave in June 1984. Early Day Motion 904, laid down in the Westminster Parliament by Wansbeck MP Ian Lavery, calls for exactly that and more MPs of all parties should be lobbied to sign.

Successive home secretaries have rejected calls for an inquiry into the unprovoked police assault on unarmed pickets outside the Orgreave coking plant.

Excuses include that policing has changed so much since that there is nothing to learn; that nobody was killed at Orgreave, and there were “no wrongful convictions.”

This is only because the trials of miners the police attempted to fit up for riot – a charge that could have resulted in life imprisonment for those convicted – collapsed when it became clear that police evidence had been manipulated. There is strong evidence that officers colluded to falsify statements on what happened that day.

The true reason governments are afraid of an Orgreave inquiry is because it could expose the role of the British state in the decisive class confrontation of the Thatcher era.

The miners’ defeat paved the way for the gutting of countless communities and an accelerated demolition of trade-union and labour rights across the board. Trade-union resistance to the media demonisation of miners was one motivation for Rupert Murdoch’s determination to break the print unions at Wapping in 1986.

Thatcher’s triumph enabled the fire-sale privatisation of public assets – aerospace, telecoms (BT), oil (BP), gas, airline (BA), water, electricity and steel under her own government, with rail and mail to follow. It saw the creation of the neoliberal economy resting on an underpaid, insecure workforce, disciplined by the existence of mass unemployment.

This deregulated, super-exploitative model is the child of Thatcher’s victory, which is too often portrayed as representing the inevitable march of history – when in fact, as Seumas Milne has exhaustively demonstrated in his book The Enemy Within, the entire might of the British state was mobilised to ensure the miners lost. This involved the police, secret service, army and of course the BBC, which at Orgreave famously reversed the footage so the public saw images of miners charging the police when in fact the police had charged first.

No-one who observed the similarly broad mobilisation of generals, spooks, Civil Service, MPs of all parties, press barons and the public broadcaster to smash the most recent serious challenge to rule by the richest – the Jeremy Corbyn leadership of the Labour Party – can imagine that the ruling class today is any less ruthless.

With public confidence in capitalism at a low ebb and millions ready to challenge Thatcher’s legacy, small wonder that her heirs are unwilling to shed light on the dishonesty and savagery deployed against those who resisted the birth of the neoliberal era.

All the more reason why the truth about the miners’ strike and the British state’s role in it must be exposed.

How to End ‘Women’s Work’
What so many of today's most underpaid and essential workers have in common is simply that they are women. Are we willing to re-examine the assumptions embedded in what we have been told are “free markets” for labor?

November 13, 2020 Anna Louie Sussman THE NEW YORK TIMES

Photograph by Jens Mortensen,


Last week, as Americans were obsessing over the results of the presidential election, a New Zealand law aimed at eliminating pay discrimination against women in female-dominated occupations went into effect. The bill, which takes an approach known as “pay equity,” provides a road map for addressing the seemingly intractable gender pay gap.

Unlike “equal pay” — the concept most often used to address gender pay disparities in the United States — the concept of “pay equity” doesn’t just demand equal pay for women doing the same work as men, in the same positions. Such efforts, while worthwhile, ignore the role of occupational segregation in keeping women’s pay down: There are some jobs done mostly by women and others that are still largely the province of men. The latter are typically better paid.

But if the coronavirus has taught us anything, it is that what has traditionally been women’s work — caring, cleaning, the provision of food — can no longer be taken for granted. “It’s not the bankers and the hedge fund managers and the highest paid people” upon whose services we’ve come to rely, said Amy Ross, former national organizer for New Zealand’s Public Service Association union. “It’s our supermarket workers, it’s our cleaners, it’s our nurses — and they’re all women!”

It has also taught us how poorly these jobs are compensated. Over half of workers designated essential in the United States are women; their jobs are typically paid well below the median hourly wage of a little over $19 an hour. (Median hourly pay for cashiers is just $11.37; for child care workers it’s $11.65; health support workers such as home health aides and orderlies make $12.68.)

Instead of “equal pay for equal work,” supporters of pay equity call for “equal pay for work of equal value,” or “comparable worth.” They ask us to consider whether a female-dominated occupation such as nursing home aide, for instance, is really so different from a male-dominated one, such as corrections officer, when both are physically exhausting, emotionally demanding, and stressful — and if not, why is the nursing home aide paid so much less? In the words of New Zealand’s law, the pay scale for women should be “determined by reference to what men would be paid to do the same work abstracting from skills, responsibility, conditions and degrees of effort.”

What is at stake is not just a simple pay raise but a societywide reckoning with the value of “women’s work.” How much do we really think this work is worth? But also: How do we decide?

The idea of pay equity is at least a century old. A 1919 draft of the International Labor Organization’s constitution, which formed part of the Treaty of Versailles, cites “the principle that men and women should receive equal remuneration for work of equal value.” The I.L.O.’s Equal Remuneration Convention, which went into force in 1953, has been ratified by 173 member countries (the United States is one of 14 holdouts). Still, the gender pay gap remains a feature of nearly every economy on earth.

The movement for pay equity gained momentum in North America in the late 1970s and 1980s, when provinces across Canada began passing pay equity laws and several U.S. states with strong labor movements, including Minnesota, Wisconsin and Hawaii, undertook pay equity evaluations for public employees. (As a result, in 1982, clerk typists in Minnesota saw their monthly pay increased by $267, to match that of a delivery van driver, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity’s website.).

But the movement, in the United States at least, lost much of its momentum just a few years later, when a 1985 ruling in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a judgment by a Federal District Court that would have given female Washington state employees substantial raises based on a pay equity study. Judge Anthony Kennedy, who would later go onto the Supreme Court, wrote the opinion, in which he argued that the Washington state pay equity plan required the state to “eliminate an economic inequality that it did not create,” thus interfering with the free market for labor. With that ruling, alongside other legal setbacks courtesy of conservative judges appointed by President Ronald Reagan, and the broader ascendance of free-market thought, the movement lost its legal leverage. By the early 1990s, the pay equity movement was faltering

The political and legal campaign for equal pay had preceded the pay equity movement. Pushed by the college-educated women who dominated mainstream feminist groups, and who sought to work alongside men in corporations, universities, and law firms, the equal pay movement was initially less attentive to the concerns of low-wage workers in pink-collar jobs, argues Michael McCann, a University of Washington professor who wrote a 1994 book on pay equity. But after the judicial rulings of the 1980s undercut the comparable worth legal framework, equal pay became the dominant standard for addressing the gender gap in the United States

In 1972, New Zealand passed an equal pay law that could have, in theory, required a pay-equity type approach: The law included a provision calling for equal compensation for work “exclusively or predominantly performed by female employees” with “the same, or substantially similar, skills, responsibility and service … under the same, or substantially similar, conditions and with the same, or substantially similar, degrees of effort” as work performed by men. But courts, until recently, interpreted the provision narrowly: to mean equal pay for identical work.

Then, in 2012, Kristine Bartlett, a caregiver who had worked for more than 20 years in an old age home making barely above minimum wage, filed a claim with the Employment Relations Authority against her employer, TerraNova Homes and Care. TerraNova relied on traditional equal pay logic in its defense, arguing that it paid its four male caregivers the same as its 106 female caregivers.

The claimants asked the court to take a pay equity approach instead and to look more closely at the actual nature of the work. They argued that caring for elderly people was just as demanding and dangerous as better-paid jobs mostly performed by men, including, notably, prison guards. One filing by Ms. Bartlett’s union noted that both jobs require “dealing with challenging behaviors including sexual behaviors and/or aggression.” Arguably, care home workers could be even more at risk, since while corrections facilities are specifically designed to promote maximum security for workers, care homes are not. Before the claim was settled, Ms. Bartlett was earning $15.75 (U.S. $11.20) an hour, 50 cents above the New Zealand minimum wage, for work her union estimated was worth $26 (U.S. $18.50) an hour.

Ms. Bartlett’s claim was settled out of court through a three-way negotiation between union officials, employers and the government in 2017, resulting in pay increases of 15 to 49 percent for 55,000 workers (paid for by the government, which funds elder care in New Zealand through contracts with private firms and NGOs). The outcome sparked a wave of new claims throughout the public sector from other female-dominated occupations, including midwives, social workers and school support staff. The same year, the newly elected Labour government, led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, set to work: The government would follow through on her party’s campaign promise to amend the 1972 law to finally deliver true pay equity.

In 2015, a 15-member joint working group, made up of union leaders, employer representatives and government officials, had begun meeting to agree on a set of principles for resolving pay equity claims. A 2018 settlement on behalf of around 1,300 state-employed social workers was proof of concept, said Ms. Ross, the lead advocate for those negotiations. It was a chance to show the recommended principles — in particular, that female-dominated occupations should be evaluated in a way as free from bias as possible — could work in practice.

Economics 101 says wages are set by the intersection of a supply curve and a demand curve — if demand for say, data scientists is high, and there aren’t enough of them to fill the available roles, data scientists will have more pricing power over their wages. But in the real world, (and, sometimes, in Economics 201), most people recognize that wages encapsulate a host of other factors: monopoly and monopsony power, the quirks of a given firm or institution, and, most relevant to pay equity, social beliefs about the relative value of a job. These social beliefs inevitably intersect with biases like racism and sexism, which then manifest in ways both formal and informal.

The 1950s — a time when only around a third of women were in the work force and their earnings were often referred to as “pin money” — saw the rapid rise of job evaluation tools, which were developed decades earlier as a way to analyze and classify jobs within an organization so as to systematize roles and pay scales. One of the most widely used, the Hay method, attempted to capture not tasks, but rather, the various skills, competencies and responsibilities that make up a given job; each of these were then assigned weights and graded according to a point system. These tools, which are today still commonly used in large firms and in government bureaucracies, were intended to measure and rank the work being done by different employees, from line workers to chief executives, as organizations grew and became more complex.

At the time, given the nature of the economy, these tools largely applied to jobs held by male workers in manufacturing firms, said Ronnie J. Steinberg, a longtime pay equity advocate and professor of sociology emerita at Vanderbilt University. They eventually came to encompass managerial, executive and administrative roles, but the built-in male bias held strong.

Most job evaluation methodologies ignored what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild called “emotional labor” — adjusting one’s feelings in order to competently perform a job — while others, if they measured some aspect of it, often treated it as a proxy for the femaleness of a job, so that jobs with high levels of emotional labor wound up with lower pay.

As a result, an evaluation tool might rate dog pound attendants and parking lot attendants as more highly skilled than nursery schoolteachers, Dr. Steinberg noted. She and others have since developed gender-neutral job evaluation systems, but their implementation still hinges on who is doing the evaluation and what aspects of the work they’re able to recognize and document.

In effect, New Zealand is engaged in a countrywide effort to use these tools to fundamentally rethink the value of the work typically done by women. But where equal pay processes are relatively straightforward, pay equity, when done properly, challenges us to think deeply and objectively about a job and its components. This can be a messy process, one that requires unlearning decades of bias about gender and work, as well as political good will and a spirit of collaboration.

To negotiate the New Zealand social workers’ settlement, for instance, a working group composed of union officials, delegates from the Ministry of Children, social workers and employer representatives undertook a comprehensive assessment process to build a richer understanding of the social worker’s role. In dwelling on parts of the job that are often overlooked — the emotional demands, the problem-solving, the physical danger — many at the table were surprised at its difficulty and complexity. Even articulating the role’s various demands and skills posed a challenge.

“People struggled with the language to describe it, and that speaks to the undervaluation in itself, because we don’t often have the language to really talk about the skills we’re using,” Ms. Ross said. What skills are being deployed to, say, deal with someone who is angry and doesn’t want to be there, and several hours later, with someone who is needy and crying, all while maintaining meaningful boundaries? To describe this capacity to navigate “these emotionally complex situations — how to be both emotionally present but not emotionally enmeshed,” as Ms. Ross put it, the group eventually came up with the term “emotional dexterity.”

Although everyone at the table sought consensus, disagreements arose. The employer advocates, for example, hesitated to classify “listening” as a skill, arguing that anyone can listen; Ms. Ross, herself a former social worker, tried to explain how active listening entails not just hearing, but also picking up on what goes unsaid, the way things are said and what that means in context. When employers were skeptical that the job’s cumulative stresses were severe enough to result in post-traumatic stress disorder, social worker delegates at the table testified about their experience of hearing stories every day about physical or sexual abuse and the treatment they needed for their own emotional distress.

Based on what they had learned about social work, each side came to the table with proposals for comparable male-dominated occupations, but quickly realized they were better off identifying a set of agreed criteria (that these jobs should be at least 66 percent male, have a collective bargaining agreement and also be public sector jobs) to create an initial longlist. This list included several outliers, such surgeons (who undergo highly specialized training) and park rangers (who face no barrier to entry into the profession), that were quickly tossed out.

What remained were four occupations that all parties agreed were potentially comparable to social workers in different aspects of the work: Detectives and family violence constables in the New Zealand police force, engineers employed by the Auckland City Council and air traffic controllers for Airways New Zealand. All of these roles require alertness and focus and therefore rate highly on sensory demands. On the other hand, they vary widely in the degree of physical effort or emotional skills involved (a published analysis of the occupations noted that air traffic controllers, for example, “operate within a highly codified environment,” which reduces the need for interpersonal skills.)

The next step was administering a questionnaire to workers in these occupations. (The questionnaire included sections on problem-solving skills, physical demands, interpersonal skills and emotional demands.) Based on the answers, as well as a range of data, such as health and safety records and professional body requirements, each component of the job was given a point rating, which formed the basis for understanding the skills and responsibilities involved in each role. These, in turn, formed the basis for negotiating the social workers’ pay.

The final settlement included an average 30.6 percent pay increase, phased in over two years. It was, to Ms. Ross’s surprise, a higher figure than the union had historically promoted — and a powerful argument for going through the job evaluation process with the goal of eliminating gender-based undervaluation, rather than targeting a specific pay hike.

The job evaluation process yielded another unexpected benefit. Ms. Ross said many social workers found the analysis of their work “more valuable” than the pay raise itself. Some, on seeing the many skills and competencies they brought to work every day spelled out in a detailed assessment, were moved to tears.

Many, she said, were “seeing themselves as skilled professionals for the first time.”

Unions in New Zealand are currently pursuing over a dozen public-sector claims, covering, among others, library assistants, clerical workers and customer-facing roles, which were all prioritized because of their high shares of Maori and Pasifika women and especially low pay.

New Zealand is not the only country taking serious steps toward pay equity. The World Bank’s most recent Women, Business and the Law report notes that since 2017, seven economies have introduced legislation requiring employers to grant equal pay for work of equal value, though they vary in scope and ambition. In December 2018, Canada passed a federal pay equity act, which covers federal public agencies and state-regulated private firms such as banks, airlines and telecommunication firms, and requires firms to proactively implement pay equity plans. In 2017, Iceland passed a law requiring organizations with more than 25 employees to evaluate workers’ pay based on their comparative responsibilities; the results were to be certified by third-party auditors.

Unlike New Zealand’s law, however, which allows claimants to look across nearly the whole of the labor market for male comparators, Canada and Iceland’s laws only require companies to undertake pay equity efforts at the organization or firm level; as a result, they’re inherently limited, since some firms will still be focused primarily on professions dominated by women or those dominated by men.

New Zealand’s more ambitious law is also notable for the buy-in it garnered at the legislative level. Several New Zealanders pointed to the unanimous vote on the pay equity law as an important sign of where the public had moved on the issue. “It wasn’t seen to be politically tenable to oppose equal pay, because that’s just wrong,” said Kerry Davies, national secretary of the New Zealand Public Service Association.

Even so, New Zealand has, so far, been able to take the steps it has because the government pays for these wages. It’s not yet clear when, or whether, these efforts will work their way into the private sector. The vast majority of New Zealand’s businesses are small, with some 95 percent of firms employing fewer than 20 people. Not all of these employers are wealthy, nor are these small firms universally profitable, said Paul Mackay, manager for employment relations policy at BusinessNZ, an advocacy group for New Zealand companies.

But proponents of pay equity say arguments about affordability miss the point. “Employers are not entitled to make even small profits on the backs of underpaid women,” said Linda Hill, a member of the Coalition for Equal Value, Equal Pay, a group of feminists who have worked in different fields on this issue for years. “Businesses that can’t pay fair wages aren’t viable businesses.” Still, especially in the private sector, this money will have to come from somewhere, raising uncomfortable questions about our expectations of cost, value, and worth.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, it has taken extreme levels of injustice and deprivation, and a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, to expose the emptiness of how different types of work are valued. We are finally beginning to grapple with fundamental questions about what makes a worker truly “essential” — but how far will this grappling actually go?

There are important efforts now underway — the push for a higher minimum wage, say, or more visibility for domestic workers — but they fail to address a deeper problem: The thing that so many of today’s most underpaid and essential workers have in common is simply that they are women. In America, where state support for gender equality has never been less robust, pay equity’s financial obligation will likely fall on individuals. Are we willing to pay more, say, at the grocery store, or to the home health aides who look after our elderly? Are we willing to re-examine the assumptions embedded in what we have been told are “free markets” for labor?

New Zealand’s experience in the coming years will serve as an experiment in what happens when an entire society, led by a feminist prime minister, decides, in effect, to say yes.

The idea of pay equity is at least a century old. A 1919 draft of the International Labor Organization’s constitution, which formed part of the Treaty of Versailles, cites “the principle that men and women should receive equal remuneration for work of equal value.” The I.L.O.’s Equal Remuneration Convention, which went into force in 1953, has been ratified by 173 member countries (the United States is one of 14 holdouts). Still, the gender pay gap remains a feature of nearly every economy on earth.

The movement for pay equity gained momentum in North America in the late 1970s and 1980s, when provinces across Canada began passing pay equity laws and several U.S. states with strong labor movements, including Minnesota, Wisconsin and Hawaii, undertook pay equity evaluations for public employees. (As a result, in 1982, clerk typists in Minnesota saw their monthly pay increased by $267, to match that of a delivery van driver, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity’s website.).

But the movement, in the United States at least, lost much of its momentum just a few years later, when a 1985 ruling in the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals overturned a judgment by a Federal District Court that would have given female Washington state employees substantial raises based on a pay equity study. Judge Anthony Kennedy, who would later go onto the Supreme Court, wrote the opinion, in which he argued that the Washington state pay equity plan required the state to “eliminate an economic inequality that it did not create,” thus interfering with the free market for labor. With that ruling, alongside other legal setbacks courtesy of conservative judges appointed by President Ronald Reagan, and the broader ascendance of free-market thought, the movement lost its legal leverage. By the early 1990s, the pay equity movement was faltering.

The political and legal campaign for equal pay had preceded the pay equity movement. Pushed by the college-educated women who dominated mainstream feminist groups, and who sought to work alongside men in corporations, universities, and law firms, the equal pay movement was initially less attentive to the concerns of low-wage workers in pink-collar jobs, argues Michael McCann, a University of Washington professor who wrote a 1994 book on pay equity. But after the judicial rulings of the 1980s undercut the comparable worth legal framework, equal pay became the dominant standard for addressing the gender gap in the United States

In 1972, New Zealand passed an equal pay law that could have, in theory, required a pay-equity type approach: The law included a provision calling for equal compensation for work “exclusively or predominantly performed by female employees” with “the same, or substantially similar, skills, responsibility and service … under the same, or substantially similar, conditions and with the same, or substantially similar, degrees of effort” as work performed by men. But courts, until recently, interpreted the provision narrowly: to mean equal pay for identical work.

Then, in 2012, Kristine Bartlett, a caregiver who had worked for more than 20 years in an old age home making barely above minimum wage, filed a claim with the Employment Relations Authority against her employer, TerraNova Homes and Care. TerraNova relied on traditional equal pay logic in its defense, arguing that it paid its four male caregivers the same as its 106 female caregivers.

The claimants asked the court to take a pay equity approach instead and to look more closely at the actual nature of the work. They argued that caring for elderly people was just as demanding and dangerous as better-paid jobs mostly performed by men, including, notably, prison guards. One filing by Ms. Bartlett’s union noted that both jobs require “dealing with challenging behaviors including sexual behaviors and/or aggression.” Arguably, care home workers could be even more at risk, since while corrections facilities are specifically designed to promote maximum security for workers, care homes are not. Before the claim was settled, Ms. Bartlett was earning $15.75 (U.S. $11.20) an hour, 50 cents above the New Zealand minimum wage, for work her union estimated was worth $26 (U.S. $18.50) an hour.

Ms. Bartlett’s claim was settled out of court through a three-way negotiation between union officials, employers and the government in 2017, resulting in pay increases of 15 to 49 percent for 55,000 workers (paid for by the government, which funds elder care in New Zealand through contracts with private firms and NGOs). The outcome sparked a wave of new claims throughout the public sector from other female-dominated occupations, including midwives, social workers and school support staff. The same year, the newly elected Labour government, led by Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, set to work: The government would follow through on her party’s campaign promise to amend the 1972 law to finally deliver true pay equity.

In 2015, a 15-member joint working group, made up of union leaders, employer representatives and government officials, had begun meeting to agree on a set of principles for resolving pay equity claims. A 2018 settlement on behalf of around 1,300 state-employed social workers was proof of concept, said Ms. Ross, the lead advocate for those negotiations. It was a chance to show the recommended principles — in particular, that female-dominated occupations should be evaluated in a way as free from bias as possible — could work in practice.

Economics 101 says wages are set by the intersection of a supply curve and a demand curve — if demand for say, data scientists is high, and there aren’t enough of them to fill the available roles, data scientists will have more pricing power over their wages. But in the real world, (and, sometimes, in Economics 201), most people recognize that wages encapsulate a host of other factors: monopoly and monopsony power, the quirks of a given firm or institution, and, most relevant to pay equity, social beliefs about the relative value of a job. These social beliefs inevitably intersect with biases like racism and sexism, which then manifest in ways both formal and informal.

The 1950s — a time when only around a third of women were in the work force and their earnings were often referred to as “pin money” — saw the rapid rise of job evaluation tools, which were developed decades earlier as a way to analyze and classify jobs within an organization so as to systematize roles and pay scales. One of the most widely used, the Hay method, attempted to capture not tasks, but rather, the various skills, competencies and responsibilities that make up a given job; each of these were then assigned weights and graded according to a point system. These tools, which are today still commonly used in large firms and in government bureaucracies, were intended to measure and rank the work being done by different employees, from line workers to chief executives, as organizations grew and became more complex.

At the time, given the nature of the economy, these tools largely applied to jobs held by male workers in manufacturing firms, said Ronnie J. Steinberg, a longtime pay equity advocate and professor of sociology emerita at Vanderbilt University. They eventually came to encompass managerial, executive and administrative roles, but the built-in male bias held strong.

Most job evaluation methodologies ignored what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild called “emotional labor” — adjusting one’s feelings in order to competently perform a job — while others, if they measured some aspect of it, often treated it as a proxy for the femaleness of a job, so that jobs with high levels of emotional labor wound up with lower pay.

As a result, an evaluation tool might rate dog pound attendants and parking lot attendants as more highly skilled than nursery schoolteachers, Dr. Steinberg noted. She and others have since developed gender-neutral job evaluation systems, but their implementation still hinges on who is doing the evaluation and what aspects of the work they’re able to recognize and document.

In effect, New Zealand is engaged in a countrywide effort to use these tools to fundamentally rethink the value of the work typically done by women. But where equal pay processes are relatively straightforward, pay equity, when done properly, challenges us to think deeply and objectively about a job and its components. This can be a messy process, one that requires unlearning decades of bias about gender and work, as well as political good will and a spirit of collaboration.

To negotiate the New Zealand social workers’ settlement, for instance, a working group composed of union officials, delegates from the Ministry of Children, social workers and employer representatives undertook a comprehensive assessment process to build a richer understanding of the social worker’s role. In dwelling on parts of the job that are often overlooked — the emotional demands, the problem-solving, the physical danger — many at the table were surprised at its difficulty and complexity. Even articulating the role’s various demands and skills posed a challenge.

“People struggled with the language to describe it, and that speaks to the undervaluation in itself, because we don’t often have the language to really talk about the skills we’re using,” Ms. Ross said. What skills are being deployed to, say, deal with someone who is angry and doesn’t want to be there, and several hours later, with someone who is needy and crying, all while maintaining meaningful boundaries? To describe this capacity to navigate “these emotionally complex situations — how to be both emotionally present but not emotionally enmeshed,” as Ms. Ross put it, the group eventually came up with the term “emotional dexterity.”

Although everyone at the table sought consensus, disagreements arose. The employer advocates, for example, hesitated to classify “listening” as a skill, arguing that anyone can listen; Ms. Ross, herself a former social worker, tried to explain how active listening entails not just hearing, but also picking up on what goes unsaid, the way things are said and what that means in context. When employers were skeptical that the job’s cumulative stresses were severe enough to result in post-traumatic stress disorder, social worker delegates at the table testified about their experience of hearing stories every day about physical or sexual abuse and the treatment they needed for their own emotional distress.

Based on what they had learned about social work, each side came to the table with proposals for comparable male-dominated occupations, but quickly realized they were better off identifying a set of agreed criteria (that these jobs should be at least 66 percent male, have a collective bargaining agreement and also be public sector jobs) to create an initial longlist. This list included several outliers, such surgeons (who undergo highly specialized training) and park rangers (who face no barrier to entry into the profession), that were quickly tossed out.

What remained were four occupations that all parties agreed were potentially comparable to social workers in different aspects of the work: Detectives and family violence constables in the New Zealand police force, engineers employed by the Auckland City Council and air traffic controllers for Airways New Zealand. All of these roles require alertness and focus and therefore rate highly on sensory demands. On the other hand, they vary widely in the degree of physical effort or emotional skills involved (a published analysis of the occupations noted that air traffic controllers, for example, “operate within a highly codified environment,” which reduces the need for interpersonal skills.)

The next step was administering a questionnaire to workers in these occupations. (The questionnaire included sections on problem-solving skills, physical demands, interpersonal skills and emotional demands.) Based on the answers, as well as a range of data, such as health and safety records and professional body requirements, each component of the job was given a point rating, which formed the basis for understanding the skills and responsibilities involved in each role. These, in turn, formed the basis for negotiating the social workers’ pay.

The final settlement included an average 30.6 percent pay increase, phased in over two years. It was, to Ms. Ross’s surprise, a higher figure than the union had historically promoted — and a powerful argument for going through the job evaluation process with the goal of eliminating gender-based undervaluation, rather than targeting a specific pay hike.

The job evaluation process yielded another unexpected benefit. Ms. Ross said many social workers found the analysis of their work “more valuable” than the pay raise itself. Some, on seeing the many skills and competencies they brought to work every day spelled out in a detailed assessment, were moved to tears.

Many, she said, were “seeing themselves as skilled professionals for the first time.”

Unions in New Zealand are currently pursuing over a dozen public-sector claims, covering, among others, library assistants, clerical workers and customer-facing roles, which were all prioritized because of their high shares of Maori and Pasifika women and especially low pay.

New Zealand is not the only country taking serious steps toward pay equity. The World Bank’s most recent Women, Business and the Law report notes that since 2017, seven economies have introduced legislation requiring employers to grant equal pay for work of equal value, though they vary in scope and ambition. In December 2018, Canada passed a federal pay equity act, which covers federal public agencies and state-regulated private firms such as banks, airlines and telecommunication firms, and requires firms to proactively implement pay equity plans. In 2017, Iceland passed a law requiring organizations with more than 25 employees to evaluate workers’ pay based on their comparative responsibilities; the results were to be certified by third-party auditors.

Unlike New Zealand’s law, however, which allows claimants to look across nearly the whole of the labor market for male comparators, Canada and Iceland’s laws only require companies to undertake pay equity efforts at the organization or firm level; as a result, they’re inherently limited, since some firms will still be focused primarily on professions dominated by women or those dominated by men.

New Zealand’s more ambitious law is also notable for the buy-in it garnered at the legislative level. Several New Zealanders pointed to the unanimous vote on the pay equity law as an important sign of where the public had moved on the issue. “It wasn’t seen to be politically tenable to oppose equal pay, because that’s just wrong,” said Kerry Davies, national secretary of the New Zealand Public Service Association.

Even so, New Zealand has, so far, been able to take the steps it has because the government pays for these wages. It’s not yet clear when, or whether, these efforts will work their way into the private sector. The vast majority of New Zealand’s businesses are small, with some 95 percent of firms employing fewer than 20 people. Not all of these employers are wealthy, nor are these small firms universally profitable, said Paul Mackay, manager for employment relations policy at BusinessNZ, an advocacy group for New Zealand companies.

But proponents of pay equity say arguments about affordability miss the point. “Employers are not entitled to make even small profits on the backs of underpaid women,” said Linda Hill, a member of the Coalition for Equal Value, Equal Pay, a group of feminists who have worked in different fields on this issue for years. “Businesses that can’t pay fair wages aren’t viable businesses.” Still, especially in the private sector, this money will have to come from somewhere, raising uncomfortable questions about our expectations of cost, value, and worth.

In the U.S. and elsewhere, it has taken extreme levels of injustice and deprivation, and a once-in-a-lifetime crisis, to expose the emptiness of how different types of work are valued. We are finally beginning to grapple with fundamental questions about what makes a worker truly “essential” — but how far will this grappling actually go?

There are important efforts now underway — the push for a higher minimum wage, say, or more visibility for domestic workers but they fail to address a deeper problem: The thing that so many of today’s most underpaid and essential workers have in common is simply that they are women. In America, where state support for gender equality has never been less robust, pay equity’s financial obligation will likely fall on individuals. Are we willing to pay more, say, at the grocery store, or to the home health aides who look after our elderly? Are we willing to re-examine the assumptions embedded in what we have been told are “free markets” for labor?

New Zealand’s experience in the coming years will serve as an experiment in what happens when an entire society, led by a feminist prime minister, decides, in effect, to say yes.

Green New Deal Champion Chloe Maxmin Unseats Powerful GOP Incumbent in Rural Maine

The victory of Democratic state Rep. Chloe Maxmin, a progressive champion who ran on the promise of a Green New Deal and offering a "politics as public service" in a strong GOP district, tells a different story than the re-election of Susan Collins.

November 12, 2020 Julia Conley COMMON DREAMS

Maine state Rep. Chloe Maxmin, who won a state Senate seat Tuesday night after running against state Sen. Minority Leader Dana Dow, speaks to a voter on the campaign trail., credit: Chloe Maxmin // Common Dreams

The results of the U.S. Senate race this week in Maine—won by four-term Republican Sen. Susan Collins after Democrats poured $50 million into challenger Sara Gideon's campaign—may have given the impression that a Trumpian right-wing agenda has an iron grip on the state's more conservative rural voters, but the victory of Democratic state Rep. Chloe Maxmin, a progressive champion who ran on the promise of a Green New Deal and offering a "politics as public service" in a strong GOP district, tells a much different story.

Two years after winning a seat in the state House of Representatives, representing conservative, rural District 88, Maxmin secured a win in her challenge to state Senate Republican Leader Dana Dow. As in her first campaign for elected office, Maxmin won over voters in state Senate District 13—where residents chose Collins over Gideon—by engaging deeply with her community and offering a platform focused on climate action, investing in universal broadband access, and treating healthcare as a human right.

Maxmin's campaign was focused on providing help to people in a part of Maine where many feel disillusioned by politics and neglected by leaders in the state legislature and Washington, D.C.—but her energy was spent less on convincing voters to back a progressive agenda and more on giving them a platform to talk about their own experiences. "Too often we talk about these things in a partisan lens, but overwhelmingly people believe we need to tax the wealthy, that we need to raise the minimum wage, that we need sick days, paid family leave, healthcare access that's real, that everyone can see a doctor when they need to. Those are not limited to a party. And when you build a multi-race, multi-class coalition like Chloe did... That's how you win in those places."

—Mike Tipping, Maine People's Alliance

"When I talk to folks, I mostly listen, I don't show up and talk about myself," Maxmin told Common Dreams on Thursday. "I really try and listen and make sure that the voices that I hear are reflected in our campaign... The work that we do on our side is to really think about campaigns differently, because we see them as one of the primary ways that we can start building a new type of politics. So we didn't use any party consultants. We designed all of our mailers, palm cards, postcards ourselves. We're all about authentic conversation and just had dozens and dozens of volunteers writing postcards or having conversations with voters and using the same style of just listening, and not going around saying, 'You should vote for Chloe because of this,' but trying to understand where people are at."

"My sense is that people really saw that we were doing it differently and that I could be in office differently, too," she added.

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit earlier this year, the Maxmin campaign further stepped up its commitment to engaging directly with voters, enlisting 200 volunteers to check on voters' wellbeing.

"Maxmin called upon her volunteers to reach out to every senior in her district and her network of campaign volunteers provided food, assistance with prescription drugs and identified transpiration needs," Marie Follayttar, director of the progressive grassroots group Mainers for Accountable Leadership, told Common Dreams. "Chloe is both a community organizer and an elected official. Not only is Chloe willing to listen to the people where they are—at their dinner table or at their door—she is demonstrably responsive to their needs and leverages the organizing structure of her campaign to assist her in accomplishing mutual aid work."

Other Democratic campaigns in the state, Follayttar noted, "could have done this as well. We transform lives by being present in them and building community to support one another. We move into legislative action by turning the concerns heard at the door into legislation."

Maxmin, who introduced the state's Green New Deal in 2019, with the notable backing of the state AFL-CIO, and co-founded the fossil fuel divestment campaign Divest Harvard while in college, won applause from national climate action campaigners at 350.org and Friends of the Earth.


Hats off to new Maine State Senator Chloe Maxmin, a true climate champ who managed to beat the incumbent Senate Minority Leader.
— Bill McKibben (@billmckibben) November 4, 2020


Congrats to progressive champion (and Friends of the Earth board member) Chloe Maxmin! https://t.co/qKVceZQAfu
— Friends of the Earth (Action) (@foe_us) November 4, 2020

"Just seeing the amazing news that Chloe Maxmin—who was a young leader of Divest Harvard—has won a seat in the Maine State Senate!" exclaimed Thelma Young-Lutunatabua, an organizer with 350.org, on Wednesday. "Youth of the climate movement gaining political office!"

Maxmin's tactic of engaging authentically with voters in reminiscent of "deep canvassing," a method of campaigning used by the national grassroots network People's Action and found to be 102 times more effective at winning over undecided voters than a typical brief interaction during a door-knocking or phone-banking campaign.

"Deep canvassing differs from traditional campaign tactics because it relies on soul," People's Action Director George Goehl told Common Dreams. "In a deep canvass conversation, you break down your walls and the canvasser and voter really connect with one another. This is the kind of organizing that changes hearts and minds."

Maxmin told Common Dreams that her campaign led her to "thousands" of similar interactions.

"I had thousands of conversations with people," she said. "And it's so interesting when you have that kind of breadth to your exposure of humanity, just the themes that you hear. And it was really, really consistent—rarely hearing direct issues, mostly hearing about how people are so frustrated with everyone and everything on both sides and just hating the negative campaigning."

Mike Tipping of Maine People's Alliance, an affiliate of People's Action, credited Maxmin's ability to connect with voters across party lines, stressing that Maxmin ran a campaign she defined as "bipartisan" rather than "progressive" because issues that matter to voters in her rural district are important to people of all political beliefs.

"These are universal progressive values," Tipping told Common Dreams. "Too often we talk about these things in a partisan lens, but overwhelmingly people believe we need to tax the wealthy, that we need to raise the minimum wage, that we need sick days, paid family leave, healthcare access that's real, that everyone can see a doctor when they need to. Those are not limited to a party. And when you build a multi-race, multi-class coalition like Chloe did... That's how you win in those places."

In "Rural Runner," a short film by Forest Woodward about Maxmin and her campaign manager, Canyon Woodward, Maxmin is seen knocking on doors in rural Maine, talking to voters about how their lives could be impacted by a Green New Deal for the state and other progressive legislation.

"Every year we keep electing the same kind of folks," she says in the film. "They tell us the same things, they act the same way, we elect them, they get into the state House, and they break the same promises and we're left with the same disillusionment that we had before."




Watch here.

In 2018, Maxmin began her campaign in House District 88 as an underdog, 16 points behind her opponent, but credited her tireless face-to-face campaigning with securing victory.

"What Chloe and I have done is pretty simple," said Woodward in "Rural Runner," which was filmed as the team was beginning Maxmin's campaign for the state Senate race. "We put one foot in front of the other, we listen, we show up every day rain or shine, we do our best. We never really know what we're capable of unless we try."

After becoming the first Democrat ever to win House District 88 at the age of 26, Maxmin introduced her state's own Green New Deal, centering the legislation on a just transition for workers in the fossil fuel sector and investing in solar installations for newly-built schools.

In the State House, she has also sponsored legislation to provide access to rural public transportation, an issue she campaigned on this year and called "the great equalizer in rural communities." Maine Senate District 13 has been represented by Republicans for most of the last decade.

While the national Democratic Party often express wariness about engaging with voters in traditionally conservative areas about issues erroneously deemed "left wing," such as far-reaching action to solve the climate emergency, Maxmin's winning campaigns suggest Democrats can find more success with rural voters by being unapologetic proponents of policies aimed at helping working people.

"She is no shrinking violet and didn't try and moderate herself or be anyone other than who she is, and I think voters responded to that," Tipping said.

During the campaigns Maxmin and Woodward have run together, they wrote in an article for The Nation in 2018, "We dig into the local, cultivating relationships and utilizing the resourcefulness of our rural communities to build a rooted movement... We see that rural America is alive and beautiful, eager to be heard and remembered."

"Many have welcomed us into their homes and honored us with stories of family members who are registering to vote just for our campaign, who are voting Democrat for the first time, who have never voted in a midterm but now are because our movement gives them hope," they continued.

"We view our campaign as a movement, built on shared values and authentic conversations," Maxmin and Woodward wrote. "We build real political power, with lasting muscle for the long fight, with an inside-outside movement that elects authentic representatives to fight for everyone and continues to organize beyond the election to maintain pressure on our politicians."

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Biden’s Win, House Losses, and What’s Next for the Left

The congresswoman said Joe Biden’s relationship with progressives would hinge on his actions. And she dismissed criticism from House moderates, calling some candidates who lost their races “sitting ducks.”

November 8, 2020 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Astead W. Herndon 

NEW YORK TIMES 

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke outside her campaign office in the Bronx on Election Day., Desiree Rios for The New York Times


For months, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has been a good soldier for the Democratic Party and Joseph R. Biden Jr. as he sought to defeat President Trump.

But on Saturday, in a nearly hourlong interview shortly after President-elect Biden was declared the winner, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez made clear the divisions within the party that animated the primary still exist. And she dismissed recent criticisms from some Democratic House members who have blamed the party’s left for costing them important seats. Some of the members who lost, she said, had made themselves “sitting ducks.”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

We finally have a fuller understanding of the results. What’s your macro takeaway?

Well, I think the central one is that we aren’t in a free fall to hell anymore. But whether we’re going to pick ourselves up or not is the lingering question. We paused this precipitous descent. And the question is if and how we will build ourselves back up.

We know that race is a problem, and avoiding it is not going to solve any electoral issues. We have to actively disarm the potent influence of racism at the polls.

But we also learned that progressive policies do not hurt candidates. Every single candidate that co-sponsored Medicare for All in a swing district kept their seat. We also know that co-sponsoring the Green New Deal was not a sinker. Mike Levin was an original co-sponsor of the legislation, and he kept his seat.

To your first point, Democrats lost seats in an election where they were expected to gain them. Is that what you are ascribing to racism and white supremacy at the polls?

I think it’s going to be really important how the party deals with this internally, and whether the party is going to be honest about doing a real post-mortem and actually digging into why they lost. Because before we even had any data yet in a lot of these races, there was already finger-pointing that this was progressives’ fault and that this was the fault of the Movement for Black Lives.

I’ve already started looking into the actual functioning of these campaigns. And the thing is, I’ve been unseating Democrats for two years. I have been defeating Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee-run campaigns for two years. That’s how I got to Congress. That’s how we elected Ayanna Pressley. That’s how Jamaal Bowman won. That’s how Cori Bush won. And so we know about extreme vulnerabilities in how Democrats run campaigns.

Some of this is criminal. It’s malpractice. Conor Lamb spent $2,000 on Facebook the week before the election. I don’t think anybody who is not on the internet in a real way in the Year of our Lord 2020 and loses an election can blame anyone else when you’re not even really on the internet.

And I’ve looked through a lot of these campaigns that lost, and the fact of the matter is if you’re not spending $200,000 on Facebook with fund-raising, persuasion, volunteer recruitment, get-out-the-vote the week before the election, you are not firing on all cylinders. And not a single one of these campaigns were firing on all cylinders.

Well, Conor Lamb did win. So what are you saying: Investment in digital advertising and canvassing are a greater reason moderate Democrats lost than any progressive policy?

These folks are pointing toward Republican messaging that they feel killed them, right? But why were you so vulnerable to that attack?

If you’re not door-knocking, if you’re not on the internet, if your main points of reliance are TV and mail, then you’re not running a campaign on all cylinders. I just don’t see how anyone could be making ideological claims when they didn’t run a full-fledged campaign.

Our party isn’t even online, not in a real way that exhibits competence. And so, yeah, they were vulnerable to these messages, because they weren’t even on the mediums where these messages were most potent. Sure, you can point to the message, but they were also sitting ducks. They were sitting ducks.

There’s a reason Barack Obama built an entire national campaign apparatus outside of the Democratic National Committee. And there’s a reason that when he didn’t activate or continue that, we lost House majorities. Because the party — in and of itself — does not have the core competencies, and no amount of money is going to fix that.

If I lost my election, and I went out and I said: “This is moderates’ fault. This is because you didn’t let us have a floor vote on Medicare for all.” And they opened the hood on my campaign, and they found that I only spent $5,000 on TV ads the week before the election? They would laugh. And that’s what they look like right now trying to blame the Movement for Black Lives for their loss.

Is there anything from Tuesday that surprised you? Or made you rethink your previously held views?

The share of white support for Trump. I thought the polling was off, but just seeing it, there was that feeling of realizing what work we have to do.

We need to do a lot of anti-racist, deep canvassing in this country. Because if we keep losing white shares and just allowing Facebook to radicalize more and more elements of white voters and the white electorate, there’s no amount of people of color and young people that you can turn out to offset that.

But the problem is that right now, I think a lot of Dem strategy is to avoid actually working through this. Just trying to avoid poking the bear. That’s their argument with defunding police, right? To not agitate racial resentment. I don’t think that is sustainable.

There’s a lot of magical thinking in Washington, that this is just about special people that kind of come down from on high. Year after year, we decline the idea that they did work and ran sophisticated operations in favor of the idea that they are magical, special people. I need people to take these goggles off and realize how we can do things better.

If you are the D.C.C.C., and you’re hemorrhaging incumbent candidates to progressive insurgents, you would think that you may want to use some of those firms. But instead, we banned them. So the D.C.C.C. banned every single firm that is the best in the country at digital organizing.

The leadership and elements of the party — frankly, people in some of the most important decision-making positions in the party — are becoming so blinded to this anti-activist sentiment that they are blinding themselves to the very assets that they offer.

I’ve been begging the party to let me help them for two years. That’s also the damn thing of it. I’ve been trying to help. Before the election, I offered to help every single swing district Democrat with their operation. And every single one of them, but five, refused my help. And all five of the vulnerable or swing district people that I helped secured victory or are on a path to secure victory. And every single one that rejected my help is losing. And now they’re blaming us for their loss.

So I need my colleagues to understand that we are not the enemy. And that their base is not the enemy. That the Movement for Black Lives is not the enemy, that Medicare for all is not the enemy. This isn’t even just about winning an argument. It’s that if they keep going after the wrong thing, I mean, they’re just setting up their own obsolescence.



What is your expectation as to how open the Biden administration will be to the left? And what is the strategy in terms of moving it?

I don’t know how open they’ll be. And it’s not a personal thing. It’s just, the history of the party tends to be that we get really excited about the grass roots to get elected. And then those communities are promptly abandoned right after an election.

I think the transition period is going to indicate whether the administration is taking a more open and collaborative approach, or whether they’re taking a kind of icing-out approach. Because Obama’s transition set a trajectory for 2010 and some of our House losses. It was a lot of those transition decisions — and who was put in positions of leadership — that really informed, unsurprisingly, the strategy of governance.

What if the administration is hostile? If they take the John Kasich view of who Joe Biden should be? What do you do?

Well, I’d be bummed, because we’re going to lose. And that’s just what it is. These transition appointments, they send a signal. They tell a story of who the administration credits with this victory. And so it’s going be really hard after immigrant youth activists helped potentially deliver Arizona and Nevada. It’s going to be really hard after Detroit and Rashida Tlaib ran up the numbers in her district.

It’s really hard for us to turn out nonvoters when they feel like nothing changes for them. When they feel like people don’t see them, or even acknowledge their turnout.

If the party believes after 94 percent of Detroit went to Biden, after Black organizers just doubled and tripled turnout down in Georgia, after so many people organized Philadelphia, the signal from the Democratic Party is the John Kasichs won us this election? I mean, I can’t even describe how dangerous that is.

You are diagnosing national trends. You’re maybe the most famous voice on the left currently. What can we expect from you in the next four years?

I don’t know. I think I’ll have probably more answers as we get through transition, and to the next term. How the party responds will very much inform my approach and what I think is going to be necessary.

The last two years have been pretty hostile. Externally, we’ve been winning. Externally, there’s been a ton of support, but internally, it’s been extremely hostile to anything that even smells progressive.

Is the party ready to, like, sit down and work together and figure out how we’re going to use the assets from everyone at the party? Or are they going to just kind of double down on this smothering approach? And that’s going to inform what I do.

Is there a universe in which they’re hostile enough that we’re talking about a Senate run in a couple years?

I genuinely don’t know. I don’t even know if I want to be in politics. You know, for real, in the first six months of my term, I didn’t even know if I was going to run for re-election this year.

Really? Why?

It’s the incoming. It’s the stress. It’s the violence. It’s the lack of support from your own party. It’s your own party thinking you’re the enemy. When your own colleagues talk anonymously in the press and then turn around and say you’re bad because you actually append your name to your opinion.

I chose to run for re-election because I felt like I had to prove that this is real. That this movement was real. That I wasn’t a fluke. That people really want guaranteed health care and that people really want the Democratic Party to fight for them.

But I’m serious when I tell people the odds of me running for higher office and the odds of me just going off trying to start a homestead somewhere — they’re probably the same.

Astead W. Herndon is a national political reporter based in New York. He was previously a Washington-based political reporter and a City Hall reporter for The Boston Globe. @AsteadWesley