SEIU President: Kamala Harris Stands for America’s Workers | Opinion

This Labor Day, no matter what you look like, how you vote, or where you live, we can all agree that working people need more good jobs with wages that you can raise a family on. We need elected leaders who will stand with working people, not with greedy, price-gouging, union-busting corporations. We need leaders who not only understand our struggle but have lived it.
That’s why the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and other unions have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. She has shared how growing up the daughter of a single mom who worried about paying the bills shaped her worldview and has spoken about her own experience working at a McDonald’s. She has walked a day in the shoes of two SEIU members, shadowing a security officer and a home-care worker as they went about their work. She’s turned her understanding of what it’s like to be an everyday worker trying to make ends meet into action, using every tool of government to help working people.
In the White House, Harris has rallied behind care workers who are fighting to turn their jobs into good union jobs and also pushed to win historic safe-staffing mandates at our nation’s nursing homes. She met with Starbucks workers at the White House and SEIU members who work at a Planned Parenthood clinic as our reproductive rights came under attack. And as a part of one of the most pro-worker administrations in recent history, she chaired the first-ever White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment.
SEIU members were incredibly energized when Harris announced Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a former union member and public-school teacher, as her running mate. He signed the “Minnesota Miracle,” the most pro-worker package of laws in decades, including a first-in-the-nation nursing home standards board that gave these crucial caregivers a seat at the table with employers and state government, where they boosted pay to above $22 an hour. And thanks to Walz, Minnesotans no longer have to worry about missing pay when they’re sick or need to care for family members.
SEIU members are proud to back these two because they are the proven leaders working people need right now. Their campaign recently announced plans to address price-gouging by corporations in grocery stores, lower housing costs, and make prescription drugs more affordable for all Americans. We need champions for the working people in the White House, not cheerleaders for corporate greed.
Just ask care workers like Lolita Owens of Pennsylvania, who had the distinction of introducing Harris when she spoke at the SEIU Convention in May. For the past 22 years, Owens has been an SEIU Healthcare Pennsylvania member and a compassionate caregiver and advocate for seniors and those with disabilities. Lolita says, “Vice President Harris brings decades of public service to the table and is the best-prepared candidate for the job. As a woman of color and the daughter of immigrant parents, she grew up like so many Americans, just trying to get ahead despite a system that was determined to keep them down.”
Mitch Tropin, a higher education instructor in Maryland and member of SEIU Local 500, says that when he hears from the Harris-Walz campaign, he thinks about the words to a tune from the musical The Wiz that goes, “Can you feel a brand-new day?”
Service and care workers feel it, but as recent history has taught us, we can’t take victory for granted. So much is at stake in this election: our economy, our democracy, our future. When Donald Trump was president, he tried to take health care away from millions of Americans, gave huge tax breaks to big corporations, and appointed the Supreme Court justices who have ruled against our union rights and reproductive freedoms. His Project 2025 is a blueprint for more of the same, but even worse.
It was my honor to stand onstage at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago alongside five other union presidents to voice our members’ strong support for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. As the first Black woman to lead SEIU, I was proud to say that together with Kamala Harris we will write new rules to make it easier for all workers to join a union and build a younger, darker, hipper, more inclusive, sneaker-wearing labor movement.
Now it’s time to lace up our sneakers and hit the doors to elect Harris and Walz. They will back workers who are trying to form unions, stand up to union-busting corporations, and help us usher in a new era of worker power.
April Verrett is president of the Service Employees International Union, which represents about 2 million workers.