![]() (WFP-style liberals generally side with teachers’ unions in viewing education reform, which the Obama administration and many Democrats have championed, as a corporatist plot to undermine public education.īall details many other WFP accomplishments, which leads readers to conclude that this is the progressive vanguard role the Democratic Party should be embracing and supporting to expand its voter base. The party also worked to elect Ras Baraka, an opponent of education reform, to succeed Cory Booker as mayor of Newark over a better-funded candidate. The WFP’s protests, ethics complaints, and calls for Christie’s resignation helped put the Bridgegate scandal on the map, severely wounding the presidential hopes of the man once considered a top 2016 GOP contender. Mejia has also spearheaded the party’s role as Christie’s chief harasser–a task the state’s sclerotic, Christie-co-opted Democratic Party originally hesitated to take up. And when Governor Chris Christie vetoed a set of voting reforms–including automatic voter registration and restoring felons’ voting rights–the party set out to collect signatures to put it on the ballot instead, hoping to put the issue before voters in November 2016. When the Democratic-controlled New Jersey Legislature wasn’t advancing a statewide paid-sick-leave bill, the WFP went to the municipal level to find a workaround 10 New Jersey cities have now mandated paid sick leave. “The rules are rigged against working people, so we have to think outside the box to find different ways to win at this game,” Mejia said. “We make politicians walk the walk–and pay the price if they don’t.” The idea is to make Democratic politicians more accountable to their liberal base through the asymmetric warfare party primaries enable, much as the conservative movement has done to Republicans. “We’ve found ways of electoralizing our issues,” Mejia told me. ![]() It channels their anger at the constricting terms of the national debate into ground-level organizing–where the politics may seem unglamorously small-time, but there’s a chance to make a difference in people’s lives. The WFP gives activists like Mejia an outlet for their frustration with national politics. (In this sense, the WFP represents a stab at an American labor party, a common feature of European democracies that the U.S. Given the dramatic contraction of the labor movement, which has fallen to just 7 percent of private sector workers (in 1984, it was 16 percent), she longed to improve the lives of all workers, not just those lucky enough to be in a union. ![]() ![]() Union work was satisfying but limiting for Mejia. In one part of her article, Ball focuses on the activism of one of the WFP’s top leaders, Analila Mejia, director of New Jersey Working Families:Ī longtime union organizer who actually postponed her wedding to work on the Obama campaign, Mejia had previously served as New Jersey political director of the powerful mid-Atlantic janitors’ union, SEIU 32BJ, whose 145,000 members can be found everywhere from Yankee Stadium to the Pentagon… How Working Families Party is Transforming the Democratic PartyĪt The Atlantic Molly Ball profiles “ The Pugnacious, Relentless Progressive Party That Wants to Remake America,” a.k.a. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |