Letter: Allow Massachusetts State Senate Staffers to Unionize

The staff of the Massachusetts State Senate announced earlier this year that they had gathered the requisite number of authorization cards needed to form a union with the IBEW.

They are organizing to ensure fair wages, protection from workplace harassment, sufficient healthcare benefits and accountability from their management.
Much of what happens in the State Senate would be impossible without the hard work of staffers. They respond to constituents, draft and redraft legislation, meet with advocates, organize scheduling and so much more.

However over half of House staffers and more than a quarter of Senate staffers earn less than $45,000/year—hardly a livable wage in a state with some of the highest housing and day-to-day living costs in the nation—costs now spiraling upward due to inflation. In addition, Senate staffers face a 60 day waiting period for health care benefits. Many staffers have to resort to second jobs just to make ends meet. On top of this, workplace harassment, and long working hours lead to burnout and high turnover rates.

This means that many individuals without independent financial means choose not to enter public service—depriving the state of a diverse workforce and the perspective that this brings to policymaking. Moreover, inasmuch as many staffers move on to run for office, this lack of diversity means that the statehouse will continue to be unrepresentative of the state’s population as a whole.

The right of workers to organize and bargain collectively is not only a cornerstone of American democracy, it is a core policy position of the Democratic Party, to which a veto-proof majority of the State Senate belongs.

It is high time for our State Senators to live up to the values they profess to admire and permit their staffers to unionize.

John Kyriakis

Op-Ed: For Mass. Democrats, a troubling gap between party platform and practice

Jonathan Cohn, “For Mass. Democrats, a troubling gap between party platform and practice,” CommonWealth

“So the fact that the Mass Dems have a robust platform and one of the most, if not the most, progressive platforms in the country should be a point of pride. But it raises the question: Does it even mean anything?  

A platform is, in theory, an actionable agenda for a party, a promise of what that party will do when in office. But the Massachusetts Democratic Party platform says quite little about what our Legislature’s large Democratic majorities intend to do.  “

Letter: “Mass. House is not moving the needle on workplace harassment, abuse”

Check out Progressive Needham’s Jan Soma’s new letter in the Globe:

Mass. House is not moving the needle on workplace harassment, abuse

Many thanks to the Globe for reporting about the empty Equal Employment Opportunity officer position in the Massachusetts House (“Empty post has House staff doubting commitment to equity,” Page A1, March 18). The idea was a good one as far as it went. A number of states require harassment education for legislators and their staffs, and many more recommend it. If we are going to lead the way, though, training is far from enough. This training has not been found to move the needle significantly. Harassment and sexual misconduct are baked into our culture, and we are hard pressed to change unconscious tendencies that have gone mostly unnoticed and unpunished for hundreds of years.

What’s more, it is common sense that staff are unlikely to confide in someone who is hired and fired by the Legislature, the very body that must be scrutinized. This position must be fully independent. And there must be transparency and data to assess whether progress is being made. The best way to measure the degree of the problem and whether improvements are being made is an anonymous survey of the workplace climate. The results should be made public to improve trust.

Most leaders have little to no information about the degree of harassment or abuse in their workplaces. Workers who are harassed tend to be those with the least power, and most historically have remained silent. This silence encourages leaders’ complacency. The recently passed federal Ending Forced Arbitration of Sexual Assault and Sexual Harassment Act of 2021will eventually give employers more information because workers will have additional tools to stand up and fight.

I would challenge our Legislature not to wait, and to lead the way to increasing the safety and dignity of our workforce.

Jan Soma

Needham

Letter: “Wu is right to stay the course amid anti-vax misinformation”

“Wu is right to stay the course amid anti-vax misinformation,” Boston Globe, December 31, 2021

During Boston Mayor Michelle Wu’s campaign, she promised that she would center public health and equity, listen to experts both in the ivory tower and on the ground, and learn from best practices. And that’s exactly what she has done with her vaccine mandate for restaurants, gyms, and entertainment venues.

It’s disappointing to hear that she and City Hall have been barraged with negative, misogynistic attacks since announcing the order (“Wu facing continued hateful attacks,” Page A1, Dec. 24). But having testified earlier this year at the State House in support of pro-vaccination policies like Senator Becca Rausch’s Community Immunity Act, I find it disappointingly unsurprising. Public health professionals were clear and insistent on the need for stronger state policy, but those seeking to spread misinformation about vaccines dominated the 13-hour virtual hearing, often resorting to outright hostility toward the legislators present.

Wu has shown no sign of backing down, and we are all better for it. But those of us who believe in science, public health, and solidarity as the way forward on the pandemic and other issues need to be more vocal in our support so that we can relegate the misinformation and invective to the mere noise that it is.

Jonathan Cohn

Policy Director, Progressive Massachusetts

Boston

CommonWealth: It’s time to bring transparency to the Legislature

PM Issues Committee chair Jonathan Cohn just had an editorial printed in CommonWealth about transparency in the MA State House. Read an excerpt below and the full piece here.

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In 2016, when the Massachusetts Legislature updated the state’s public records laws, they chose to punt on the issue of how such laws should apply to themselves. Indeed, Massachusetts remains the only state where the courts, Legislature, and governor’s office all claim to be fully exempt from public records laws.

In traditional Beacon Hill fashion, the Legislature created a commission to study the issue further, and the bicameral commission ended up with no actual recommendations.

But that’s not the fault of the senators in the commission. Frustrated with their House colleagues, the six Senate members issued their own report on December 31, 2018. In the report, they highlighted several as-of-yet-unadopted ways make the Massachusetts Legislature more accessible, including the release of all written testimony received prior to all committee hearings and any testimony or other materials submitted in-person during the hearing process, upon request and the online publication of any vote recorded either by electronic poll or by a vote of the “yeas and nays” during a committee meeting or executive session.

Earlier this month, the Senate reaffirmed their support for making testimony available (with, of course, appropriate redactions for “sensitive personal information or information that may jeopardize the health, wellness or safety of an individual”) and publishing committee votes online in the Joint Rules. The House again is proving a roadblock. In the Joint Rules on which the House plans to vote today, public access to testimony is gone. And although the House embraced a form of publishing committee votes, they narrowed it to a list of the dissenting votes and the vote count. Why not just list yeas and nays as we do everywhere else?

To be clear, public access to testimony and committee votes are not radical reforms. The majority of US states, including California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Oregon, and New Jersey, publish committee votes online. And states like Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, and Oregon go further than the proposal to simply make testimony available upon request: they publish it by default—something that the Massachusetts House showed it was able to do last summer with testimony submitted on the police reform bill.

Boston Globe Letter: Moving Forward with Driver’s Licenses

Emily Achtenberg of JP Progressives’s Immigrants Rights Action Group penned a letter to the editor to the Globe about the need to pass the Work and Family Mobility Act:

Marcela García is right to wonder whether President Biden’s proposed federal immigration reform promises, as the headline of her column puts it, “a new day, or an old story, for the undocumented” (Opinion, Feb. 2). Here in Massachusetts, we should be concerned, too, about our elected state officials’ failure to protect our undocumented neighbors.

Last year, the proposed Work and Family Mobility Act, which would authorize driver’s licenses for undocumented residents, failed to pass the state Legislature after being reported out of committee for the first time in 15 years. The bill received widespread support but was opposed by Governor Charlie Baker.

As the pandemic has revealed, undocumented immigrants make up a significant portion of the essential workforce, the people who keep our economy going and our families safe while suffering a disproportionate share of COVID-19′s burdens. Now more than ever, households need the ability to drive in order to gain access to medical care, testing, and vaccines; grocery shopping and food distribution; jobs; and schools. Public transportation and ridesharing options are unacceptably risky as well as severely curtailed.

The Work and Family Mobility Act has just been refiled in the Legislature, and it deserves our active support. Fifteen states, including Vermont, New York, Connecticut, Maryland, and Delaware, plus the District of Columbia have legalized immigrant driving. Let’s catch up in Massachusetts.

PM in the News: Redistricting Looms Large

Our Framingham chapter chair Beverly Hugo recently had an op-ed printed in the MetroWest Daily News about the importance of a diverse Redistricting Committee. The lines of our Congressional and legislative districts will be redrawn later this year, with major issues of representation at stake.

Redistricting will determine our political power for the next 10 years. Make sure the ‘redistricters’ reflect us

The Joint Redistricting Committee, which is to be appointed by Senate President Karen Spilka and Speaker of the House Ronald Mariano will oversee the 2021 redistricting process.

As is customary every 10 years, the process of redistricting has begun. Although this undertaking culminates in November with the Legislature voting on newly defined congressional and state districts, the process begins now with the appointment of members to the Joint Committee on Redistricting. 

Ultimately, the Joint Committee will determine whether the political power of our communities is fairly represented.  It will decide which candidates run for office and who they will represent. The delineation of legislative districts will affect nearly every issue our communities care about for the next decade. 

The goal of the committee is to ensure that district lines are centered on the voters, not political interests, and that the redistricting process is fair to all our communities. 

Having a truly representative committee composition will also encourage public participation in the process by attending hearings and submitting proposed maps. In addition, a well composed Committee will assure participation from historically underrepresented communities.

In decades past, we have seen what can go wrong during redistricting: the legislature could break our communities apart and dilute our political power; it could combine communities with very different priorities into the same district; or it could otherwise draw district lines that do not make sense for voters. Massachusetts did, after all, invent the gerrymander.

We also know what can go well. In 2011, Massachusetts broke from its legacy of closed-door redistricting, where district lines were essentially drawn by those in leadership without any regard for input from members of the legislature and the public. Instead, it conducted a far more open and transparent process with statewide hearings and platforms that allowed Bay Staters to submit their own maps – resulting in districts that reflected common interests of voters, rather than protecting incumbent politicians.

Redistricting will shape Massachusetts’ political future — and the process begins with the Senate President, Karen Spilka, and Speaker of the House, Ron Mariano. I am confident that they will meet their responsibility by appointing legislators to the Joint Committee who will equitably consider Massachusetts’ racial and geographic diversity. We call on them to do exactly that.

Beverly Hugo is the founder of Progressive Framingham/Metrowest.

PM in the News: Two Letters in the Globe

Two PM board members recently had letters to the editor published in the Boston Globe.

Jonathan Cohn, “Mass. should move on Safe Communities Act before session ends,” 12/28/20:

The Globe editorial board is spot-on with its call for ending Bristol County’s 287(g) contract with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in light of Sheriff Thomas Hodgson’s latest abuses of power (“Time’s up, Sheriff Hodgson,” Dec. 21). Massachusetts is the only state in New England where such contracts exist. Fortunately, we don’t have to wait until the new presidential administration to end them.

A bill called the Safe Communities Act, filed in the Legislature by Representatives Ruth Balser and Liz Miranda and Senator Jamie Eldridge, would end such contracts with ICE and take additional steps to make sure that the rights of our immigrant communities are respected. It was reported out of committee in July, and it deserves a vote before the session runs out.

If we don’t take action soon, Massachusetts will have gone the four years of the Trump administration without passing any new legislation to strengthen the rights of immigrants in our Commonwealth, a sorry reflection of the politics in our so-called deep blue state.

And Mohammed Missouri responded to a misguided column by Globe opinion columnist Joan Venocchi:

Don’t blame the progressives

The 15th Suffolk state representative race was the most hotly contested legislative primary of 2018 (and the most expensive). Voters in the district looked to the State House to find a bold response to the chaos and daily horror show of the Trump administration. They were hoping for bold action to protect immigrants’ rights, ensure a livable planet, and invest in community needs. But despite the high rank of their state representative, Jeffrey Sánchez, they didn’t find that leadership. So they voted him out, as we do in a democracy.

It’s easy to blame progressive activists for any disappointing outcome, as Joan Vennocchi does in her column “With Speaker Mariano, progressives get what they deserve” (Opinion, Dec. 29). But she ignores that Ways and Means chairman Sánchez was himself supporting majority leader Ron Mariano for speaker, and many of Mariano’s supporters pledged to him more than a decade ago (“Long the House’s consummate insider, Ronald Mariano poised to finally lead it,” Page A1, Dec. 27). An alternative outcome, unfortunately, wasn’t in the cards.

Many politicos believe that Mariano’s tenure will be short before he passes it on to someone else. Rather than relitigating old fights, I hope to help build support for a progressive speaker. I invite Joan Vennochi to join me.

Lowell Sun LTE: Supporting Immigrants’ Rights

Dee Halczak of Solidarity Lowell penned a letter in support of the Safe Communities Act and the Work and Family Mobility Act in the Lowell Sun:

There are people in our communities, friends and family and neighbors, who have been here for years providing needed services and stability to our communities. But because they arrived here, the way desperate people do, without dotting all the i’s, under current policies we’re supposed to forget those relationships and the good they’ve done and deport them to places many of them don’t even remember and where they have no connections to help them survive.

It is time someone did the humanitarian thing and found a way to help them stay here and thrive, instead of kicking them out of the only country many of them really know.

One state can’t change federal immigration policy, but it can protect its residents from excessive zeal in the enforcement of unjust rules and regulations.

Massachusetts legislators can lead the way by passing the Safe Communities Act, which allows our police to focus on the jobs we hired them for, and the Work and Family Mobility Act, which allows people to obtain a drivers license so that they can support themselves and their family without providing information on immigration status.

We’ve been arguing over this issue for half of my lifetime. It’s time to stop arguing and do the humane thing. People are already here. Pass the legislation that will let us all go on with our lives and focus on more important things, like standing together to help this country overcome one of the worst crises it has ever encountered.