32BJ SEIU’s Weekend Warriors promote voting
32BJ SEIU sent out hundreds of its “Weekend Warriors” union members this past weekend in an effort to urge people to cast votes in the upcoming November election.
Union members volunteered to take part in 32BJ SEIU’s Weekend Warriors program, which helped get out the vote (GOTV) among undecideds and voters who might be less than enthusiastic about the candidates and proposals available in this year’s national and local elections.
At 6:30 a.m. on Oct. 12, the Weekend Warriors boarded buses that took them 90 miles away from New York City to Allentown, Pa. “The canvass coincides with National Hispanic Heritage Month,” the union said in a press release. The buses went to “…a city where more than half of the population is Hispanic. 300 32BJ SEIU cleaners, door people, security officers, and airport workers who live and work in New York will arrive by bus.”
Union members fanned out across Allentown to generate support for Kamala Harris’s campaign for the U.S. presidency.
Tammi Durant, a union member who works as a security guard in Queens, told the AmNews she was more than eager to take part in the day’s events because she wanted to share her healthcare story with others. She wants to see Harris win the presidency because she likes what the candidate is promising in terms of healthcare assistance.
“I lost a few family members to not having affordable health care,” Durant said, “so when Kamala Harris says healthcare matters, it plays a real part in my heart because I’ve lost my grandmother, my grandfather, all because they couldn’t afford the health care that they needed.”
Durant’s grandmother died nearly five years ago, and her uncle died just within the past week. Neither her uncle, who had Medicare B, nor her retired grandmother could come up with the funds to cover any of the surgeries they needed to stay alive.
Durant said she spent her time in Allentown knocking on doors and letting people know that Kamala Harris has vowed to improve access to health care, in particular by getting more people covered under the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or Obamacare). On Oct. 11, the vice president told a Univision Town Hall that “I firmly and deeply believe that access to health care is a right and should be a right—and not just a privilege of those who can afford it or have access to it easily.
“It should be something that we make accessible to all people.”
Even though it was a Saturday morning and 32BJ members were stopping Allentown residents as they were heading out on weekend errands, Durant said she believes she was able to garner strong support for Kamala.
Union member Delroy Dawkins, 38, who is employed as a maintenance worker in Manhattan, has been on various Weekend Warriors canvassing campaigns with 32BJ SEIU—he’s been volunteering to join local and national Weekend Warriors efforts for at least 20 years. “Because a lot of us don’t read and don’t follow the news,” he explained. For Dawkins, it’s important for Black people to understand how politics affects how they live. “They really don’t have an idea of how important voting is and what voting can do for your community and your children. By just the vote, we can get certain people elected, and get the federal government to support unions, which is very important for us.”
The early-morning Weekend Warriors bus was fun for union members who are serious about the solidarity that being part of a union can provide. It was another opportunity to see people who were energized about political possibilities, Dawkins said, and who wanted to talk to other people about those possibilities.
Dawkins proudly spoke about how he explained the importance of voting and the policies the Democratic Party’s Kamala Harris is proposing to an undecided voter he met in Allentown. “He said he was undecided, [that] he’s going to wait until the end of the month to vote…I said, ‘Well, it’s very important that we go out and vote.’ And I told him the benefits that we get when we vote. That as a union, we get good jobs, good union jobs, this and that. And [by the end] he said, ‘You know, I’m going to vote for Kamala’…I said, ‘Thank you very much: That means so much to us to hear that from you.’”
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