San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Labor’s clout comes into play in Oakland mayoral contest
There’s no doubt that Oakland is a union town.
The Alameda Labor
Council counts 26,000 Oakland residents as members — or roughly one in 10 registered voters
— and 60% of all voting households contain at least one union member.
But as the Oakland mayor’s race kicks into the home stretch, some are openly pondering a blasphemous thought: that labor has too much sway in the race where 10 candidates are battling to replace termed-out Mayor Libby Schaaf.
Two independent expenditure committees backing firstterm Council Member Sheng Thao have raised nearly $800,000 in just a few weeks. That kind of change goes a long way in Oakland, supporting an army of people to knock on doors and make phone calls as well as paid advertising. That is invaluable in a race where no candidate has much name recognition.
Labor — which often splinters in Oakland — has uniformly been on Thao’s side, many since since Day One of
her campaign. That roster includes the Service Employees International Union, the Alameda County Building and Construction Trades Council, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union, and the United Food and Commercial Workers. Some unions endorsed roughly a year before Election Day — timing that wasn’t lost on rival candidate Ignacio De La Fuente, who grew up as a worker and organizer in the labor movement before serving on the City Council from 1992 to 2012.
“It’s unprecedented,” De La Fuente, who ran unsuccessfully for mayor in 2006, told me. “I’ve never seen anything like that. And I’m a labor guy. That never happened even when I had the endorsement of labor.”
Voters should be concerned that Thao will be a soft touch when it comes time to negotiate contracts with public service unions, De La Fuente warned. “Obviously, they want her because she’ll support all their demands.”
De La Fuente isn’t the only person in Oakland sounding alarms about labor’s influence. Jody London, who spent 12 years on the Oakland school board, recently bemoaned how labor had influenced the local Democratic Party organization to back Thao over her preferred candidate, first-term Council Member Loren Taylor. London urged voters to look beyond those endorsements.
“Let’s show the Democratic establishment that we want candidates who are competent and qualified,” London, a Democrat and union member, wrote in an opinion piece in the East Bay Times, “not mouthpieces for a party line that favors union loyalty over qualifications.”
Taylor told me that the amount of independent expenditure money spent on Thao is “undemocratic.” (There is an independent expenditure committee jointly backing his candidacy along with De La Fuente and first-term Council member Treva Reid, but it has raised less than $20,000.)
“When you look at one-person, one-vote, this drastically skews the equation,” said Taylor, whose campaign has raised more ($430,291) than any other candidate. “And the folks who suffer are those without a voice — as opposed to the $800,000 or more that will be poured in to make sure that their words get amplified.”
Thao told me that the insinuation that she’s bought and paid for by labor is “absurd.”
“That is actually hilarious that people think that I’m not going to be tough enough” on public sector unions, Thao said. “But I do believe that city workers — any worker — should have a living wage. They should be able to live here, play here and work here. And so if you want to be upset because somehow I’m supportive of families having some sort of living wage, then I think you’re going to be upset.”
Becky Rhodes, political director of the Alameda Labor Council — which has given $80,000 to one of the independent groups backing Thao — said the group backed Thao last year “to send a really clear message that Sheng Thao is the right candidate for working families in Oakland. She’s been a champion for workers and working families and has been standing up against corporations in really fighting for a better future in Oakland.”
And what is labor’s expectation of Thao should she become mayor?
“The expectation of a candidate like Sheng is that she’s going to continue to be an ally for us and for working families. She will continue to be exactly who she is,” Rhodes said.
The challenge for Thao’s rivals is that it is politically treacherous to criticize labor’s support in the Town.
In most other locales, when one candidate garners all the union support, the other opponent is typically a Republican, “so this gets put onto the leftright spectrum. So conservatives typically feel more comfortable making those suggestions,” said Sarah Anzia, a professor of political science and public policy at UC Berkeley.
But Democrats critiquing fellow Democrats for their union support in a deep-blue city like Oakland might worry about “being called conservative or Republican if they’re saying anything that is not in line with what unions might be advocating for,” said Anzia, author of “Local Interests: Politics, Policy, and Interest Groups in US City Governments.”
That explains why attacks on Thao’s labor support have been made very delicately and often with qualifiers. Like how Schaaf described her endorsed candidate, Taylor, in an email to supporters Friday as a “skilled problem-solver who is not beholden to special interests.” ( Cough, labor, cough.)
As he critiqued Thao, De La Fuente stressed his union roots as an organizer for foundry workers decades ago. Taylor emphasized that he “came from a union household. My mom is retired teacher. I understand and appreciate the value that labor unions bring. At the same time, when you disproportionately weight one group and their priorities over the rest of Oakland — that’s when we have issues.”
The critique over Thao’s labor ties doesn’t just stem from the money she’s raking in. There are also rumors of a backdoor deal cut last year when Thao briefly mulled — including to me — running for the East Bay Assembly seat vacated by Rob Bonta when Gov. Gavin Newsom named him attorney general. The alleged deal was that Rob Bonta and his wife, Mia Bonta, who ultimately won the seat, asked Thao to stand down. In return, they would back Thao for the next office she would seek and recruit labor’s backing.
“That’s the deal,” De La Fuente told me, saying that is how labor leaders and others have explained it to him. He declined to specify who his sources were. (De La Fuente has also been the beneficiary of more than $300,000 in recent independent expenditures, much of it from a hedge fund manager and developer who support a coal export terminal project at Oakland’s port. De La Fuente supports the project, saying it would bring jobs and investment to the city.)
Assembly Member Bonta told me that such a deal was “absolutely not” in place.
Bonta didn’t even have all of the labor endorsements sewn up in her eight-person Assembly primary.
“The conjecture or the narrative of those deals do a disservice to me, do a disservice to (Thao) and do a disservice to the working people of Oakland,” Bonta said Friday.
Thao told me that she backed out of the Assembly race after discussing it with her 15-year-old son, who was traumatized after a break-in of their home. After hearing him express his concerns about her spending three days a week in Sacramento, Thao said she reconsidered.
There is something else about all of this money pouring into the race, said Jim Ross, a longtime Democratic consultant who is not advising any candidate but supports Thao and has advised labor organizations. So far, the race has been a genteel affair, with the largely unknown field of candidates spending more time introducing themselves to voters than ripping one another. But that could change soon — just as voters receive their ballots.
“These kind races don’t start until somebody throws a punch. And that hasn’t happened yet,” Ross told me. “If it’s going to happen, it’s going to start this week.”