In this episode of Who Cares!, SEIU 2015 President Arnulfo De La Cruz talks with Doug Moore of UDW/AFSCME Local 3930 and Max Arias of SEIU Local 99 about uniting care workers across California. They discuss the fight for fair pay, respect, and recognition for home care, child care, and nursing home providers, and how caregivers are building power to make care a true priority in our state and nation.
Transcript
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Welcome to Who Cares, the podcast by SEIU 2015, the largest union of long term care workers in the United States. I’m your host, Arnulfo De La Cruz, President of SEIU 2015. Every day, over half a million caregivers across California show up to care for our state’s most vulnerable people. They make a living with dignity possible for millions of families, and they do it with love, skill and dedication.
Today, we’re going to be discussing the challenges that care workers face in caring for the people who rely on them. We’re going to be discussing the challenges that workers face whether they work in homes, provide child care, or nursing homes and hospitals. Aside from challenges, we will also discuss how care workers are uniting and building power to have a say in ensuring that our future is one where care work is prioritized and to help us break it down.
Today, we’re joined by two of California’s most respected labor voices, Doug Moore International, Vice President of AFSCME, and also the executive director of the United Domestic Workers of America Local 3930. We’re also joined by our SEIU brother Max Arias, who’s the executive director of SEIU Local 99, representing care workers from the education sector and child care throughout Los Angeles and Southern California, San Bernardino and Ventura Counties.
Doug and Max have spent decades organizing care providers in every sector of the care economy, from education to home and nursing and fighting for social and economic justice. Doug and Max have also been part of campaigns that have captured not just the imagination of Californians, but the entire country as caregivers lift up their voices for justice and dignity. Doug and Max, welcome to Who Cares. Please share with our listeners a bit about yourselves and your respective unions.
Doug Moore: Thanks, Arnulfo. Thank you for inviting me on your podcast. I’m Doug Moore, I’ve been involved in the labor movement for well over 35 years. Started my career in Southern California with CWA, eventually worked for SEIU International and SEIU 250 and worked for the National AFL-CIO, and then came over to AFSCME.
Why am I doing this podcast? Quite simply, right now, at this time, we are at war. Workers are being attacked on every front. When you look at what’s happening with immigration, when you look at what’s happening recently with SNAP, with health insurance going up, we are under attack at every front. And UDW and our members that we represent, all three of us are at the tip of the spear. We have no choice if we’ve never had a choice but to always fight back.
And I think the rest of the working class is starting to recognize that you can’t rest on your laurels. You always have to be ready to fight back. And UDW has always been a fighting union, a social justice union. UDW started in 1977–it’s one of three unions that were founded by people of color, the first being the Brotherhood of Sleeping with Car Porters by Philip Randolph in Max’s old turf, in Chicago. The United Farm Workers, something that Arnulfo knows a little bit about, Cesar Chavez, and then it’s us UDW. And UDW was the vision of Cesar Chavez to organize domestic workers, because a lot of the wives of farm workers were domestic workers, and he felt they were treated worse than farm workers. And the founders of UDW were members of the Chicano movement and the Black Power movement.
So social justice is in our DNA. We are rooted in social justice, and we will always be rooted in social justice, and we look at everything that we do through a social justice lens. And that’s why, even when you look at Prop 50, we didn’t start fighting for Prop 50 when everybody else did. A few months ago, we were in Sacramento, just like Arnulfo, your members were and your union was back in January, fighting to stop these Medicaid cuts, cuts to Social Security. We’re already doing this work. We were already doing it.
So when Prop 50 came around, it was a no brainer for us to be right in the middle of that fight. UDW have been on the forefront of fighting around racial justice, immigration justice, environmental justice, housing, you name it. We’re right in the forefront of those fights.
Now, we don’t have any members in LA, but we support a lot of the issues in LA, because a lot of the big fights are in LA. In the big March is big rally. We may not be there physically, but resource wise, there’s a lot of events that we support because we know that if we can stop it in LA, we can stop it from spreading every place else. We’re pleased to join with our brothers and sisters in LA with 2015 and the fights with 99. So we’re partners in many ways with both unions in UDW. We’re proud of those partnerships.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Thank you, Doug. All the conversations that we have probably a couple times a week and I did not know that history, the full history of UDW, and I’m sure there’s a lot more, but what a fascinating history.
Doug Moore: There’s a documentary coming out.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: All right. Well, there you go, folks. For our folks listening, we’ll be on the lookout for that documentary, and I’m sure Doug will let us know. And speaking of Los Angeles, brother Max, welcome.
Max Arias: Well, thank you, Brother Arnulfo, for having us. It’s really great your vision of having all of care together, everybody that does care from the cradle till we need it till the end of our life. And it’s great to be here with Brother Doug, who’s also a partner in the fight for coalition childcare providers united, of which UDW is a part of as well.
And so just a bit about myself. I was born in El Salvador. My family was exiled twice from El Salvador during the conflict in the 80s, and so had a kind of a crazy life. I ended up here in the United States twice, but the last time I ended up here was in the year 2000 when I came back. And my whole life, that life led me to always learn from my father that we have to fight for social justice. We have to fight for equality and equity. We can’t put a blind eye to suffering. We can’t just accept that people are starving as just a fact of life. So we got to keep fighting.
That was instilled in me throughout my life, but I’ve been in SEIU for about 20 years now. I started in Chicago. Brother Doug alluded to that in a local four where we represented nursing home workers, being from El Salvador, I thought nursing homes were like like the movies, you know, but I learned right there, like the harsh reality, how they treat the workers, and how that has a horrible impact on the residents there as well, and what we gotta keep organizing.
And so I came to California in 2009 in healthcare. Worked for UHW, representing nursing home workers, etc, and ended up in 99 in 2015. I’ve been with 99 for 10 years. Who is local 99? Local 99 was founded at about 75 about 75 years ago, 76 years ago, celebrating 75th anniversary. In the late ‘40s by some LAUSD janitors, actually, they were, they were black, and they didn’t have a union. The teachers had a union, but they didn’t. So they formed their union, and it grew into what we are now. Local 99, LAUSD workers alone, there’s 30,000 members there. And local 99, we represent around 60,000 workers.
And I want to share who we represent. We represent education workers from the cradle to higher ed. I mean the cradle. I mean family child care providers who, after a 20 year fight to have to change the laws of the state of California, following the brave example of home care workers and how they want their union. Child care providers did the same. Took them a long time, but in 2020 right in the middle of covid, they got their union, and we had to double down and fight hard. And all this history you hear is a rich history shared with UDW and AFSCME, because we are in a coalition.
And when we formed the unit in 2020 the members are members of our locals, but they’re also part of something bigger, which is called childcare providers united. It’s a coalition of three different unions, SEIU Local 521, Puerto Rico. Brother Amanda’s over there in the Central Valley San Jose, etc. And then brother Doug Moore and Joanna Hester, who works with him, work with us, and they represent workers in Sacramento, San Diego and other counties.
It’s really convoluted, by the way, and Local 99, but we act as one. We have just won a third contract. We talk a little bit more about that later, but in our third contract, literally in the fifth richest economy in the world, a fourth now, sorry, our members care workers that care for children, children of essential workers throughout the state, and are certainly going to hear more about that. We had to fight back against the state taking away our health care, which our members just won two years ago. So we had to have a huge fight. It was a great organizing victory. But we managed not only to defend our healthcare, but to create some improvements and set the groundwork to keep fighting.
And I really appreciate, again, this conversation, because at the end of the day, I know that our members, a lot of our members, do both. They care for children, take care for adults. They care for teenagers, they care for elderly, they care for them, and sometimes the same person is doing two or three of those things. So I’m really happy that we’re starting to talk about care, because all of us are going to care at some point in our life, some of us more than once. Some of us may need care in a systemic way or ongoing. Sometimes we just need care for a week, but we all do, and it is important to value the people that do the work, because it’s hard work.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Thank you, Max. And again, I talked to Max all the time. I must be asking the wrong questions, because I did not know that full history. What a powerful history.
And you know, sometimes we say in the union, it’s rare, or it’s a blessing, if you’re able to be part of a generational organizing drive with a group of workers who previously had no union, and Doug and Max have been part of not just one, but more than one, of those incredible breakthroughs for workers who didn’t have a union.
And I think Max, I know you don’t mention this a whole lot, and we’ll talk about it later, but you also led a historic strike in Los Angeles for education workers that really didn’t just capture the imagination of California, but really captured the imagination of the entire country. And I know that was a really proud moment for SEIU.
And then, of course, childcare workers in California having the right to organize was historic in so many ways, an open inspiration and vision for childcare workers across the country to say, Si se puede, right? We can do this following the model of California and you and Doug and Rico and all of the folks who helped to make that happen. It’s an incredible testament to the power of workers.
So speaking of care, you know we always start the Who Cares podcast with a care story, because at SEIU 2015 we know that care is personal. It’s not just a job for so many of our members. It’s a calling. It’s family. Doug, as a legendary labor organizer, you’ve worked with thousands of home care workers across our state, but I know you also have your own connection to caregiving. What’s a story that stayed with you? One that reminds you why this work is so important?
Doug Moore: I’m going to start with my dad. My dad was, before it was 2015, it was 434B. And my dad was a 434B activist out of Victorville who took care of my mom and the staff. He was an activist, and the staff used to hate calling the house to ask for him, because my mom would answer the phone and “No, he’s not coming to your meetings,” but he would come anyways.
But he was one of the activists out there in the Victorville area until he came down with Alzheimer’s. When he came down with Alzheimer’s, I was in San Diego and he was in Victorville, and the stories he would tell me was when he would have one of those bright lights where he would say, “I need to tell you something, because I may not remember this tomorrow.”
And he would tell me something while I was in the process of–at that time UDW is under administratorship, and I was running the day to day I would drive every weekend from Victorville, I mean, from San Diego to Victorville, to relieve my mom or to relieve my brother and my sister. And I had weekend care with my dad that helped me connect with the workers at UDW and to understand what they were going through, be it they were taking care of someone with dementia or taking care of someone with a disability.
It really helped me understand what they were going to because I was going through the same thing, because I would Friday on the road, get there, Friday night, Sunday morning. At 5am, I’m back on the road to San Diego. And if you ever ran an administratorship, you know that’s not an eight to five back on the road for like, a year, that’s what I did.
So it really made me understand how important what it is they do, and you can’t put a price on it. There’s no such thing as a price that you could put on that because you are doing it out of love. And whenever you get one of those moments where they can remember something you cherish that time. So that really helped me connect with that work.
And when, typically, if you’ve ever done an administratorship, and Max, I know you’ve been around long enough where you’ve probably done them, you typically say, Okay, it’s done. It’s over. Let me get to my next assignment. The administratorship was lifted in 2008 and I’m still here. It’s something about doing the work and actually being able to build a strong union the way a union should be built, versus okay, I’ve done what I needed to do to get it in compliance. Off to the next assignment.
We’ve actually are building. We’ve actually built an activist union with leaders and leaders coming up. And when you can do something like that, it’s rewarding work and and also just being able to, even when you have a, still remember doing a rally at a membership meeting raffle, I should say, and the young lady wanted a gift card. And I said, Oh, you can buy this. You can buy this. And she looks at me, and she says, Can I buy food? And I just kind of looked at her, and I said, Of course you can. And we’ve been doing food drives ever since.
Some of the things that we take for granted, things our members don’t, the small things that we take for granted. Being able to put food on the table every day for our families is a struggle for a lot of our members, and we just can’t take those small things for granted. I don’t you know we look at we know we look at SNAP benefits running out. We already have a plan. So those little things that a lot of people take for granted, we can’t take those things for granted.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: For our members, there’s nothing that compares to a love of a son for his father or his parents, and vice versa.
Doug Moore: And he passed away, by the way.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: I’m very sorry to hear that. He must be so proud of you, obviously. And I didn’t realize he was up there in Victorville.
And it’s funny, we just had a food bank in LA for 2015 members. It was historic turnout, bigger than any we’ve ever seen, which I really think speaks to this need on the basic things that our members are having to struggle and deal with. Max, you represent, both you and Doug. represent some of the hardest working people and one of the hardest and most rewarding jobs in America, and that’s taking care of children, right? And like all of us, I know, you must have your own connection to caregivers or caregiving. Would you mind sharing a story about what caregiving has meant to you in the life of someone you know?
Max Arias: I think my first story, and it has to do with caregiving and early education, is my grandmother. I don’t remember how old I was, but I do remember knowing the alphabet, knowing how to add, and all that when I was so little that when I went into school, I didn’t have troubles. I did okay.
And so I just really those memories are there with me, because I just remember her teaching me, and I think knowing now in the future, and knowing the science nowadays, how important that is, and see what our childcare provider members do with the children of essential workers is incredible, and it’s important because we, everybody needs a leg up, and every education is one of them. So that’s one just the memories.
You know, I can speak of a lady called Patricia Moran. She’s a family child care provider. She’s still alive, but she doesn’t do child care anymore. There’s a documentary called Make a circle. She’s an immigrant from I remember Bolivia, I’m not mistaken. She’s a fighter, and she was in our bargaining team. She is a member of SEIU 521. She was in our bargaining team, and she is the one that always gave us high spirits when things were down. She understood the issues well, and she was always fighting.
Little did we know, as we were doing this, providers here, childcare providers here in California, they only get about one-third of what it costs to care for a child. We go into that later, I know, but that means that they live wanting it and can barely make ends meet. Barely make ends meet.
So Patricia went through an illness that incapacitated her to the point where she could have physically continued to do the work, and the resources that she received did not allow her to hire the support that she will need to keep doing this work. And she had to close and through all that, through all that as she was fighting the illness, as she was educating the children, she was also fighting at the bargaining table, going to Sacramento in crazy times to be able to why, because she wants justice. She sees the need, and that’s what she did.
When the raids started here in California, in LA, we were in an escalation in CPU in which the governor had threatened to take away healthcare.
I’ll tell you a healthcare story: of one of our providers, and I can tell many providers. They tell us how they had to go to Mexico to be able to get care for their cancer treatments because at the time, they didn’t have healthcare here. So we want a healthcare fund for our members, and that’s what they use.
And so during this time, as we were fighting the raids in Los Angeles came and we needed to go do this rally in Sacramento, and we met with our priority team of 30 providers from throughout the state, including members from UDW, members from 521, members from 99 around 30. And our members, you should have heard how brave they were, made the decision that regardless, they would face the risk of our busses getting stopped, the risk of getting detained. All of that risk to them was important to be able to keep fighting so that we can have better, more resources to be able to support the children we serve, and that providers can live in dignity doing so.
I could just keep going. The history of bravery in nursing homes. I remember a person called Ernestina Avila in Chicago. These workers that cleaned, she was, she was a janitor, they would have to buy, actually, the detergents, they would have to buy cleaning supplies to be able to keep these nursing comms clean. And nobody would speak out in a nursing home, nobody was ready to really act and organize as needed.
And there’s Tina Avila, I remember, stood up and marched on the boss herself. It was supposed to march on the boss, and just, you know, told them the message, the message at the time, and forget the exact message at the time they had to do XYZ, but she did it, and I can just keep repeating.
And as you notice, I’m mentioning women, and I’m mentioning black and brown and immigrant women at every step of the way, are ready to just fight, not only for the person that they care for their family. So I am really, really feel privileged to be able to share the space with them and to be able to be a part of their fight.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Ernestina, voice will not be lost, right? That’s part of her legacy. Max is those are the stories that influence you to be the leader that you are. And I know that a lot of caregivers listening right now to the podcast can certainly.
Related to that, to having to balance everything that they do through the goodness of their heart, also with the challenges of making sure that they can make ends meet and provide for their families. And that’s why it’s so important that we continue to have these conversations, because maybe there’s a lot of Americans who don’t know what what’s involved in doing the work of being a child care provider, or what happens behind a closed door with a home care provider and someone they’ve taken care of for years?
This is the journey that we’ve been on, right? Trying to make sure that America lives up to his promise, and that caregivers are deserving of their rightful place as American workers and all of the benefits that that is that they’re deserving of, right? And we know that we still got a long way to go.
I think, for instance, some of the challenges, and I know Doug’s very familiar with this and Max, but 2015 members tell me all the time wages are still too low. The young providers that are coming into this profession are working multiple jobs. Caregiving is just one of them. They’re in the gig economy. And so this speaks to this challenge that we have, that we call a crisis of care, is that the demand of an aging population, or those who need childcare, continues to outpace the amount of workers that are able to do these jobs, and we have strong feelings about why. Right?
If a caregiver in California still does not have a pension or retirement plan when they’re in the years where they need one most after giving their all to their consumer, that’s an injustice. Right? We know too many private providers also put profits first and are not held accountable.
So Doug, what are the some of the challenges that UDW is facing that your members communicate?
Doug Moore: Same ones your members talk about. You know, we tried to address it this past legislative session with statewide bargaining, which would put us on the path of at least being able to address the retirement issue. And I think we got to go at it again, to be honest with you, and the current administration has already eroded over time. I mean, they’ve already tried to take it away. Thank God.
You know, we had the courage to fight and get it, get it into the budget for 2026 for our members to keep it. But at the federal level, it’s gone. You know, we got it in the Obama era, and this new president has taken it, taken it back, but that’s because we had the power and the strength to fight back. Other folks don’t have it, but we, we really, you know, there was a time there that it looked like we were not going to get it, but we held on. We just said, We cannot allow that to happen.
You know, that was a big fight in Sacramento, because it looked like we were not going to get it, but we did not give in. We held together, we stayed together, and we would not take no for an answer. That was solidarity at its finest, because that was a big ticket issue to take that overtime away, because there was legislation in statute that said, if that, basically, if we lost it at the federal level, the state had the option not to give it at the state level, it goes away. We had to fight. We had to fight, and that was a big fight.
But that’s what happens when you stand your ground and our members, we knew what was at stake. How do you go back and tell your members you were able to protect your institution in terms of dues, but I’m sorry. You lost your we lost your overtime. There’s no way in hell I was gonna go back and do that, and you and I are not. We’ll have those conversations a few times. It’s like, No way, no way.
You know, that was us saying our members matter. We know how much this means to our members, and it was a big issue, and there’s just no way we can do that. And in terms of private providers, we have to organize in the long term care space, in the private sector. They are, they are eroding the wages that we can negotiate at the county level. We have to lift those wages up, and the only way we can do that is to organize in the private sector.
Interesting, this is on the list because I did call it awful. It might have been a day before yesterday. It said, we have to take this on. We have to. It’s too much there for one, I think. But let’s figure out a strategy on how we can go after this together. You got, you know, these private equity companies out there buying these companies up. Let’s figure out a strategy on how to go at them.
You got to strike while the iron is hot. We have, we have an advantage legislatively. Let’s figure out how we can go at them and start organizing. These companies now, these private sector long term care and child care companies, Max who, in California, Let’s not give them a free ride. Let’s go at them, and if they don’t want to, if they don’t want to organize, run them out of California. Get them out. Either organize or get them out.
That’s the way I look at it, but let’s not give them a free ride, and that will lift everybody’s wages if we can raise their wages. That’s the challenges that we face, but they’re not challenges that we cannot overcome together. But it’s about us working together and figuring out a strategy that can lift everybody’s wages up, and that’s what I would love to do.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Couldn’t agree more, none of these are challenges that can’t be overcome when we stand together in unity. And how about you Max? To give our listeners a sense, what are some of the challenges child care workers are facing, or members of your local in this moment?
Max Arias: Well, here in California, child care providers, independent child care providers. There’s child care providers, and then there are centers, as you know, right? We need to organize the centers we represent the in-home child care providers. At this point, what the biggest obstacle is compensation and why is it so low. It’s very low. The state of California sets the compensation for the family child care providers, whether they do if you are caring for a child who is part of the subsidy system, that means the state of California is subsidizing the care, right? There’s actually a system that does that. Then your rates are set for by the state, whether it be for the child to care for or for a private sector child.
And so what that means is that the state setting the rates results in providers receiving only between one-third and one half of what it costs to care for a child. So the way it works is, if your child qualifies for subsidy in the state of California, and there is a subsidy slot open. That’s another problem. The state only has about 200,000 slots when the need is about over a million children need the care.
So just to start there, so you get that slot, then a child care provider agrees to care for your child, then that child care provider receives from the state of California only one-third of, one half of what it cost to care for the child. If you’re in Los Angeles, for example, under a certain category, it may take $2,000 for you as a provider, to pay for food, transportation equipment, electricity, assistance, etc, everything that you need to care for the child. It may cost you $2,000 but the state gives you $1000, you have 10 to 14 children like that. What you do is you figure out how to make ends meet with 10 to 14 children, and so what’s left over for the provider is negligible.
By that. I mean, we know through surveys that providers make between seven to $8 an hour, if that, because of the amount of hours that they have to work their assistance, the people that come to assist them in caring for the children make more money that they do that is the underlying care.
And for a long time, for decades, providers did not have access to any type of health care except the exchange. You know how that works. They have no access to any retirement and they don’t have such things as wage and hour laws or none of that. It’s just them and them. And so what they did, that’s why, for 20 years, they fought to organize, following the leadership of home care workers who organized in the same way we had to pass a law, et cetera, et cetera. And then they won.
And I remember I shared with you the organizing during covid. Right after that, covid shrunk the workforce in a significant way. It. Covid hit a precarious industry that was barely hanging on by a threat. Furthermore, we don’t have an early education system and care in California or the country. We just have a half hazard net of people doing the work. It’s not a systemic thing, that’s what I’m trying to say.
And so throughout these three years, ever since they organized in 2020 of providers, we have fought for two or three contract cycles, and they have won certain things statewide. We want a healthcare fund that’s about $100 million a year to be able to provide health care for providers. We want a retirement fund, which is around 80 million a year, which is still not enough, but it’s a foot in the door for these providers, as well as a training and education fund.
And most importantly, we won in our contract in 2023 the ability to move to the cost of care. What do I mean by that? When I shared with you that they’re getting only from the state about half of what it costs to care under the new model that the state agreed that we were due, a provider will now just receive what it actually costs for to care for the child and to be able to compensate themselves at some level. So when 2020, right now, this year came along, that is why I shared with you the big fight we’ve had is the state of California, even though it’s really not struggling.
And I understand what Trump is doing, and we’re going to fight like Doug, SEIU, we need to keep fighting, and I know in the neck we’re going to talk more about how we fight back the state it was that’s why the state decided to not keep its promise to fund the cost of care. In fact, the state tried to take away the health care from these providers half of their retirement fund and by eliminating the cost of care, really basically lowering their wages.
And so it seems to me that right now, the state of care in California is at the same time. Though the state put billions of dollars to create an early Transitional Kindergarten program, which is great, but the majority of parents in a transitional kindergarten program, your kid may go to a kindergarten for four hours. What are you going to do for the rest of the four hours? You go to a childcare provider, but because you invested all the money in a program that is good for parents that I have one job, most parents don’t have one job. They have many jobs. Sadly, I wish we only had one job.
Then they also started creating competition. So we gotta keep fighting. We gotta keep fighting. But this is a story that ends in that our members did not just sit there and take it. We pushed back for a month, a whole month, I think more than we stayed in Sacramento. Our members stayed there in the streets. They stayed there. They not only did the rally, we understand a rally is a point in time, they stayed after the rally. Every day the legislatures went to work there. They were reminding them of their commitment, taking over the swing space, doing vigils. Just continue, continuing, educating the legislatures, all we needed to do, until finally, finally, we were able to save our healthcare fund and get a modest increase.
So this is just a setup to keep fighting for the next three years. As Doug said, we need to organize. We are currently, Local 99, organizing push you to organize those centers. The resources and referral agencies are agencies that not only do they own a lot of centers, it’s a public it’s supposed to be public money, by the way, not private money, but they also get to assign the slots to parents, as they need children, and we need to organize them, because as we want for our members, we want money for these agencies, and I don’t think they’re giving it to the workers that are doing the primary care to these children.
So we got a lot more work to do, and we’re going to keep fighting and organizing and building power at the end of the day. Why do we build power so that all children in California have access to quality early education and care, and all working parents can work and have the peace of mind that the children are learning that they’re being cared for. That’s what we’re fighting for.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: The child care providers, your members, have not just met the challenges head on. They’ve actually driven solutions. Mean this is a group of workers that had no union, who wanna have union contracts, with some incredible victories that we talked about, which is really about, I think Doug’s point, none of the challenges are insurmountable when we stay united. And Doug for you, how do you think that we meet this moment of turning challenges into solutions?
Doug Moore: What we’re doing at UDW is year round mobilization campaigns and organizing, and what that means for us is always in a campaign mode or mobilization mode. It doesn’t have to be around a particular political campaign, because, Arnulfo, you know who you represent. You have nursing homes, but we are all home based, be it child care, be it home care. So we have no work sites.
So when there’s not a political campaign, we are in our communities doing community organizing. What’s going on in the communities where our members live? Get involved in those community activities where our members live. So we’re going to be in a year round mobilization, organizing campaign strategy in the communities where our members live for the next five years.
So that’s grassroots base building organizing that we’re going to be doing, and so that when there is a political campaign, because when you think about it, as soon as we get out of Prop 50, we’re looking at primaries where we’re already on the ground.
And when the general elections come around, we’re already on the ground. We never leave the ground. And we have a lot of staff that was hired during covid that never did a lot of house visiting. Guess what? They’re feeling what it’s like. A few of them don’t like it. Old School organizing, Max: house visits, house meetings, and that’s how we win. We got to get back to our grassroots organizing and community campaigns and really being the center of the universe for our members in their communities.
Our headquarters, there’s a church, the Rolando count, Town Council in our community where our members, where our headquarters is called Rolando, that’s where they have their community meetings right there, so we’re the center of attention. So when stuff goes on, we know about it. So we want to do that in every little community where our members are at. We just want to be in everything, so that when they call on us, we’re there.
We think that that’s how we engage people on the ground, and then that’s how we start building power, not just for our members, but in communities, so that, like I said, this is war. We got to have all workers. We got to have a big army to take on what we’re getting hit by, because we’re getting hit on all sides.
And it doesn’t matter if you’re a Democrat or a Republican or independent right now, you’re a target. If you’re not a billionaire, simple as that, because these guys are not playing they are taking everybody on that’s in their way. So I’m looking at a bigger picture. We got to play the long game with these guys, because they’re taking everybody out. They have their own agenda, and none of us are on it, unless you’re in their world, and I don’t, and that’s the 1% that’s in their world.
We got to stand together. We really, really, really got to be on the ground, listening to folks and taking action. Think about our coalition that we’re growing. Veterans are in our coalition now, our elderly, our disability, our child care providers. If we open up and allow other folks in, we can take on and make the changes to the status quo. That’s necessary, but we can’t be isolated. That’s when we lose. That’s when we lose.
And I see a lot of folks not opening up. I love I mean, if you ever been to a rally that we have in Sacramento, be it home care, child care, it’s a beautiful thing to see, but imagine opening it up, saying, Hey, we have a common enemy, and it’s not us, it’s the White House and the cronies there. Let’s, let’s, let’s, let’s focus our energy there, winning Prop 50, taking back Congress, taking back White House, and eliminating any Democrat who can’t speak out for working class people who want to be a status quo Democrat.
Because guess what? We don’t need those anymore. We don’t. We got to change the status quo in this country and have fighters for all workers and not people who just give us lip service. That’s what it’s that’s what it’s about for me, and bringing that message out, we have too many people that give us lip service.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Amen. And Doug, you bring up a really good point. We can’t be isolated in this moment at the same time. It feels like everything this administration or the President is doing is about dividing people based on color language, country of origin, the type of work you do. But you brought up a good point. It really does feel like it’s a 1% of the population making decisions for 99% of everyone else, and that we can’t be isolated.
So I think this principle of unity is so important, right? We’ve started to see some mobilizations, maybe not as big as they could be, where you have a majority of Americans saying, this is just not meeting our needs. The 99%, we’ve seen what the cost of groceries is doing. You pick the grocery and the costs have gone up. It seems like the cost of everything is going up. At the core, we have much more that unites us against those who would look to divide us or take from us.
And really, the Big Billionaires Bill was all about taking money from working people, from poor people, from people who are struggling, and giving it over to billionaires. That’s actually the goal that they were looking to accomplish.
So Max and Doug, how do we build unity and also cross racial solidarity? Right? We know the attacks on immigrants, the attacks on federal workers, it seems like you name the attack, but they’re happening all over the place. How do how do we build unity and cross racial solidarity in this moment as a labor movement,
Doug Moore: I think we got to show where that’s actually happening. My brother is a pastor out in Rialto and their church in Loveland, and some of the other pastors are finding out where immigrants are, like, not coming out, and they’re actually taking food and taking them, taking the food out to them, and they’re really trying to reach out to undocumented people who are like saying, Hey, I’m not coming out because I don’t want to get picked out. They understand that that’s their ministry.
More people need to do that really, especially in the African American community, because this, this fight is for everybody. We are next. We’ve always been on it’s like we’re there for them to pick him, and every time, whenever they decide to go after us. Anybody who thinks they’re safe from this administration is in La La Land. No one is safe. All of us can be picked up at any time.
All they got to do, and I’ve lived it, say, because I’ve been pulled over and had a gun put on me saying, you fit the description. That’s all it takes. And if you think that you’re immune from that, I got news for you. You’re not.
And that’s what I say when I go out to different communities and speak. We are all on their list. It’s just a matter of time when they decide you’re next. So anybody who thinks they’re not is full of it. None of us is safe from these people. None of us are.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: That’s really powerful Doug, and I actually do think there’s a lot that we can learn from the history of the black community, even as Latinos, as immigrants, that really gets to the foundation of this country. In a lot of ways, America is dealing with a reckoning right on the foundation of the country and how division, slavery, racism was kind of seeded as a thing that’s okay to do.
Doug Moore: It always has been. But when we were doing a training, and some of our childcare workers out of Ventura County were in Riverside when they started doing the raids out there in the cannabis farms. And I was there, and I noticed a lot of them crying, and I said, Wait a minute, what’s going on here? And we stopped the training, because they knew some of the people who you know, got picked up. So I had to stop the training.
And we started talking about the history of America and how we started with Native Americans, and then we started with slavery. Then we talked about the Japanese and the internment camps. I mean, we went through the whole history and said, Look, this is nothing new for America. I said, they’re just doing it now right in our face.
I said, America has always had this legacy of disappearing people. I said, You need to understand that. I said, now that they’re doing it right in our face, and now they have laws that say it’s okay. I said, the police departments were created from slave patrols. I said, so this, this is a legacy of this in the United States, so we had to really have this conversation with them.
And you know, many years ago, we took several of our members to Selma and to Montgomery, Alabama, and we’re going to do it again next year, so that they can understand all of this, that this is not something new, that they’re seeing, that this is not something new in America. There’s a whole legacy of this hate that they try to bury, that’s still around. And I think we do need to have these conversations,
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Yeah, and to say it that way, disappearing people, wow. I think a lot of folks who are listening are going to be able to relate to that. Max, how about you? Are you thinking how we build unity and cross Russia, solidarity in this moment?
Max Arias: At the end of the day, everything. Doug, I completely agree with what Doug said, I appreciate the analysis, the Native American. I consider myself, you know, my ancestors were now people, actually, people in El Salvador. I’m a descendant of people from West Africa, people from Europe, right?
But this is it, at the end of the day, who’s holding us back? It’s because it’s a capitalism. It’s just a straight capitalism. Is it the billionaires? In this case, it’s billionaires or wealth, right? And what they did right now is they took over and they created a new oligarchy. They have taken over the government through puppets, which is the Republican Party, including Trump. And who is making them billionaires? It is us, all of us, when we talk about cross racial solidarity, we are making them billionaires, and more heavily, black and brown people and immigrants are making them even more billionaires, because we are the ones being the most exploited at the end of the day. So it is in our power to make them billionaires.
It is also in our power to stop them from being and I know that’s a concept that’s lofty, but in 2023 you just mentioned LAUSD workers making, at that point, $25,000 a year, black and brown, women, most immigrants, ignored by society. When you hear schools, you think teachers, you don’t think classroom assistants, food service workers, bus drivers, these workers were struggling. Not only were they struggling, they were being oppressed by everybody in the district, including, and I love the teachers, but including the teachers, we’re friendly, and we really get along with utility, don’t get me wrong, but it is part of the analysis.
And to break out of that oppression, they have to show to society in LA that without them, nothing works. So you have to value my work. You can’t keep paying me $21,000 a year in a city that requires over $100,000 a year to live. Okay, to afford a one bed, you know, just to live okay. So it took years. If our members showed it for three days, our members stopped working, not because they didn’t love the students, because they love the students. Our members, three days of pay is critical for them, but they made that choice, and the teachers join us in solidarity.
For three days, we showed the city and the state, and as you alluded to the country and the world, that without the workers that clean or nothing moves, and that is called the value of work, we have to build up to that. I’m not saying we have to. That is not the only expression. Childcare providers, I don’t know how they’re going to strike. They’re not looking to strike. They’re in the relationships of their parents, just like a caregiver. You know, it’s different, but we have to find that expression.
You know what? Before the sit down strikes in Flint, a strike was getting outside of the factory and striking it, those folks decided, well, we’re going to do something different. We’re going to take over the factor just like that. We got to get creative and figure out how to show the value of our work, because the billionaires have to be afraid that we may not work, so that they can start tempering.
Now all we are demanding in reality, it’s a fair, it’s a just society, a society in which you can work one job and not have to worry, like people are worried right now, that the SNAP benefits are going to run out because the President is going bananas all due respect, right? Or because the Republicans are trying to take away their health care or their benefits. It is unacceptable if you work, you should not have to rely on the benefits, and those benefits need to exist for those people.
Well, that can’t work because it just can’t. We are supposed to be an enlightened and advanced society, and we need to act like it. So I agree with everything. Doug said everything’s important, from educating ourselves to militancy to organizing and creating that inter union solidarity movement is important because we don’t know where the next spark is going to be that can generate a mass movement.
So right now, we can’t give up, but we have to remember one thing, that I am one of those people I know that lived in the repressive state on El Salvador, and when I went back in the 90s, right when the revolution ended. In ‘92, the peace deal was signed, I returned to my country for the rebuilding stages of it, and I got to see firsthand. And before that, I got to see firsthand what a repressed election could be like. What does an election look like when you actually have to go to polls? Because here we don’t have to go to polls, but if the Republicans have the way we want, we will have to go to polls and show IDs.
How do we go to polls when the military is standing there that fear? We have to be ready, as Doug said, for the eventuality of that in the midterm. So we gotta keep building strength. We gotta keep the militancy in a scenario like that. What’s the recipe?
2000 of us did show up and vote in peace, right? Peaceful demonstrations. Educate ourselves and what it means to do peaceful resistance, non violence. Sorry, not peaceful. Because this is not peace. This is war, but non-violent resistance, right? Because this is all about how to be confronted with non violence.
Sadly, non violence means we have to be ready for violence being done upon us and how we’re going to deal with it. That is exactly what we’re facing. So childcare providers have a pathway forward in the state of California at this moment. The way we close our contracts left it open for us to keep fighting this year, to continue to fight to get that cost of care. And we’re not giving up. And I know we’re not, and I see you Doug, and I know that your members are not as I know them too, because we share a fight and we’re just ready to keep going. And this is exciting, and what you are doing here inviting us to join, that’s what building solidarity is. So I look forward to seeing all of you in the streets or in a park or wherever next our fight takes us with our members, but really look forward to seeing you.
Arnulfo De La Cruz: Likewise. Thank you, Max. Folks, there you have it. Doug Moore, Max, ideas, I’m sure you can appreciate the incredible wisdom in their stories and what they’ve shared that I think really is a reflection of both of their decades of leadership in the labor movement and fighting for fairness, for equity, for democracy and justice.
My name is Arnulfo De La Cruz, and this has been another episode of Who Cares, a podcast by SEIU 2015, one of the unions for long term care workers who keep California strong. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, and we look forward to seeing you next time.