Seattle labor leader and organizer. Author, The Fight for Fifteen. @SEIU775 Founder+President Emeritus. cofounder @workingwa, @fairworkcenter @theworkerslab

Seattle, WA
Joined October 2011
Rideshare Drivers and the Future of Labor laborinnovation.substack.com…
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Labor unions are a lot more effective at promoting family formation and stability than right-wing podcasters and meme-lords raging against women these days. I’ve been making this argument FOR YEARS. Now there’s more empirical proof. If you want strong families, especially in the working class, you have to support a material foundation. That means a less lopsided distribution of the social income (which unions achieve through collective bargaining) and a sense of empowerment / agency (which they achieve through collective action).
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Labor Innovation | CSLI | Substack laborinnovation.substack.com…
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Check out the latest from Labor Innovation laborinnovation.substack.com…
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2026 in the Democratic congressional primaries reminds me a bit of 2016 in the Republican presidential primaries. If centrists and institutionalists want to argue that DSA D’s or MAGA R’s are unelectable, their first job is to prove it in primaries. Oops.
Maybe Democrat Party leaders can stop the twitter wars long enough to pay attention to actual voters across the country who seem to be damn angry. We need to be humble and get off this platform and get on the ground nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/po… via @NYTimes
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Maybe Democrat Party leaders can stop the twitter wars long enough to pay attention to actual voters across the country who seem to be damn angry. We need to be humble and get off this platform and get on the ground nytimes.com/2026/08/18/us/po… via @NYTimes
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"Private enterprise sets aside political differences to defend its interests. Workers and their allies should learn from the example." Read the latest from @SohrabAhmari and @AndyStern_DC: laborinnovation.substack.com…
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I'm proud to be associated with @LaborInnov, a new venture from friends in the US world of labour. I am the sole Canadian on the advisory board, and thus, will plague my friends with the use of U in labour, but while we differ in spelling the word, we are all committed to seeing organized labour innovate to ensure justice for workers. Check it out below and give them a follow!
New from @SohrabAhmari, Ron Bloom, Wilma B. Liebman, @DavidMRolf, and @AndyStern_DC: Labor Has to Innovate, Too. Read it, share it, and let us know what you think. open.substack.com/pub/labori…
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New from @SohrabAhmari, Ron Bloom, Wilma B. Liebman, @DavidMRolf, and @AndyStern_DC: Labor Has to Innovate, Too. Read it, share it, and let us know what you think. open.substack.com/pub/labori…
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So that’s more than $1M plus benefits for 19 months of work…? Many public employees work for lower pay than they’d earn in the private sector because they care about public service. This seems like fleecing the City. Time for a charter amendment on executive pay?
Shon Barnes will get a lump sum of around $600,000, plus he will keep the $50,000 signing bonus and the $60,000 relocation benefit. Resignation letter was minimal. @komonews
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The economic right of center is always saying “If you want less of something, then tax it” Maybe after the millionaires tax next we can figure out a tax on corporate lobbyists, political action committees and federalist society members?
“Billionaire, former Starbucks CEO, and man who sold the Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City Howard Schultz announced this week he’s moved to Miami, proving that the state of Washington’s new Millionaire Tax is already working.” Ouch.
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With a few anomalous exceptions privatizing public monopolies generally means wealth accumulation for shareholders and austerity for ratepayers, consumers, workers. No thanks.
I trust your opinion on this entirely. But here’s another radical idea. Seattle City Light should be privatized, and report into shareholders and customers and regulatory bodies, not the Mayor’s office. There are far too many other priorities for the executive and legislative branches of Seattle.
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Okay but if income is property, then laying someone off from a job must be theft, right?
Rob McKenna, former Washington State attorney general, weighs in on what he sees as the dangers of implementing a progressive income tax.
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Democrats have a neoliberalism problem and a billionaire sycophancy problem. Unions aren’t perfect. But after $80T of upwards income transfer to the 1% over 5 decades, blaming them for govt failure is like blaming the bank janitor after the CEO loots the vault.
Democrats have a public-sector union problem. It’s not a popular thing to say, but continuing to ignore it won’t serve us well. My latest, together with the excellent @robertmgordon, at @nytimes (link in thread below):
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Advocates allege fraud in WA's public comment system, saying duplicate and fake sign-in inflated opposition to a proposal to enact a income tax on income over $1 million. st.news/3Muanxv
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I guess it’s nice that the @CityofSeattle put up these warning signs, but it would be nicer if they just fixed the problem…
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London bus stop near Amazon HQ 🎯🔥
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In 2013, progressive SEIU union leader @DavidMRolf, one of the most innovative and strategic thinkers in organized labor, sparked the $15 min wage movement that spread across big blue cities by running and winning - by 77 votes - a then quite radical ballot measure in Seatac, a small working class Seattle suburb (home to thousands of low paid airport workers), to raise their min wage to $15. Now, 12 years later, urban working class voters are voting increasingly Republican and only 6 percent of private sector workers are in a union. And Rolf is in a surprising (to us, anyway!) dialogue with a rising right-of-center movement led by conservative economists like @oren_cass that seeks to push the Republican Party to adopt economic policies that boost blue collar workers. So on the latest episode of Blue City Blues (@bluecitypodcast) @hyded and I sat down for revealing conversation with Rolf to ask him whether present-day union leaders are culturally and politically out of step with their own members, why the Democratic Party is losing the working class, and whether the Republican Party is really likely to embrace pro-worker economic policies. We weren't disappointed - David has a lot of candid and insightful things to say on all of these fronts!
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One of the world’s richest men wants his newspaper to strictly push policies that favour the rich. That’s the upshot of Jeff Bezos’s announcement today of a new regime at the Washington Post. My latest. unherd.com/newsroom/jeff-bez…
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