The Washington Post reports recently that Bernie Sanders is embroiled in a wage dispute with his unionized campaign workers (emphasis mine):
Unionized campaign organizers working for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s presidential effort are battling with its management, arguing that the compensation and treatment they are receiving does not meet the standards Sanders espouses in his rhetoric, according to internal communications.
Campaign field hires have demanded an annual salary they say would be equivalent to a $15-an-hour wage, which Sanders for years has said should be the federal minimum. The organizers and other employees supporting them have invoked the senator’s words and principles in making their case to campaign manager Faiz Shakir, the documents reviewed by The Washington Post show.
…
The draft letter estimated that field organizers were working 60 hours per week at minimum, dropping their average hourly pay to less than $13. It said that “many field staffers are barely managing to survive financially, which is severely impacting our team’s productivity and morale. Some field organizers have already left the campaign as a result.”
It seems that the Bernie Sanders campaign, managed by Mr. Shakir, is unwilling to pay its own workers the $15/hour minimum wage that it has so aggressively campaigned on for years. In my view, this exemplifies the issues that put Mr. Sanders at or near the bottom of my preference list. It also hands red meat to advertising writers of GOP candidates and commentators about Democratic Party hypocrisy.
BMG has a consensus here that we Democrats hold our candidates to a higher standard than our GOP counterparts. Given the enthusiasm with which Mr. Sanders promotes the $15/hour minimum wage and his claimed eagerness to support working-class families, the fact that this dispute is still on-going (no matter how it is ultimately resolved) shows the true values and priorities of Mr. Sanders. When it comes to paying his employees, Mr. Sanders has already failed the standard he himself proclaims.
I invite anyone here who joins me in supporting a $15/hour minimum wage to also join me disqualifying Mr. Sanders based on this behavior.
Having worked on campaigns I’m just not sure how this can work in practice. There are just so many variables which permanent businesses don’t have to address.
I refer you to my comments below.
It just isn’t that complicated. There is only one variable that matters — the effective hourly wage of each employee.
If you’re going to base a campaign on a $15/hour minimum wage, then you find a way to pay every employee $15/hour. If you can’t do that, then you have no business seeking the presidency.
The rest of the story seems to be that the campaign is negotiating in good faith with the union (the first union of a major Presidential campaign for which they have health coverage and sick leave) and responding in a way that provides a $15/hr minimum wage to all workers. Remember, those falling under $15/hr are salaried, not hourly. The hourly wage for hourly employees is over $15/hr.
This seems demonstrably false from the reports of them negotiating an agreement.
This seems like a story about the difficulty of managing a fast moving campaign and needing to get salaried workers working fewer hours to meet wage goals, not a story of hypocrisy, although people who don’t like Sanders are reveling in this.
Yeah, it’s not a good look for him but the conclusion that it is a disqualifying example of Sanders being a hypocrite with false values is ridiculously weak.
The game of putting employees on salary to reduce their hourly rate is a very old gambit known well to anybody who’s ever punched a clock. The excuse about respecting the process is well-known to any union worker who has worked for a predatory employer.
My comment about the campaign’s unwillingness to pay is based on Mr. Shakir’s own words, reported in the piece, and on the attempt to shaft the workers in the first place. Here’s the relevant quote from the piece (emphasis mine):
So here’s how the campaign played the game:
1. Lots of positive press about welcoming the union
2. Roll out old-fashioned screw-the-hourly-worker strategy of making them salaried
3. Announce a strategy of demanding an extra day per week
4. Whine about the cost of actually paying the workers the $15/hour minimum wage that Mr. Sanders has so loudly trumpeted
5. Follow up with sanctimonious rubbish about the collective bargaining process.
I’ve run fast-moving companies. I’ve set salaries and hourly rates for my employees as an executive at those companies. I’ve also punched a clock. I never did item 2 above. I never did item 3 above. My hourly employees were all well above minimum wage so that item 4 never came up.
If the campaign can’t afford to pay its workers a living wage, it should say so before putting them on salary and then asking them to work longer hours. It should give them the payroll data and offer them a choice of working for less money or reducing the headcount to raise the hourly rate while staying within the available budget. It IS a hard choice — exactly the kind of hard choice that Mr. Sanders has never been willing to face.
The entire process reeks of hypocrisy, and empty statements about negotiations don’t make it smell any better.
I stand by my characterization.
Nah.
As have many of you, I’ve negotiated successor labor contracts, and that can be a nightmare. Doing an original contract, in an industry with no history of organized labor relations, with an organization that among other things knows it has a max lifespan of 1 year where things are already falling apart…yikes.
So I’m willing to give them time to come up with something. Nor am I willing to blame Sanders for having those kinks….Warren has a unionized staff. What’s going on with that? Can I blame Sanders for paying a unionized team far more than Billionaire Steyer is? Frankly, from what little I know he is doing the most for his staff.
There’s much that disqualifies Sanders from serious consideration from me. But this isn’t any of it.
The campaign ads write themselves.
If it’s too hard for Mr. Sanders to pay his own workers $15/hour, then how can he or we require a struggling Mom-and-Pop business to do the same?
Bernie Sanders is the only candidate that has made the $15/hour minimum wage and his alleged love for the working class the center of a public persona and campaign. This is like the revelation that Newt Gingrich had been cheating on multiple wives while leading the charge against the “moral turpitude” of Bill Clinton.
In my view, this episode confirms that Bernie Sanders is unwilling or unable to apply his own standard to himself. That says everything about his claimed standard, himself, or both.
A higher standard? How about just holding our party members to any standard! Yes, I agree with you Tom. This is just another example of how we lose the trust of the independent voter who reads that Trump hires illegals to work at his golf courses and Sanders takes financial advantage of his campaign workers and leaves us open to the “See, They ALL do it” line…..
Sanders blew it. Does this disqualify him? Possibly. The only way for it to not would be for his campaign to immediately pay what they owe, even if it means a serious blow to their ability to campaign.
Look, I work in retail and we can get “written up” and disciplined and eventually dismissed if we work “off the clock”. It’s called respect for one another and acknowledging the value of work.
We agree.
This isn’t that hard. If it’s so hard to pay a $15/hour minimum wage that Mr. Sander’s can’t do it in his own organization, than it’s very hard to dispute the contention that it’s also too hard to codify into federal law.
The Hill reports today (7/23/19) that this issue has been resolved. Excerpts:
“Field staffers for Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) presidential campaign have reached a deal with its management over a pay dispute, the candidate and the union representing the campaign workers said on Tuesday…
Jonathan Williams, a spokesperson for the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) Local 400, the union representing Sanders’s campaign workers, confirmed to The Hill on Tuesday that an agreement had been reached.
‘Both the campaign staff and management have engaged in this process in good faith and to achieve a mutually agreed upon outcome,’ UFCW Local 400 said in a statement. ‘This is what democracy in the workplace looks like.'”
It appears that the initial agreement was negotiated before the field organizers were hired and therefore didn’t have a seat at the table. Now that they are on board and have input, the process resolved the issue in their favor.
— End of Story —
I hope those who have been quick to jump all over Senator Sanders are as willing to vote for him should he be the nominee as they scold his supporters to be should their candidate win the primary. It would have been nice to see a little party unity while this labor negotiation was in process.
I’m glad that the campaign agreed to abide by its own standards.
I am not aware of any similar disputes involving other candidates, specifically the other candidates whose workers have unionized. I’m also not aware of any other candidates who’ve made their stance towards minimum wage and the working class so central to their campaign. I assure you I will react with the same hostility to any other candidate who advocates a $15/hour federal minimum wage and simultaneously fails to meet that standard.
I hope you’ll agree that the entire issue could have been avoided altogether by never underpaying these employees in the first place.
@ field organizers with no seat at the table:
Is the campaign claiming that it didn’t know what it was paying its workers when it hired those field organizers? Did nobody in the campaign do the same arithmetic done by the Washington Post — dividing the annual salary by the 60 hour per week demand — and compare the result to their own campaign promises?
This was an unforced error on a topic that is the centerpiece of Mr. Sanders’ policy. If the men and women who hired the field organizers and set their working hours and salary actually believed the campaign rhetoric, they would never have created this issue in the first place.
If I was running this campaign, I’d be announcing the immediate departure of Mr. Shakir.
So who are you supporting for 2020, Tom?
Elizabeth Warren.