Two important elections happened this past Tuesday. First, in Massachusetts, a coalition of environmental activists, progressive union members, and white liberal Democrats propelled moderate Democrat Ed Markey into the second Massachusetts Senate seat. At the same time, in Washington, D.C., members of the Senate nearly unanimously voted in multi-billionaire hotel magnate Penny Pritzker ’81 as President Obama’s new Secretary of Commerce.
Andrew Seo wrote in the HPR this week that “Pritzker’s stellar business record won out” to garner her support on both sides of the aisle. If that’s true, I’m alarmed—because any Senator paying attention to the issues of working people in America would be hard-pressed to call Pritzker’s career a “stellar business record.” In fact, Pritzker has demonstrated nearly every poor business practice in the book, from labor rights abuses to secret offshore tax havens.
Last year, The New York Times noted that Pritzker was taking a much smaller role in the 2012 election than she had in 2008, when she chaired the Obama campaign finance team. They suggested that her poor credentials among unions and working people in America might have made Pritzker a major liability to Obama’s campaign. Then, the Times wrote:
“[Obama] considered nominating her for commerce secretary but did not, because her fortune risked making her radioactive. She does plan to join him on the campaign trail this month, but that could prove awkward, given that the president is pounding Mr. Romney for some of the same practices of which Ms. Pritzker or her family business is accused—housing significant wealth in offshore trusts and treating workers poorly.”
Pritzker’s reputation among working people is especially bad in Boston. In 2009, 98 housekeepers at the three Hyatt hotels in Boston (including the Hyatt Regency Cambridge) were fired on the same day and replaced by workers from a temp agency earning roughly half as much per hour, after being told to train the workers for the jobs they would then take over. The housekeepers—known as the Hyatt 100—joined with union members from around the country to call out Hyatt for being the worst hotel employer in the nation, leading to a national boycott of Hyatt Hotels and naming Pritzker as a company leader who abused workers for the sake of profits.
Perhaps unions and union members could have fought even harder to protest Obama’s nomination of a union-busting businesswoman as Commerce secretary. But UNITE HERE, the hotel-workers’ union leading the charge against Hyatt, has—rightly, I think—been focusing on other things. Cathy Youngblood, a Hyatt housekeeper, has made national news traveling around the country to meet with other Hyatt workers and demand a worker be added to the Hyatt Board of Directors. At the same time, UNITE HERE members around the country have done everything from organizing for union representation within their workplaces to joining community coalitions that demand comprehensive immigration reform. This is productive and important work: unions and union members should center their political work around their own communities, focusing on organizing for changes in the workplace and electing pro-labor local leaders.
But unions have also supported progressive and supposedly pro-labor candidates for national political office. Here in Boston, UNITE HERE, as well as SEIU, the Massachusetts Teachers’ Association, the United Auto Workers, and other unions, endorsed and campaigned strongly for Democratic candidate Ed Markey. It is up to political leaders like Obama and Markey, when elected, to remain accountable to the working class and represent their interests.
I am ashamed of the Democratic Senators who casually voted in Pritzker as Commerce Secretary, apparently without a second thought for labor rights or tax havens. As Markey prepares to join their ranks, we must make sure that he remains accountable to the union members who got him elected and does not, too, sell out working people on the Senate floor.