Listen: Low-Wealth Voters and the 3rd Reconstruction
1199 SEIU during a lunch time rally at New York Presbyterian Hospital in Washington Heights, one of just 40 such actions throughout New York State to protest Gov. Hovhul’s billion dollar-plus cuts to Medicaid, and the state’s shortchanging of all Medicaid patients, putting safety net hospitals at risk. Photo/Bob Hennelly
By Bob Hennelly
On this week’s show, George Gresham, president of 1199 SEIU, Rev. Rupert Hall, Kelly Smith and top Democratic Party Pollster Celinda Lake discuss the unrealized power in America’s 85 million low wealth voters in 2024. Panelists discuss the up coming Poor People’s Campaign rallies in Trenton and Albany as well as 30 other state capitals on March 2.
In our fourth Monday get together this Black History month we continue to explore the fight for racial justice in our nation that was built on the original sin of slavery and how it laid the very foundations for the modern American labor movement. On our MLK special we examined the essential role that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King played in the American labor movement and how his 20th century campaign based on disciplined non-violent collective action laid the foundation for the 21st century revival of the American labor movement that we saw manifest in the recent UAW, SAG-AFTRA, SEIU Kaiser Permanente, NYSNA, United Steelworkers Local 4-200 strikes that resulted in generational gains for workers, their families as well as patients in healthcare.
King’s last address in April of 1968 was to striking sanitation workers in Memphis who went out in part because two of their co-workers, Echol Cole and Robert Walker had been crushed to death by their broken trash compactor of their sanitation truck. Throughout Dr. King’s career, unions like the United Autoworkers, the Transport Workers Union, and AFSCME where allies in his campaign for civil rights, peace, and social justice. But SEIU’s 1199, the hospital and healthcare union founded here in New York City in the 1930s by Leon Davis and a group of pharmacy workers was truly a strategic partner that played a pivotal role.
In Dr. King’s final years he had focused on building a multiracial-interdenominational coalition of poor and low-wealth people that had galvanized into what was called the Poor People’s Campaign to address the linkages between poverty, racism, as well as the American prosecution of the war in Vietnam and our obscene military spending. In the decades since, in the aftermath of 9/11, we have seen military spending continue to grow exponentially. At the same time, wealth and income disparities have reached historic highs as America’s global ranking in average life expectancy continues to plummet.
These macro trends have alarming consequences that are profoundly troubling as we saw playout so tragically during the COVID pandemic that took 1.1 million lives, disproportionally people of color so often from the essential workforce who had to work in our hospitals, transit systems and service economy. We know from the latest public health research done by David Brady at the University of California that before and after the COVID pandemic, poverty had become the fourth leading cause of death in America, leading to the premature deaths of 800 Americans a day, more than homicides. Race-based disparities in maternal and infant health outcomes tell the same horrendous story about an America in 2024 where in New York City, one-in-four children live in poverty, with many neighborhoods where it’s a much higher ratio of families with children struggling just to get by.
What can be done? What is the remedy for what has plagued our nation for so long? Could 2024 be that year that the tide finally turns for working people and their families? Is there an unrealized potential power amongst us to bring about a Third Reconstruction?
Listen to the entire show below: