Labor icon was not aware, she says, of mayor’s labor record
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In a video press conference this afternoon, Dolores Huerta, legendary labor organizer and co-founder of the United Farm Workers, expressed regret over her decision in September to endorse current mayor London Breed in the San Francisco mayor’s race.
Last week, Huerta released a statement making a surprise second endorsement: Of Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin, Breed’s campaign rival.
Thursday’s press conference was a follow-up to last week’s statement, and included Huerta, Peskin and Sal Rosselli, president emeritus of the National Union of Healthcare Workers (NUHW). At the conference, Huerta said that she had endorsed Breed at the urging of friends in the Latinx community, on the grounds that Breed was a good leader during the Covid-19 pandemic.
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Even before she endorsed Breed, Huerta said, she and other members of the board of the Dolores Huerta Foundation had their doubts. “We held back,” said Huerta. “Because of some of the mayor’s issues that people thought were rather controversial, and not supportive enough of poor people. But many of my friends in San Francisco were urging me and saying, ‘You have to support the mayor.’”
After learning of the Breed endorsement, Sal Rosselli called Huerta to ask what was going on. “Dolores and I go way back to the ‘80s,” says Rosselli. He remembers, at one point, Huerta showing up to support a healthcare strike and being surrounded by an angry group of counter-protestors chanting, “Go back to the fields where you belong.” The chant did not have the desired effect.
Breed is endorsed by several unions. But NUHW and SEIU 1021, the two leading organizations that represent San Francisco’s healthcare workers, are not among them.
SEIU 102, which represents healthcare workers in governments, schools, and nonprofits in Northern California, has criticized Breed over pay freezes and staffing shortages during the pandemic. This February, it reached out to the city attorney, claiming Breed violated the law in placing Proposition F on the March 5 ballot. The measure, which requires people who receive cash benefits from the County Adult Assistance Program to undergo drug screening in order to continue to qualify for housing and other benefits, would endanger the city workers who have to enforce it, SEIU 1021 argued. In July, the union, which is San Francisco’s largest, gave Peskin its sole endorsement for mayor.
In the case of NUHW, which represents healthcare workers at for-profit healthcare providers like Kaiser and Sutter, Breed has declined to offer even symbolic support during major struggles, says Rosselli. That includes situations where workers weren’t even asking for higher wages, like the long effort by Kaiser’s mental health workers to push back against understaffing. NUHW has also endorsed Peskin.
Huerta told Rossellli that Peskin was welcome to contact her and make his case to her as a mayoral candidate, which he did.
“Supporting labor has got to be a litmus test for all candidates,” said Huerta. “If candidates do not support labor unions and the working people who are the majority of the population in the United States of America, then they don’t really deserve to be public officials. You’ve got to support the people that create the wealth of our country and the people that are doing the hard work to keep our society healthy and fed and in place.”
“Had I known that,” said Huerta, she “never would have endorsed Mayor Breed at that time.”
“I would say, at this point, we still have a double endorsement,” Huerta continued. “But let’s put Aaron first. Because workers need to be first. Always.”
H.R. SMITH
H.R. Smith has reported on tech and climate change for Grist, studied at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow, and is exceedingly fond of local politics.More by H.R. Smith
