Tag: Stop & Shop

What does the enthusiasm from top Democrats about the strike, and others like it, say about the party’s relationship to unions right now? But labor’s in a position now to make them prove exactly how serious they are about that support, and I think that’s why we’re seeing what looks like a surge of enthusiasm from this year’s crop of candidates. Ed: Well, there’s a supply as well as a demand side to this phenomenon: all these candidates pursuing a fixed quantity of labor resources and endorsements. But is that renewed attention simply a result of the party’s leftward drift, or is it because labor has actually gotten more powerful too? Members have told me that their fellow workers didn’t need a lot of convincing to stay in their unions after Janus. Unions promise workers a way to better their conditions. Ben: You wrote that unions may take a while, perhaps a long while, to endorse a Democratic candidate. I’d say the other front-runners to be the labor candidate are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Kamala Harris, who’s really working hard to position herself as a pro-teacher candidate. Ed: That’s especially interesting insofar as AFT is a union whose membership skews pretty heavily female. Sarah: There might be an interesting gender divide within the labor movement this year.