Seattle’s socialist City Council member is coming to Portland to talk about organizing and movement building
Before Kshama Sawant won a seat on the Seattle City Council, she was a prominent organizer within the city’s Occupy movement. Now in her fourth year at City Hall, the former software engineer and economics professor has remained committed to activism.
A member of the Socialist Alternative party, Sawant is a proponent of democratic socialism and has been successful in leading grassroots campaigns to benefit the working class of her city. First came the Fight for $15; more recently an income tax on the rich; next up is rent control.
Originally from India, a country known for extreme income inequality, she said it was the breadth of poverty she witnessed in the U.S. that she credits for her radicalization.
According to the party platform, Socialist Alternative members believe the capitalist system is the root cause of economic crisis, poverty, discrimination, war and environmental destruction. The party aims to build a movement that will take the top 500 corporations into public ownership under democratic control to end elite control of global competition for profits and power.
During her bid for City Council, Sawant announced she would take home no more pay than the average Seattle worker. She has lived up to that campaign promise, keeping $40,000 of her $117,000 annual salary and donating the rest to social justice movements.
She’ll be in Portland on Sept. 30 to give the keynote address at Portland Jobs with Justice’s annual dinner, a fundraiser for the coalition of more than 100 labor organizations and community groups.
Sawant said Portland Jobs with Justice has focused its efforts on the struggles she believes working people in cities across the country should be addressing. She plans to discuss organizing, movement building and the direction of the left at the Portland dinner.
In advance of her Portland appearance, Sawant spoke with Street Roots about her strategy for fighting homelessness in Seattle and how the nation needs to strengthen its labor movement. We began our interview with a question from Street Roots vendor Charles McPherson.
Charles McPherson: My wife and I want to start a recreational marijuana grow and use the money to build homes for the homeless. What do you think about private businesses funding housing for the homeless?
Kshama (“Shaw-ma”) Sawant: I think given the massive crisis in affordable housing and the explosion of homelessness, we have to pinpoint that the sources are not at all what the economists and many corporate politicians will have us believe, which is individual responsibility. But as a matter of fact, the explosion of the homelessness crisis is a symptom of how deeply dysfunctional capitalism is and also how much worse living standards have gotten with the last several decades of the pushback against labor unions and against organizing and the decimation of mass movements.
I think one of the starting points to change this situation is for us to build mass movements, and we demand that big business is taxed to deal with the question of homelessness, specifically, taxing big corporations to generate the revenues to build enough affordable housing units so that we can completely eliminate the problem of homelessness. I absolutely think that we should be doing that. I would focus primarily on the most profitable organizations that have made millions if not billions for a small number of people who have benefited from it and left the rest of us at the wayside.
I want to add one more point on the question of homelessness, because it’s on the forefront of the homelessness issue in Seattle, and that is the question of how the City Council and the mayor respond to the problem of homelessness.
Homelessness now, not just in Seattle but in King County, the greater Seattle region, has been so acute that it has forced politicians – even though they may ordinarily simply pay lip service – it has forced them to recognize it and respond. A year and a half ago, the mayor of Seattle – now going to be the former mayor – Ed Murray, stated an emergency around the homelessness crisis. But the actual policies that have followed have been anywhere from meager to nonexistent.
One policy that has been followed systematically is the one policy that should not be carried out – sweeps of homeless encampments, because (the sweeps) they are inhumane and ineffective. In this last year alone, the mayor carried out 601 sweeps of homeless encampments. And it hasn’t made, as you might imagine, any dent in the homelessness problem because when you sweep homeless people without any real options for housing, they’re just going to come back there or go somewhere else because they need to exist somewhere, but the homelessness situation remains unchanged. And we don’t even know how much money our city has spent on this because there is no budget line item that says, “This is how much the mayor spent on sweeps.” All the departments – the department of public utilities, the department of transportation, the police department – the personnel of those departments are used on a regular basis to carry out these sweeps. So I would estimate, without adding a number that I have asked for but not got, I would imagine at least millions have been spent on those hundreds of sweeps – millions of taxpayer money in the context of the most regressive tax system in the entire nation.*
There is massive outrage at the fact these sweeps are being carried out with almost zero solutions for housing. I am outraged about it, and what we are talking about right now, our movement, is to make the business tax more progressive but also put more on big corporations so that small businesses pay less than they are now but big businesses pay more than they are now, so that we can raise $160 million over five years to build 1,000 units of affordable housing every year that could be targeted toward homeless people, but also used for funding for services so that people have a cushion to fall on so that they don’t become homeless in the first place.
All the politicians know everything I’m talking about. It’s a question of political will. How are we going to generate the political will unless we have candidates running for office who are part of the movement, who are accountable to the movement and don’t take money from big business so that when they go to City Hall, they use their office to amplify the voice of movements and to really fight for the oppressed.
*(Why Washington has the “most regressive tax system”: In Washington, there is no statewide income tax, so the poor pay a much larger portion of their income on taxes than the wealthy through the state’s sales and property taxes. In July, Seattle City Council unanimously approved an income tax on only the wealthy residents of the city, an initiative championed by Sawant.)
Emily Green: So few Americans are represented by unions, yet most of us work. Do you see a viable replacement for the traditional union model that would include the needs of all working people in its efforts?
K.S.: You’re right, that in the last several decades the labor movement and the unions as an organization have taken a severe beating, much of it starting in the Reagan-Thatcher era. It’s been, in many ways, a downward spiral. But I think you can also see that, just in the logic of capitalism, unless workers get organized, in a real way – meaning we get united behind a common political demand like $15 an hour, like rent control, like taxing the rich, getting organized to build unity in our political demands, developing strategies and tactics for the movement so that we are able to push back against the might of big business – unless workers and ordinary people get organized in some shape or form, we have no hope of defeating the might of big business and the political elite that support them. That’s the system of capitalism, and we’re fighting against those forces. There is no alternative to that kind of mass organizing.
We should resist the temptation of looking at unions as something old-fashioned, but while recognizing and making a sober assessment of how far we have to go. We are starting almost at rock bottom in some ways given that the vast majority of labor in America and in our cities is not unionized; young workers especially are not unionized. But the cycle here, this is a concrete example of how we won in 2015 – and a woman is running as a socialist for Minneapolis City Council now – the only reason we won is because we were organized; we had a grassroots campaign that actually brought working people together, something like a union.
As we continue to build movements in our lifetime, it will require organizing workers and the unions. But the other dimension to this that I should mention within the labor movement right now, there are workers who are unionized, but there is an urgent need to raise up rank and file representation and realize democracy within unions.
Look at the downfall from last year. Most major unions endorsed Hillary Clinton, but if you talked to most of the rank and file members of those unions, they said they voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary.
Why did major unions, like SEIU (Service Employees International Union), national unions, which could be decisive factors in national election outcomes, why would they endorse Hillary Clinton in the primary? Randi Weingarten, the president of my union, AFT (American Federation of Teachers), she went door-knocking for Hillary Clinton while most of us teachers, members of her union, were supporting Bernie Sanders.
We need to demand real accountability. Rank and file have to get organized within their unions to fight for greater democracy. Seattle has a mayoral race going on, and unfortunately, the (M.L.) King County Labor Council (affiliated with National AFL-CIO) has just endorsed Jenny Durkan, the most corporate candidate in the race, the candidate who comes with the blessing of the Chamber of Commerce and all the businesses that fought hard against $15 an hour and launched lawsuit after lawsuit on every worker law that we have succeeded in passing. Why is the Labor Council endorsing that candidate? They should be fighting to run working-class candidates who are accountable to the labor movement.
E.G.: Oregon has been getting pretty cozy with (Seattle-based) Amazon lately. We have two new fulfillment centers hiring thousands of people (and on Sept. 18, a third fulfillment center, in Portland, was announced), and we plan to bid on the new corporate headquarters. Any lessons we should take from Seattle on this one?
K.S.: This is a very good time for us to be talking about this. As you know, just days ago Amazon announced that they are looking for a different city for their new headquarters, and it’s a chilling message to Seattle, but it’s not a new one. It’s reminiscent of what happened with Boeing. Boeing has carried out, and is still carrying out, a decades-long extortion of working people and taxpayers in this state, and every time they have done that, they say, “If you don’t do this or that, we will take away your jobs.”
But this is not about good apples versus bad apples. This is the logic of capitalism, and as long as there are workers in other cities and other countries that are worse off than us, who are willing to accept worse-off conditions just to get the jobs, the jobs will move; the companies will move. The only way to reject this race to the bottom is for workers to refuse to be pitted against each other in this kind of perverse bidding war and say we fight for workers everywhere.
Ultimately, the solution is for workers to fight everywhere and in solidarity.
We don’t want a system where a few people make such an unimaginable profit and everybody else has to live in deplorable conditions, not to mention the conditions in which the workers in the Amazon warehouses work: Amazon workers who want to unionize. Fulfillment centers, which by the way is an ominously Orwellian name considering the conditions the workers face there, so we need to begin fighting on that basis, and not accept the logic of corporate politicians and the corporations themselves.
E.G.: Seattle used to be like Portland, in that its city councilors were elected citywide. But as you know, in 2013 that changed, and now Seattle’s councilors represent geographical districts instead. Can you tell me how this restructuring has changed city politics either for the better or the worse?
K.S.: When we ran our first campaign for City Council in 2013, we ran citywide, and that same year, the district initiative was passed by ballot. When I ran for re-election in 2015, by then it was a district election, and I ran for District 3, which is essentially the central part of the city. I would say from the standpoint of grassroots campaigns like ours, which has never taken any corporate cash in campaign donations, we ran our campaign entirely, without exception, on the basis of funding from working people because our campaign and our office belongs to working people and the labor movement, and so for us, running a districtwide campaign is much less daunting in terms of the resources it demands than running a citywide campaign.
But as you’ve seen, it’s also possible to win a much more daunting citywide campaign even openly as a socialist, so in terms of resources for a grassroots campaign, I would say this is something we can take advantage of in Seattle. But you can also see in the last two years since the district initiative passed, that by itself it is no guarantee of outcomes that are more favorable for those who are left out of city politics.
There is no shying away from the real political struggle, which means regardless of the conditions you face, each day it was that ordinary people, homeless people, those who are marginalized become organized in a movement and really fight back, which means building street heat, building workforce actions. It also means that while not every campaign will be won, our movements need to run candidates because we will generate an inspiring example so that we can really build movements on top of them. Because having even one voice, as we’ve shown in City Hall, can completely change the dynamic of a city’s politics.
Email staff writer Emily Green at emily@streetroots.org . Follow her on Twitter @greenwrites .
If you go
What: “Our Community, Our Cause,” Portland Jobs with Justice’s annual dinner with guest Kshama Sawant; music from Eddie Parente Trio
When: Saturday, Sept. 30; doors open at 6 p.m., program and dinner from 7 to 9 p.m.
Where: OHSU Collaborative Life Sciences Building, in the ground-floor atrium, 2730 SW Moody Ave., Portland
Tickets: Tickets ranging from $40 to $175 can be purchased at the door if space is still available, or in advance via jwjpdx.org
